Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Don’t know why, but today is turning out to be the best day for income from the blog ever and by a long way too.

If I’m quick enough, it looks like I might be able to double my previous record at a stroke.

Still, no doubt tomorrow will be pretty dry in comparison as indeed was the weekend.

Wendy’s about to make a start on Mums Finance after finding out that there’s money in tham thar hills, especially if you’re writing a finance related blog.

I imagine that it’ll be a day or two before she gets going in that we don’t even have the software loaded nor the database set up as yet. She’s busy picking out a new template for it at the moment though.

Sometimes I think we’re getting a bit carried away with the blogs but then we look at the money flowing in from them.

I’m sure that it’s an incredibly misleading statistic but I’m dead chuffed to read that I’ve had over 11,000 readers via Reuters in the last week alone.

Still, it’s a very encouraging statistic and indeed the number of readers of the blog as recorded by the stats on this site are showing a nice upward trend with almost triple the number of subscribers as it had in the Summer. The international readership is also well up with articles being taken by places as varied as FoxNews and the Palm Beach Post.

All of which I was blissfully unaware of ’til I started getting a rapidly rising number of click-throughs from Reuters over the last few days.

If this keeps up I may have to see about getting a job as a “real” journalist!

Googles long awaited pagerank review started working its way through the sites over the last few weeks but still doesn’t appear to have settled down.

It’s quite a confusing picture going by a number of sites that I keep an eye on. A friends key site for instance has dropped from PR5 down to PR3 for no good reason and is particularly worrying for me as he does far, far more SEO than I ever bother with. My thinking is that if it can happen to him, then it’s sure to happen to me sooner or later.

Wendy’s site has gone from PR2 to PR2 to PR0. Again, no good reason comes to mind. In fact, she’s been upping the ante with the SEO over the last few months so it should have gone to PR3.

This site is, for the moment, steady at PR4. I’ve not done any SEO on it over the last few months but was sort-of hoping for PR5 in that there’s a lot more content on it now than there was.

Meanwhile, our Whole Earth Guide has gone from PR0 to PR2 on a site which doesn’t, yet, have a whole lot of content.

Actually, as I read that, the one common factor in drops is that SEO has been done on the sites. Could it be that Google have somehow managed to negate all that SEO and look instead through to real value in the sites? Although, that would beg the question: is this blog of “real value”?

That used to be a relatively simple question to answer in that it began life broadly as a way of communicating with the folks back home so was effectively an expat blog. It dropped into that category more formally last year when it moved to the Foreign Perspectives domain and along the way the travelogue aspect of it became more prominent as well.

There was always a bit of an ongoing theme of finance cum investment which is a little more prominent these days if only because I pick a lot of paid posts on those themes. They’re not distorting the content of the blog per se as I’m just choosing them because they’re topics I find it easy to write about.

In fact, that “easy to write” is what is really the defining aspect of the blog. If I can write it easily, then chances are it will appear here. Sometimes that means that the content will fall into a neatly defined category, but quite often it just won’t.

For example, today I’ve quite a sizeable chunk of a post on video conferencing. If you read it you’ll see that it’s something I’ve used quite a bit in the past yet it doesn’t fall neatly into the expat cum travel aspects. Actually, lately there have been so many techie type things coming up that I’ve added a technology category, again because I find them easy to write (more techie stuff is on the techie sister site An Age of Magic).

So, now, we’ve expat things, travel things, finance things and tech things. Plus, now and again, stuff that’s “different” and which represent little experiments on my part to see if I can write about stuff outside the main themes of the blog.