Foreign Perspectives

From about October through to March each year anyone who rents out holiday accommodation is usually innundated with offers for free trial listings from a range of listings sites around the world.

One thing that almost all of the free trial periods have in common is that they limit the facilities available on your entry as compared to the paid subscription version. Usually, that’s done by a very simple restriction: they don’t publish your website address.

The reason behind that is simple as without that website address most people will use the contact facilities on the listings site to get in touch with you and you’ll know that they’ve done that ie that the site is working for you. The downside of that is that many more people won’t bother contacting you and will instead go to other properties who do have their website listed so overall you get fewer bookings. Fair enough really as you’re not paying the site to list you at that point.

Some would say that if you get one booking enquiry that way then you should take up the paid subscription (which is usually at a discount during the trial period) but I feel that it’s better to wait for the second e-mail from a site in that the first one could just be spurious. If people find you twice on a site then that’s a good indication that the site is going to bring you business and it’s probably best to sign up on receipt of the second booking enquiry.

The only problem is that once you’ve signed up then you will no longer get the direct feedback that the site is working for you and it’s only by looking at your website stats that you’ll know if they’ve sent you any traffic at all.

Surprisingly given the market conditions, the number of people picking up posts from the blog on real estate is growing daily.

Why is that though? Surely with a relatively depressed housing market you’d think that less people would be interested in it? I suspect that the reason is that everyone is looking to catch the market turning upwards and hence the interest is even more intense now than it would ordinarily be during normal trading conditions.

Of course, the fact that a lot of people are looking for that upturn probably means that it’s some way off and certainly the messing around on the share markets recently isn’t a particularly hopeful sign.

Much as you might think that video production was for film studios in fact there are a number of small production companies which target the corporate video production market.

Of these, 522 Productions confines itself broadly to the Washington DC area along with those neighbouring it of course. As it’s in the capital area many of the productions that it has created are for non-profit organisations and there’s a surprisingly wide range of work in it’s portfolio already.

They even run to quite an interesting blog which looks at many of the issues concerning video production these days as, of course, it’s rarely as straightforward as producing a video tape since people will often want a flash version for online distribution along with the possibility of running streaming videos and distribution via YouTube. Naturally that range of outlets makes it important to consider just what outlets you are likely to be using before you start shooting: the grand production that you originally thought you needed might not be suitable if many people will be watching the quite small video sizes that are generally available online for example.

One thing that constantly surprises me with the adverts that we get for the listings sites is how poor some of them are.

Whilst most people will write two or three paragraphs to describe their place and some even run to quite extensive descriptions of both their property and the local attractions, others put as little as one sentence on and don’t bother with a photo either.

Now, it’s possible to get some hits with a one sentence description but realistically the number of hits you’ll get with one sentence is tiny as it just isn’t enough for the search engines to work with. And the search engines do matter because even with listings sites, the majority of hits are generally on the pages generated for individual properties rather than the home page of the listings site. Therefore if your entry is very short then you’re going to get a good deal less business than if your entry is above average in length.

Photos are a different matter. They’re usually not important in bringing people to your place although there’s been a recent trend towards people using image search to find properties so they are more important than they were. However, many people book directly from the advert so it’s a good idea to load as many good photos as you can with any adverts that you place. Make sure that the photo used on your summary page is eye-catching too or your place will get skipped.

In fact, rather than spending time to get the “perfect wording” for your ad, it’s much better to spend the time in making it longer.

We’ve been looking around for a new template for this blog but haven’t really seen anything that really catches our eye and is broadly in tune with the themes that we talk about here.

However, there’s loads of people out there who run up custom templates and we’re toying with the idea of getting one done for the site. Well, depending on the charge for it that is as I can certainly live with the free ones if the charge is over the top and if really pushed could run up one ourselves I suppose.

I think we’ll have a look round some more but that custom template is getting to be quite tempting.