Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category
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Is anyone reading this blog?
February 7th, 2007 | 
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I read the other day that there are over a million blogs in the world at the moment which is a pretty staggering number. In practice though, the real number of blogs is much smaller. I don’t think that you can really count a blog that’s not been updated for a few months and many of those blogs counted haven’t been updated for over a year.Why is that though? Simple really: you need something to write about, it takes a fair amount of time to keep it up to date and there’s often little indication that people are reading what you write anyway.
I think a lot of people fall at the first hurdle in that they run out of new things to say. We started writing this way back at the start of 2004 as we were moving to France and had loads to say each week but once we’d been here six months or so the amount of new things dropped dramatically and so too did the blog entries. Will that happen again? Hard to say as the style of the blog is quite different to what it was then so there’s a lot more scope but perhaps that’ll run out in a year or so too.
The time taken can be considerable too. You might think that it would only take 30 minutes to write one of these entries but it can be a lot more than that. Don’t forget that I need to think about a topic first, plan what I’m going to write and then write it. Can’t say that I never just sit down and fire away but hopefully it reads better than that most of the time. Again, in a lot of cases people just find more things to do with their time.
I think that the last point is key though. In the early days there is next to no feedback. Blog sites are unusual in that they rarely give accurate figures as to how many people are actually reading your blog. For instance, our stats on Feedburner are bouncing along at fairly low level but if you compare the stats on the website hits for the blog there are obviously a lot more people reading it than Feedburner is counting.
So, it’s anyones guess as to how many people are reading this.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.French expats in America
You usually don’t see French expats online, or at least not in English but I just came across one excellent blog that gives a view (in English) of a French resident in America. Reading it definitely gives me a “foreign perspective” on life from there for sure. Every time I’ve been to America it’s always seemed like home. Well, except in Concorde Mass but then that’s where the War of Independence started so you’d expect some differences there (eg those they call patriots, we’d call terrorists in today’s terms).Yet, even though it’s been a considerable time since America and France were on opposite sides of a war, the French still think that they’re subject to “French bashing” by the Americans. Odd.
The really odd thing is that both America and France tend to think in similar ways ie Americans consider only America when they do stuff and likewise France only considers France when they do stuff. So, for example, almost all Internet directories have a “regional” heading to hold everything not in America and in France you still get chip readers only accepting French cards. Likewise both countries pass laws that they consider to have worldwide applicability eg look at the global hassles we now have from American passport requirements and the nonsense of France banning junk e-mail.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.
Is it worthwhile writing a blog?
People seem to come to the world of blogs from two basic angles: 1) a personal diary of sorts and 2) a business diary. Of course, in many cases there’s a lot of cross-over between the two.
Whatever way they get there, sooner or later you start to see adverts on the sites. Do they make money though?
Our own relatively low-key efforts have made us around $10 and I suspect that’s a reasonably typical income for most blogs. After all, few will get the high level of traffic that’s required to pull in the advertising income but then that’s the case for a lot of ordinary websites.
On the other hand, if the blog attracts a particular audience things can change. For instance, you’ll see a fairly small advert on the relatively high profile site Petite Anglaise for clothing which I suspect works quite well as it fits in very well with the overall theme of the blog. Others make the blog one of the main planks of their Internet promotion such as Europe A La Carte. We sometimes seem to have the market cornered on French toilets and French septic tanks, neither of which are in our main line of business but both have attracted people to the blog and have moved us significantly up the blog rankings as a result.
As personal blogs meld into business ones, there’s money to be made through mentioning your business in the blog. I don’t think you can realistically do this by “in your face” advertising and so we’ve adopted a very low-key approach through telling people what it’s like here at various times of year and via our series on buying a house in France. However, whilst both may attract people to the region, they might not stay with us.
What about the “in your face” approach though? Would that work? Actually, I suspect that it would work in that google shoots blog postings right into the top 10 within a day or two. Snag is that they don’t stay there for long. For instance, we were briefly the world expert on French septic tanks when we posted on that topic and by mentioning French septic tanks several times in this piece should be the top site once again, if only for a few days. It’s even possible to stay in the top 10 if you choose your key words properly. For instance, the top entry for google on “French military victories” has remained there for several years and indeed we still get a regular trickle of hits on our septic tank page.
Where this “in your face” approach falls down is that it’s a one-shot deal and doesn’t use the power of blogs which is to attract a regular readership.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.The blog comes home
Seems like ages since the last Mas Camps News!
What’s been happening?
Well, we had our first holiday since we got here. More on that if you read the blog entries from April. Although we just went to Turkey to see the solar eclipse, we’d like to go back as the trip was far too short. Might even drive it next time as we had some Turkish guests a month or so back who did exactly that. However, they recommend taking the ferry from Italy to Greece rather than driving through Croatia etc. as they reckon that route is a bit dangerous.
The pattern of reservations has been quite different from last year. Very, very little in February and March but once we hit Easter, the occupancy was way up. Almost triple the number of people this June as we had last year. July was slightly higher but completely with “ordinary” guests as we didn’t have the equivalent of the two massive bookings we had last year. Different from last year too is that September already has a fair number of bookings.
And we’ve launched a few more websites. With the quiet period in February, I was able to move Our Inns and Our Gites into PHP and MySQL which has reduced considerably the amount of effort required to put properties online. Not only that but I’ve taken the opportunity to add a number of enhancements and permit people to add a whole lot more information.
Once all the information was in the database (major nightmare!), I made a start on the much more commercially targetted Our Holiday Rental Homes and Our Bed and Breakfasts. Can’t really see them doing well in the search engines this holiday season but the older sites are doing very well. Both Chambre-d’Hote and Our Gites (listing B&B and self-catering properties in France respectively) regularly appear in the top 10 on google searches.
Last, but not least, I thought that I’d move the blog into my own domain. Still haven’t sussed out the full route, but expect to see it arriving at Foreign Perspectives shortly.
Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.4wd thoughts
We’re starting to make a bit of progress with the backlog of administration and it’s looking like in another week or so we’ll be up to date.
Yesterday was “toilet day”. We have a growing collection of toilets that aren’t operational for a variety of reasons so we thought that we’d blitz them. Net effect is that the two at the back of the dining room are ready to go though we need to put a new seat on one of them, the room 10 cistern is filling up normally, and the two outside toilets just need a bit of cleaning to get them going. The only serious one now is the one in the lobby which is still blocked up after the latest stupid guest flushed something down it and clogged it up (no, not that!).
We reckon that we need a new car for next year as the RAV4 isn’t really up to carrying the people and stuff. Sooo, we’ve started thinking about what we need and have come up with the following little list of essentials:
– 4wd, because we hope to do tours into the ski areas in due course;
– 6 or 7 seater, because we’re starting to do a lot more airport shuttle runs than expected and also because we want to do little tours;
– diesel, because it’s costing us a fortune in petrol.
We’d like automatic too ‘cos Wendy can’t drive manuals and ‘cos I’m to lazy to drive them.
I was thinking that a long wheelbase Landrover would do the biz but I gather that they’re awful to drive so that’s put me off them. In the frame for consideration at the moment are the Mitsubishi Shogun (called Montero here) and the Nissan Patrol.
Does anybody have any thoughts on those (or indeed other cars we should be looking at)?
Dunno what happened, but we’re up to over 120 readers a day of Mas Camps News!!
