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Montybird
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A couple of people have suggested that brochures and leaflets are a waste of time these days.  On the whole I think that's true, no one ever asks for one when they enquire about our place.  However, what I have found is that guests often ask, when leaving, if I have a leaflet or poster of some kind that they can put up in their local community centre/surgery/pub/staff canteen/school staffroom etc. because they've had such a good time and know of other people who may be interested.  Now I don't know whether you would ever get any bookings from this kind of advertising because I never had any leaflets on hand to give them.  However, I do know which guests they were and have just bought myself a ream of good quality paper and am going to print off  some leaflets and send them out, as well as keep a supply on hand in case I get asked again this year.  After all, if it's only cost me a ream of paper and a wet afternoon in January, even if I only get one booking from it, then it's been worthwhile.  And as someone else said, it will give you a bit of practice in design and layout before you start on the more technical stuff of your website creation.
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I have a (small-ish) design agency, and what St Amour says is perfectly true. In every industry, companies these days are cutting back on printed literature. Customers for whom we used to produce fresh brochures at least once a year, sometimes more, are now asking us to create generic brochures that will last for years. Instead we build them websites that can be updated whenever details change, and that can be daily with some of them.

So I'd definitely agree that a printed brochure is probably a waste of time unless you're running a while chain of gites. Stepping over now onto the other side of the fence, here are some suggestions for what you might do instead . . and we think will work quite well. Apart from an informative website, we will be offering our guests a generous stock of headed writing paper (and matching envelopes) printed up with a tastefully artistic line-drawing of the house that they are free to use whenever they want to write a letter. That not only helps them, but acts as a bit of subtle advertising for us too. In addition, we're producing a series of colour postcards. Although there is one of the house (it's pretty and/or photogenic) there are also others of popular sites in the local area and artistic views of sunflowers and vinyards. On the back, we're including basic details - address etc, plus the URL for the website. When our guests send these off to their friends . . ."weather is here, wish you were wonderful" . . . they're doing our advertising for us, and to a targeted audience as well.

Once you've got your website up and running, make every email you send work for you. Don't be obvious about it, but set up your system so that you have a "signature" that appears automatically at the bottom of every page. Create a simple graphic of your property, based on an attractive photograph perhaps, that can act as a link straight to your website. Don't say "Click here to discover all about our lovely house in France", because that will put some people off, but if a recipient is curious enough to click on the image, your website will open and they'll only have themselves to blame if they didn't want to look!

I hope this is helpful.

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That's an excellent idea re the e-mail. I'm constantly surprised at the sheer number that I send out and it wouldn't take a massive proportion of people to be interested to create a useful quantity of bookings.

Useful too is to add a similar thing to your forum signature although there are generally restrictions on that eg here it's one website, no accompanying text and (I think) no graphics. As it happens this particular website isn't as useful in that way for generating bookings or at least the B&B owners section isn't - mostly I used to get other curious owners rather than potential guests when I used www.mascamps.com .

 

Arnold

 

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Hello Thumper, didn't expect to see you on here, how are you?!!

With regards to the brochure  I have made my own on my PC. It's a piece of cake. If some one asks for details I firstly direct them to the web-site and then simply print one off. If I know it's going to be put up in an office etc. I just run it through the laminator. No upfront printing/artwork and you don't really notice the cost 'cause it's just pennies.

But like your web-site' make it look good or it will put people off.

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[quote user="Smiley"] Hello Thumper, didn't expect to see you on here, how are you?!! [/quote]

Well, you know us rabbits, Smiley . . . we get everywhere! [:)]

Going back to websites for a moment, I'd like to pick up on Smiley's last comment. I hesitate to give away too many trade secrets - some of us have to make a living somehow - but there's one thing I feel ought to be mentioned, and that's search engines. If you want to make sure your site pops up somewhere near the top of a search, you have to work very hard to achieve a good ranking.

While it's true that you should still try to ensure that every page on your site has a good and relevent set of metatags included in the headline coding, most of the major search engines no longer refer to these when it comes to deciding on a listing, and it will certainly not have any significant effect on the ranking your site achieves. Money talks, and if you want to top the poll, you have to pay for it. Look at this from Google's point of view. They're more likely to promote a purely commercial site if they're getting money from it. For that reason, if you make your website overtly commercial, don't expect a quick listing or a high ranking without parting with some cash.

