You know what, when you’re running an internet business, it doesn’t matter where you live. Almost every day, I’m talking to people here in the UK, in Australia, in Canada, in the Philippines, in So Cal, etc, etc, etc - as if they were simply at the next desk.

No doubt you do the same - even if your only interaction is leaving comments on other peoples’ blogs.

Anyhoo. I had an enquiry a week or two ago from a company who wanted to run a text ad campaign across the wurk network.

“Fine”, I said.

My price was $100 per month for sites with at least a Google PR of 4.

“Fine”, they said.

Plus, next time there’s a Google PR Update, I’m probaby looking at around 23 sites with a PR of 4 or above. which means I was in a position to milk at least $2300 a month for the next 6 months. Not a huge amount. But it’s still an amount.

So we started working things through. I first talked to their US office - then, when they discovered the network originated from a European IP, they put me through to their UK office.

“No problem”, I said.

However, they subsequently found out that the network originates from a German IP address. Yup, my server is sitting in Germany somewhere.

“Big problem”, they said.

And sure enough, the plug was pulled from this text link deal, because:

“…we will not be able to go ahead with the sponsorship, since your websites are in English. We would either be looking for English-language websites with UK addresses, or German-language websites with German addresses.”

Sheesh. There goes a couple of big ones down the tubes.

So, the moral of the story is: learn to write in German, kids. And do it fast.

Or, more seriously, make sure you know where your servers are when you buy hosting. Because it might cause more problems than you think.