Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

I thought that we were home and dry with the various blogs on the new hosting service and had just one last blog to move.

Apparently not though as the feed for this blog ain’t working which is probably why the number of subscribers has dropped off somewhat. Feeds are, of course, something that you don’t normally look at yourself so everything seems fine even if they aren’t and it was only when I tried to sign up for a new blog aggregator that the problem surfaced.

Anyway, I’m having another go at installing this blog, this time starting from scratch so it should be a clean upload but as the problem is related to some odd characters that WordPress saw fit to insert itself it might be a little while before everything is back the way that it should have been.

That’ll “just” leave the forum and the two directories to move over. I’m not really that bothered about the forum as such and it wouldn’t be a great loss if I just dropped it. The directories are rather larger though and need moving over.

It has taken AGES but finally Foreign Perspectives is over onto the new hosting service. Well, I hope so anyway as the last attempt a month or so back didn’t work out due to several technical hitches which I think I’ve resolved this time.

One big problem I find is that the blog has been on the go so long long (just into it’s fourth year!) that it’s very big and the photos that I’ve collected over that time amount to megabytes. Combine that and you end up with all kinds of time-outs when you try to use the normal (read: easy) ways of moving it.

Anyway, fingers crossed it’s operational now.

One of the oddities of blogging is that it’s very easy to change the overall look of a blog without affecting the content at all.

Now, on the whole outside the regular readership most people arrive on a blog by way of a search engine of some sort. Some are blog specific, some are generic like google but either way they don’t see the site until they click on the search result ie it doesn’t really matter what the blog looks like as far as these people are concerned.

It’s different once they get to the site of course and if you want to keep them as regular readers you’ll need a look that’s appealing to them. Oh, and some interesting content of course.

Anyway, now that I’ve spruced up the template for Foreign Perspectives, I’ve picked up several new subscribers which is one plus point for the new template.

Whilst this isn’t really an out and out financial blog as such I write about various financial topics from time to time as you’ve probably noticed.

What’s odd about them is that any time I write about something financial, I always get a little flurry of incoming links from an assorted collection of blog aggregation services. They’re always blog aggregators rather than real blogs too whereas any other incoming links are almost always from real blogs.

Why that should be the case I’ve no idea but it’s certainly handy in increasing the number of incoming links to the site.

If you’re ever leafing through blogs that do sponsored posts there seem to be two basic styles that people use when writing them.

First, there are those which are pure advertising. They have written exactly what the advertiser has asked for and nothing else. Commonly in these you’ll get extensive repetition of phrases along the lines “you must visit this site”, “you really must visit this site”, “this is a great site to visit”. You might think that nobody would do that but that’s taken from a real-life example where those phrases were used in the first, and only, short paragraph about the product. It’s quite clear that the writers of those know next to nothing about the product and they’re a shining example of why google felt it necessary to knock a wide range of blogs down to PR0: they add nothing to the information available on the Internet.

The other type are quite different. Yes, they have the links that the advertisers asked for but they use those merely as starting points to write about the topic. Frequently, you’ll find that these posts are much longer than the length which the advertiser asked for. They don’t scream out “buy this” and often don’t even mention the advertiser by name. In fact, they’re often hardly distinguishable from a normal post on the blog which is really how it should be I think although perhaps some would argue that these are very much subliminal advertising and would prefer not to find at the end of a post that they’d been reading an advert. I don’t agree with that point of view basically because this style of sponsored post tends to be an advert only in name and, by and large, they’re normal posts except that they have a link in them that ordinarily wouldn’t be there.

What’s very common too is that the first style tends to be associated with absolutely dreadful spelling and grammar whilst the second type read more like an article for want of a better word.

Ironically, the first type are more commonly what advertisers want yet the second type are much more effective in providing the in-context links that they actually need. Just as in real-life, people often ask for what they want rather than what they need!