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.