Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

Winter is the time when we get around to looking in detail at our various sites and so it was only yesterday that we noticed that one of them wasn’t nearly so complete as it could be.

An easy thing to fix and as from this afternoon our Holiday Rental Homes site now lists all the properties that it should have been listing all along. The effect of this is that the site should have a much greater profile than it did before with hundreds of new pages under it’s wing.

Whether it’ll make any difference with the search engines is something that we’ll just have to wait and see.

We’ve been rolling out our marketing campaign to pull in more entries on our B&B listings sites over the last few weeks and it’s interesting to see how differently the offers have been taken up.

First off, the Spanish began with a vast number of duff addresses which implies that a lot of them don’t bother with e-mail for their bookings. Virtually all of the addresses were from free accounts like hotmail and the Spanish equivalents which also implies that they’re not really using the Internet as a primary means of promoting their businesses. Overall takeup was really low at around 0.5% although, to be fair, it’s my first attempt to do a mailshot in Spanish so I wasn’t expecting an overlly high response. What did surprise me was that they looked at the example sites I quoted in really big numbers and also clicked on the various ads that they came across.

This was my second major mailshot aimed at Scotland. The first, about a year ago had a fairly low takeup but this one completely took me by surprise and the takeup has been over 3%. By contrast, they didn’t look much at the example sites nor did they click on the ads: they just went ahead and either signed up right off or passed on the offer.

It’s my first run at Ireland too and early days with that as yet. What has surprised me already though is that a much lower number of places quote an e-mail than I’d expected. In fact, the Internet presence seems largely to be confined to B&Bs with hotels not bothering to quote either an e-mail or a website. Still, we’ll see about Ireland over the coming week.

Next up is England and Wales which I hope to do over the coming week or two. It should provide an interesting contrast with Scotland where I went from fairly low numbers a few weeks ago to quite a sizeable and growing presence today.

One of the ongoing discussions since November in our little household is: “how come YOUR blog is OK and MINE isn’t?”.

Well, thankfully after over a month of hassling google, Cultured Views is once more back at PR2.

How did we get it back? Well, you’ve to register for google’s webmaster tools section, then claim the site and finally send a grovelling message to them saying that you’ve added “nofollow” tags to your sponsored posts and please can you have your pagerank back.

The snag is that adding “nofollow” just to sponsored posts doesn’t seem to be easily doable at the moment (ie there’s no plugin to do it) and therefore we’ve got nofollow on all outgoing links which seems somewhat counter-productive to google’s stated aim of identifying sponsored posts vs those that aren’t sponsored.

Several months ago, we implemented a new facility on the websites designed to track where people were coming from when they signed up on our site.

One of the side-effects of that upgrade was that we could begin to offer in effect an affiliate programme for the first time. All that people needed to do was to include a reference code in their referral link and we’d pay them up to $20 for each property which subsequently signed up with us.

We’ve not really promoted that terribly widely as yet as we wanted a proper guinea pig to try it out for us before we released it on a widespread basis. Anyway, said guinea pig has turned up in the form of our friends in the Dordogne and we’re pleased to say that we’ll be making the first payment to him this evening.

Hopefully that’ll be the first of many payments in the months to come!

As always, the answer is “it depends”.

If your website is one of the majors, the answer is “probably not”. Would it really make any difference if Amazon decided to spend another million dollars promoting their site? I think not. After all, there can’t be many people around who haven’t heard of them these days and realistically nobody is going to buy twice the number of books through them no matter how much they’ve promoted the site.

On the other hand, if you’re like most organisations, essentially average then it probably does make a difference. Unless your name is very well known then you do need to invest some money in getting your site into search engines and perhaps also through PPC programmes such as adwords. If you don’t do that you run the risk of becoming an also ran in your business niche which was the fate of many small bookshops having an online offering at the time Amazon was launched.

Finally, there’s the special case of start-up websites. If you don’t promote them, nobody will know about your super-duper new site. For these, what you need to to usually is to spend a little at the start to get your site into the search engines to begin with (usually under $50 is enough) and start higher level SEO investment three to six months later.

What you’ll find after a while though is that, regardless of your level of investment in promotion, the traffic on your sites will grow over time. In my own case this growth is roughly 3x year on year which keeps things at a manageable level for me: the growth rate that suits you may well be different of course.