The Railway Station Is A giant Advertisement - and I like it

Linkway at Bugis MRT station in Singapore.

I know three stations in Singapore with long linkways which need travelators to speed you on your way. Two are Promenade and Beauty World. The third is Bugis, above.

The advertising is inescapable. However, I like it. The tedium of the walk is enlivened by the unmissable advertising. The walls and floor are filled with colour. You learn something new. Unlike permanent installations, the ads change every week or so, so your journeys offer new experiences.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

Buy to rent? The problems of an absentee landlord!

You go to live abroad. You might hope to pay your rent by renting your old home. Or use your savings or inheritance to let a property back home.

Buy to let? What are the costs?

Costs
Replacing old furniture and fittings - and a family of four will destroy a washing machine, bed and carpet in three years which would have lasted your grandparents or singe granny ten years.

Replacing curtains. Replacing carpet - John Lewis one thousand pounds for one small bedroom. Get a cheaper quote. Add five hundred for fitting the carpet!

 Repainting walls. The painters quote - but they charge extra to do skirting boards and doors.

Advertising for a tenant  Paying management fee if you don't live near the property. Add fee for every visit.

LEGAL CHECKS
 Charge for annual gas and electricity check.

MAINTENANCE
Payment of maintenance covering.

EXTRAS
Add payment to gardener.

Window cleaner.

Five hundred or more pounds for professional clean - add fifty pounds if they do the furnished flat table and chairs and not just walls floors, carpet cleaning and oven.

Extra maintenance charge for repair of building roof, lift update, security phone update, subsidence, windows, garage doors, painting and roofs.

Charge to remove dumped furniture. Charge to remove tenants furniture.

Repair of damage left by tenant's furniture removers. Forwarding tenants' mail from their doctor and bank. Showing prospective tenants around for first.

Flying home from overseas when tenancy ends and finding tenants refuse to move out because ...

Correspondence with tenants. Meet inventory people. Charge made every time inventory is updated.

Tenant wants washing machine or sofa removed - spend half a day getting competitive quotes from rent a van.

Find single person removal, unwrapped item is damaged in .

 Tenant keeps windows shut forming condensation so whole place needs repainting.

Tenant moves out three days early. Have to pay council tax. Endless phone calls and log ins.

Accountant needed for paying income tax. Payment for Xero online accounting shortly to be a government requirement. Once a year accountant bill changes to once a month accountant bill.

Listing expenses for every visit.

Time transferring gas and electric bills and reading meters.

Endless queries over rental agreement. Leaking radiators. Tenants family die.

Tenants bring in another family (visiting parents, extended family). Increased wear and tear on carpets. Are they doing something illegal - overcrowding.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/buytolet/article-6620839/How-Britains-239billion-buy-let-bubble-burst.html

Make Money From Blogs

Problem
How can I make money from blogs?

Answers
Three basic ways:

1 Advertising
If anything you write goes viral or you already have a huge following, you can attract advertisers. If not, try the next methods.
How to get huge numbers of readers? You have to work at it all day, have a photogenic dog or kid or be glamorous, or visit zany and unusual places - or offer really good advice on a popular subject, or be a trusted authority with a huge following. (Or be great at sales.)

2 Affiliate marketing
You have to provide links to every item you recommend in order to get a proportion of sales from people who click through on the link. This would be tedious making hundreds of links. But you can get a couple of standard links to big sites such as Amazon.

If you sign up for Amazon affiliates in English, you can also opt to join the Amazon in other languages to pick up readers if your bog is also published in other languages.

Publishing in other languages is easy. When you or the webmaster set up your blog, it just means ticking the boxes for a choice of a dozen languages. Flags or letters for other languages then appear on your webpage for your readers to select.
You just do this once when setting up your webpage. Then every post you write is on a website with the translation symbol.

But you then need to read all the emails and reminders which Amazon Affiliates sends you in all the other languages you have chosen, or run them through google translate.

