Foreign Perspectives

The really odd thing is that both America and France tend to think in similar ways ie Americans consider only America when they do stuff and likewise France only considers France when they do stuff. So, for example, almost all Internet directories have a “regional” heading to hold everything not in America and in France you still get chip readers only accepting French cards. Likewise both countries pass laws that they consider to have worldwide applicability eg look at the global hassles we now have from American passport requirements and the nonsense of France banning junk e-mail.

A few years on and the local supermarkets offer a fairly reasonable choice as you can see. Prices aren’t what they might be though with baked beans costing 49p in the UK being sold at the equivalent of around 87p for instance. However, that’s for specialist food so to speak as the existence of the British section has also been accompanied by various brit-foods appearing elsewhere in the supermarket at local prices. For instance, Carrefour even put out their own brand salt & vinegar crisps and Leclerc sell proper bacon these days.

Noticeable too is that it really is a British section and not just an English one. After all, who but the Scots drink Irn-Bru?

What is a little odd is that the Catalán food has started to disappear into the ethnic foods section when in the past it was spread around the supermarkets.

If it had gone ahead in either of the forms proposed there would have been much that would have been different in the last 50 years. The European Union would never have gotten off the ground for a start or at least it would have but in a very different form with countries joining either the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and France or the British Commonwealth depending on which option they had ran with back then. Would the Commonwealth have once again become the British Empire?

Presumably either way the British Commonwealth would have remained a source of goods rather than being pushed to the one side as sourcing for bananas and the like moved towards European countries.

Would it have made a difference to how the settlement of France by the brits has actually happened in recent times? It certainly could have started to happen much earlier as it was only possible to move easily to France after various European laws came into force but with a UK including France that movement could have started nearly 30 years earlier.

I think that the timing of things is perhaps the major difference that there would have been. The channel tunnel would have been built a lot sooner as a means of tying the new kingdom together and we might even have had the BritishFrench Airways Concorde still flying as the symbol of a much larger nation.

‘Tis a shame that it didn’t get off the ground.

Whatever way they get there, sooner or later you start to see adverts on the sites. Do they make money though?

Our own relatively low-key efforts have made us around $10 and I suspect that’s a reasonably typical income for most blogs. After all, few will get the high level of traffic that’s required to pull in the advertising income but then that’s the case for a lot of ordinary websites.

On the other hand, if the blog attracts a particular audience things can change. For instance, you’ll see a fairly small advert on the relatively high profile site Petite Anglaise for clothing which I suspect works quite well as it fits in very well with the overall theme of the blog. Others make the blog one of the main planks of their Internet promotion such as Europe A La Carte. We sometimes seem to have the market cornered on French toilets and French septic tanks, neither of which are in our main line of business but both have attracted people to the blog and have moved us significantly up the blog rankings as a result.

As personal blogs meld into business ones, there’s money to be made through mentioning your business in the blog. I don’t think you can realistically do this by “in your face” advertising and so we’ve adopted a very low-key approach through telling people what it’s like here at various times of year and via our series on buying a house in France. However, whilst both may attract people to the region, they might not stay with us.

What about the “in your face” approach though? Would that work? Actually, I suspect that it would work in that google shoots blog postings right into the top 10 within a day or two. Snag is that they don’t stay there for long. For instance, we were briefly the world expert on French septic tanks when we posted on that topic and by mentioning French septic tanks several times in this piece should be the top site once again, if only for a few days. It’s even possible to stay in the top 10 if you choose your key words properly. For instance, the top entry for google on “French military victories” has remained there for several years and indeed we still get a regular trickle of hits on our septic tank page.

Where this “in your face” approach falls down is that it’s a one-shot deal and doesn’t use the power of blogs which is to attract a regular readership.