Solitary confinement is coming to an end
Well I’ve had my four days all alone and tomorrow I drive to Toulouse and get the rest of the family. They will be looking forward to seeing me, I’m sure.
At least I know they are alive and spending – I had a ten second phonecall this afternoon to check up on me. Not very flatteringly, the first thing Mrs B said was ‘I won’t put any more money in the phone’ – apparently I am only worth 50 cents, and only that much because the phone wouldn’t accept 10 cent coins. I hope they have taken the same frugal approach to shopping and restaurants.
They might be eating at a fine restaurant this evening, but my own dinner has unfortunately been eaten by the cat – we are blessed in having the world’s least well trained cat, who hopped onto the oven and ate the second half of my bolognaise sauce from the saucepan while I was taking the bins out.
Apart from that disappointment – I now have to cook again tonight – things have been going very well. That is to say, I have done nothing except gawp at the computer for four days. I’m quite pleased with progress – I have been working on a little project to enable owners of gites to advertise their properties on this site, and if my calculations are correct I will be enormously rich in three months time.
And if they are wrong I won’t be.
Until now we haven’t had ‘direct advertising’ on the site, because it involves registering with the Chamber of Commerce and paying lots of French social cotisations, but since I keep receiving requests for my advertising prices I thought we’d go for it. So next week we’ll tootle along and get all properly registered as a business. That should be exciting!
Or not. The internet is littered with holiday rental listing sites that only have about four properties listed despite offering free advertising to gite and property owners, and so clearly there are obstacles ahead. Mostly related to marketing, about which I know nothing.
The problem of course is that no-one wants to advertise until you have a good track record, and you can’t get a good track record if there are no properties listed. Nothing ventured nothing gained, someone once said, but I can’t recall if it was someone very successful or living in abject poverty.
So anyway now the advertising floodgates will be opening. In a couple of weeks the entire francethisway site will be emblazoned with adverts for ‘meet the partner of your dreams’ and ‘play poker now’, since these are apparently the highest paying ads.
You will come to this blog to find out about life in France, but I’ll sneak in adverts for ‘male enhancement products’ without you even noticing. And yes, apparently the French do have the same need for such products as the rest of the world, in case you were wondering. I read it in the Economist.