A GROWING number of holiday home owners are beginning to hook into the benefits that a regularly updated, blog-style website can bring.
The ‘original’ blogs were very often a diary of a person’s life, which although they could be read by anyone, were most often written for the benefit of friends and family.
But today a few small business owners have seen the advantage of using blogging software and this includes those in France looking to promote a gite.
One of the sites I’ve been following recently is that of Geoffrey Coan, who has a cottage to let in Brittany, but also writes a blog about running the gite.
He recently featured This French Life in one of his posts, but Geoffrey has written about many different subjects covering both the gite, travelling in France and just those everyday things like donating blood and reviews of his holiday reading, which gives the site a real human touch.
One of my favourite posts is on ordering business card magnets through Vistaprint, which offers a great method for promoting the gite in a simple and effective way.
The only thing I would like to see more of are photographs of the Brittany countryside, Geoffrey already has an account with Flickr, and it is a simple way of hosting and uploading pics.
And the one thing I’d like to see a little less of are links to the gite’s own website, as too many links in an article trip up the flow of a piece and people are not always receptive to being sold at, see Don’t hard sell your readers.
A simple way around this would be to feature a small picture of the gite in the right-hand column of the site close to the About Me section, and then link from this and the gite website address below.
Overall though the site is a great example of using a blog to help your business, Geoffrey even makes use of del.icic.us tags to organise his articles into a coherent format, and if you are looking to start your own it is well worth studying.