Sunday, May 1, 2011

Promoting your B&B in Free Ways.

Do you Heart EzineArticles.com, too?
So, we know now that a B&B has to have a web site, a Facebook Fan page and possibly a blog. Those can and should be promoted to the existing guests as well as to potential customers. If you collect e-mail addresses of your guests, you can easily create a promotion e-mail letter and invite your former one-time or regular guests to visit your new web page, Like you on Facebook or share opinion on TripAdvisor.
Your can promote your pages by advertising: in the traditional media (be it a local or regional newspaper or a TV-ad), or on the Internet. The Internet offers both payable and free of charge means. Ads on Facebook, or GoogleAds, Yahoo! and others can be used, as well as banners on all kinds of sites.

It is proven though that people tend to pay more attention to non-commercial information. Besides those payable ads can be quite costly without bringing any result. People often ignore the payable ads, and rather read the same information if they think it is pasted for free. Why? Because they read it for their own interest, not because it was pushed on them.

So how can you attract that kind of attention?
TripAdvisor:
It has been told already about the potential of TripAdvisor: log inn as an owner, answer the reviews (about the importance of the review answering check out the webinar), and answer the forum questions.

EzineArticles.com

I have found this resource accidently. Those who haven’t seen it yet, are advised to do so. I’d like to share some ideas about how to use this resource for free promotion of a B&B Inn.

Here what Enzine creators write: “Want to generate more traffic to your website? We can help. EzineArticles.com is a community of 360,000+ Expert Authors who share their best original articles with our 30 million+ monthly visitors. Our Expert Authors get exposure and traffic back to their websites in exchange for the submission of their high-quality, original articles”. Not bad, huh?

I have to add that one can find a whole lot of articles about particular places. But what I don’t like in most of them, it that a lot of articles sound just like ads. And that turns me off. So if you decide to join this community and use its advantages, don’t try to sell your property there. Rather share a description of your hotel without typical tremendous words like “fantastic”, “fascinating”, “unique” and so on. Tell a story!

The best part is that you can paste a link to your web site or blog at the end of your article, as a signature.

Besides the discription of the B&B itself, you can also share information about your region or town, and then – Bingo! – share your web site address at the end. Those who are interested in this specific place, will thus know that they can stay with you while visiting. And they will appreciate the information that you shared with them.

Are you good in cooking and have fantastic recipes? I know that many B&B's like to share their breakfast specialty recipes. Share them there as well at Enzine and create a link to your blog or web site! Don't forget, it is not only about visits to your web site or bookings. It is also important to create a presence of you on the Internet, so that search engines would be able to track those links and put your web site in a better position.

What should you do? Register as a free member. Write an article or more (you are allowed to send 10 articles in the beginning). Choose a category where you want it to be visible (normally it would be Traveling/Hotels and Accommodation if you describe your B&B). Post it following some simple rules that are presented by the creators of the EzineArticles.com. Wait for review (takes up to 7 days).

The resource provides tips for article writing as a weekly e-mail update and gives you statistics of reads and linking from this article.

Link exchange. To make your web site searchable in the search engines, you must have a great content and, as mentioned before, as many as possible links to your web site from other sites. This is why it is improtant to create a constant link exchage. There are special resources for it. I use for example Link2me.com.

What you do there, after you register (for free of course), you choose a category of companies which is most interesting for you to be linked from, and who would be interested in linking TO you. You choose companies (5 a day) and send a request. Once you have agreement, you paste their link somewhere on your web site (normally it would be something like: “Links”, “We reccoment” etc.) and verify that you have done it at the link2me. Thus both you and the other party earn 1 point which can be used for extra application for link exchange.

You can also request link exchange directly with the companies you know, your partners or guests. We here offer a link exchange for B&B Inns and place them in the page “Find B&B”.

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