The biggest and the greatest advantage of the internet is that you can access it from anywhere across the globe. If you have a blog you can access and upload new posts from any place on the globe your business is open 24/7. That’s the biggest advantage and the biggest challenge.
Why is it a big challenge?
When you have an internet business, you need to have a global perspective of your site and audience. How your website looks in London, Ontario may not be the same in London, UK . Especially when you have targeted content or advertisements set up for customers in different geographies.
Don’t get me wrong here I am a big fan of geographic targeting as a publisher. It has made it possible to deliver targeted content or advertisements to their potential customers present in different geographies.
That solves a big problem by getting rid of the requirement of setting up different urls for different geographies.
But here are some of the challenges
– You will not be able to see global ads as they appear in real time on your website.
– Checking the ranking of websites in a country other than your place of living: I live in Canada but a number of my niche sites are targeted at US traffic. It is common knowledge that Google delivers different result in Canada compared to US.
How do I track where does Google put my url in the US Search engine Ranked Pages ?
– Finding out pay per click bids or any other form of competition: I will like to see which other websites are bidding for my target keywords. Again there is no way for me to do simply because I live in a different country.
– Filter out low paying adsense advertisements: One of the most repeated advices to increase the adsense income is to filter out the low paying advertisements.
I can do that only if I can view the advertisements that are being shown to my visitors.
Why not use a FREE proxy ?
FREE proxies have been the used by bloggers, internet marketers and online ad agencies to solve some of the above challenges, they will let you view your website from the perspective of different countries or states. But FREE proxies come with serious problems just like any other FREE service.
They are too slow, too many pop ups and ads, confusing interface, slow and very unreliable. It can be dangerous to access password protected websites through proxy sites. I would not recommend you to log into your wordpress admin from a proxy site to upload a post or and an image.
A recently came across a tool called Geosurf, a simple solution to get rid of the above complications.
What is Geosurf ?
Geosurf allows you to make other websites believe that you are in a different location. It has all the advantages over proxy sites, it’s reliable, maintains privacy of your visits, its credible and transparent. The usability of the tool is far superior to any FREE proxy. You can see the tool in action in the demo video below.
How does Geosurf work ?
The tool can be installed as a browser toolbar. It is available for IE and Firefox. Lack of chrome support is a bit of a disappointment but the tool is worth a change of browser.
Anyways using Firefox is great for use of several other awesome plugins as well. Using the toolbar is as easy as selecting the target country from a drop down.
The toolbar supports most of the country that I could think of. Some of the countries included in the geosurf toolbar are Brazil, Russia, Hong Kong, UAE, UK, Japan, Mexico, India and Germany. That’s another advantage over using the free proxy method as there are not many proxy sites that target geographies other than US very well.
Pricing
The pricing is reasonable and affordable, prices start from $29 per month for a single country support and goes upto $89 per month for a 5 country support. You can opt in for a FREE 5 day free trial to test the tool.
Affiliate Program:
Geosurf also runs an affiliate program via clickbank, you can become a Geo Surf affiliate and make 50 % commission for every sale you generate via your blog or website. Clickbank pays you the commission every 15 days.
13 comments
This was a very useful post. How do I filterout the low paying adsense? I am not really sure if there is a way to find out the cpc for a particular website?
Does this really work? Yeah, I’ve been using free proxy for a while now. It may be worth the try.
Yes , it does work 🙂
I am sure that the Chrome support isn’t too far away especially since Google is opening its doors on its browser for extendability. Pretty cool program though I wonder if it would help me out in cases where it says I can’t view content because I am from a certain country, if it can let me do that, then its definitely a worthwhile investment!
Till then,
Jean
I’m already using in and yes it let’s you see content unavailable for your country.
So if I get this right, you can use geosurf for every country in the world? (actually nevermind I just saw their supported countries, but I will let this question here in case someone is wondering).
This is really a nifty tool to have, especially if you targeting other traffic then that of the country where you live.
Do you know how it handles login sessions ?
They support more than 70 countries, it covers all major countries that have internet access and traffic
This would be a great service to have in today’s global marketplace. I am in the same boat as I am in Canada, but often need to see US search results or other content. At this point I can’t justify this price though. Perhaps when my side business picks up I will reconsider this. Thanks ZK.
Well this is very nice, but unfortunately the price is very high. You can find a vpn service under 10$ with unlimited bandwidth. You can even use your hosting account for that if you have ssh access.
Yes the price is definitely the problem with this service. I couldn’t imagine paying monthly fees just to see rankings in another country. I’d rather just use the AdWords ad preview tool which allows you to specify the country.
Geo Surf is really nice tool. I will install in my ff browser. Thanks.
ZK, Is there a free trial period for GeoSurf..Seems to be interesting but would like to give a try to this first.
Yes it is absolutely right that the biggest and the greatest advantage of the internet is that you can access it from anywhere across the globe. And location aware web browser for people with a laid back life style. Geo Surf is pretty straightforward. Geo Surf increases team productivity by viewing geo targeted ads and web content in multiple areas.