Financial & Travel Musings

Much as we might laugh at the Trabants that East Germany used to turn out as being unreliable and prone to break down, sadly that’s what many blogs seem to look like these days.

Oh, they don’t break down, but the quality of the workmanship that you see in some of the posts is really deplorable. What’s perhaps worse is that a lot of those low quality blogs are taking sponsored posts and if anything the quality of the posts that they get paid for is even worse than the norm for them.

Why do the advertisers put up with it? OK, they might just want the link from the blog but do they really want their product to be associated with shoddy workmanship? After all, the authors of these posts are numbered amongst their suppliers ultimately. Surely they can’t be so uncritical to accept what are often very shoddy posts indeed?

How bad are they? How about “you must visit this site. i think there products are really great. visit this site they have great products.”? I’ve paraphrased the real example so you can’t search for the actual blog entry that was based on (which was worse than that).

Good quality writing doesn’t mean that it can’t be about trashy subjects. Whilst many would call The Sun a trashy paper, every one of their articles is well written. Sure the writing style is laid back but it suits the content just as the relatively dense writing style of The Times suits it’s content and readership.

Just as there’s a range of writing styles in newspapers, so too one would expect there to be a range of writing styles in blogs. That doesn’t mean that the spelling, grammar and repetitiveness of my example is acceptable though because it isn’t and especially so since the advertiser paid $50 for it (quite why they approved payment is beyond me).

I’m not saying that you need perfection from day one but you should at least aim for that.

Popularity: 16% [?]

One of the relatively little known aspects of how search engines work is that they use the location of your hosting as a key part of determining how high your site will appear on the search results. The differences can be particularly striking if you’re marketing a vacation or holiday property.

Now, most people will know where their own site is listed (you can check by going to www.whois.sc/yourdomain.com and scrolling down to IP location) but what they’re much less likely to know is where a site they’re advertising is listed on. The greater number of Americans usually means that there are more American based vacation listings sites around and, of course, the majority of these are hosted in America.

OK, so you’ll probably know if it’s talking about 1-800 numbers and vacations rather than 0800 numbers and holidays that it’s an American site but many sites are global in scope and will talk about both vacations and holidays with the effect that it’s often not clear which side of the Atlantic they’ve been written. However, even aside from that, the lower cost of hosting in America means that many holiday accommodation listings sites are hosted there even if they are run from the UK or Australia (the cheapest American host is $1/month, the cheapest British one is around $4/month).

So what? Well, when we moved our own listings sites from America to the UK, the traffic and booking enquiries that we produced for those listing with us went up around THIRTY fold. Therefore, if your main customer base is in Europe a comparable European hosted listing will be worth, say, ten times what it’s American counterpart is in terms of bookings that it will provide you. Naturally, the reverse applies too although the greater amount of vacation time that Europeans get means that European vacation listings are usually more effective than comparable American ones.

To be fair, if you aim squarely at listing with only European based sites, then clearly you’ll not get as many Americans as you would otherwise. If you want guests from America too then you’re either going to need to list with an American based listings site or with one like OurInns which hosts in Europe and America.

Finally, don’t forget that Americans usually only get 2 weeks vacation time each year vs the typical 5 or 6 weeks in the UK so although there are around four times the number of Americans as British, the number of each should that you get should, all things being equal, be roughly the same. In practice, it rarely is equal, of course, as clearly it costs more for Americans to travel to Europe and vice versa.

Popularity: 53% [?]

Whilst you might expect a small software company to skimp on software testing, clearly Microsoft doesn’t fall into the category of “small company” and yet Vista seems to be the most untested software product to have hit the streets in a long time.

If I didn’t know better, I’d assume that there was someone in Microsoft who wanted us to use some other company’s products. And, yet… Vista and Office 2007 are so bad that I’m planning on doing exactly that as soon as I can get the move organised.

To begin with, Outlook 2003 isn’t compatible with Vista so you’re immediately forced to upgrade to Office 2007 if you want to access your mail via a version of Outlook. That in turns brings with it new versions of Word and Excel with are neither compatible in terms of the file format that they use nor in terms of the user interface.

That wouldn’t be so bad but even Outlook 2007 doesn’t seem to be entirely compatible with Vista as it hangs up on a regular basis and seems to need to check/repair the database almost constantly. For that matter Explorer isn’t compatible either in that it hangs up after a couple of hours of use.

As it turns out, it looks like it’ll be the Outlook problems that will finally push me  into moving towards Linux. The primary reason for keeping Microsoft software has been that of compatibility. You could always move to the new version of the software quickly and easily. This time you can’t do that and it doesn’t work either.

Consequently, I’m currently investigating how to go about making this machine dual boot Vista and Linux as a first step. If along the way I can find a way of importing the e-mail from Outlook into a Linux based product, I’ll be junking Vista almost immediately. It’s that bad.

Popularity: 49% [?]