Foreign Perspectives

Post offices in many countries around the world offer a range of banking services these days, but are they really up to it?

Typically a small post office will have one counter to do everything. That works well when “everything” is mainly posting letters and parcels which take a few minutes to process.

Add on banking services and you’re into a whole different league in terms of the time that it takes to process a transaction though. For one thing, opening an account takes ages and delays everything. OK, it’s not something that happens every day but it happens fairly frequently: I spent getting on for an hour in a queue in a post office today which ended up snaking right round the available space and out the door because two people were opening accounts.

The problem really stems from the practice of governments to consider post offices in country villages to be a “good thing” and therefore worthy of support. That in turn leads to them being considered a job creation scheme so, of course, you wouldn’t want to add too much automation into them as then you wouldn’t create so many jobs. What automation that there is often is counter-productive: posting my three letters took nearly five minutes because the stamps had to be scanned in and destinations entered into the computer.

So, no, I don’t know that it’s really true to say that many post offices could be considered banks.

Now and again I try out adwords, mainly to advertise the listings sites or rather to advertise for owners to list on them.

It’s been ages since I spruced up the campaigns so I thought I’d have a shot at it again today.

One thing to remember is that you only want relevant clicks on your ads. How many times have we all come across an adsense ad that was on a site that seemed totally inappropriate to the content? That’s because the person placing that advert hadn’t thought enough about exactly what keywords they should be aiming to use and probably thinks that it’s great that they’re getting loads of page impressions but they’re getting very few clicks.

In fact, the best approach is to have very tightly defined keywords, get very few page impressions but get very high click through because your advert is displayed where it should be. Not an easy task for sure, but one way to tackle the problem is to consider all the factors that go into placing your advert and why someone would click it.

Consider an example: a self-catering property in Brittany, France.

1. The language. If your ad is in English then you need to select that as an adwords option.

2. What country? OK, our property is in France, and the advert is in English but there are a lot of English readers out there so we could list the UK, Ireland, France as a first cut but it’s probably also worthwhile adding in all the countries bordering France. In practice the use of English will exclude non-English speakers but you could add the rest of the richer European countries on the basis that English speakers in them might want to go on holiday in France.

3. What keywords? This is where many people fall down. Yes, your property is in France but you don’t want people clicking on your ad if they’re looking for a place in Provence so you need to include Brittany as one of the keywords. This isn’t quite so easy though as it means that you need to add phrases like “gite brittany france”, “france brittany gite”, and so on. It’s best to include the keywords in quotes as this will limit the irrelevant page impressions and clicks but note that you need to put in all possible variations.

4. What about the ad? This needs to say what you’re offering. Now, that might sound silly but many ads don’t or rather attract irrelevant clicks because they aren’t clear about what they’re offering. Remember that the people seeing your ad won’t know what keywords triggered it so you’ll need to say something like “Brittany gite with pool”. The ad needs to be readable too which often isn’t easy as there isn’t much room for the text.

5. Where should it go? Whilst you could just go to your homepage, it’s best to run up a special adwords page that follows through with the sale information. Not only will a more direct sales page be more effective but you’ll also see more clearly in your stats which clicks came via adwords.

6. What about the budget? This is a difficult one. For example, there are a lot of gites advertising using adwords so the more general phrases have high bids. Remember too that you generally need 100 clicks to make a sale so if you’re charging $1000 a week then paying $1 a click means that 10% of your income will go in adwords costs. Also, no matter how careful you’ve been, you may get heaps of irrelevant clicks through some oversight so you should always test a new ad with a low budget.

Finally, don’t forget that the longer the phrase you use, the lower you need to bid. Long phrases mean low numbers of page impressions but higher click-through from them and lower costs for you. What you don’t want is lots of irrelevant clicks as that just costs you money.

I came across an interesting site a few days ago which has set me thinking about my own listings sites.

What this site does is build mini websites for accommodation properties and then enters those properties in a property listing. It’s interesting because my own sites operate from the other end so to speak. They’re listing sites that build mini websites for the properties that list on them.

That different starting point has created numerous differences in emphasis between my site and theirs but I suspect that if you were to compare both in a few years time there’d be little to distinguish between them. I’m currently beavering away to soup up the mini websites that I create for the properties and no doubt they’re beavering away to soup up the performance of their listing service.

If nothing else, they’ve provided me with enough ideas to keep me busy for the rest of the year!

Launching a new blog is a peculiar thing to do in many ways.

This blog for instance has been running for a little over four years now. From before that time I’ve had a domain sitting around which I basically just used for e-mail so I thought that I’d use it as something of a soapbox for a change.

It’s odd in some ways as it seems like forever since I started a blog totally from scratch.

What’s involved?

Well, registering the domain is the first step normally but I’d done that 10 years back for the new blog. Next is to get some hosting but then I’ve that already done. Then, it’s loading the software which takes about 20 minutes and another 20 or so to get the various plugins sorted out.

At that point, it’s ready to go but it looks pretty plain so you end up spending ages searching for a decent template for it before making that historic first post.

After that, you need to register it all over the place eg at FeedBurner to handle the subscribers, Technorati to get some blog type stats. Then you’ve to start adding it to blog aggregation services to pick up a little traffic although you can short-circuit that process by using one of the manual submission services to do it for you ($23 well spent).

Then it’s down to the slog of writing posts with no feedback from an audience for the first few months (which is why most blogs stagger to a halt after 2 or 3 months).

Oh, at some point you need to pick a topic for your blog too. In this case, not so easy as “soapbox” usually doesn’t appear as a blog category!

You might not think it, but it makes a substantial difference because google and other search engines use geotargetting.

This is fine if your website is country-specific (eg .co.uk) but not so good if you’re using a non-geographic domain (.com, .net, .org, etc.) as many people do these days because then they will assume that your target market is the country in which your site is hosted. For example, if you own a holiday property in England and rent it mainly to the English then your target market is the UK. However, if you have a .com hosted in America you may not even appear in searches done by people in the UK using google.com or google.co.uk.

It’s not always obvious where your hosting service actually is as many are rebranded. The easiest way to find out is to go to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scroll down to “IP Location”.

What if it’s in the wrong place? Surely it won’t matter that much?

Well, when we moved our sites from American hosting to UK hosting the traffic went up THIRTY fold so, yes, it does matter quite a lot.