Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

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.

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”.