Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

As you may know, I am a participant in the Technorati favourites exchange which was thought up by DoshDosh as a means of getting loads of into the front rank of Technorati and indeed a growing number of the participants are turning up in the top 100 favourites list on Technorati.

However, what I found most instructive was the number of ideas exchanged across the last 10 days amongst the various participants in this programme. For one thing, a considerable number of those participating fall into the “techie” or “make money online” groups of blogs worldwide and the number of lessons I’ve picked up in that time has been enormous.

Some of the first fruits of those lessons has been in the new ad format that you can see throughout the blog. I figured that if the square adsense format was used by almost all the “making money” blogs, it was bound to be a “good thing” so I’ve adopted that. Also, you’ve seen from a few days ago the little underlined popup adverts which is also used by them.

Funnily enough, although I was adding all the blogs to my favourites just to get into that top 100, I’ve found a number of the articles on the favourited blogs quite interesting. I’ve even picked up several relevant backlinks from blogs which I’d not otherwise have seen.

Now, if only I could up the traffic on Foreign Perspectives and/or get ‘yall to click on the adverts for me, I’d be able to give up the day job… Funnily enough, I’d not really have thought that possible a few weeks ago but there does seem to be a whole lot of people out there living off their blog income so apparently it is possible.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Everyone and their dog seems to be running up lists of blogs these days, so I thought it was time us expat bloggers got in on the act. Why though? Well, it helps everyone on the list get a few more links for their site and thereby improve the visibility and hence traffic of their blog.

The idea is a simple one and was pinched from the idea of the T-List which lists travel blogs itself copied from the Z List, originally launched by Mack Collier of Viral garden. I shamelessly pinched the original of this from Ministry of Propaganda.

Coming soon are the rest of the world… there are wayyyyy too many expat bloggers to put in one list!

What you do is:

1. Write a post titled “The Expat List”
2. Copy the links below into it
3. If you’re an expat blogger not on the list, add yourself
4. Add any additional expat blogs that you know of (English language only please for the moment)
5. Notify the blogger you got the list from in a comment to their post.

Note that cut & paste doesn’t always work with links ie check that the list you have has clickable links.

Austria

    Novalas Europa
    Life as it happens
    Metamorphosism
    Nerd’s Eye View
Belgium

    Tomato And Basil Sandwiches
    A lawyer’s dream of heaven
    My Boyfriend Is A Twat
Denmark

    Observations of a globalite
    Desirable Roasted Coffee
    Moron Abroad
France

    An Australian Lass, a Frenchman & a Burmese
    Textism.com
    Les filles in Glasgow (oops) Paris
    Non Tibi Spiro
    Anders Jacobsen’s Blog
    Petite anglaise – lost in france
    Foreign Perspectives
    Peregrinations
    Blethers.com – Weblog
    Perso.fraise.net
    Home in France – News for family & friends –
    Wicked French Kiss
    From my French Window
    Dispatches from France
Germany

    Bits and pieces
    Mausi
    Rancuret abroad
    Rainy Day
    PINAYexpat: In Deutschland
    I am a doughnut
    Bowlerised
    Broke in Berlin
    Flip Flop Flying
    London Dan
    Transblawg
    Greenhaddock
    The Silent Penguin
    Murray’s Diary
    Keys Corner
    Savory’s Blog
    That Queer Expatriate
    Stringbean abroad: the Xpatriate files
    LawPundit
    German Joys
    AGITPROPOLIS
    Schokolade Mädchen in München
    My Euro-American Life
    Daily Dose of Dave
    Greg’s World
    American in Dusseldorf
    HeisseScheisse
    Germany Doesn’t Suck
    Chicagokarl
    Moore’s Radio Free Mike
    JeweledConcrete
    Notes from Germany
    Culture Shock and the blondelibrarian
    German Diary
    Raskal trippin
    PapaScott
Holland

    Suze Abroad
    A Canadian Girl’s Just Dazzle
    Dutched Pinay on Expatriation
    Reluctant Nomad
    Thinking Aloud
Italy

    Ben Hammersley.com
    A Welshman in Milano
    With a Rebel Yael
    Il Blog Enogastronomico di Brendan
    At Home in Rome
Luxembourg

    EuroYank: an American Alien in Europe….

Portugal

    The Weblog
    Tim Worstall
Spain

    Brain Tags
    Trevor’s k’alebøl
    The Spanish Cockpit
    A wandering woman writes from spain
    kellycrull.com
    mylifeinspain
Sweden

    How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Herring
    Shazzer’s ShazzerSpeak
Switzerland

    Ms. Mac’s Meanderings
    GLOG: A Genevan Log
UK

    Anthonyjhicks.com – weblog
    I live on your visits
    Michael Jennings
    Speedysnail
    What’s new, pussycat?
    Bloggerheads – the weblog of Tim Ireland (aka Manic)
    Christof.Meerwalk@blog.www
    Anna Overseas
    Trailers and dirt
    blog from a broad: Lisa’s nonsensical ramblings
    Knitting on the Cam
    A Canadian Postgraduate in London
    The Dustless Workshop
   

 

Ministry of Propaganda
    I can do waffle in my sleep
    FlorianDargel
    Beans on toast
    Hiya
    A Student’s Life
    Cartside
    dotFAF.com
    The Earth Beneath Her Feet
    Lost in Thought
    J+B=Us
    Not as lame as the JediKid
    A Tennessee ex-pat’s The Vol Abroad
    Adam Curry’s Weblog
    Dùn Èideann Wayfaring
    Towering intellect
    The Misadventures of a Jersey Girl that crossed the pond
    Neurotic Traveler
    Jackie Danicki
    Yankee Fog
    Cambridge mba blog
    Occasionally, something happens
    An American in London
    Expat Yank
    Grey’s Journal
    Wanderingz
 

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

As you know, I was one of the first to repost the 2kbloggers list last Thursday and in common with Bob and Chino had my blog suspended from Technoratis listings temporarily (Angela by chance didn’t make the list clickable). It would have been rather more than a temporary suspension but for the words of wisdom from Bob.

