Now I know there are a few of these about but I’ve always liked Keep Me Booked for a couple of reasons. First, they host it so I don’t have to worry about installing software, upgrading it, yada, yada, yada. Second, because it’s been pretty easy to use. Set up your rooms, provide a link from your website or blog to your account over there – job done.

It’s nice when people upgrade to give you more value for money, but I was initially a bit concerned that it was all going to get over complicated. Seems to happen with a lot of software over time and I feared their accommodation reservation software was heading the same way.

Well I’ve had a look and it seems I shouldn’t have worried. What they’ve done is add features that give you more choice – and give those with bigger businesses more flexibility – without making the room reservation software a monster. There are nice touches for the small bed and breakfast, like being able to individually name similar rooms – rather than just having room 1, room 2, room 3, etc.

At the other end of the scale, for those small hotel or large guest house owners, there’s the ability to link the accommodation reservation software to the big online booking firms like Late Rooms or Expedia.

Something everyone with a bed and breakfast, gite or similar in a foreign country will benefit from – or even those with a large number of foreign guests – is the  room reservation software’s new multi-language choice: French, German, Spanish and Italian are now supported.

There’s a lot of accommodation reservation software around and I’d be lying if I said I had investigated all of them. Keep Me Booked has become more complex – no doubt – but if you don’t need the new features it’s easy enough to ignore them.

What you can’t ignore is the growing number of people who want to book online. They don’t write, they don’t phone, they go to your blog or website and book. If you don’t have accommodation reservation software in place, they’ll go somewhere else. Simple as that. Whether you’re looking at this for the first time, you’re not happy with your existing room booking software or you’ve outgrown it, Keep Me Booked will offer you a free trial that’s got to be worth your time to try.

Would I recommend them? Well I have an account there myself, what more can I say?

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You realize you’ve got to let people know you’re out there, but how? The phone book is getting very expensive to advertise in – and less and less effective. Newspaper or magazine space costs an arm and a leg and is very hit and miss.

The easy option is the internet then. Stick up a website and you’ll be beating the customers off with a stick, right?

Wrong.

Yes, you’ve got to have some kind of internet presence – otherwise you will lose out badly to your competition – but just putting up any old site is either a waste of time or money. With bed and breakfast website designers charging from $500 upwards it’s not loose change you’re throwing away either.

The good news is that getting it right is not as difficult as you might think. Getting something working really effectively for your bed and breakfast or guest house can be done surprisingly quickly and remarkably cheaply. The secret is not to think “website”, the secret is to think “blog” – or more particularly using blog software like WordPress to create a CMS, a content management system.

Bed and breakfast website designers don’t want you to know this but you can set up a stylish blog / CMS in a day or so. It will look good and it will cost you next to nothing. There are free blogs available but you don’t get your own domain name and someone else is ultimately in control. That’s probably not an ideal situation and, when you can run a professional blog for under $10 a month, why bother?

So why a blog and not a traditional website? Well if you’re looking for effective bed and breakfast marketing you want something that’s relatively easy to handle yourself, low cost, does well in the search engines and appeals to your customers. A blog / CMS fulfills all these criteria – and more.

If your site is not producing the results you expected, or if you don’t yet have a site, it’s definitely something you should be looking into in more detail. My free ebook “Fill Your Beds” explains the basic concepts and how to set it up. You can get your copy over on the top right of this page.

If you need more help, have a look at “How To Win on the World Wide Web“. It’s got step-by-step instructions. Finally, if you’d rather have a pro put it together for you (and still save money on “ordinary” web design, have a look here.

One of the ideas was to invest a few dollars in a really professional appearance. Not by paying a web designer hundreds of bucks to sort it out for you but by installing a premium WordPress theme. A fraction of the cost for a great look.

Well in the last couple of days I’ve discovered another site that has a great collection – there’s even one called Bed & Breakfast!

The site is called ThemeForest and most of the themes I saw were under $50. In fact the theme pictured here is just $22.00!

There are all kinds of themes – not just for WordPress, so you’ll need to specify WordPress in the search or you’ll get a lot of stuff that might look very nice but won’t actually work!

Anyway – well worth checking out. Lots of different independent theme designers to give your bed and breakfast website just the look you want!

All I can say is wow – some accommodation businesses must be making really big bucks to afford those guys and gals!

To name names would be a little unfair, and obviously I’ve only looked at their sites rather than investigating their services in any depth, but most of them read like they work for Fortune 500 companies rather than you and me running our modest hospitality businesses.

Which is no problem – so long as you don’t get the wrong idea about what’s possible and how much it might cost you. I don’t know about you but I’m fairly sure I can’t afford someone who says they are going to hold meetings to review my bed and breakfast marketing strategy at least once a quarter and bill me hourly!

It’s not that they don’t promise to deliver useful intelligence. I have no doubt they can. They almost certainly use Google Analytics – yours for free by the way.

They talk about the importance of SEO (search engine optimization) for your bed and breakfast business (yep, it is really important) – but they don’t actually tell you that a properly set-up blog or CMS will do a good chunk of it for free and on auto-pilot.

