The Best B&B

I have decided that I am going to offer the best B&B on the moor.

This, of course, means the most expensive.  But I'm still cheaper than a hotel, and I'm not liable for VAT yet, which means 20% off for guests - or 20% more for me - one or the other.  If I have sufficiently few guests so that I can manage all the work myself I should be quids in!

The reason I have been 'off air' recently is because I have been trying to market the thing.  After three months I have felt as though I have been banging my head against a brick wall until it bleeds.  I have become increasingly frustrated and irritable as nothing I do seems to work, and all appears out of my control.

I used to style myself modestly as 'Queen of PR'.  I could make anyone famous, and get any crappy old product into the national papers for free. Well these talents are now redundant. These days I have just one simple marketing goal.  That if you plug 'Dartmoor B&B' into Google's search engine, up comes Wydemeet. Simples. Not. These three months I have got nowhere.

Owners Direct - for holiday rentals - no enquiries since January, despite my putting a 20% reduction on my prices.

Trip Advisor - after three months they have still failed to put me on their map, and I am languishing at No 47 in their 'Top 166 B&Bs in Dartmoor'. They refuse to include any contact details unless you pay, and finally I got myself signed up with LateRooms who include a Booking Diary on Trip Advisor if you push hard enough to remind them to sort it out for you.

AdWords - they're the ones that come up in the yellow box, or are listed down the side when you do a Google search. Every time somebody clicks on them it costs the advertiser around £1 according to a complicated kind of auction-system. You have to make up several very short ads, and fill in columns and columns of keywords and phrases (I completed over 200 in the end) to make sure they come up according to the various searches potential guests might make (most of which contain spelling mistakes such as acomodation).  I upped my budget to £5 a day and my ads started appearing on the front page occasionally, but the campaign has come to nothing so I have cancelled my subscription.

LateRooms - I spent hours sorting out details of what should go on their website, and then changed to a company called Eviivo, which covers LateRooms, TopRooms, LastMinutedotCom, Expedia and about 30 others, all at once. So I needn't have bothered. It took two weeks to get up and running with Eviivo - quite quick in this business.  They were sensible and efficient to work with. What a relief!

Booking.Com - operates separately from Eviivo. Loony company.  Writes its own copy and chooses what pictures to use and in what order.  My greatest asset, according to them, was that I offer 'easy access' to the ghastly Torquay (25 miles away), and the first picture they used to advertise my home was one of a silver horse and some glasses on my dining room table.

Air BnB - operates differently from the above agencies.  The others mostly charge me 15% commission per booking.  Air BnB charges both customers and operators. Canny! And they are flying, judging by the number of enquiries I have been gettting from them.  And easy to set up on.

God of B&Bs - has gone away to France so I won't be on his website until after he gets back.

Search Engine Optimisation. Otherwise known as SEO.  Hah! How modern am I to know that? I have been working on optimising my own website www.wydemeet-dartmoor.com.  You have to list lots of 'key words' in your copy and behind the scenes in special hard-to-find sections of your website, add a blog, use captions with capital letters in under your photo's, etc etc etc.  Apparently it can take six months for all these little touches to start working, once Google's 'spiders' have crawled all around them.  It is an ancient myth that the more clicks you get, the higher up you appear. So far I'm nowhere - not even on page 12 of search results!

YouTube: on one of our rare sunny days I grabbed the opportunity to film the garden and a bedroom I've called 'Dartmeet', and put the results up on YouTube, using as many keywords as I could think of, accompanying the footage with a Chopin Nocturne for the bedroom, and a quick blast of Beethoven's Pastoral for the outside footage.  This has put me onto page 6 of Google Search, but somebody not very kind has added a 'dislike' little sign to my bedroom film.  Perhaps they thought the use of one of the most beautiful tunes ever written, to advertise a B&B, was naff.

So I have been busy.  With zero result.  No other accommodation in the area is following up so many marketing avenues, as far as I am aware. So what's the problem? That I am up there too late in the season, that I am too expensive, that I am too dictatorial demanding a minimum of two nights, that the place is let out for a week in July, that I am new, so that I am at the bottom of all the marketing arms with no reviews as yet and have no repeat business?  Or possibly just because I am horrid.

All this remains to be seen.  At least I now have an on-line presence.  Which means that I can calm down, leave my computer for a few minutes a day, and be a bit nicer to people around me.

And I remain firmly optimistic that very soon it will all begin to gather momentum and in due course I will be over-inundated with bookings.  Watch this space!