In actual fact, some of their commercial schemes are very fair, and worth considering, but if you want to achieve a high rank without paying for it then you should consider including as much information on your site as you can that is not aimed purely at selling your property to potential punters. Add pages devoted to places of intererest locally - chateaux, theme parks, towns, beaches, whatever. Plan "days trips" for your guests. Describe the region in glowing terms, with lots of pictures, maps, recommended restaurants, golf courses and so on. Give them information on travelling, including ferry/rail/motorway and airline connections etc. In other words, include the kind of material that will be of interest not only to your guests, but also anyone else who might just happen to stumble across your site and have an interest in your area. These are the pages that will appeal to the search engines, because you're freely providing information of wider interest.

Secondly, include as many links to other sites as you can, and get them reciprocated by those other sites if at all possible. So called "link popularity" is now one of the main factors in determining a site's ranking in many search engines - the more links to and from your site, the more traffic is generated, the higher up the ranking you'll go. If you mention a chateaux on your site, see if they have a website, and if they do, include the link. They won't mind, and it will be another plus-point for you.

That's enough for now, and best of luck!

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Chezshells, I agree with thumper but I would have charged up front and then rebated on completion of the other sites.

I know this thread will make strange writing but we got an e_mail before you amended your posting!

Thumper, with regard to your posting spell it out in Dummies language for me will you. I post my link wherever I can in the hope of  bumping the search engines, are you saying we should go for something like pay per click?

I am not fantastically genned up the way the searches work, that's why I get my web designer to do the optimising !!!

I do understand the concept of reciprocal linking though.

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Hi Smiley. If you want to learn a bit more about how search engines work, an excellent place to start is this website: http://www.searchengines.com. As I understand it, the site is totally independent and free to use, and within its pages you'll find lots of information on how to optimise your website, submit to search engines, and how to make your site more attractive to the webcrawlers that still do a lot of the donkey work. It will also explain about "link popularity", keywords and metatags.

Pay-per-click can work very well if you occupy a niche market. If you don't, you run the risk of getting a lot of visitors who aren't really interested in what you've got to offer, but have been brought to your site by a slender overlap somewhere down the line - and you'll pay for every one of them! So, if you decide to go this route, be very careful about what keywords you use, and if you have a limited budget that you're prepared to spend, set that into the system. You can usually state how many clicks you're prepared to accept over a particular period, and if your site reaches that limit during the course of a month, say, then it will drop out of the listing until the next month. At least that way you can keep control of expenditure.

I don't know your situation, Smiley, but if you have just one property available for holiday letting, for instance, I wouldn't have thought pay-per-click was the solution for you. If you had an on-line store selling hundreds of items a day, then I'd give it serious consideration.

One trick that I've found to work quite well is to include a link in a sale on eBay. You have to be careful not to infringe eBay's rules, so it has to have some relevance to the item you're selling. By way of example, I auctioned a brochure for a classic car and included a link to the club website, which we'd just finished building. We had 300 hits the first day the auction went up and the club's website topped Google's search within a week . . . and it didn't cost us a penny.

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Whether pay-per-click works for an individual property depends on the characteristics and location of the property. There seem to be a fair number of people on laymyhat.com who do use it for individual properties. However, I'd say that it would be difficult/impossible to make it profitable for a relatively "standard" property eg I can't see it working for a "stone house in the Dordogne" simply because there are so many similar properties.

The ebay thing is very worthwhile but very misleading. For instance, we had several attempts at directly selling rooms on ebay in October/November 2004. We had hundreds of hits but ended up only selling one for two days at a slight loss. However, over the following nine months we received one three room three day booking with meals and one five day booking directly from the ebay listing, both at full price. In effect, it's similar to pay-per-click but much cheaper.

On the brochure front; we print a small number of brochures ourselves so that we have them if/when people ask for them. To date we have only had one booking (albeit a seven day one with meals) from them directly. Remember that the 1% return rule of marketing applies to these (hence my reluctance to print thousands) so even if one gets onto a noticeboard somewhere, it would need 100 people to look at it to pick up one sale.

 

Arnold

 

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I wasn't recommending that anyone tries selling their holidays on eBay - far from it. I'd consider that a very risky undertaking and highly unlikely to prove worthwhile unless, perhaps, you have a very full calendar of bookings and just one or two weeks left to fill, in which case, it might be worth the chance. My suggestion about eBay was merely to illustrate that the high volume of traffic it can generate via a hyperlink (from a popular auction, of course) can raise a site's 'link popularity' with the search engines very quickly.
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Thumper, thanks for that info, will look into it and try and learn something!

As for posters I agree with Arnold, although I'd say if you get 1% you'd be doing well. I have got friends and family to put brochures up anywhere they can and I've had just 1 enquiry and no bookings in 4 months from them.

The web site is definately a better method.

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Ah, but the thing is that I think it IS worthwhile trying to sell on ebay. My experience is that to actually sell something, you need to reduce the price too much to be profitable but my objective these days on being on ebay is just to get people looking at my site on the assumption that if enough do then I will eventually sell to them but directly rather than through ebay. Running a constant 10 day listing runs to all of 30p (or is it 30c?) per day which is about as cheap as you can get for advertising.

I do stress in this that the objective is NOT to sell the item listed (ie a room) but rather to get the hits with a view to creating interest in our place. For instance, over a one month period we had two direct enquiries for periods outside the period we were offering rooms on ebay this time. Last year we managed to pull in from the two chunky bookings, something like EUR 2000 directly from ebay ads costing in total around £5.

The 1% is really only applicable if the advertising is fairly targetted ie it's a maximum return. Most people forget that and assume that distributing leaflets to friends & family "back home" will bring hundreds of bookings. I suspect the only way that would happen is if you had a friend who was a travel agent. I heard of one B&B a few years back who sent a brochure out to everyone who enquired. At the end of the year, they'd sent some 500 odd out, total cost something like EUR 2000 to EUR 2500 but that 1% return (applicable in their case as they were targetted) meant all of 5 bookings, total return something like EUR 250.

Posters are definitely better of course in that one would be seen by a few dozen people. Snag is that you need to get people to a) look at them (and how many posters did you look at when you were working in the UK?) b) be interested in going on holiday in France and c) be interested in going to your area of France. Having said that, I did pick up the equivalent of around 15 days worth of bookings last year in a similar manner so it's not unknown to get bookings this way.

 

Arnold

 

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Hi Arnold, tell me then, how do you go about doing this? Should I put an ad on for a really quiet week ( I have a house to let) at a low price and hope that the cheap looking deal attracts people or do you just put it on at a 'buy now' price?

PS. getting referals already from www.ourgites.org.

Just looked at your site, you're not a million miles from our house. We often go to the beach at Canet Plages, It's on the D117 at Belesta, just inside the Midi-pyrenees border, so about an hour or so away from you.

 

 

 

www.midipyrenees.co.uk

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You have to take account of ebay's pricing structure. The minimum charge is for items costing up to 99p (I sell on ebay.co.uk hence prices in sterling) so ideally you want to keep the bid to that (remember that the objective is not to actually sell anything but rather to promote your place). At that level, you can have the standard ad plus one photo in the listing for (I think) £3 over 10 days ie 30p per day. If you happen to sell something, they charge an amount corresponding to the band (0-99p, £1-£9.99, etc.) which the price fell into.

Now, the trick is to list something that you can sell at 99p without causing you major losses. What I generally do is to specify that the bid is for the per night deposit rather than the full amount. Our deposit is usually 10€ (£7) a night so by listing at 99p, if someone did buy it then we'd be discounting the deposit by £6 a night which we can live with. We used to list based on the full price but that bumps up the cost of the advert significantly.

The problem you'd have with the gite is that the deposit would generally be larger than that I think. For instance, if you were charging £420 a week with a deposit of £84 (20%) you could get away with listing like me ie the bid is for the per-day deposit. With those figures, your per-day deposit would normally be £12 so someone winning at 99p would cost you £11 per day in effect.

I found that to get a lot of interest (ie 1000+ hits) I needed to price unprofitably low. Remember that, on the whole, the people on ebay are looking for things way, way below their normal price. I tried three different forumulae in 2004: 1) 10% off 2) 50% off and 3) free but with an obligation to buy meals. First one, minimal hits, second (I think) a few hundred and the third, thousands. You don't have the free stay option so might need to drop to 25% of the normal price to actually sell something. But remember, the objective is to advertise, not to sell.

I'd be inclined to experiment to see what the interest is like. If you can keep the opening bid to 99p then it's only going to cost you about 30p a day so it's no big deal if it doesn't work first time around.

You can only do "buy now" if you're already a well-established ebayer (I'm not).

Re the listing: don't know if you saw the recent thread on laymyhat.com re the hits I've been getting (worth reading: it's in the "personal website" area, called something like "typical number of hits"). Anyway, it would appear that as a consequence of a series of seemingly minor updates I made on some pages of my mascamps.com site in September, the number of hits across all of my pages went up around 10-fold (laughably the daily page views now exceed that of several commercial sites!). I just realised recently that this has even rippled down to the listings sites and at least partially to those listed on them too, hence your clickthoughs.

 

Arnold

 

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[quote user="mascamps.com"]seen .... laymyhat.com re the hits I've been getting (worth reading: it's in the "personal website" area, called something like "typical number of hits"). Anyway, it would appear that as a consequence of a series of seemingly minor updates I made on some pages of my mascamps.com site in September, the number of hits across all of my pages went up around 10-fold

Arnold[/quote]

Cripes, Arnold - that's quite a string you started off there on laymyhat - just finished reading it and I gather no-one's any the wiser about what caused the jump in stats!  The posting has pushed me to have a look at the rest of the same website to see if I can pick up the same tips - but I bet they don't work as well for me!  Good for you anyway - hope it brings those bookings in!

Phil

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Since the thread petered out, the hits have kept up well (normally everyone gets a dip in December - mine stayed fairly constant at 500 views a day) which seems to be a crazy number to me and will probably mean that I'll have to upgrade the bandwidth once we start edging into the main tourist season when presumably I'll get the normal seasonal jump but this time it could take me into the thousands of views per day.

As Alan pointed out though, the issue is whether a 10 fold jump in hits results in a corresponding 10 fold increase in bookings. Now, we're not into the booking season for us so I don't know for sure but we have had a fair increase in the number of enquiries and ownsite bookings compared to the same period last year (as opposed to bookings via listings on other sites). Still way too early to know if that's from the increase in site visitors of course but it's the earliest indication that we'd expect to see.

But, as you say, nobody is any the wiser as to what caused the jump. My money is on it being the combined effect of all of the changes. Mainly it was stuff from the FAQ on laymyhat but also a few things that I'd read about in the course of the year. What puzzled me was that the folk regularly on laymyhat (and indeed Paolo who runs it) haven't got a similar level of site visitors as they're collectively way, way ahead of my website design abilities. Because of that, I suspect that it's something to do with my site having fewer technical features than theirs generally have.

What I have tried doing is rolling out the upgrade in stages to the listings sites (not allowed to mention them by name due to the no-advertising rule on livingfrance). So far, I'm about 90% through with one relatively minor thing yet to add (but then, all of the things were minor) and there's not been the jump in hits experienced when I made the updates to the mascamps.com pages. If that doesn't do the biz then there is only one other thing it could be and for that I'd need the co-operation of those listed to apply it. Interestingly, I seem to have a bit of a jump in the languedoc-roussillon section which is the only one to have a page with all of the amendments made (hard to say though as I can't obviously see the stats for those listed - I'm just going by the jump in people clicking back to the site from someone who is listed on it).

Funnily enough one of the very best listings sites I've come across is also one of those with the least technical features. So few in fact that it looks positively primitive (naff even). But it works in terms of bringing in enquiries and bookings and that's how to measure success I think. Funnily enough, at the other end of the scale, the fanciest listings site that I've yet come across has brought no enquiries! Now, I'm not arguing for using naff designs as a matter of course but "over design" and too many "technical features" isn't the way to go either. Those people who've got Flash intros for their site have not just paid more for it but they've also lost business as 1) those sites take so long to download that it reduces the number of people bothering to look and 2) there's usually no text at all on the home page so no way to find it via google (which, remember, ignores the keyword lists). Likewise those with really fancy Java menus. They do look great but those menus usually aren't crawled by the search engines: much better to have a simple text menu. Even worse are those sites (increasingly common) which only use graphics - even the text is a graphic. OK, that gives you full control over how your pages look but it also means that the site is invisible to a considerable number of search engines (google just sees a blank page on those sites).

 

Arnold

 

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Well, I find all that you've said here and on laymyhat.com makes sense and it ties in with what I've read on other sites.  There's a great temptation to go for too many images, rollover effects, marquees and the rest - and I fell for it when I did our site last October - my first attempt.  As a result I'm now in the process of

1. stripping out a lot of the fancy effects and reducing the number of images without making it look too bare-bonesy in order to improve load times

and

2. rejigging the html to make it easier for search engines to analyse - simple stuff like putting all the text at the beginning of the <body> section, loading images last of all, putting in more keyword phrases in the body text and so on.  My difficulty now is making it read nicely at the same time!

Please don't talk about listings and directories until I've done this lot!

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Well Arnold I've took your advice and stuck a dead weeks on e-bay, done it as a daily price as you recommended, I'll watch my hits and refferals with interest. I'll also see how the renkings go.

