Creating your website :
the right tools you need to create a
better website
then your competitors
Find the right keywords
Many business owner thinks that to receive traffic from search engine, they just have to pay someone to submit there site once their website is completed. This is so wrong. To receive traffic from search engines, you need to start planning BEFORE you start your website. You have to find the exact keywords
that are going to send you a lot of traffic.
Example : keyword "Bed and breakfast"
This would be a normal keyword you would want to target, after all your website is about a bed and breakfast. So, is it the best thing to do? Definitely not. You see, if you choose to target the keyword "bed and breakfast", you will be competing against approximately 244000 other websites and it is going to be pretty hard (not to say impossible) to come out in the first page when someone type in "bed and breakfast" in a search engine.
What is the solution? Target, target and more target. You have to find more specific keywords to target a specific audience, in which you have less competitors. But how will you find those niche keywords for your bed and breakfast website? You can do it the hard (and very long) way by trying different keywords in google, to find the keywords that has less competition. You could also use a keyword tool like wordtracker, that help you find the keywords that has the most potential in search engine.
This process is crucial, you should find the right keywords for every pages of your bed and breakfast website.
Tip : Wordtracker has a free trial version, which is nice. But the nicest thing is that you can access their service on a daily basis. No need to pay for a full year access! You can use the whole tool for one day, for less then 7$. This is probably the best investment you will do online. So prepareyourself and do all your research in the same day to save on this tool.
Web hosting
When you want to put your bed and breakfast website online, you need to find a web hosting company to do so. The cost of hosting can vary a lot form one company to another. Although some company are very cheap, it is not always the best one to choose. What should you be looking for in a hosting company ? The uptime, the statistic, the space, customer service, the bandwidth, email accounts, etc It is better to have a company that you can reach at any time, and that insures you a very good uptime. After all, if your website is not "up" on the web, who will see it? So, how much should you pay for hosting ? Usually, for a bed and breakfast website, you should pay between 10$ and 30$ per month for your hosting. Personally, I prefer to choose a hosting company that is in my area so I can easily cal them if there is a problem, and I can more easily get feedback on the quality of there service from other customers in the area. A good place to start is by asking around other business owners who they use for hosting.
Website statistics
Like every other type of marketing, you need to track results to find out what works best for your website.
My email manager
To stay in touch with your potential visitors, you absolutely need to have a newsletter. To do this, you invite people to subscribe to your list from your website. At the beginning, if you are on a very tight budget, you can use your own software, like Outlook, to manage your list. But if you are serious about promoting your bed and breakfast on the web, you might want to use a specialised email manager tool like "My email manager". You will start off the right way and you won't have to move your list in a few months because it is too large.
Domain name
At the beginning of the web, buying a domain name was extremely expensive. Today, because of competition, it has become very affordable to own your own domain name so there is no reason not to have one. Now, how do you choose the address ? Not always easy, but the basic rules are to keep it short. A little tip : choose a domain name that you can easily say on your answering machine!
You can choose the name of your bed and breakfast, which makes it easy to use in all you print advertising.
So, how much does it cost to
build and maintain
your bed and breakfast website?
Let's take a look :
Total costs : Annual total Monthly cost
(annual divided by 12 )
Website statistic 
180$ 15$
And that does not include website design...
If you are serious about creating a successful website for your bed and breakfast, you can have it all (including web design) for less then 1$ a day
There is only one service like this one on the web, and it will be the only one for quite a while because it combines all the tools I mentionned earlier on this page in one place, including the web hosting and the web design with profesionnal template, for the weirdly low price of 0.82 cents per day (299$ a year). It is even cheaper then if you bought just webs hosting alone for your bed and breakfast website.
If you are in a hurry (who is not?!), you can take a quick tour for now and come back later.