3 You sign up to the services which do the affiliations for you and share the profits with them.
WooCommerce
Simple Payments

4 Sell you own product.
 I went to a talk by a young Singaporean millionaire. to find products which would sell well, he did not have to produce anything or do any test marketing. He simply went onto sites such as Amazon and Ebay to find their best sellers and sold those products through links to his website.

It depends whether your aim is to simply find a product to sell, or whether you want to do a job you love. If you lose interest in products you don't know about or care about, then make a whole blog on something you will love writing about every moment of the day, whether it is fashion, or fishing, or football. Add videos and focus on the one subject and add newsletters and forums and comments to increase your ratings.

Be on media with links to all the sites. Which ones? Just check out the sharing options on the newspapers and websites you read.

5 Sell your services. You can advise on Skype. Use WooCommerce. Wrodpress.com Simple Payments.

6 Sell a product you make. You could sell through Ebay and Etsy.

USEFUL WEBSITES
https://wordpress.com/go/content-blogging/ways-to-monetize-a-blog/?sgmt=gb&utm_source=adwords&utm_campaign=

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Lost in translation in advertising - Pepsi bringing the dead back to life

If you have ever worked in advertising or marketing or copyrighting advertisements, you are likely to have heard marketing disaster stories about products whose names sounded wrong when translated, or not translated.

The one mistake many people remember is the Pepsi slogan. The English version reads: brings you back to life. Translated into Chinese, it reads: Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead.

My other favourite is slogan that it takes a strong man to make a tender chicken. The translation was: It takes a sexually excited man to make a chicken affectionate.

For your amusement here are some more.

Useful Websites
https://www.face
book.com/groups/linguisticcoincidences/?multi_permalinks=2343850812299290&notif_id=1532912113256609&notif_t=group_highlights

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/the-20-worst-brand-translations-of-all-time.html

https://blog.printsome.com/marketing-fails-wrong-translations/

Author
Angela Lansbury
Please share links to your favourite posts.

Wall Drug, South Dakota - world famous - why?

You stop at Wall Drug driving to Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. Mount Rushmore is 60 miles west of Wall Drug. Photo of Mt Rushmore in public domain because taken by a federal government employee. See Wikipedia for details.

Problem
When we stopped at a giant supermarket in South Dakota and the Tourist Board told us it was one of the state's main attractions, known throughout the USA - and world-famous, I was slightly puzzled.

Now I know why it was world-famous. They started small, with so few customers they were on the point of selling. Until the wife thought of advertising free iced water. Their selling point was 'free iced water'. Their water came from a well in the backyard.

The husband installed advertising wherever he could, non-stop, everywhere. The 3,000 signs along the highways had something to do with it. The great American success story.

They advertised on buses in Britain, buses in New York.

It's a story about the power of advertising, of believing in yourself. The religious couple provided a chapel, where travellers could give thanks for their safe journey, and pray for further safe journeys. A bit like modern chapels in airports.

The son took things one stage further. The store became more like a theme park, full of big models, moving models, photo opportunities. Free water, cheap coffee, and every kind of clothing and souvenir you could think of.

I wanted a cowgirl shirt - or a cowboy shirt. They were too expensive. Eventually, I admitted that I wanted something cheaper. Somebody found me a bargain corner. I bought a shirt.

The moral is, for tourist attractions, advertise, offer something free or cheap. For tourists, if you want a cheaper souvenir, ask for it. As they say, those who don't ask, don't get. They have had ads from as far away as Afghanistan and the Arctic.

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Sign for Wall Drug
Date	10 June 2004 (original upload date)
Source	From http://foreversummer.escf.com/pics.html (permission granted under GFDL) Previously at en.wikipedia; description page is/was here.
Author	The original uploader was Jkeiser at English Wikipedia

Licensing[edit]

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License. Subject to disclaimers.

More details on Wall Drug from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Drug
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2216
visitusa.com

Advertising on the Underground (MRT) in Singapore

If you are wondering where to go in Singapore there's advertising all around. Free maps o f Singapore everywhere at Changi airport. Ads either side of the doorways where the trains stop - one alerted me to the museum in Little India (see my earlier post). Giant ads for the safari parks are on posters, columns and even on the floor of the MRT (underground and overground railway network).

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer.