The Holiday Homefront -April 2018
The Holiday Homefront
Welcome to the April 2018 edition of The Holiday Homefront. This is a bit of a bumper issue. Over the past four weeks, we have found many ‘must-read articles’ you’ll past four weeks that you’ll need to relax with a cup or glass of something while you take it all in.
Main Image: Holly Tree House in Herefordshire
Pick and Choose to Read the News You Need
The Holiday Homefront is a free publication, but it will mainly appeal to anyone owning or managing holiday cottages (or planning to). It is published as and when we have a full house of interesting articles to tell you about - which is usually, but not always, once a month.
Our format is to include a title and a short snippet that conveys the purpose of the article and the benefits in store should you choose to read it in full. To read the whole story, click on the link.
You’ll also find a copy in the News section on our website: Click here to see back issues and other holiday cottage blog articles. Please feel free to share the link with friends or on your blog or social media (especially when your cottage gets a mention!).
This month’s news
Website News
Can We Help When it Comes to Selling Your Cottage?
Every year, people decide it is time to sell their holiday cottage. It is always worth selling it as a going concern because the price includes some goodwill in the price based on its profitability.
We are just wondering if you would find it helpful if we added a page to the My Favourites website for holiday cottages for sale. Advertising would be free to all those with a live listing on the site. Please let us know what you think by emailing your answer to Rick. Any thoughts on what you feel should be included within an advert would be much appreciated. Let us know.
New Search Pages: More Opportunities to Be Found
We have added the following search category pages recently:
- Eco Cottages
- Coastal Cottages (properties within 5 miles of the coast)
- Countryside Cottages
- Waterside Cottages (any property alongside or overlooking a river, estuary, harbour, canal, or lake)
- Small Cottages: Properties Sleeping 1-4 guests
- Accessible Cottages: Everything from registered cottages to those with level access and ground floor bedrooms (please include details in your property description)
- Cottages with a Hot Tub
If any of these relate to your cottage, then:
- Log in to tick the relevant search category box so that it will be displayed on that page.
- Amend your listing to ensure the feature or facility is included in your short and long description.
- Doing this will help attract many more potential bookers to the site because the more properties listed on a search category page, the higher we will be able to rank the page on Google.
Thanks to all those who ticked the rural and remote box, these pages appear ‘above the fold’ on Google’s first page.
Photographs on My Favourite Holiday Cottages.
Some of you may have been concerned about a note appearing in your admin area indicating that some of your photos are too small,
Don’t Panic! Your images will still appear, albeit smaller than they could be displayed.
However, you’ll notice the difference if you can size your images to’ l920 x 1080 pixels.
As you’ll have noticed, correct-size images really do have a much greater impact and generally result in more enquiries or clickthroughs to your website—always assuming you have good-quality photos!
If you have images that are 800kb in size or greater, you should be able to quickly re-size these to 1920 x 1080 reasonably quickly. Below that and, their quality may suffer. If you’d like to know how to do this, email Rick for a copy of our cheat sheet on’ re-sizing Images) You won’t need to be a techno-wizard). Read more
General
The Top 5 Self-Catering Trends
From booking patterns to optimised pricing – 5 trends noted by SuperControl based on analysis of the hundreds and hundreds of holiday cottage businesses using its booking software. Understanding these is a possible route to increasing revenue from bookings.
Advertising
How to Prepare a Holiday Cottage Website
Starting from scratch and wanting a Lamborghini quality website for the price of a Skoda? Doesn’t, everybody? But, a website isn’t something to skimp on: Your website is your shop window and has to impress and tell the story that potential bookers want to read - which is often very different from what owners write about! Holiday Cottage insurer Schofields has published a beneficial article on what to plan for and incorporate into your website to make it sing. It also recommends some easy-to-use software that enables even those unskilled in the dark of website design to create impressive-looking sites.
Marketing
How to Handle Fake Reviews
From fake news to fake reviews – such things are sadly a fact of life. If you ever become a victim of this practice, put down that hammer and read this article from Moz -for help finding a remedy. Moz, for the uninitiated, is an excellent software for those who like to monitor their site traffic, page rankings, and website issues that need fixing or link-building.
5 Tips to Increase Income from Your Holiday Cottage
Talk about the blindingly obvious! Common sense they may be, but hand on heart, how many of these do you actively pursue in the race to get more bookings for your holiday cottage? A valuable little aide memoir and as an excuse for a pat one’s back?
