Financial & Travel Musings

One of the ongoing fads in marketing is to add the tag “natural” to the ingredient list.

I laugh when I see the list of “natural” ingredients on one of the packets of sweets that the kids get sometimes. It’s a list of ingredients that you’d definitely never find in nature yet it can call itself “natural”.

So too it is with the diet pills. Thus you can find natural fat burners on the shelves these days. There are some truly natural diet “products” available of course although you’d hardly want to take most of them as there’s quite a tendency for them to give you the runs. Not so the natural fat burners to be fair but, as with all diet pills, you need to check that this is the dieting action that you need and that the side-effects don’t outweigh the benefits.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I thought I’d try a little experiment with one of the blogs that I’ve not really used in quite a while.

What I did was to write a post matching the searches coming in to the blog and see how that did. Now, before you do that you obviously need some content for searches to find so seeing as we were in the depths of winter I wrote a few posts about that to begin with.

The first trickle of searches coming in were for things like Russian clothing and cold weather clothing. Fair enough as that matched some of the posts in a vague kind of way. So I wrote some more on the clothing angle. Next stream up was along the lines of rain wear which also seemed reasonable enough. However, a month down the line and it’s more along the lines of shiny winter clothes and girls in wet clothes which do follow the progression of the searches and subsequent posts but which seem a long way from the original ones!

As I’m only doing it as a side-line I’m only writing one post a week so it’s taking a while to bring in the search traffic but if you’d like to add it, pop on over to On a Postcard.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Until recently it was quite expensive to personalise products but as we’ve all seen there’s a massively growing market in t-shirts while you wait and so on. Now it does seem to make sense to have personalizable coffee mugs and perhaps pens, the range of items that you can personalise these days does seem to be getting out of hand. Do you really need to have your name embossed on  your laptop? Perhaps it makes sense for security, but what when you come to sell it?

Popularity: 1% [?]