Music groups, Bees and Vide-Greniers… Your May Newsletter

Welcome to our new guest bloggers

I’m delighted to welcome two new guest bloggers to our Brittany and Pays de la Loire team who are happy to share their experiences with you.

Simon Pocock is a member of a local Brittany music group and writes about his experiences in the group and about events in and around his local town of Plestin – including this story about a neighbour whose mother was sent to Ravensbrück in 1944 for sheltering 2 pilots who had crash-landed.

Jean Halford-Thompson and her husband have lived in France since 1993. Their garden at Grand Gennetay produces nearly all their fruit and veg, with other food coming from their pigs, chickens and geese. They also keep bees, and Jean has been writing a very informative series on Beekeeping, including these excellent pieces on how to create an Artificial Swarm and how to relocate bees from an abandoned hive. These excellent pieces of work, so if you know of anyone who keeps bees or is interested in keeping bees, please pass this newsletter on to them.

We still have space for a few more – so if you have something to write about, are interested in this part of France, and want a bigger audience, why not get in touch to find out more?…

Find out more about how you can benefit from the website

Vide-Greniers – Be sure to tell the Taxman

Hands up those of you who didn’t know that you need to tell the French authorities if you intend to take a stall at more than 2 vide-greniers in any one year. Nicola had a visit from the President of the local Vide-Grenier to make sure all the forms were completed… Read about Tax Implications and Vide-Greniers.

French Pension Age

Last time, we asked you to let us know whether you agreed with the proposed rise in pension age in France. Well, an overwhelming 92% said ‘Yes’ it does need to rise, with 67% of you saying that 2 years was not enough.

Helping English website owners in France

Do you have a website that is in need of an update? Could you do with more traffic? Would you like more of your visitors to buy from you?

If you answered YES to any of the above then it might be worth talking to me. I have built a number of sites aimed at ‘English visitors to France’ and ‘English business owners in France’, and can help with issues such as what type of domain name to use, where to host your site, how to provide multi-language versions of your site. I’m a Francophile web developer, a WordPress expert, and I know a lot about SEO. I love to help website owners get the best out of their web presence – without breaking the bank!

Ask me about your website project

A word about Social Media

I’m a fan of Social Media. I don’t promote myself as an expert, but I do use tools such as Blogging, Linked In and Twitter to help build my online network and promote my services. Social Media marketing isn’t a fad. It’s not going away in a hurry, and so if you aren’t embracing it yet you probably should be. There are plenty of articles on how to get the most out of the various tools, so I’m not going to repeat those here, but if you need to talk about how you can incorporate Social Media into your main website strategy, please get in touch.

Twitter Tip – There’s no point being on Twitter if you don’t have enough followers to read, and act on, your tweets. Who would you like to have follow you? Think about sectors, geographic locations, potential customers, people who are followed by lots of others – then follow them. Many people will auto-follow you back, and others will read your profile and tweets and follow you as a result. Twitter will help you identify who to follow – just click the ‘Who to follow’ link at the top of your Twitter page!

LinkedIn Tip – Don’t take on Linked In in a half-hearted way. It will be useful for you, but you need to really work on it. Make sure your profile gets to 100% completion, as this will help you to get found by more LinkedIn users. To see how you’re doing, click on ‘Profile’ then look for your % profile completeness score over the right hand side.

Until next time…

Martin Jarvis, Francophile Blogger, Website Developer and WordPress Expert!

p.s. Talking of Social Media, if you’re on Twitter – follow me here.