Are You Ready to Comply with GDPR Rules Next month?
If you haven’t heard about GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations), you really should, or after 25 May 2018, your holiday cottage business could be breaking the law.
Website Management
8 Common Website Mistakes Revealed Via Content Audits
At My Favourite Holiday Cottages, we do our best to get our site visitors to become your site visitors using prominent web links in your advert. You could say that clickthroughs to your website are even more important and effective than an enquiry. From then on, it is down to you and your website. It may look pretty, but could it be better? Please take a look at these 8 very sensible website mistakes to find more ways to improve its performance. We did and thought it would be worth sharing.
How to Get High-Quality Backlinks: 21 Strategies that Still Work
For property owners who understand the role eternal links play in boosting the ranking of your website – and helping you to reach more potential guests, this is a pretty good checklist to follow. You don’t have to do them all, just those you have the time and ability to do. You can see some of our tactics to get pages at My Favourites to the top of the rankings!
Guest Appeal
10 Things Guests Should Clarify Before Booking Your Holiday Cottage
This is an article written with your future guests in mind. However, if these are the questions they are being advised to ask you before booking, we thought you would appreciate a little advance notice so that you can have your answers ready and waiting.
Property Management
Expert Tips to Keep Your Holiday Home in Pristine Condition
For those who love to spring clean their cottages, you’ll love this list. Once Easter is out of the way, take advantage of those little gaps that tend to occur between the end of the Easter holidays and the May Bank Holiday to spring clean your holiday cottage thoroughly. And if you thought you do that every week anyway, check out this list from Evolve. It demonstrates the difference between a clean property and a pristine, clean property! Fewer guest complaints all around!
Interior design
The Laws of Interior Design for Holiday Rentals.
Did you know that one of the main reasons why people rebook a cottage is that they love its interior design? This is an interesting illustrated article that makes you reconsider why, unless you’re definitely going for the retro look, dated design can prove a big turn-off.
Bad News
There’s no bad news this month. But, if you encounter any scams or other things that cottage owners need to be warned about, email us details. Read more
Better News
Share any good news stories – or even bright ideas with the holiday cottage community to send us away with smiles on faces. Share your news with us here.
My Favourite Page One Google's rankings
Our rise up Google’s page ranks continues! Most of our site visitors now find us on Google. Since the launch of the new site design, traffic numbers have followed a trend that we expected would result in an initial fall in our Google rankings. However, it appears we have turned the corner.
Since the beginning of the New Year, numbers have climbed and continue to climb. This time last year, we felt pretty pleased to have achieved more than 150 Page One rankings on Google. As of this week, we now have more than 250 page-one rankings and are heading towards 300. This is particularly good news for you if your holiday cottage falls into any of these categories.
- Large (sleeps 8+)
- Welcomes pets
- A countryside cottage
- Rural
- Remote
- Isolated
- A coastal cottage
- Accessible for those with disabilities
- A cottage for couples
- Equipped with a pool or hot tub
- Family-friendly...then more people will be finding your cottage via My Favourites!
In the meantime, we are working to get many more key phrases on Page One to attract more people planning to book a holiday cottage.
A New Newsletter for Holiday Cottage Bookers
In March, as another way of attracting more cottage booking visitors to the site, we launched our second Newsletter,
This one is packed with articles that appeal to anyone planning a self-catering holiday in the UK. Articles include holiday ideas, special offers (featuring properties listed on our last-minute availability pages (also on Page One) and advice on seeking and booking cottages for particular types of self-catering holidays. Where possible, we will be including links to cottages on the site.
The Blog is Back!
We had to suspend this service while working on the new site design, but we are once again publishing weekly blogs promoting holiday ideas, such as “10 Top Cornish Pubs: Where to Stay to Enjoy Them.”
Opportunities to Feature Your Cottage
If you have an idea for an enticing blog theme for your location, e.g. Norfolk’s Secret Beaches, email your holiday idea suggestions to Rick at info@mfhc.co.uk. If we use it, it will contain a photo of your cottage and a link to your advert, meaning more people to admire your property.
Thanks.
That’s it for April. Thanks for reading!
Please let us know if you find this Newsletter helpful. We want to ensure it is a looked-forward-to item in your mailbox. Tell us what you like – and feel free to suggest any ways we can improve it.