July 2012 Newsletter
Rain, Rain, Go Away….
Rick recently posted an article on the excellent Lay My Hat Forum about what would make the perfect rainy-day pack of activities. As well as being an excellent forum for holiday property owner information, why not read Rick’s post and add your suggestions? Here’s the link: https://www.laymyhat.com/. The aim is to collect and share as many ideas as possible. If it’s going to rain, you’re much better off in a holiday property than a hotel as you can do far more indoors (and make more noise). We’re going way beyond board games and jigsaws here; until you’ve tried these games, for example, you’ll have no idea how much Paper Dart Olympics or Balloon Baseball can contribute to a fun-filled family holiday until you’ve tried them. We’d love it if you could contribute your ideas, and we will summarise the best suggestions in a new blog post.
Games Consoles in Cottages:
Continuing the above theme, most of you will have learned that including a games console in a property can be an excellent way to keep children entertained when wet outside. Although many parents choose a property to escape from technology, many more don’t! Games consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 can also be a fantastic source of evening entertainment for the whole family. For example, although cordless handsets are popular, they depend upon batteries – which someone has to replace - and are more likely to ‘walk’ than those with cables. You can vote for the most popular console to place on your property on our Facebook Poll. (Not having a games console at all is also an option!)
The Top 4 Marketing Mistakes
Being in the holiday cottage industry, we see many holiday cottage websites. We see some real gems, but many could be so much better. It’s difficult telling people that their sites are losing their bookings, which is probably why so many continue to exist. It’s like trying to tell someone politely that their children are letting them down. You just can’t! So we’ve compiled a list of people's top 4 marketing mistakes on their holiday property websites. Read carefully and see if you can spot something that applies to you – don’t shoot the messenger, please – but feel free to ask us for further advice! And if you have any of your own tips, add them to the comments at the bottom of the article.
Google Analytics:
Alongside our monthly statistics emails, we encourage everyone on our site to sign up for Google Analytics, using it to discover ways to improve traffic to your site or see which directory sites work for you. As well as being a fantastic tool to monitor your other marketing activities, we’ve written a quick blog post to explain how to set up Google Analytics and how to check where your website’s traffic is coming from.
On My Favourite Holiday Cottages
We reached the 600 Cottage Mark at the end of June! A huge thank you to everyone who has registered with us. Cottage No. 600 was the beautiful Haven at Pennyland Farm on the Mull of Kintyre. We also recently raised our prices (we hate it when people say ‘revised’ as it only means one thing, and we’d rather be honest, so we say ‘raised’). From July 16th, the price for a single listing on My Favourites is now (2020 rate): £98.99) We’ve implemented a new sliding scale so that the more cottages you add, the cheaper each listing becomes.
If you want to add any additional cottages, you can see the complete list of prices on our List a Cottage Page. It’s probably appropriate at this juncture to mention site traffic figures. Earlier in the year, when prices were £35 a year, My Favourite Holiday Cottages enjoyed around 8,000 unique visitors a month. We’re now getting twice that, having begun to achieve more Google no.1, Page 1 slots – and with more about to appear, the number of visitors to our pages will continue to grow.
Festival Cottages
Folk Weekend: Oxford has also signed up, so if you can recommend us a holiday cottage in the Oxford area which signs up, we’ll give you a free Featured Favourite listing for a whole month. Our Festival Cottages search function is growing in popularity –with the click-throughs from a Festival’s own website to their My Favourite page, which will feature your cottage if you’re in their catchment area, averaging about 200 a week. Send us contact details about a Festival near you that runs for two or more nights, and we’ll invite them to come on board and help promote your cottage.
Finally
If you’d like us to write a blog post about something you’d like to know more about or contact us about any of our other services, then feel free to contact us at 01598 710631. We hope you all have an excellent start to the summer holidays.