Foreign Perspectives

As it’s the third Monday in January today, it’s Martin Luther Day.

Well, more or less, as America is, as we all know, a country that’s built from a whole bunch of separate countries (ie states) and therefore it doesn’t have a standard name in all 50 states and indeed wasn’t a holiday in them all until 2000.

Although it doesn’t really mean anything outside America, it does have a knock-on effect worldwide in that various Internet outfits close down since they’re based in America. In fact, we didn’t even know that it was a holiday ’til we started wondering why there were so few sponsored posts available today.

Not that we’re complaining as it would appear a lot of folk doing sponsored posts have also taken the day off so we’ve picked up several juicy ones whilst they’ve been away.

One of the more interesting things that came up when I was in discussions about buying a commercial holiday accommodation listings site a year or so ago was the level of turnover in the properties listed on it.

Would you believe that the renewal rate of property listings is around 50-70%? Think about it: that means that there is pretty much a complete change in content of the listings sites every two or three years.

The turnover is presumably at the higher end of the range of the scale for smaller sites (say around 500 entries) but even then that means that they need to attract around 250 new entries per year merely to replace those that don’t renew which in turn means around 25, 000 e-mails to do that for the small sites (assuming a 1% return on marketing). For a large country-specific site (say around 2000 entries), the dropout % is lower but the absolute number of dropouts is higher at around 700 thus requiring something like 70,000 e-mails (assuming a 1% return on marketing).

Those stats are particularly interesting to me in that my own dropout rate is made up of those getting out of the business and is therefore somewhat lower at around 1%. This in turn means that, slowly but surely, I will become one of the larger listings sites. I’ve already caught up with the scale of that listings site that I was going to buy and hope to finish the year with around twice the number that they had when I was looking at them.

With that extra scale comes extra hits on the site and I’ve needed to upgrade the hosting package I use three times since Christmas as a consequence of that jump in size since Christmas a year ago. This, of course, means extra bookings for all those listed on the sites too.

We’ve been without TV since December 31st when the satellite decided to down tools.

It’s not that we’ve not been trying to get it sorted but, until this evening, all our efforts were in vain. We changed the satellite dish from our trusty 80cm to a 95cm, we changed the LNB to a nice new one instead of our very weather beaten four year old one, we changed the coaxial cable and we even changed the satellite decoder. And nothing.

So we thought we’d go back to first principles late this afternoon. Within 30 minutes of going back to our old dish and old LNB we started picking up TV channels. OK, we’re not getting the right satellite just yet but we should have that sorted in fairly short order tomorrow.

However, we do need to source a new Sky box as the old one ain’t working anymore so, for the moment, we’re limited to non-subscription channels.

By far the most popular post on our Whole Earth Guide is the one detailing how to go about opening a bank account in America.

The reason is simple really: if you run an online business then sooner or later you generally find yourself in need of an American bank account. Unfortunately, the increased security measures in place post 9/11 mean that it’s not quite so easy to open one these days unless, of course, you’re living in America and therefore a considerable number of websites have grown up with the specific aim of selling you the required information.

Our site doesn’t charge for that information and therefore is increasingly popular as it provides exactly the same information that other sites charge anything from $5 to $250 to provide.

However, we’re sorely tempted to start charging for it too given some of the emails we’ve received demanding additional information and wanting to know why it isn’t on the site yet. What we’ll likely do is to charge for the hand-holding level of information or at least offer it for sale as the information on the above page is quite sufficient to allow anyone to open an account in America.

The number of entries from the United Kingdom on our listings sites has been growing quite rapidly over the last few months so it seemed an appropriate time to start work on a country-specific domain to represent them.

Therefore, we’ve just started running with Great British Bed and Breakfasts and Great British Self-Catering which hold all our UK properties.

One big advantage that we’ve already found is that using the new domains means that the statistics are separated out for the UK for the first time. Early days yet, of course, but it looks like the UK sites were getting a lot more traffic than we had thought they were getting which is good going since we hadn’t specifically promoted them.

On the promotion front, now that we have separate domains for the UK we can run promotion exercises on them too which we’d not been able to do before. In theory, that should mean that these new sites will become very significant for us over the course of the coming year or so.