Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Just as we were assuming that we were back down to lower paid opportunities and not a great selection for that matter either, today happened.

Whilst it’s always possible that a particular paid post outlet could have a run of opportunities, today just about all of them seemed to be full of opportunities whereas only a few days ago they seemed to be drying up.

So much did this take us by surprise that we stuffed ourselves with them today and hit a new personal record of postings of 16 posts in a single day!

A pretty unbelieveable number, eh? Still, no more posts from now ’til Wednesday for me ‘cos I’m off to do the final Spanish exam of my Modern Languages degree.

Although I’ve been plugging away with a series on living in France and you’d think that it would be something French that would be the most popular post on the blog, in fact it’s a post that is solidly in the expat finance field that is by far the most popular.

It’s, of course, our article on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident. Why? Well, for those that are running a small business on the Internet, the preferred way of getting paid is via PayPal which is brilliant for a small business as you get to accept credit card payments with no hassle at all. However, obviously you need to get the money out of PayPal and into a real bank account at some point and that’s where the problems start.

PayPal is basically an American payment scheme and only lets you transfer money out to a fairly limited number of countries. Crucially, that range of countries excludes quite a lot of Asia who are, of course, one of the most active business communities on the Internet.

If PayPal don’t support bank accounts in your country they give you only one other option: transfer money to an American bank account and so opening a bank account in America has become very popular. Unfortunately, the tightening up of security checks after 9/11 means that it’s quite difficult to open an account there or at least the options have closed up somewhat.

What’s happened then is that there has been a massive growth in websites offering to sell you the information for anything from $5 to $1000. Yes, up to one thousand dollars! Since I don’t charge anything for somewhat better information, the post in question has steadily moved up the rankings in google and indeed the corresponding entry in the expat resources section of the Whole Earth Guide has soared right up to the top of google too.

In fact the post has become so popular that I’ll be rolling out a similar guide for other countries which have been requested (Switzerland is next in line, the Channel Islands after that).

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.

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!

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.