P.S. you can't put visit my website etc, it comes up as a violation.

Many thanks

 

 

www.midipyrenees.co.uk

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Wow, just been reading this thread and the one on laymyhat. There is some good advice and some absolutly terrible advice and, what seems to me anyway, a preocupation on getting the highest number of hits on your website. There is no way I would rely on my website for bookings, you really need to spread you adversiting around. Getting the best best meta tags etc is really quite simple, you copy them. Nothing illegal I can asure you but just use what you consider to be the best search phrases to find accomodation in your area then 'edit' the pages of the top ranking websites in something like Frontpage and copy the meta tags etc. Although they won't admit (and will veminously deny it) it its what a lot of 'proffesionals' do.

I like the Ebay idea but why not sell your brouchure for say 0.01p (or cent if Euros) with a delivery cost of a couple of pound/euros?

Don't get involved with Pay by Click else you could fall foul of 'Click Fraud' and it could cost you a lot of money with no result. It is believed that 'Click Fraud' which is the fastest growing fraud on the intenet could be the downfall of Google (BBC2 program on Google 20/01/06).

Do not rely on google giving you the correct information as others see it either as google keeps track of your computers ESN and every search you have ever carried out, it then tailors it's responce based on this knowledge. So if you search on anything illegal and think that by even throwing your hard drive away nobody will know forget it. This is subject of a major court case in the US at present between google and the US government (the latter wants access to this information). Although this and Click Fraud (not the best description for the activity) where mentioned on the TV they have been known about 'in the business' for quite some time.

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The number of hits is irrelevant unless yr revenue is based on that alone, it's what comes along next.

Agree totally with Q on the need to spread it around but as Lord Leverhume (who he, ed ?) allegedly said “I know that 50% of my advertising is working, I just don’t know which 50%”

BTW Q I like your word "veminously" but suspect that you have omitted an "r". I would advise caution though on lifting and editing the words of others if copywrited, there is software that will search the net and identify breaches.

John

not

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[quote user="Iceni"]I would advise caution though on lifting and editing the words of others if copywrited, there is software that will search the net and identify breaches.[/quote]

I think before you copy anything that appears on the viewed page, you should contact the author, ask permission and offer to put in an acknowledgment - even a link, if what you want to copy is substantial.  That said, I wonder how many people have actually been prosecuted for breach of copyright on the Net?  If I put something up on the Net for all and sundry to access, I would be flattered to think someone liked it enough to copy it - sincerest form of flattery and all that. 

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It's certainly crazy to totally rely on your own website. However, if you can get the hits up then it's, in principle, a good thing to do. I think that we all assume that there is "some" connection between page views and bookings and therefore that more hits=more bookings (or at least hope that).

As I said on the laymyhat thread, historically there has been a very good relationship between increases in hits on my site and bookings. Aside from April & May (when Easter and bank holidays skew the pattern), when my hits have doubled, so have my bookings. I don't know that such a direct relationship applies to everyone but it has to me; whether it will continue to do so at the higher level of hits has yet to be seen.

Very, very much like the "sell the brochure" idea! In fact, that's a perfect way to distribute them in that there's no real outlay.

One big plus point that I had with google was that by running adsense on some pages, it gave me a very quick indication that the website hits had indeed gone up 10 fold on most (perhaps all; it's hard to say) of my pages. I think that's almost a better way of showing the increase than the raw stats as it indicates that the hits are broadly relevant.

I'm not sure that copying the meta tags is really that useful these days in bumping up the hits; it is useful to use them to get ideas though. Where it is useful is in picking up a list of standard tags. To save 'yall the bother of doing this, here's my (fairly comprehensive I think) list:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> (should be there automatically)
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb"> (should be there automatically)
<meta name="keywords" content="note: keyphrases, separated by commas"> (less important than it used to be)

<meta name="description" content="We are ...."> (very important!)

<meta name="distribution" content="global"> (there's little consistency in what to put here)
<meta name="copyright" content="&copy; 2005 John Arnold Stewart">
<meta name="rating" content="general"> (may let your site get viewed if parental locks have been applied)
<meta name="revisit-after" content="9"> (how often to ask google et al to look at your site: ignored I suspect)
<meta name="Expires" content="never"> (really for newspapers)
<meta name="classification" content="Tourism"> (there's little consistency in what to put here)
<meta name="robots" content="all"> (use this so google et al look at all your pages)

<title>your page title</title> (very important)

 

Arnold

 

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