November 2011
Welcome to the November 2011 Newsletter from My Favourite Holiday Cottages
With winter very much on its way, it’s still a busy time here at My Favourite Holiday Cottages. With a whole host of new features planned we’re continuing to make My Favourites even better as 2012 bookers begin looking for their next holiday. To ensure your cottages listing is ready for the New Year have a read on to see what we’ve been up to…
In this months newsletter...
Good Photography = Good Bookings
With the cottages on our site we’ve begun to notice a correlation between the quality of owners photos and the amount of traffic they’re getting. If your stats seem a little low, this may be a reason why. It’s not for nothing that the main photo is endearingly termed ‘the money shot’ in marketing circles. So, to make sure your cottage listing receives the attention it deserves, the photos you use need to be as good as they can be. To get the best photographs on our website make sure that:
- Your main picture is in landscape, not portrait.
- The file size needs to be a minimum of 1mb to ensure quality.
- The picture is bright and colourful to attract the readers eye.
Ongoing Publicity
To continue to increase our presence nationally, My Favourites has teamed up with Essentials Magazine, and with the help of 12 cottages already picked from My Favourites, Essentials will be including a cottage in a monthly competition for readers to win a short break throughout 2012. The magazine sells approximately 128 thousand copies a month and has a long ‘shelf life’. It will provide some great publicity for all cottages on the site as visitors are sure to explore other properties and the link will help to boost our page rankings. If you’re a reader make sure you keep a look out for the crossword competition and our teapot logo!
Winter Photo Competition Winner
We were really impressed with all the entries that came in for our competition launched last month. After a lot of discussion in the office, we’re very pleased to announce that the winner of our winter photo competition is Paul Read, who owns Rigsby Wold Cottage in Lincolnshire. The snowy photo really makes Rigsby Wold look like an ideal cottage to spend a wonderful Christmas in. Paul has won himself two months on our front page Featured Favourites section for early 2012, which is sure to help him with bookings in the New Year.
My Favourite Favourites Section
We’re very pleased to see that quite a few of you have signed up to have a look around our Favourite Favourites section. If you haven’t had a look around already, please do so on the link here. As always we’re really keen to hear back from you about what you think of this feature and how it could be improved.
Featured Favourites
Due to high demand, we’ve increased the number of cottages which are displayed on our front page Featured Favourites section. 14 cottages can now join each month, and every time a visitor arrives at the site 7 cottages will be displayed. These alternate making sure every cottage is displayed an equal number of times. Places are still available for January and February at £10 per month, so to take advantage, log into the owners section, or ring Dan on 0845 6805431 to purchase.
Updates to the Website
Located with the other search boxes on the left hand side, we now have a ‘Cottage Name?’ box for people to search for a cottage they already know the name of. This ensures people who’ve already seen your property can easily re-locate it on the website.
We’re also upgrading the Owner Login section to make the central hub for everything you might need to do the first page you see. We’re still working on this, and other upgrades – more about these in next month’s newsletter.
Latest Blog Updates
Our Latest Website Design Launch... If you're in need of a new website get in touch!
More details about our Winter Photo Competition Winner...
Should you translate booking emails for non-english speaking guests?...
Finally...
As ever, if you would like to make any recommendations for improvements to the website, please feel free to get in touch by emailing us at info@myfavouriteholidaycottages.co.uk
Don’t forget that for every bright idea to improve the website submitted by a subscriber that we use, you’ll get a free Featured Favourite listing!
