Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Last year we thought the bookings were pretty late – just a few days ahead in many cases – but it’s much, much worse this year. In fact it’s increasingly common that people will book and come not only the same day but even as little as a few hours later.

Now, I can understand people booking in the morning and arriving later that day. After all, peoples’ plans change. But whereas in years gone by you’d have had driveby bookings in fairly large numbers at times, nowadays it seems as though that driveby market has moved online.

That means that we in turn need to tighten up our systems as we used to assume that the bookings for the day were in when we checked our e-mail in the mornings but it’s no longer unknown that we’ll get someone turn up after 10pm with a booking form that we’ve not yet seen because we’ve not picked up our e-mail since teatime.

I’m sure too that it can be a little confusing when a driveby does knock at the door and you have to check the computer first to see if you still have room for them.

One of the best things about the paid posts is that there are a fair number of them that I’d be writing anyway in due course. ‘Tis easy enough to pick these ones out as they’re a lot longer, more complete and get a photo or two.

I’ve even had someone offer to pay for one after I’d written it!

Now, the big question is how I can get people to sponsor the other websites directly….

Although our Whole Earth Guide is only two days old, we’ve already pulled in some cash from adsense on the site which is a good start seeing as it has very little content at the moment.

We’re aiming to add several new articles to the site a week over the Summer and hoping to step that up over the coming Winter not to mention site improvements that will be ongoing over that period. At the moment, it’s limited to articles on specific places or attractions such as our piece on the Rambla area of Barcelona but we’ll be adding the facility to hold articles on regions and countries in due course.

In parallel with this, we’re enhancing the new versions of our B&B and self-catering listings sites and will be cross-linking those with the Whole Earth Guide in due course (and indeed with our other listings sites).

If you’re very keen, you can even add your own article (about 300-400 words plus a photo) via the link at Our Inns (just select “Whole Earth Guide” as the property type) you can add a link to your own site from an article, but put it in the comments as I’ll need to edit it in for you.

Google’s adsense is a peculiar product in many ways.

On the one hand it seems to pull up adverts that are just what people are looking for on webpages. Yet, if you think about it, they’ve arrived at that webpage looking for something and presumably haven’t found it if they’re clicking on one of the adverts.

That being the case, sites that are full of useful content don’t do too well from the adsense point of view. So, for instance this site is quite information rich yet doesn’t get a whole lot of income from adsense. Similarly, our Pyrenees guide is fairly packed with information (and getting more complete by the day as we’re in the midst of an update) but does quite poorly in terms of adsense.

So, what we’re planning is to have an experimental site which is designed with adsense in mind to see if that does better. Anyway, that’s why Whole Earth Guide will be a little light on content (well, that plus we won’t be properly starting on it ’til after September).

Hopefully we’ll manage to get all the right keywords packed in to get people to the site and adsense will provide them with the content that they’re really looking for.

Almost all of the photos on our sites were specially taken for the purpose and a number of them are quite unique. The overall effect of this is that we get quite a lot of hits on our sites arriving because of those images so we thought we’d have a go at selling prints of them a while back but have only gotten around to doing something about it today.

We’ve started with by far the most popular: our photo of the castle in Foix but will be adding the rest as we go along (it’ll probably take a few weeks to get caught up with the backlog). In the meantime, if there’s one that you’d quite like a print of, pop a comment on this post and I’ll put that on by the following day.

In theory, we can produce t-shirts, mugs, fridge magnets etc. using the same images so if you fancy one of those, let me know. Also in the works will be a book form version of our Pyrenees guide but that’s going to take us well into the Winter I expect.