France 2016 Best rental websites ! Bookings wanted !

[russellt]

it still took 7 mins and at the time nearly 12hrs to upload on to youtube !

From a photogenics point of view, your property looks stunning and is crying out to be marketed. And with so many attractive features, it is already a potential tourist trap!

Yet your youtube video does it no justice whatsoever. How sad. You ought to try to boil the video down to 90 seconds or so. You would then have a piece of marketing collateral which could have lots of uses.

How to do it? Challenge yourself as follows:

Get yourself some video editing software and do a few online tutorials. Copy & save the original file. Cut all the lateral wobbly bits out of the copy file. Join all the leftover bits together. Switch the sound track off. 'Fade to black' all the joins between the leftover bits(most video editing packages have this setting). If possible, add a soft-edge grey vignette(a kind of almost invisible doughnut shape) around the edge of the whole video. Throw a piece of music over the top of the file. Save the file in an appropriate format. Re-upload.

(You didn't have anything else planned this week, did you?)

[Jensen]

Thanks once again for the imput !

I built this place from a pile of stones single handed. I have the luck to be able to turn my hand to anything !! except building websites etc...

Marketing is a Job/skill ! n'est pas ! Looked into it before but companies wanted far more that our pathetic turn over could afford!

I have placed a local advert to try and find sombody to re-build us a website and also see if Speilberg is interested in the video work.

Thanks for all your comments good or bad, I can take it and more over it's getting my *** in gear

Keep them coming !

[French Cricket]

Yes, marketing is a skill - but there's nobody better placed to market your own holiday rental than you are!

You're the one with the passion for it and it's your passion for it that will sell it to guests - not some faceless marketing bod more used to promoting a pack of butter.

Think about all the things that you love about it, all the things that make it unique; think about the kind of feelings and experience that you have and your guests have when they stay there; all the history/the bucolic environment/the gentle flow of the stream .... and so on. Let yourself be moved by the place all over again - and then write from that place. Remember that in your marketing you're trying to get your potential guests to imagine themselves there, and that you're selling an experience not a product.

Don't write too much, but write from the heart. And back up your writing with some magnificent photos. You've got a unique place there - it really deserves a fantastic showcase.

Why not think about making your new website yourself? Lots of people on here use Promote My Place; not my cup of tea but it's very popular. I use Weebly, which is also a Content Management System, put together by dragging widgets onto the page, but is far more flexible than PMP. No knowledge of code needed unless you want to tinker - you can put together a perfectly good site without it.

If you do go for someone to design you a new site, make sure that you have access to it yourself for updates, so a Content Management System ideally. And - um - be very careful who you use - there are still some real shocking designers, producing real rubbish, here in France