Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

One of the problems with paid posting sites is that the majority of them expect you to know how much your blog is worth which, for most bloggers, is the one thing that they know next to nothing about.

That being the case, you often find “high value” bloggers writing substantial posts for $5 when they could just as easily be writing shorter ones for $50. They’re not crazy, they just don’t know what their blog is worth.

So, it’s nice to see that SnapBomb have taken away all that guesswork. Signup with them and within a few minutes their system produces a price range for your blog. Why the range? Well, as they explain on their blog most blogs will have a certain base value but that value can be enhanced if the blog is particularly attractive to an advertiser’s campaign. Thus, you can have a range from, say, $25 to $100. A generic post might get the $25 end of that range but if you’re in the right market segment for a campaign you’d get closer to the $100.

Also good is that signup is pretty much instant and there’s no delay before you can start writing posts for them. Payment is 60 days after taking the post and you’ve 12 hours to do the writing.

The weather has taken a distinct lurch for the better over the last week or so and we’re having to go back to just the t-shirts as it’s just too hot outside at the moment for anything else.

Somehow I just can’t see that heat wave holding up but we’re trying to make the most of it while it lasts (well, will be once we all get over the flu that’s felled most of us over the last week).

It is pretty peculiar to be needing the airconditioning in February though!

There haven’t been any posts in the last week or so as I was felled by the flu. Isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly trivial thing can still knock all of us out?

Of course, with the relatively cold weather and the school holidays it’s been working it’s way around everyone over the last week.

Still, just about everyone seems to be getting back on their feet again so we’re back to (almost) normal.

Whilst I include most of my sites in an annual site-promotion programme I’m really bad at omitting the blogs from that. Why? Well, because it’s not so easy to promote a blog as most directories aren’t geared up to listing them in a sensible way.

So, now and again, I look around for new places to list the blogs and just came across rssHugger this afternoon.

As in most blog directories, this one considers blogs separately from normal sites and, of course, in this particular instance targets the RSS feeds which is always useful as you can get a whole bunch of new readers if you’re on the “right” RSS aggregators. Now, the question is whether rssHugger is one of those “right” aggregators but, at the moment, it’s just impossible to say as 1) this is a relatively new site and 2) I don’t know the demographics of those that use it and therefore whether or not they’d be generally interested in the stuff that I write.

Initially the sign-up was $20 for 10 years but they dropped that requirement recently for those blogs that write a review of them. Personally, I think that it’s good to have that notional $20 value as it gives a broad indication as to where they themselves feel the value of a listing on rssHugger would be.

What’s the site like though? It has a very clean look which in some senses is good but it’s a little too clean as it’s not immediately clear from the opening screen that there’s a directory living here. I think it would be better to move that directory onto the front page. It’s also quite a long directory and could do with being stuctured eg you get “Investing” and “Save Money” as two categories yet since the directory is purely alphabetical these related categories are nowhere near each other.

Is it worth listing with? In that it’s free at the moment there’s no downside and it has the feel of a site that could have a lot of upside so, yes, it’s worth listing with. How valuable the listing will be only time will tell.

You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000‚€ a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.