They talk about pay per click advertising, email marketing (I covered that here), search engine marketing, project management, etc…

These are some clever folks – without a doubt!

In truth I’m sure that some of these bed and breakfast marketing companies provide excellent value for money. I was just a little startled by the budgets that some hospitality providers must have available.

I think you can do the same job for a fraction of the cost. Scratch that, I know you can.

I know because I’ve done it myself and it’s not rocket science. A I type this article, the blog is just five months old and ranks just outside the top ten at Google against competition of almost 2 million other results. You can do the same for your business.

But I’m sure you realize that if you want to radically improve the performance of your bed and breakfast it isn’t just going to fall in your lap.

I have a book that I would recommend you buy – hey, I’m a businessman too – and other services which may help, but they are intended to free you from reliance on other people and enable you to do all these things for yourself…

…effectively and efficiently – I know you have better things to do than spend all your time in front of the computer.

If you don’t have the budget, no problem. You can visit here whenever you like and pick and choose from the free info available. When you have twenty bucks spare, get a copy of my ebook. If it doesn’t do what I say it will I’ll give you your money back.

In the meantime, if you have any questions ask me here. I’ll see if I can help.

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You decide what you want, not some template-driven site builder, not a website designer either.

I have nothing against web designers – it’s how I’ve made a comfortable living for quite a few years – I just think that small business owners like those in the accommodation or hospitality business can do just as good a job – if not better – themselves.

Using WordPress to build what appears to be a traditional website with a built in blog might sound like a complicated operation if you have little or no online experience but in fact it’s surprisingly easy.

How To Win on the World Wide Web goes into it in much more detail and brings in the idea of plug-ins to automatically control some functions for you (like updating the search engines and backing up your site) and themes to give you a unique appearance.

I can understand how that sounds even more complex (which you could do without) but actually you do nothing more than click to install, click to change to something else. Email is more complicated than most of this stuff so if you can handle that it will be a walk in the park!

However, one criticism that is leveled at WordPress blog/CMS set-ups for your bed and breakfast website is that the theme you choose might also be chosen by someone else – and so it’s not going to look unique.

There are two approaches to solving this, and it will depend on your budget. If you’ve chosen a free theme like those from WordPress.org/extend/themes then simply changing the header image can change the appearance quite dramatically. Put a montage of pictures of your accommodation together, upload it and you’re done. If you can’t handle this aspect yourself, a graphics professional should be able to do it for you for very little money.

You can go further, by changing the themes colors, but this requires messing with the code – which, understandably, most people don’t like to do. It’s easy to get help with this though and, like changing the image, it’s a relatively quick process.

The theme for this site is a customized free theme, which I did specifically to illustrate what’s possible. The original theme can be found at that link above – but you might struggle to find it because of the changes I’ve made.

There are lots of people who can do the work and I wouldn’t expect it to cost you more than $100.00 to get something entirely unique and customized to suit you.

Which isn’t free – but then $100.00 for a custom designed template is a lot less than you would pay a website designer to set up a site for you!

The second option is for when you want the ultimate in customization.

The one thing you can’t really do with a free theme is change the layout. You can make it look quite different but the columns are going to have to stay as they are.

The graphic I’ve put in here shows what’s possible with a remarkable tool called Genesis Theme from StudioPress. This will let you choose any of their superb range of “child” themes or, if you feel like tinkering, you can create just about any layout you could possibly imagine.

It’s probably not a solution for complete beginners but then again, Genesis starts at just $59.95 so it’s not going to break the bank. Choose a child theme to go with it for about $30.00 or $40.00 and you’re good to go – still having spent way less than any website designer is going to charge you.

If you’ve got a few bucks more then you can look at getting the customization done for you. Not everyone will have that much in the budget but you’re still going to be below even the most basic package from your average webmaster. You really should have a look at the StudioPress site and think about what’s possible and how good you want your site to look. If you have any questions, send them here and I’ll see what I can do to help.

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As promised, How To Win on the World Wide Web is now available.

Rather go into the content in this post I’ll direct you to its dedicated page here.

You would expect me to be biased, but I really do believe it could change the way you look at promoting your accommodation business. At the very least, check out that page for the details.

Any questions just drop me a line.

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Now’s the time to sign up for my newsletter (over there on the right) if you want the introductory discount!

Initially I imagined a concise document – maybe 15 or so pages – but “How To Win On The World Wide Web” has had to grow way beyond that to get in all the necessary information.

What’s more, I’ve now added its own CMS/blog/website to visually demonstrate the principles. You can see exactly what you will be able to do yourself, and how it will massively increase your effectiveness online.

Needless to say, access will only be available to those who have the ebook.

Don’t worry – it’s not going to cost much. In fact I wouldn’t mind betting it will be the least expensive thing you invest in for your accommodation this year… yet it could well be the most important.

OK, got to get busy and get it finished so I’ll talk to you again next week!

It’s also something you’ll be able to do yourself, rather than relying on outside webmasters – and, once set up, it won’t take you more than a couple of hours a week.

