Marketing a gite website and property

Yippee doo dah! Yesterday we broke all records (at least for us) and the francethisway site had 6,400 page views (about 2,600 people total). So almost every 30 seconds, right through the whole 24 hours, someone new came across the site and popped in for a look.

I’m especially happy because the end of September should in principle be a quiet time for people looking at travel in France – roll on January when the world and his mother want to find out where to go for next year’s holiday…we might yet get to 10,000 page views a day in four months time!!

Why do we care? Well one day we’ll start accepting direct advertising on the site and become rich beyond our wildest dreams. Or get an offer from a leading travel company to buy us out for 10 million euros. I’m sure it’s just around the corner…perhaps the letter got lost in the post.

Funny thing is, we offer free advertising in various forms already, but it’s not often someone takes advantage of it. I guess our audience is people wanting to learn about or visit France, but potential advertisers are already here so don’t come across the site.

I did once spend a pleasant morning tracking down likely candidates for ‘partnerships’, sent out lots of emails (you mention our car-hire section, we’ll advertise your gite, kind of thing) … and got precisely zero interest. So I gave up on the idea.

I believe that people always think they are being hoodwinked. Which is unfortunate, because there are hundreds of great gite websites out there that never turn up in google (and so never attract any bookings for the gites), just because the owners don’t know how to promote their sites. So here are a couple of hints if you have a website for your holiday rental that never gets you any bookings:

1. Google and the other search engines are only a little bit interested in what you write on your own site. They are very interested in what other people think of your site – a link to your site from another site is a vote for your site. This is how they decide if your site is of interest to people – how many votes you get. It’s hard to believe but both sites involved benefit – this is a fact, not a matter of personal opinion!

2. Get listed on a few general travel sites, even if you need to give them a link back in return. tripadvisor.com would be a good place to start, then after that search for ‘travel directory’ in google to find some more

3. Get your website listed on your local tourist office website

4. If you know other holiday rental property owners, you could link to them and they link back to your website. Works best if your properties are a bit different, but recommended even if they are very similar – it is a win:win situation.

You might be surprised to know that a lot of people, who know how to promote their websites, get all their bookings without paying anything at all to the big holiday rental listing companies. Why not be one of them?

(We do have ways to get listed on this francethisway site if you are interested. My favourite, which I have just added, is to add your property to the maps at www.gites.francethisway.com – we can add your property to the map for your region with a direct link to your website (although we do ask for a link back from your site homepage). The page is on page 1 of google for ‘gites in france’ and I have high hopes for the spring when bookings get going! Other options for advertising are detailed at advertise a gite.)