Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Development’ Category

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.

Last year we had quite a noticeable dip in traffic on the sites from November onwards but this year we’d simply a small dip over part of the Christmas period.

In fact, it would seem that people have been booking much, much earlier for 2008 than they did the previous year. We’ve had pretty much level traffic on the sites from August right through to now with, as I say, a small dip over part of Christmas.

Part of that is probably due to us starting our marketing programme for the sites in November but even so we still had pretty much summer level traffic on the sites before we started which is pretty unusual as the B&B site traffic usually drops like a stone after August and the self-catering traffic drops up to a month earlier than that.

In fact, the traffic is up so much that I suspect that I’m going to have to upgrade the hosting package for the sites as soon as Easter when ordinarily the upgrade that I did in December would have seen me through at least a year.

After promising people for ages that I was going to upgrade the maps on the listings sites, I’ve finally gotten around to making a proper start on it as you can see from the first edition of the new map of Europe that appeared on the site this afternoon.

That European map is long overdue as I’ve been adding a couple of countries each year as I’ve gone along which had made the original format less and less viable. I say that it’s the first edition because I’ll need to add a couple of countries further east than those on the map here and, of course, there’s the entries in China and Thailand.

So, in practice, that map is merely stage one of the sites going global with the maps but that’ll need a bit of restructuring of the database so it’ll be a “while” before all of the planned changes come online.

Still, a good start with the graphics pad I think. Next up is France which needs some tidying up and then Spain which needs a lot of tidying up.

One of the things that I thought would be hard to do with the graphics pad was the business of looking at the screen yet drawing with the pen on the pad.

In fact, it doesn’t seem to require any adjustment at all. Within a few seconds I was drawing away no problem at all.

Simple things are very simple with the pad but there’s a lot more capability that can be brought into use with the pad that I have. For one thing, the heavier you lean on the pen, the heavier the line becomes. Vista adds a whole bunch more functionality too but I’ve not even scratched the surface of that yet.

Retouching photos looks like it will be somewhat easier too though, so far, I’ve not attempted that with the pen yet.