But… you could have guessed there would be a “but”, couldn’t you. The thing is, I haven’t got on with it as quickly as I hoped. I had said it would be ready about mid April, but as we head towards May I’m still working on it.

It’s got bigger than I first thought but there’s important stuff that needs to be in it. I’ve also been very busy with the renovations for our gite, and a couple of other projects which, to be frank, pay too well to be ignored!

The upshot is that the book has been delayed. I don’t want to give a concrete date and miss again, but I’m getting there. If you want to know as soon as it’s released, join the mailing list by letting me have your name and email in the boxes on the top right. You’ll also get a healthy discount that people not on the list won’t hear about!

So how do you make an informed decision? Which room reservation software is right for your bed and breakfast (or guest house, country inn, gite, chambre d’hotes, etc). Reading a website can only tell you so much and, would you believe, they don’t always tell you all of the truth!

You need to look at your requirements. If you’ve got two or three letting rooms you don’t need hundreds of dollars worth of program. Even if you’ve got 20 rooms, at the high end there’s a lot of reservation booking software that does way more than you need.

At the budget end of the scale you might find a free reservation software download – but “free” is often worth every penny! Price is always a consideration – but you’ve got to know you’re getting something that does the job. If you don’t, you are just going to waste time learning it, then waste more time trying to get it fixed. I’ve done it myself and it gets very frustrating!

I think the easiest solution is not bed and breakfast reservation software as such – it’s a managed solution provided by someone else. They take care of the actual software side of things and give me something that’s easy to for my guests and me to use. In return I pay them a few bucks a month. It’s worth it to save you all that grief downloading, installing, setting up, sending emails when things go wrong, not getting good enough support…

What’s more, with several of these web reservation software services you can get a free trial – so you don’t have to commit to anything before you’ve had a chance to really put it through it’s paces.

I’ve recently started using Keep Me Booked – in fact I’m still on their 30 day free trial. So far it has been excellent – and I have really put it to the test. I try pretty hard to break these things at first so I know it’s going to be up to the job!

They have a couple of options and I would recommend the “PLUS” service, which not only lets you enter details yourself but also gives you a bit of code so you can have a booking form on your own b & b website. It’s excellent that people don’t have to leave your site to book. The “PLUS” level can incorporate Paypal too, at no extra cost, so people can pay you by credit card. It all runs in the background so all you really need to do is log in and see when people have booked for!

Installing the code to have it working on your own site is just a question of copying and pasting. It can also work in a WordPress blog if you have the right plug-in (drop me a line if you need help with this).

To be honest, it does a lot more than I could explain here. It’s really well thought out, yet it remains the easiest bed and breakfast reservation software that I have seen so far.

You can enter details yourself, or your guests can book themselves in. The system will send them a confirmation email, and let you know who has booked. I could go on but I would recommend that you take the free trial like I have. It’s absolutely free – they don’t want any kind of deposit or a credit card number – and there’s lots of videos to help you through the set-up (although I doubt you’ll need them).

Keep Me Booked seems to do exactly what you need. A few dollars a month for a fuss-free bed and breakfast reservation software with a 30 day free trial and no commitment. That’s my kind of service. Test it out here.

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It’s far more profitable for a bed and breakfast business to re-book guests than it is to find new ones. Unfortunately, if you rely solely on that, your b & B won’t last long. Drawing in new people is an absolute must. Your ongoing bed and breakfast marketing plan need to be something you have in mind all the time.

We all have budgets though. We can’t just advertise here, there and everywhere. When you run a bed and breakfast you need to run a tight ship. You need to know where you are going to get the best bang for your buck!

A brochure to advertise your b & b (or guest house, gite, country inn, chambre d’hotes etc.) is usually seen as a good marketing tool. It can be, but you have to consider where you can put it and how far it can reach. If you have a local tourist office who will stock it, that’s great targeting. Likewise if you have tourist attractions near your bed and breakfast. In return you take some of their brochures to hand to your guests. It’s a win, win situation.

But showering them around everywhere is just a waste of money. With modern digital printing methods you can have much lower print runs than before but it’s still not something that’s cheap. You can’t go throwing them around like confetti.

So how else do you advertise? Well anyone running a bed and breakfast today simply must have an internet presence of some kind. Bed and breakfast websites are common but the most powerful tool is your own bed and breakfast blog. They’re cheap to set up, have negligible running costs and, most importantly, you don’t have to rely on outside contractors or agencies. After a little initial help you can run your own.

A well run B & B blog gives you virtually global reach. Using clever marketing tactics it costs no more to put it in front of a thousand people than it does to put it in front of one. For anyone running a bed and breakfast there is no marketing tool that even comes close in terms of its ability to increase your business.

Does that mean you shouldn’t bother with “old fashioned” bed and breakfast brochures? No. It just means you can afford to be more selective. Get just a hundred done and see how they go. If there’s more call, get more printed. It’s an economical option while your blog does most of the work. Good bed and breakfast marketing is a question of testing, seeing what works and acting on the results – all the while keeping an eye on the pennies. With a blog as the backbone of your marketing you can test other things cheaply and thus more profitably – which is what we’re all after!