Foreign Perspectives

I’ve been trying to build up the representation of properties that I have in Spain by way of sending out an e-mail in Spainish to a number of properties. Now, the sites that I have are basically targetted at an English speaking audience so I need the entries to be in English of course.

What’s interesting is that a number of properties have responded and are all excusing their “bad English”. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? After all, these are largely Spanish owned properties. The funny thing is that the English is often better than the English that I’ve been getting back from properties based in the UK!

Still, what I must do next time is highlight that I’ll translate the entries into English if needbe which I suspect will bump up the take-up somewhat next time I’m trying to get more Spaniards onto the listings.

Whenever we send out a newsletter to our B&B people, we always get a number of e-mails returned with errors.

Now, in some cases it’s because the owners have sold up and moved on but in surprisingly high number of cases it’s because they’ve changed their e-mail address and not told us. In fact, when you do a search for them there’s usually a considerable number of places that they’ve been advertising with yet which still hold the old address.

It’s just crazy to throw away advertising like that and yet people do it.

OK, sometimes they are forced into a change when they change ISP (although, quite why they don’t use their own domain name for their e-mail escapes me) and, after all, who remembers everywhere that they’re advertising? Fair enough, except that they don’t need to remember all the time: just searching for their old e-mail will turn up a reasonable fraction of their advertising in most cases.

What they should do, of course, is to keep a list of everywhere that they’re advertising so that they can change the e-mails and other details if need be.

Many people move to France to live their dream and why not? If your dream is to live in some idyllic spot in France, who’s to say that you can’t?

Unfortunately, for every one that succeeds in living out their dream of a life in France, there’s another who falls by the wayside and ends up returning to the UK.

For some, it’s the case that the dream was never backed up by practical activities. Most common amongst those is the lack of preparation in terms of knuckling down and learning to speak French. I don’t blame those who arrive here not speaking any French or at best just a little because you can do something about it when you get here and besides sometimes the opportunity to move comes when you’re least prepared for it and you just have to jump or lose your dream.

Some come unstuck in not getting down to the practical business of living in France. Many fall in this camp I suspect. If you’re not at retirement age then you’re likely to need a job and, no, running a gite business usually doesn’t count as the income just isn’t enough on it’s own. B&B can be made to work but generally even that needs a supplementary income.

Finally, there are those who do nearly everything right and it just doesn’t work or doesn’t work well enough. For them it is truly sad I think. They genuinely want to live in France, have what seems a viable form of work and integrate with the local society yet it just doesn’t work out and they end up having to leave as the dream slips out of their fingers. At least for the others they can point to something specific that they didn’t do and could potentially fix it and live out their dream.

If you do fall into one of those first couple of categories, why not try to fix the problem and live out your dream?

Many people these days work their way through a short list of the top directories when they’re promoting a new website. For some it’s a very short list: addurl to google and they’re done, for others they either slog away for months or just use one of the manual submission services to do it for them.

However, many people ignore all the new directories that are launched every day. After all, they’re weighing in with PR0 so why bother about them at all?

Well, for one thing google had PR0 when it started out (OK, so they probably fiddled the books to give it PR10 from day 1, but it should have had PR0). It’s the same with all the little directories that are launched. Certainly few of them will get beyond PR5 but links from all those little PR1-4 directories add up even if the bulk of them are sitting around PR1-PR2.

Also, they are usually free at the start but charge for listings after anything from 6 months to a year, essentially when the owner gets swamped with all the free submissions (which, in my case amounted to over 100 a day this time last year on Whole Earth Directory which I assume is fairly typical). So, if you go for a free entry now, it’ll save you money later and indeed it will save you from having to add a reciprocal link to the directory (generally the first step in trying to stem the flood of free entries).

Sounds good then? The problem is that these directories are launched just about every day of the week right through the year so it’s a major hassle in trying to keep up with them all (yes, I tried for a while). Fortunately, those nice folks in India have come to our aid again though and some services are on offer to do it for you for around $20/month which should net you something like 50 new directories each month and, even better, is the kind of growth in inbound links which the search engines love.

The head of IBM in 1943 announced that he felt there was a world market for five computers.

It might sounds silly at first glance but in fact he wasn’t far off the mark if computers had remained the same. The crucial thing is that, of course, they didn’t remain the same as the 1943 version. Not only did they shrink drastically in size (the smallest pocket calculator you can buy is more powerful than the  1943 era supercomputers) but they also dropped even more dramatically in price with that 1943 computer power now available for under £1.

That drop in both size and price opened up vast new markets for computers of course. You’d never think of lugging around a removal lorry sized computer just to add numbers but when it’s pocket sized you do.

Of course, it wasn’t just the size and price that changed: the power available went up equally dramatically as did the functionality of the software available. In the early days it was largely payroll that computers were used to calculate and they still do that but, of course, they do a whole lot more. Many of those functions are things that wouldn’t even have been considered something that a computer could do then. You’re reading this courtesy of the Internet and yet nobody would have considered publishing pamphlets like this one via computer back in 1943.

And, that increase in functionality is still going on. The computer that I’ll type this on in 10 years time will be a considerably more powerful one, the standard connection speed will probably be much faster and rather than type this I might well be doing a video version in 10 years time.

Even over shorter periods change can be quite staggering and needs to be allowed for in your business plan unless you want to be left behind.