March 2012 Newsletter
Driving more visitors to your website...
We’ve now animated’ the right-hand sidebar to get more people to visit your website (or make an enquiry). If you look at a listing, the sidebar with links to your site will follow you down the page. This provides visitors with a clear call to action alongside your essential details, regardless of where they are on the listing, so even more people should be able to click through to your website.
Festival Cottages
We have had a flurry of new festivals signed up recently. Added to the Festival Cottages page, we now have Ireby Festival near Keswick, Ryedale Folk Festival and Beverley Folk Festival in Yorkshire, alongside Ludlow Open and Ludlow Festival in Shropshire. We also have finalised the details of festivals in Penzance and Northumberland so that we will reveal these details in the following newsletter. If you know of any cottages in any of these areas that would like more bookings during the festival and throughout the rest of the year, then let us know. Each festival carries a link to its Festival Cottages page on My Favourites, giving them wider exposure to people looking for self-catering properties in the area.
Wifi
Based on feedback from owners, we have now included a ‘Wifi’ tick box in our Advance Search Options. We’re finding that more and more people are looking for properties with internet access if they need to work on a holiday. Equally, other bookers are intentionally looking for properties without internet access to escape modern life, so the Search will help bookers make the correct choice. If your property has Wifi, please log in to your account and tick the ‘Wifi’ box under the edit section of each property to update your listing. When you do this or make any other alterations to your listing, it will automatically be moved to the top of any listing search in which it appears.
Essentials Magazine
Our partnership with Essential Magazine has been going incredibly well. Still, we’re looking for four more holiday cottages that could be used as a September - December 2012 competition prize.
All you have to do is offer your cottage for a 3-night stay outside of school holidays, and your cottage could feature in the magazine. Essentials have a monthly readership of over 182,000, so you could boost your property profile and help boost your winter bookings. If you are interested in taking part, please email info@mfhc.co.uk.
Social Media
It’s well-known how vital using sites such as Facebook and Twitter is in marketing holiday cottages. However, our pages have been quiet lately as we plan a new exciting initiative to promote My Favourites to the wider world.
We will soon be re-launching our Facebook and Twitter pages aimed at potential bookers, expected to draw even more traffic to the website and expand our blog and social media pages for owners. In the meantime, we have added the ‘Social Share’ buttons to each property listing page. These are a great addition to the site as, at the click of a button, people can share a cottage’s details with their friends, increasing traffic and, hopefully, bookings to your property. We will keep you posted when the new pages are ready, so we hope you will become fans and friends once they have launched.
Staying top of the Search
Did you know that logging into your listing and updating anything will automatically put you at the top of any search results you feature? Keeping your listing fresh and up to date can really help people to find your listing and click through to your website. (Note: you can only do this once a week). We have noticed that those properties higher up in a search list get more click-throughs than those at the bottom.
Good photography = Good Bookings
We’ve also noticed a strong correlation between listings with good photographs and increased click-through and enquiry rates. If you have some new photos for 2012, feel free to upload them. Each listing can have up to 20 images, and once you’ve added your photos, your listing will be placed at the top of any search results you might feature. If you’re getting lots of click-throughs to your site which do not appear to be converting to bookings, you might want to consider whether you can improve its appeal. People make an emotional decision first and then justify that decision using logical information. So, beautiful, appealing photos first – text second!
Top Tip of the Month: Garden Preparation
While on the theme of excellent photography, seasonal photographs can add something to a website. With the daffodils out in time for Easter, it may also be worthwhile heading out into the garden to take some images for advertising your property for next Spring. With everything coming into bloom, getting your garden into shape for the summer months is essential. Planting colour-coordinated pots are a fantastic way to bring colour into your garden. When taking photographs during the summer, they can also be moved around to get the best possible shots.
Finally...
‘As always, we always appreciate your feedback about how we could make the website better, so please feel free to get in touch by either emailing us at info@mfhc.co.uk or phoning us on 01598 710631 We’ll reward any good ideas that we then put into action with a free listing in our popular ‘Featured Favourites’ section on the Home page.’