Foreign Perspectives

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.

One topic that was hotly debated up until quite recently was whether or not there was an effect on your site traffic related to where you hosted your site. It has since been confirmed by google that they use the IP address of your hosting service as a factor in prioritising the search results.

This means that one very easy way to increase the traffic on your site is to ensure that either your site is hosted in the country in which your main customers are based. So, if you target the UK then your site should ideally be hosted in the UK.

Changing hosts can be a hassle and isn’t something to be done at your busy time of year. However, one simple change that you can do in minutes is simply to tell google that the site is targetted at the appropriate country. To do this, you need to sign up for google’s webmaster tools, claim the domain, verify that it’s yours and then tell them what country it’s appropriate to. Sounds complicated, but really it’s very easy and quick.

The improvement in traffic can be very dramatic and kicks in within a week or two. In our own case, one domain had THIRTY times the site traffic when it was moved from an American host to a UK one.

There are loads of devices around these days that can display video but few people seem to realise that almost all the devices can display the videos from almost all of the other devices and seem amazed when you can take, say, a video from youtube and play it on a PSP or for that matter record a TV programme and play it on their phone.

And yet, it’s usually fairly simple. Granted, youtube aren’t too keen on people recording the videos as such but if you can see it on your PC screen you can definitely record it. Once you have it recorded on the PC then you’ll find that there are a whole range of programs dedicated to changing video formats and thereby letting you copy it onto an iPOD or PSP or DVD.

Going from a broadcast TV programme is a little more complex in that you need a little item of hardware (cost: around £60) to let the computer record the programmes but once you have it on the PC you can move it on elsewhere.

The one thing that’s usually pointless is moving mobile phone videos to other devices with larger screens. It’s not that you can’t do it, just that the resolution isn’t high enough. In general, it’s best to move from high resolution devices to equal or lower resolution ones eg TV to/from PC and from these to smaller devices. Going in the other direction is usually a disappointment.

Once we get into the summer season, there’s really no chance of us keeping up with anything that isn’t essential to the day to day running of the place and one of those “non-essential” things is keeping the accounts up to date.

It’s not that we’ve no idea what money is coming in and going out as we go along, just that the formal accounts don’t get kept up to date over the summer period. This year is particularly bad as there was a lot of additional work needing doing with our UK side of the business and so it’s really only now that we’re getting settled down to get the finances up to date.

Naturally, that long period since the relevant transactions makes life more difficult as it’s that much easier to lose the odd document along the way of course and getting the whole lot into a sensible sequence takes a whole lot longer than it would do if we were keeping up to date as we went along.

Having said that, overall it seems to take us a lot less time to do when we do the whole lot in bulk. This morning we went through the majority of the receipts over a couple of hours for instance whereas doing it a little bit at a time would consume a lot more time when you added it all up. In fact the biggest downside is that the whole thing feels much more like a chore when you’ve a big heap of documentations to work through than when you’ve only a couple of bills to mark off.

Fingers crossed, we’ll have tidied it all up by next week and then it’s off to the accountant with it.