Top 4 Recommendations For Making Your Online Presence Easier
We have enjoyed working and helping so many Luxury B&Bs and Inns over the years by accelerating their growth in the hospitality sector.
From our experience, growth starts to occur once certain tasks and responsibilities for your business are outsourced and automated.
As a Luxury B&B owner, scaling your business is possible faster with the right tools and systems to benefit your operations.
Now at Luxury B&B +InnKeeper Mag, we’ve saved you years of the hassle of painstakingly wading through countless of tools that un-deliver, thus losing you time and money in the process.
The below tools are highly beneficial to your business, so you can focus on what is important work more on your operations.
Domain Names:
What is a domain name?
A domain name is your website name and address on the Internet.
Your domain name is your brand name – in this case, your Bed and Breakfast name.
People type in your domain name on their laptop or smartphone, then get taken to your website.
One of the most popular domain name configurations for businesses for-profit is to buy one that contains .com at the end of their brand name. The cost for a domain name can vary, usually they are about £8.00 for the first year.
Namecheap is a hassle-free domain name marketplace.
With a responsive support team who go out their way to resolve technical issues you may have even in the most frustrating of times, we can’t recommended anyone else for easy domain purchasing.
Information like your address and name is protected forever (for FREE!) and you can even get a domain free for 1 year if you choose to get web hosting with them.
If you’re looking to create new site or domain name, learn more about Namecheap:
Web Hosting
What is web hosting?
Once you have a domain name, your next step is to setup Web Hosting
A web hosting provider allows you to host your website on a server. Without a server, you would be unable to have a presence on the Internet – at least, one in which you have full control over. You can change or move over to web hosting providers at any time.
When people click YourB&BName.Com, they will be taken to your website – a space where all your images and posts are kept, your contact form where guests will reach out to you.. All these elements are hosted on a server – which hosts your website.
There are several different types of hosting plans – shared, dedicated and VPS severs.
The latter is the fastest of the three.
What we liked about BlueHost was that they offer a Free SSL certificate for the first year! (a website with https:) compared to other Web Hosts.
Without SSL, your site won’t appear secure and appear as a warning in Google. And your potential guests are looking for your B&B to be secure every way possible – as they will be potentially staying with you.
Plus, if you want to use WordPress for your site it is really easy – it is just a 1 click install!
Get more information on how Bluehost securely hosts your website:
WordPress and Themes
When hosting has been setup, we highly recommend installing WordPress to your site to market your B&B. It is a system best for beginners to managing their own website and with some learning, you don’t have to hire a external web developer.
Themes are how the website appears and functions to your visitor.
If you think your website has to be extravagant and win design awards. though that can help it is actually not necessary – at least in the beginning.
The front-end goal of your site is to get a lead for your business which you can market your accommodation to, with the back-end goal of getting a paying customer.
What we liked about Thrive Themes was that they have simple but highly converting templates you can use which are constantly being updated.
Email Marketing
Though it is entirely possible to manage Email marketing through your existing CRM or customer database software, there are some excellent tools available which make email marketing easier and more affordable in the long run.
One of the easiest and user friendly Email Marketing softwares is Aweber.com
Around since 1998, 100,00+ small businesses trust them to automate their email marketing – to engage with their customers.
Our favourite feature was the Campaigns feature, for which can send out an automated series of messages and create sub-lists and followups for user actions.
You pre-load the content you want sent to your subscribers, then you can set your emails to be sent out across a week or more – whatever time you specify.
They’ve wrote a excellent, free guide on what content to write in your emails, which we have found really helpful.
You can read that guide we saw results with here:
OPTIONAL TOOL: SemRush
If you are running a guest accommodation business with an website, but trade in a busy area with competing B&Bs or Inns such as London, you may decide to invest in Competitive Research tools like SemRush.
What is SemRush?
SemRush.com is a premium but extraordinary tool dedicated to competitive research – primarily aimed at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for your website.
It is aimed for digital marketing professionals, but because of the exclusive tools packed inside make it a top-choice for any competing business owner.
But how exactly can you ‘spy’ on competitors? Can’t we do just this in our own time without paid tools?
It is very possible to do manual spying on similar businesses in your area, but it can be a lot of guesswork. SemRush takes away all that by producing detailed analysis such as:
- Where your competition is getting links to their website from
- What keywords they are ranking for
- What their paid ads are
- Visitor analysis
- and how you can replicate all of this..
One of the greatest benefits of this tool is that it produces a Site Audit of your website – so you can see all errors, warnings and notices that are lowering your chance to be the first page of Google.
You can also see the exact position for the exact keyword you are ranking for – every 24 hours!