Foreign Perspectives

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.

You’d think that that these days banking practices around Europe would be fairly standard. After all, the banks handle international business every day so they’re in constant contact with their counterparts in other countries.

Of course, it’s one of many areas where European business practices are far from standard.

Take the UK and France for example. Two countries with a very long history of interaction so you’d think that many things would be similar except that they aren’t.

In the UK, credit cards are commonplace and it’s normal, expected even, for people to have several of them. In France, credit cards are a relatively new phenonmen and remain very rare.

In the UK, almost everyone has an overdraft and the banks prefer you to be permanently overdrawn as they collect more fees that way. In France, they’ll close your account if you’re overdrawn more than a couple of months.

In the UK, debit cards don’t have any purchase limit on them. In France, you can’t buy more than 3000‚€ a month usually, which is why you often see people resorting to cheques towards the end of the month.

In the UK, nobody will accept a cheque without a cheque card (a card issued by their bank and guaranteeing the cheque will be paid). In France, almost everyone until recently accepted cheques because if you bounced a cheque you could be banned from having a cheque account at all. That actually worked well until very recently when the economic situation seems to have caused something of a run on dud cheques so the effect is that more and more businesses don’t accept cheques which is sure to cause trouble soon so long as that debit card spending limit remains.

Any one of those differences can easily fell you if you don’t know about it in advance.

Although it might sound obvious, you need to ask people to do what you’d like them to do when you send out a marketing e-mail.

It might be obvious but many marketing e-mails are sent out without a clear “buy this” message and even more go out without giving the reader a clear means of actually buying the product. Many newsletters are sent out without containing links to specific products sold by the company sending it out yet it’s one of the easiest ways to pick up easy sales as you’re sending it out to people who’ve asked to be on your mailing list so they’re already interested in your products.

Don’t forget to vary your message too. For example, if you’re sending out a travel related newsletter, pick out upcoming vacations such as Easter and special interest periods like Valentine’s Day. Hallmark spend a LOT of money to produce cards that address every possible situation that you could imagine and you should approach your newsletter with the same originality (or just copy Hallmark!).

However, the most important thing is to ensure that there’s a very clear “buy this” message and a very easy way of a reader doing exactly that.

If you’re considering investing outside your own country whether it be in shares or in property you need to consider the interest rate in that country relative to your own and the echange rate with your own currency.

The two tend to be linked and can rarely be considered totally in isolation. If you consider relatively stable currencies then a higher interest rate will tend to make a currency more valuable and conversely a lower interest rate will tend to make it less so. I say “tend to” because it’s far from a direct link as exchange rates are notoriously fickle: if markets take a view that a currency is overvalued then it’ll go down regardless of how high the interest rates are raised in that country.

However, unless you’re into short term trading it’s largely trends in exchange and interest rates that are important rather than the value that either may have at a given time. In fact, the neither the interest rate nor the exchange rate at a given point really matters a great deal but what you do need to do is to keep an eye on the exchange rate which is, usually, the most important variable when you’re investing outside your own country.

This also affects how you should keep score. Say you’re in the UK and you’re investing in America. In that case you need to measure the performance of your portfolio in dollars, not pounds. To rate the performance in pounds is just going to create a false performance statistic as it’ll be affected by the ups and downs of sterling vs the dollar and those can be quite substantial: in the last 20 years the pound has ranged from around $1 to the pound to over $2 to the pound. Obviously you’ll still measure your bottom line performance in sterling in this case but the performance of the portfolio itself is best charted in dollars.