How I Made My Holiday Cottage in Whitby North Yorkshire a Very Successful Holiday Let, and so Could You.

This is my story of how I bought my holiday cottage in Whitby and how I made it extremely successful as a business.

I bought a holiday cottage in Whitby in February 2007 for the primary purpose of renting a cottage out as a business. To be perfectly honest I had no idea how good the bookings would be although I had the impression that Whitby was one of the most popular resorts. My intention was to use the holiday cottage myself when it was empty, so getting the best of both worlds.

Anyway 18 months down the line at the time of writing August 2009 I can happily say that it has exceeded my expectations and the cottage has literally been booked out almost 100% of the time for the full period from purchasing it . Now that sounds fantastic obviously but the reality is that the usual thing that makes things work, had to be applied, hard work.

I am going to write a number of articles on this subject so that people can understand what makes my cottage probably one of the most, or even possibly the most high profile cottage in Whitby on the Internet which then results in constant bookings.

The primary thing you have to showcase your business nowadays is your website. I think it's obvious that the better your website looks and the more accurate the information the most successful it will be in whatever subject you are dealing with. So I'm not going to go into the subject of websites because a lot of people reading this article will already have a website. I will at the end of my various subjects about successful holiday letting comeback to what I think is important to make your website good.

The very first thing I did after constructing my website was to place in the local paper a 13 week run of advertising that cost me £800. I also placed a number of smaller adverts in other newspapers throughout the country and probably spent approximately £200 on those over a period of the first three months. They were successful but we had to continually send out information packs and answer questions over the phone regarding the cottage's location and its amenities. I soon realised that if I could market the cottage successfully over the Internet this would be a lot easier, so I will move on to the next phase.

Because my website was not on any search engines in the beginning the only way I could get bookings was to use Google ad words. I had no idea about search engine optimisation, it is a subject I knew nothing about. All I knew was I needed to get bookings for my cottage so I happily invested money into Google ad words which were very productive, if not slightly costly but worth it in the long term in my opinion.

My budget was somewhere in the region of about £100 per week and I was probably running my ad campaign at least 50% of the time. So you could say that my actual costs were somewhere in the region of £50 per week but when you consider that the annual turnover for my cottage if it's fully booked is about £18,000 per year I decided that the cost of the campaign was worth it, especially in the beginning when the business was new.

Once again Google ad words needs a reasonable amount of attention and study to work out which sets of words are performing the best for you. You select the words which you think people will search for your particular business trying to remember that they must be as accurate as possible to the subject you're selling, so that if people actually click on your advert the more likely they are genuinely being interested in what you're selling. Obviously if you pick words which are not very appropriate to your product, they may click and not be interested, but you still paid for the click!

After awhile you can study the click through rate for your campaign which just means Google ad words tools keeps a record of your top performing keywords and also at the same time shows the click through rate, which is the percentage of people which fall onto their page and then actually click on your advert.

You set your budget for the amount you're willing to pay for each click and obviously the more you pay per click the more prominent your advert will appear on Google search engine.
I basically always wanted to be on page 1 of Google, ideally somewhere near the top right hand side of the sponsored advertising, and occasionally even appearing on the top sponsored link.
Depending on the time of year and the competition the cost per click was usually somewhere in the region of about £0.25 so it doesn't take a brilliant mathematician to work out my usual number of hits from Google ad words was usually about 200 to 250 per week.

When you actually study the number of people that find your site, the vast majority stay for a few seconds and move on, obviously not interested. In my case I found that somewhere in the region of 2% actually stayed on the website for a number of minutes looking through the pages and were obviously genuinely interested. At the end of the day I can definitely tell you that combined with a good-looking website, Google ad words certainly was worth the money and got me plenty of bookings that I required and was definitely worthwhile for my Whitby holiday cottage.

I been so encouraged by the success of my first holiday cottage, I've set up the Whitby Holiday Letting Agency

On my next article I will discuss how I started to study Search Engine Optimisation and how this improved my business bookings and at the same time reduced my costs, not a bad combination.

Thank you Alan Davidson.
If anybody would like to use this article on their website please feel free to do so.
If you would like to take a look at Endeavour Cottage Whitby Holiday Cottage

For all people that like Whitby please take a look at my Information and Guide Website Whitby