Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Most of the time you just assume that the Internet runs 24/7 and that it doesn’t have a timezone as such.

That works fine for most people except that obviously many of the new “live chat” support services are generally only online during the business hours of the company providing them which, at the moment, usually means either the east or west coast of America which ain’t too handy for us folk in Europe. In fact, I’ve only once seen one of those services online when I was looking for it.

However, for me the bigger problem is that the paid posting outfits are generally on the east coast of America which is five hours off for us. Although in theory the opportunities are there 24/7 in practice the folk in the office put them on during their business hours of something like 9am to 6pm which, for us, means 2pm to 11pm although it looks like at least some of their staff work later than that as some opportunities come on after our bedtime. Net effect of this is that naturally the folk to the west of them get the majority of the high paying ones and in the morning we see all the great payouts that we missed during the night.

Sadly we’re a long way from it being economic for us to relocate to America or at least somewhere in their timezones so we can just gripe about it for now.

I find that that’s a very difficult question to answer these days.

Originally, it was very much an expat blog, covering the process of settling into a life in France and therefore it slotted fairly neatly into the “travel” category. By listing it as a travel blog, I picked up a whole lot of other stuff travel related and at times over the last year it has most definitely been a travel blog.

However, a glance at the category cloud shows that this is changing. The rise of the America category is a little misleading as that really reflects the increased number of paid posts that I do these days but the rise of Banking & Finance is perhaps more meaningful as it represents the combined effect of me writing more paid posts in this category but also of me writing a lot more normal ones in it as well.

What’ll it look like in six months? I’m sure that America will be much larger for one thing and France will have shrunk as we’re effectively in the process of withdrawing from France (which’ll be quite a long process I suspect). Although you can’t see it yet, the UK categories are also starting to slowly rise so expect to see them starting to displace a few of the France categories over the coming year.

One thing that I found quite surprising when I started doing the paid posts on a more widespread basis than I had before was that a considerable number of them are picked up by various blog aggregation services. So much so that I’ve almost trebled the number of “readers” subscribing to the feed of this blog and there are early signs that An Age of Magic will be going the same way in due course.

Does this matter to me? Well, in theory these guys are ripping off my hard work but on the other hand I’m sure that the advertisers quite like their stuff getting a wider readership than it would do if it were only listed on this blog and, since it gives me more inbound links for no effort, it will gradually increase the amount of money that I get paid to write the articles in the first place. So, for example, my piece “Considering starting an online business” of earlier today has been picked up by YourPropertyNews already.

Funnily enough, the vast majority of the articles picked up by these aggregation sites are those in the Sponsored category so my “real content” seems immune to piracy at the moment. Why this should be, I don’t know, as a lot of the Sponsored content is broadly similar in nature to the “real content”.

When Wendy started off her blog we just used the domain wendyreid.org for it as we already had that registered.

That was back in February but by the Summer she was well into writing paid posts and it seemed like a good idea to a) be using a dotcom domain and b) using one that was related to the blog content too.

Why the dotcom? That’s because a number of the paid post opportunities specify that you have a dotcom and therefore moving to one would increase the number available to her. Also, and related to that, for reasons that are far from clear a dotcom is better than a dotorg in terms of search engine positioning (which is why we’re also in the process of moving Our Inns to Inns4U).

Having the blog name related to the content is just a sensible thing anyway but it also helps for those paid posting sites where the advertiser chooses the blog.

Anyway, we registered Cultured Views and aliased it with the existing wendyreid.org domain so you can access the content by using either domain. Then we started telling the various sites that she’s signed up with.

No problem ’til we did PayPerPost. When we did that, the number of available opportunities dropped like a stone. Although nothing had really changed about the blog, they took the current pagerank of the new domain and used that to filter the opportunities. Naturally, that was PR0 therefore there were next to none available. So we asked them to change it back ’til we managed to transfer the pagerank over.

Ironically, just about the same time as the pagerank transferred over, somebody else in ppp noticed that the blog didn’t match the domain and changed it back. Well, tried to because they didn’t do it properly and Wendy’s not been able to post anything with them for days.

Finally, they replied to her support ticket and the guy said he’d changed everything including the URLs quoted in the past…. to culturedreviews.com. So she still can’t post anything! Perhaps they’ll get it 100% this time around.

Don’t you just hate it when there’s some daft validation check applied to what you want to enter in a form?

Despite many years of crazy assumptions being made by programmers and analysts, they still happen.

France, as always, heads the list though. It’s impossible to enter the date you got your driving license if it was before you were 18 as that’s the earliest you can get it in France. Applying for a job? Well, you’ll need a reference number to do it that you can’t get until after you’ve got a job!

In a similar category there’s the seemingly pathetic software testing that’s done these days. The reason why there haven’t been any posts from PayPerPost here lately is because they’ve updated their software and it’s not currently possible to submit entries to them! I suspect that the advertisers are having problems with them too as whilst it’s normally 200+ opportunities to select from, there’s only about 100 on at the moment.