Short break in Crail, Fife

With the weather at its unpredictable best, we've had availability at Sandcastle Cottage, Crail since 12 April, and at the moment we don't have a weekly booking until 10 May, so we're available for short breaks at present.

With the renovations of the cottage completed back in March, and the recent upgrade to 4-star, we know that anyone who books a short break or a weekly holiday at Sandcastle Cottage will be assured of a comfortable stay.

There's a bit of an odd photograph at the top of this blog - but the idea is that you'll see that from the moment you open the front door of Sandcastle Cottage, you'll find how much we've done to give our guests every home comfort so that they can get on with the very important bit of their holiday - relaxing and having a good time!

Don't leave it too long before getting in touch with us - after 10 May we're fully booked through to 20 September 2008 already!

October School Holidays 2007

Having been booked constantly at Sandcastle Cottage, Crail since early May, we've suddenly come to a grinding halt with our bookings for the rest of this year. Until last Saturday (15th Sept) we had no bookings after 29th September, then I got a telephone call while walking along Callander High Street asking us for a weekly booking fromm 6 - 13 October - hallelujah! However, this gives us another challenge. Because we're just not sure what people are looking for at this time of year. We'd only just finished 'crafting' a short breaks offering from 29th September, and updating all the websites, and now we've a weekly booking - which is great, but means we're back to trying to sell a week from 29th Sept - 6th October, then probably weekly breaks again through the end of October. Last year we had a couple of short breaks in October as well as some weekly ones.

So I've updated my short breaks page on my '2crail.com' website.

Which other sites are worth working on? Well, we've a listing on 'The Cottage Guide' - so it could be worth posting some late availability there. Must e-mail them with our prices for next year too.

Then there's the dreaded VisitScotland listing - why do we 'dread' this? Well, the infamous (to members) Tiscover system is almost unintelligible for us mere mortals who have to do the updating, and our visitors don't seem to be able to figure out how to use it either, because we've had NO BOOKINGS AT ALL THIS YEAR which resulted from our presence on the system, and we paid an extra shed load of cash for a PRINTED BROCHURE ENTRY - for what??? Wish I could find a decent alternative place to spend the money we wasted this year on advertising with them! As I do this I search for my own accommodation for the week of 29 September and find it isn't available - despite updating my availability. Another e-mail required...

Need to do some more searching round for where best to advertise Autumn Breaks

URL length for GOOGLE Adwords campaign

Rats! Just when I thought my new website which I'd designed specificially for short breaks was going to be ready and open for business, I'm confounded by the size of the block for an ad in Google Adwords - their spec for the URL length says it has to be less than 35 characters long!

So: http://www.short-breaks-near-st-andrews.2crail.com won't be any good. Back to the drawing board....

Selling a short break for Dunhill Golf Tournament at St Andrews

Next thing to try - a short ad on Google. So sign up for a Google Adwords account, and get the (golf) ball rolling. It's the Dunhill Cup 5-8 October at St Andrews, so it should still be possible to pick up a rental for some short breaks around then.

Put £10 per month into my Adwords account. I don't know if this is too stingy, but I don't want to run up huge bills doing this until I feel much more comfortable with the idea.

short breaks near st andrews

short breaks near st andrews - great idea for a blog.

Trying sell a short break at the last minute

Next week at Sandcastle Cottage we could do a short break from Monday 25th September to Friday 29th September, priced at only £200 for 4 nights.

But how can I get this sold with only the internet as my tool (it's too late to do anything else)?

My friend Isabelle (a fellow central Edinburgh self-caterer and B&B owner) has just bought a new property in Plockton which she's going to get the keys to this week and is trying to hurry along and get marketed. She's taken a page on the Cottage Guide already and she sent me an e-mail the other day asking where I thought she should market it.

I'd suggested Undiscovered Scotland because they've got a late availability page which we're currently using to sell our short breaks. However, we haven't had any enquiries for next week.

We're also using the ASSC's Late Availability page - so I just take a minute to check that we've got the right dates on there. When I see how many people are now using pictures of the scenery on their late availability pages, I think it's about time we stuck in something different - so I upload the Sandcastle Cottage welcome plate photograph just so that we stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately there's a delay in the photographs posting as they have to be approved - I wonder if the Webmaster works over the weekend?

I've also offered short breaks on Visit Scotland's site for our cottage, and checked that my availability is all up to date on their IONA System - I also notice that they've updated the photograph which is being used to sell the cottage - we're using the Welcome Plate which Karen Edwards of Funky Scottish designed for us. I love that plate Karen!

I decide to try something radical - e-bay! So I put up an ad. which closes at 22.19 on Sunday night and costs me £2.50 or so to place. Check it today and its had 16 views - so maybe there's something in this, but I'll only be convinced if it actually sells.

Which of my websites to use to market short breaks near St Andrews?

I switched to host my websites with 1and1 internet earlier this year because my internet service provider, blueyonder, didn't seem to be meeting the needs of a small business, and although I had been using their personal web pages to run Sandcastle Holidays, I wanted to do things with my website which I didn't seem to be able to work out how to do on their servers.

The thing about using 1and1 is that they make it so easy to buy new domain names, so you're always being tempted to just buy another one whenever you think up a new idea. They're so cheap (you think to yourself) - under £10 and you too could have your own dotcom.

So when I decided to look at marketing Sandcastle Cottage as a short break destination, I was unsure whether I needed to buy a new domain name, or whether by clever use of an existing domain name I could use one which I already owned.

