Foreign Perspectives

Each time a new entry is added various services such as Feedburner, Technorati and more specialised services like PingOMatic inform all the other news-type services that you’ve done that. The net effect of this is that you get the equivalent of a new listing every time you add an entry which can both produce an immediate flurry of hits on the blog and also helps the more gradual building up of hits from the normal search engines.

What’s also quite different from a normal website is that you get feedback and comments on what you said. For instance, a few weeks back I was speculating as to how many people were reading this blog, I was very surprised to have a reply from the Feedburner people themselves. There’s also much more interaction between the various bloggers than there is between people running up normal websites.

One “problem” with a blog is that you really have no idea how many people are actually reading it. The likes of feedburner return a count as to how many people are potentially subscribed to the blog but that doesn’t count those subscribed directly via the e-mail subscriptions and, on the whole, there doesn’t seem to be any 100% reliable way of counting those who reach entry.

What has really surprised me though is that somehow or other this blog has managed to get into the top 1/2 million blogs already which is pretty good going I think considering that I’ve only been doing it properly for six months or so.

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.

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.

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.