Now, Technorati have gotten around to replying to us as to the reason for the suspension in a comment on Bob’s site. Seems that were a substantial number of the 2kbloggers to have similarly reposted the list, their whole ranking system would have become worthless. Their reasoning is that their system is intended to give high rankings to blogs which get a lot of relevant links.

Emm, guys€¦ if that’s the case, how come you allow the growth of blog reviews’ as a side-line to the likes of John Chow? For that matter, how come you allow the growth of blog review blogs at all? After all, the link that I have on this blog to bloggyaward is hardly a relevant outbound link to me, is it? (Although the words of wisdom from Mr Bloggy will be getting acted on in due course).

This isn’t to knock John Chow who, after all, is only out to make a buck online as are most of us. I’m just asking, how come it’s OK for him to run a long series of blog review’ competitions for his blog and thereby gather up hundreds if not thousands of inbound links, yet it’s not OK for those on the 2kblogger list to do the same?

To my mind, it highlights a severe weakness in the Technorati system. If they want the system to rank blogs on the basis of relevant links then those are the only links that they should count. They’re probably going to turn around and say that it’s impossible to distinguish a relevant link from an irrelevant one but that’s not the case. At a simplistic level, it would be relatively easy for them to only count links from site A to site B where A had more than one link to B. That in itself would exclude any irrelevant cross-linking that might happen from a spread of the 2kblogger list and the like.

After all, how long is it going to be before some awkward sod like myself decides to set up several thousand one page blogs all pointing to their main blog? For that matter, what will happen when (and it will be “when”, not “if”) someone runs up, say, 25,000 one page blogs and thereby ends up in the top 10 on Technorati?

All this, of course, aside from the freedom of speech angle. Actually, knowing bloggers, I’d be quite worried about that particular angle being taken up if I were in Technorati at the moment. There’s a LOT of support for freedom of expression out there in blog-land.

Ironically though, that 2kblogger post has actually attracted a growing number of relevant posts to my blog. So, yes, almost 1800 people now have a link from me that’s not too relevant but I correspondingly have links back which are relevant. In fact, I’ve found that looking at irrelevant’ blogs often turns up relevant links for me, hence all the click-throughs from me to those that look at my site.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Whilst I’m feeling quite chuffed at moving from a 200k ranking on Technorati down to 100k in a couple of days John Chow is the true master of such things and presently sitting at number 154. Even better, his blog is there to help you make money online, in this particular instance by (hopefully) driving traffic to Foreign Perspectives. All that’s required is to link to his blog.

His blog is just filled with ways of making money online so all being well, once I’ve worked through them all, I’ll be able to give up the day job.

 

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

This seems to be my week for marketing the blog!

Most of the time, I’m incredibly lazy about doing it and it’s just gotten to where it is today by chance for the most part. In fact, I didn’t really do any promotion of it worth talking about ’til this week when it was something of a blitz that I’ve not yet recovered from. I started the week with the blogsite submission service at DirectoryVault which at $23 seems something of a bargain. To be fair, there was some duplication with the dribble of promotion that I’d done on a now and again basis over the last six months or so. Things like the obvious of Technorati and Feedburner mainly but it did turn up a considerable number of seemingly good places that I’ve never heard of before.

Then there was the Technorati favourites exchange on Wednesday which is still rumbling on and which has left behind a fair amount of work that I’ve still to catch up on at some point.

Finally on Thursday, I aided and abetted with the 2kbloggers list which may tootle on for a while as fellow bloggers catch up with it on their own blogs. Or perhaps they won’t as it causes a fair amount of hassle for a day or so after you post the list.

Is all this worth doing though? It’s impossible to say at the moment and even in a months time it’ll probably be hard to give a definitive answer. Certainly, if I’m pulling in $100 a day on adsense at that point I’ll likely attribute that to this weeks efforts but more than likely it’ll only be $1 and I might have pulled that in anyway. At present, the only thing that it’s safe to say is that my blog has a much higher profile in the blogging community than it did a week ago but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll get significantly increased blog traffic once the efforts of this week tail off in the course of the coming week or so. What will be useful is the much improved ranking on Technorati as that should make it easier to attract links from related sites and it’s those that I think will make this weeks work worthwhile.

So now that it’s Saturday, I’m back to the other side of the fence and looking for ways to make money out of the blog and gradually working through a raft of sites that I’ve picked up. Most notably amongst those is that at Blogged-Out which has an enormous quantity of information regarding site promotion and, more importantly, making money out of it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of it at the moment and expect to be pinching great great ideas from Darren for ages to come.

 

 

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.