Marketing Your Property
Never underestimate the importance of marketing. No matter how much effort you have put into making your place beautiful, no matter how good the service you provide, none of it will do any good without marketing.
A website
Is a website actually essential these days? Well, no. By the time you've read this far, you've probably already decided to list with Our Inns and that plus your other listings will bring you the bulk of your guests. On the other hand, everyone and their dog (usually their cat actually) has a website these days so isn't it a good idea to have one? Well, if you're just starting out, money is tight and the website designer is asking for £300, I don't think so. That £300 will pay for listings with at least two good sites and spending it that way will bring in more business quicker than your £300 website will. Bear in mind too that a start-up website is unlikely to bring in any business for months whereas a listing can bring in business the next day.
However, it is possible for a website to bring in business quite quickly. The way to do it is to have your website as part of a larger one that has been around for a while and this is where we come in.
Search engine rankings
You'll come across all kinds of fancy ways to boost the rankings of your website but by far the most effective is to simply put as much text as you can muster on your website. You still need a nice website for people to look at but it's the text that gets them there in the first place.
Don't skimp on the amount of time you take to write the title and description tags for your website. They are among the more important things that bring people to your site.
Listings
Whilst we hope that this will be the best listings site ever, we strongly advise you to list in other places too. There are a lot of free and/or cheap listing sites around (see our free accommodation listing sites list for some of them; if you know of any others let me know and I'll add them to this list). Time should be the only thing that limits the number of free sites you're on.
As far as paid-for sites go, personally I'm usually too stingy to pay more than about 50€ for a site and even at that level it needs to offer me something different from the listings I've already got. However, there are a small number of sites which appear to be worthwhile spending more than 50€ on but 200€ is definitely the limit. Above that and you're getting ripped off.
Print advertising is very expensive and has long lead times (your ad for 2007 needs to be in before the end of June 2006); some people succeed with it, others don't and the problem is that you won't know which category you fall into until you try.
Phone numbers
UK Phone numbers
If you're aiming to attract clients from the UK, it's an advantage to be able to quote a UK phone number because it's cheaper for your clients to phone you and also they may not be able to call an international number in work (which is quite important as a lot of bookings are made during working hours). There are a number of places that offer these numbers but you can get an 0844 (UK local rate) number free from eSMS which is hard to beat and you can redirect this number (also free) to any European landline phone.
American/Canadian phone numbers
If you hope to attract Americans/Canadians (and who doesn't?), you need to quote your phone number as 011 33... as well as 00 33... because that's how they dial France over there. If you're in an area that attracts them, it's probably worth your while to get an American tollfree number. These are available for US$2 per month from TelCan; calls you receive on these numbers cost you about 0.05€ a minute.
