Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category

OK, so you’ve got a lovely B&B, brilliant location and beautifully decorated but what about attracting some guests?

That’s usually the step that fells most B&B owners as they generally get into the business by accident, figuring that if they have a lovely place then loads of people will come to stay.

Unfortunately, it rarely works like that and before long they start looking around for places to advertise this “heaven on earth” that they’ve created. Sadly, some of the owners leave that step far too late: you should get going on your marketing efforts as early as possible, even if it means that you are advertising the place before it’s ready and need to add “ready next Easter” or whatever.

As usual, we’re getting going on our own marketing for the new year fairly soon. In addition to the annual upgrade of our family of listings sites (OurInns) we’re rolling out two new initiatives in that area: Whole Earth Guide already and soon Inns4U. All are free listings sites so if you have a B&B or self-catering (vacation rental) place now’s a good time to add yourself here.

Once we get about half-way through October, our Winter development programme usually starts to get into its stride.

For this year, we have a whole host of things on the to-do list:

1. A general tidy-up of the original version of the inns family of sites. First-off on this front is a major spring-clean of the UK listings before we start firing our marketing e-mails off. We’ve recently added the Inns4U domain which may take over as the primary domain for these sites although it’ll likely be a very gradual changeover.
2. The upgrade of the new-generation sites over at OurBedAndBreakfasts.com will be continuing in tandem with the expansion of our Whole Earth Guide.
3. The Whole Earth Guide will be expanding quite rapidly, initially concentrating on the areas already covered by the inns listings. Once we get enough content onto Whole Earth, we’re planning on incorporating content from it into the other listings sites which should help the ranking of those too.
4. More blogs will be coming onstream over the next few months. We’ve changed over to Cultured Views and have been working on both An Age of Magic and On a Postcard on and off over the Summer.

Somehow I think that’ll keep us pretty busy this side of Christmas!

I find that after a while the focus of our blogs tends to drift off from the original idea and so, sometimes, it’s useful to change the domain name to reflect the new focus of the topics in it.

So far, that’s resulted in this particular blog living in three different guises over the course of almost four years. Mark one wasn’t a blog per se in that it was basically a mailing list that I used to keep everyone back home up to date on what we were getting up to. A couple of years later, when the mailing list became a bit unmanageable it moved into its original blog format although the content remained pretty much the same. Then last year we thought that it was time to revitalise the whole thing and put it on the Foreign Perspectives domain.

Now, its Wendy’s turn. To begin with she kicked off her blog on her own domain but didn’t really get into it for the first few months. She has now though and usually has three or four posts a day before you even count sponsored ones. Anyway, it was time to get it onto a proper domain which is Cultured Views. Of course, the snag now is that we have loads of places that we need to tell about that change of domain and there’s the issue of seeing about getting the pagerank moved over too.

Since she has a proper domain now, ’tis time to think about promoting it and we’re hoping to get going on that over the next couple of days.

Interestingly, one of our most successful website launches is our very new Whole Earth Guide. For reasons which totally escape me, our article on opening a bank account in America has proved to be an immediate success for the site and consequently we’ll be extending the expat banking section of the site over the coming months.

As you know, we upped the ante with the camera a few months ago. Up until then the computer was doing fine as the image size was around the 600k mark but now each one is more like 5mb which obviously eats up the storage space somewhat faster.

In tandem with that, we’ve both been using the computer a whole lot more than we had in the past so a) we’re fighting over it and b) it’s filling up much faster than expected.

And that’s before you even consider the usual expansion into other websites that happens over the Winter. We’ve been plugging away with Whole Earth Guide as you know and today Cultured Views was born.

Finally, we have pencilled in a slide scanner so that we can mine the slide library that I have which will, of course, eat up the storage even faster.

Or, in short, we’re in the market for a new computer.

As usual, prices have dived and performance have soared since we bought this little guy last year. Whereas our £650 bought us 60GB, 1.5GHz, 256k cache and XP Pro, this year our £600 will buy 200GB, 1.86GHz, 2GB cache, DVD writer and Vista Business. It’s even possible to weigh in at the £350 mark for 120GB, 1.86GHz, 1Gb cache and Vista Home but somehow I suspect that 1GB cash and 120GB disc plus Vista probably isn’t a long term option.

One big plus this year is that the new member of our computer family is being paid for entirely out of our Internet income whereas last time it had to be paid for out of real-world income.

Not that I’m running out of photographs but I thought that it was time that I started on the regional guides for our Whole Earth Guide so after a little enhancement of the code for the site, the Languedoc-Roussillon guide made its debut this evening.

It mightn’t look terribly spectacular but that simple enhancement is the first step to let me start integrating the guide into the various B&B/self-catering listings sites though I’ll need to run up a few more regional guides to make that worth doing. Courtesy of the way which the software works, you’ll see at least one detailed article for each of the regions which I roll the guide out to.

Still haven’t made a bean on the guide as yet but hopefully that’ll begin to change over the next month or so as the various articles are coming pretty well on google searches.