Looking for Sales/Marketing partner.

[medi1977]

I'm looking for a business partner to help grow the B&B, holiday cottage featured listings on my website.

The website currently ticks along making a few hundred £££ each month from booking commissions , featured listings from getresponse mailing lists.

I'm more of a technical mind than sales mind so really need someone to take the bull by the horns and help me grow the website further. We have around 100 featured listings and 20,000 commission based affiliate listings so the functionality and 10 years + of Web presence is already there. Just need to convince more B&B owners to list on an annual basis for relatively fair fee.

 

[fisicx]

I’m a bit confused. If you have 20,000 affiliate listings surely these should be bringing in a lot more cash. Are you getting thousands of visitors each month? Where are you marketing the site outside google? What incentives are there for B&B owners to list with you? What do you offer that the likes of booking.com don’t?

 

[Mark T Jones]

My confusion is around what you mean by 'partner'?

There are any number of companies who will provide this service (with varying degrees of competence and integrity) - are you after recommendations?

 

[medi1977]

I'd say around 2000 visitors per month, 4000 visitors in busier months.
We use instagram, facebook, twitter. I recently have paid someone a few hours per week to update facebook, instagram posts with property listings.

The 20,000 affiliate listings are from booking.com and sykes cottages , etc so we don't take bookings directly we just take a small commission from any bookings our visitors make with booking.com and sykes.

The advantage of a featured listing is they appear on the first page of the region at the top above all other listings, they can also link to their own booking page, and we take no commission from any bookings the featured listing receives.

I suspect it's a SEO reason we are not gaining much traffic for unique content, there are some blog posts with unique content about 40 odd, I guess we need lots of unique content to make it worth while.

For example if we list bluebell cottage in devon that links to a booking.com aff link and 10 other sites also list the same cottage, there is not much traffic to be gained from that because it's not unique.
If we list a featured listing from someones own B&B website and have more of a unique write up then the results are better.

 

[medi1977]

My confusion is around what you mean by 'partner'?

There are any number of companies who will provide this service (with varying degrees of competence and integrity) - are you after recommendations?

By partner I mean someone that could take a percentage of any revenue the website generates in return for bringing in the sales. Would the companies take a % or charge an hourly or monthly fee.

 

[Mark T Jones]

By partner I mean someone that could take a percentage of any revenue the website generates in return for bringing in the sales. Would the companies take a % or charge an hourly or monthly fee.

Anyone established and competent will want to be paid for the work they do - there might be room to negotiate some fixed fee and some 'by results'

By results might attract a novice - or chances. But again, if they are competent they will be asking a lot of questions about your model and your market

 

[japancool]

How much of a marketing budget have you got?

 

[medi1977]

Anyone established and competent will want to be paid for the work they do - there might be room to negotiate some fixed fee and some 'by results'

By results might attract a novice - or chances. But again, if they are competent they will be asking a lot of questions about your model and your market

That seems fair - I did short trial a freelance sales person several years ago but ended up spending £10 for every £1 I had in return so wasn't feasible.

 

[fisicx]

How many of those 2000 visitors each month result in a booking? Maybe you don't need a partner, you just need to work on converting more of those visitors.

The advantage of a featured listing is they appear on the first page of the region at the top above all other listings, they can also link to their own booking page, and we take no commission from any bookings the featured listing receives.

But that of zero value unless that featured listing is #1 on Google. There is no point Bluebell Cottage paying for a featured listing if it doesn't make any money. Maybe Bluebell Cottage has their own website that outranks yours.

When I'm looking for somewhere to stay in Devon I search on Google. Are you top of the results for 'B&B in Devon'? If not then that's what you need to work on. Instagram can be a great source of leads but you need to work hard at getting noticed.

I could set up a site with affiliate links from bookings.com in a couple of days. A bit of marketing to start getting leads and the money will begin to roll in. Can't really see what benefits I would gain from partnerting up with you.

If we did work together and I do a load of work to generate more income what percentage are you going to give me? Suppose I double your monthly income, that's got to be worth at least 50%. If I quadruple the income do I get 75%?

 

[medi1977]

Yes we had some good leads from Instagram - most of this years featured listings were from Instagram B&B or Glamping Huts. who tend to be smaller and not have top ranking on Google.

True anyone can create a quick site and spam the hell out of it, but likely get booted off the affiliate networks and not really the 15 year history of the domain there either. I wouldn't be partnering with anyone looking to just copy my website and make a quick buck. 50% for a trusted partner would be ok with me if the listings were repeated on annual basis.

 

[fisicx]

Not suggesting a quick site and spamming. Just saying it’s not a difficult thing to do.

What about my question regarding the number of conversions for those 2000 monthly visitors? You could for example make a lot of money with a better conversion rate.

I had one site that used AdWords and converted around 60%. £200 spend per month generated around £1000 in income. I know the new owner makes a lot more.

 

[medi1977]

Not suggesting a quick site and spamming. Just saying it’s not a difficult thing to do.

What about my question regarding the number of conversions for those 2000 monthly visitors? You could for example make a lot of money with a better conversion rate.

I had one site that used AdWords and converted around 60%. £200 spend per month generated around £1000 in income. I know the new owner makes a lot more.

Depends on the sector, B&B/Holiday Cottages are highly competitive with PPC , you are looking at 40p to £1 per click to compete with other PPC listings on Google.

I have also used https://www.taboola.com for a few months it created double the traffic from 2000 to 4000 visitors for example but did not see any improvement in the commission per spend ratio. I spent about £400 a month with taboola (14p to 20p CPC) and probably gained an exta £50 a month in commission. True visitors may browse and come back later, these are not instant amazon delivery shops, they are booking 6 months 12 months ahead, so the return from taboola advert might be spread further down the line.

 

[fisicx]

You don’t need more visitors, you just need to convert more. Paying for traffic is mostly pointless.

As to PPC, you choose long tail keywords, stay away from the expensive choices.

Can I suggest you upgrade your membership and get a website review. You may discover some quick fixes that make a big difference.

 

[medi1977]

Sure which membership is it the community or business membership.

 

[fisicx]

Needs to be business membership to access the private forums