Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

I’ve been thinking about the traffic that’s been arriving on this site over the last month or so and it would appear that the people most active in the “blog aggregators” are concentrated in the broad area of financial services for want of a better name for it.

To be fair, that sample of stats suffers from a bias in that I’m obviously only seeing the aggregation services that are picking up various articles on my blogs. However, the majority of my posts most definitely haven’t been in that financial services area yet the incoming links from the aggregators are disproportionately hitting topics in those particular areas.

For sure, there are aggregators out there looking at the travel end of things and whenever I write something about Hawaii and cruises in particular, then I can expect those articles to be picked up.

Anyway, that has me wondering if it would be worthwhile to kick off a blog aimed very specifically at that financial services area? For that matter, I’m also wondering if there’s money to be made with a blog aggregator: if nothing else, having other people doing all the work and having me banking the advertising income has a certain appeal.

This is our first “day off” for a while so we’re at a bit of a loss as to what to do!

Funnily enough, it feels very much like a Saturday so far, though why that is, I just don’t know.

We had our usual “Saturday morning” lay-in so everything is running later than usual. Somehow we’ve gotten to lunchtime already yet we’ve not done any of our usual morning things yet!

As we’ve been a bit lazy, we’ve all the rooms in the place to make up sometime between today and tomorrow morning so that’ll keep us out of trouble once we get going on it.

Wendy’s next in line for the computer (we’ll have two from next week: no more queuing!!!) so I’m off to have another look at the Spanish.

It’s been a while since I looked at our stats on Feedburner so I was really surprised to see that we’re now sitting at around the 75 mark vs 30 just a few months ago.

Where are they all coming from?

Well, a number of them seem to be various feed aggregator services which have been picking up on a number of my posts in the areas of finance and travel. That in turn is creating a steady stream of new incoming links for the blog. Surprisingly, quite a large chunk are picking up on the sponsored posts which just goes to show that taking sponsored posts is a good thing for a blog (even aside from the money, of course).

Even more surprising though is the rapid rise in incoming links to Whole Earth Guide which is looking like it’ll hit PR3 by Christmas (ie at the next pagerank update).

Having said that, perhaps the most ludicrous figure is the number of incoming links to Crystal Consultancy which despite consisting basically of one page has the largest number of incoming links of any of my sites!

Ordinarily, we can see Queribus no problem but for the last few days it’s been almost entirely shrouded in mist.

That’s messed up the walking season somewhat to put it mildly. Typically, walkers start with us and set off for Carcassonne which takes them about five days and goes pretty much directly there, over hill and dale. Ordinarily, I quite envy them as it’s a lovely walk (though, so far, I’ve been too lazy to do it) but it’s a different matter in this kind of weather. Cold and miserable is nice now and again but they’ll be lucky to even get up to Queribus the way it is at the moment.

We’ve even got snow on Canigou which ain’t a good sign this early on: usually it doesn’t even have a dusting for another month or so.

It looks like Pay Per Post lifted their 2 posts a day limit a little too soon as the number of opportunities on offer and the average payout from those available has dropped like a stone.

A few weeks ago, there would typically have been something like 100 posts available with maybe 1/3rd of those averaging around $7 to $10 or thereabouts. However, today there are still only 28 offers and only six of those are more than $6.

In fact, it’s worse than that as five of the six aren’t really available to me and the seventh is already used up.

So, nice idea to move the posting limit up to 3 per day but they need to pull in more advertisers or the whole lot will be cleared out very quickly indeed.