I logged on to my 1and1 account yesterday and took a look at the domain names which I already own:

www.sandcastleholidays.co.uk - the one where we bring together our two properties on one site, and also publish information about our company and my web design services.

www.sandcastle-cottage.co.uk - the site which we use to promote Sandcastle Cottage, our self-catering cottage in Crail, Fife which is a great place to have family holidays.

www.sandcastle-in-the-city.co.uk - the site for our self-catering holiday apartment in the centre of Edinburgh where we offer short breaks, weekly lets and longer stays for visitors to Scotland's capital City.

www.2crail.com - the site I'm developing to hold information about what there is to do when you come to Crail on holiday - the one where we 'sell the location' if I think about John Winkler's comments about selling the area to potential guests.

www.2edinburgh.com - the site I want to develop for Edinburgh which does the same job as the site above, but offers a personal view on what's hot and what's not for visitors to our fair city.

www.2edinburgh.co.uk - the site I was using to gather together the websites for the members of our group of self-caterers in central Edinburgh, but which didn't get off the ground after initial discussions. The members of the group weren't all in favour of having a marketing tool which wasn't properly optimised and managed. I may come back to this idea later. However, in the meantime I decide to offer the domain name to www.sedo.co.uk for parking and possible sale.
I can always change my mind later and start re-using the domain name if it doesn't sell.

Having done that, I decided to opt on the side of economy, and try setting up a sub-domain for one which I already own to do the marketing of the short breaks at Crail. So, I set up www.short-breaks-near-st-andrews.2crail.com - it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and won't be easy to tell people over the phone, but that's not the point of this exercise is it? We're getting key words into the URL and then making the web page very relevant - aren't we? Time will tell if this is the right approach.

Inspiration for this excercise

Sometimes I drift around with ideas circling in my head, but I don't get focused and concentrate on the task in hand. This happens a lot!

There are always practical things needing done and taking up time, and weeks can go by where I spend time washing, ironing, supermarket shopping, tidying, reading, cleaning the flat, attending two different book groups, supervising homework, shuttling children around, planning how to occupy the next school holiday, walking with my walking friends, swimming with my swimming friend, organising the group of Edinburgh Self-Caterers to which I belong, thinking up ideas for the group of Crail Self-Caterers - oh and so many things which divert attention from my small business. And of course when other people for whom I've done websites like Lorna, or Jan or Matt and Sally ask for changes or amendments, then I of course rush to help them first because they're my customers. So my websites get neglected, and my marketing suffers.

Then one day last week, a chance correspondence with a fellow member of the ASSC, John Winkler leads to an exciting exchange of views and tactics. John's been very active in encouraging members of the ASSC to exchange links to each other's websites. I'd added two lists of links to the Sandcastle Cottage and Sandcastle-in-the-City websites which John was having difficulty finding in his constant quest to ensure that those of us who'd said we'd participate actually did so. He'd e-mailed me to ask me where I'd hidden them and I'd been a bit short with him in my reply - sorry John! However, it led to him asking me 'how's business?'. An innocent enough question. I hope he doesn't now regret asking it.

John owns a holiday cottage in Scotland too: Bayview - a holiday cottage on a lochside near Glencoe. He is very active in marketing it and using the power of the internet to attract visitors from all over the world to visit Kentallen.

He's been working on building links in to his website from many other sites, and says that he's currently got 182 links in Google, 232 in MSN, and 131 in Yahoo.

You can check how many links your website has by typing link:www.sandcastleholidays.co.uk into Google (or the other ones) Search (of course you use your own URL). But I didn't find much that way, and preferred to click on the Advanced Search tab on Google, and search for the phrase www.sandcastleholidays.co.uk which gave me some hope that we at least had some links somewhere! I need to spend a bit of time now checking how my websites fare with this. I'll post the results as another blog.

Checking key words and looking at the competition

Spent some time yesterday morning checking out some key word searches for other operators who are offering short breaks or self-catering near St Andrews.

Did the search on Google, and picked out a few sites from their first 10 returned where I thought it might be useful to look more closely at the sites and examine their tactics, keywords, descriptions, etc.

Keyword Search: short breaks near St Andrews
Returned these sites of interest:
www.Scotland-holiday-cottage.com
http://www.standrewsalbany.co.uk/fife.html
http://www.braeside-standrews.co.uk/links2.htm
http://www.rufflets.co.uk/short_breaks/

Keyword Search: self catering near st andrews
Returned these sites of interest:
http://www.coastal-life.com/st_monans/
http://www.woodlandholidays.co.uk/
http://www.castawaycottage.co.uk/


Keyword Search: short break self catering near st andrews
Returned these sites of interest:
http://www.eastneukescapes.com/Pages/Prices.shtml
http://www.scotland-inverness.co.uk/standrews.htm

To take a look at the keywords for each of these sites I have to use Mozilla Firefox as my browser, because it allows you to View - Page Source and look at the coding which has been used to create each page.
I've kept an Excel spreadsheet containing the keywords and descriptions for these sites, which I'll refer to later when I am ready to develop my own site.

Marketing short breaks near St Andrews

Our company, Sandcastle Holidays (Scotland) Ltd is going to try to improve the number of days which our cottage, Sandcastle Cottage, Crail, Fife is let each year.

The reasons for this are:

* Fife is a wonderful part of the world. We'd like to share its delights with more people.
* Sandcastle Cottage is a great base for holidays but we've focused on the summer weekly lettting market, and have neglected other opportunities to let the cottage all
year round.
* Although we bought the cottage for a number of not very specific reasons back in 1992, we need to make sure that the cottage pays its way and that we generate enough return to pay for improvements which will ensure that our standards are high and guests want to come back year after year.

We're a small business and want to use all the tools which the internet has available to us to promote our business.