Like many people one of my websites has a links directory attached. The amount of time given to it varies but it’s been well worth it. My site has gone from being non-existent to being on page 1 all the time.
I’ve made an effort to keep it to a niche market, well 2 actually…
- New Zealand sites
- Property Investment and real estate sites
- oh, and a tiny splinter for vacation rentals (by the owner)
It’s been a really interesting experience catering for the US market, all those states and I’ve only ever been to 3!
To try to differentiate from other directories I’ve also got a section where people can submit a paragraph about investing in the category area and they get a permanent link. Not so valuable in the Egypt property category but more valuable in the Northern America category that spans 2 pages currently. Few have taken me up on it, people like Jim from Idaho which just serves to reinforce the belief investors have the real estate agents know about owner-occupiers but not about investors. I would have thought any old agent could have written 3 sentences about why investing in their state was better than other states – either because of the population, favourable taxes and laws, or something else. Funny, huh?
Alongside these little blurbs I’ve put in photos of the area. I tried to keep away from the picture postcard images although I’ve failed for some places. For the country categories it’s a little easier to find the photo but I’ve just added the Egypt property category and trying to find a picture that evoked the Egypt and Cairo that I visited (back in ’94) was quite tricky.
I thought Egypt was amazing, hard work but so wonderful. We had good luck throughout. We did a felluca trip down the Nile and seemed really unimpressed by our captain but in the end it was just my husband and me on the boat and he was great – thought I was a wimp for not wanting to kill and eat a wounded bird (shot by fat cat tourists from their beautiful launch just up ahead). Another boat that left at the same time had tourists we’d met in Luxor but they got ditched from their boat a day out from the end with no village or alternative transport – and no explanation.
Maybe we looked really uncool but the pickpockets stayed away and we only had one scary taxi ride where the driver was trying to suss out how much we’d spent. We were cycle touring in Thailand so had our bikes boxed up while we travelled through Egypt and the driver was trying to guess their value and coming up with amounts at 10%. We didn’t put him right 😉 Oh yeah, and the kid who sold us an english paper and then gave us a “clean” one from the bottom – in french! He was long gone by the time we realised, funny that 🙂
We had nearly a week in Cairo itself and what a great city. I’ve never understood why people study things like anthropology until I hit Cairo where you have villages within city blocks that people (read: poor women) often never leave. We went from Cairo to Bangkok and met all these backpackers complaining about how Bangkok was a heaving metropolis but we couldn’t believe how spacious and orderly it was.
Aaah, enough of memory lane! Thank you Rasha Basyouny for submitting your site that started all this!
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