5 Ways to get Your Website To Work for You
Your establishment website probably cost you a lot of money to put in place, and in return it should provide a return on this investment by earning income! We share 5 tips on making your site work harder.
1. Don’t over-SEO
Take a careful look at the first impression your site creates. Who is the site aimed at? Is it overpopulated with search terms for SEO? Remember, it is not Google that will come to stay! Sure you want the search engines to guide people to your site, but visitors will pick up on this and might get irritated by overuse of certain phrases.
Your site should be aimed at getting 3 important factors across in the shortest possible time:
1. Location
2. Comfort and
3. Value Read more
How Blogging can Increase your Website Bookings
“No one comes to your website to be entertained. They have questions they think you can answer. Content answers questions.” ~ Jay Baer, Convince and Convert
The Phantom Forest Eco Reserve’s blog posts include mouthwatering recipies and green living tips
Regular, relevant and useful content published on your website will ensure that visitors will want to share items from it, revisit it and be comfortable enough to book through it.
If people spend more time on your site, they are more likely to become a customer. Provide them with useful information to read through and they will be more likely to book online. The simplest way to group all of this additional content together is in blog format. Read more 
Indaba 2012: Old Friends and New Partners
NightsBridge consultants Jacques and John-Ross on our busy stand at Indaba 2012.
We’re just back from Indaba 2012, one of Africa’s largest tourism marketing events held every year inthe Albert Luthuli Convention Centre in Durban. What a show!
Our stand seems to get busier every year and this was no exception.
As always, we were delighted to see many of our existing clients and partners — who have become friends over the years.
There were more than 1800 exhibiting companies taking part in Indaba this year, including 700 accommodation businesses. We were very proud to note that almost one third of the accommodation establishments use NightsBridge to manage and distribute their rooms.
Improve visibility and bookings from partner sites
You have set up your property with to the various sites available via NightsBridge and added the booking button to your website. Now what? How can you get more bookings?
Remember that your business is competing with hundreds of other properties that may have more convenient locations, competitive prices and larger marketing budgets. If the bookings don’t just come streaming in, you may have some work to do on how you present yourself online. Here’s some tips from a few of our partner sites to improve your visibility on their websites and hopefully increase the number of bookings.
The most important item noted by all of our partners is to ensure that you upload appealing photographs of your property. Many also encourage you to add more images using their photo gallery functionality. “Ensuring that you have high quality, professional pictures will correlate directly to increased bookings. We know from our website statistics that a good set of photos can more than double your enquiry rate” says Marcel van de Ghinste, Director of TravelGround.com. When you are choosing your images remember that you are selling what the guest is going to experience, not just the facilities on site.
Facebook: the NightsBridge BookNow Button
Yes, it’s true! NightsBridge has created a great app for Facebook that allows you to take online bookings directly from your Facebook page. As far as we know, we’re the first South African company to make this facility available.
Competitively priced as always (at R20 a month), we’d say it’s the most cost-effective Facebook booking app you’ll find anywhere.
You can add the BookNow Button to your Facebook page by following the simple instructions from our page.
Click here to Add a BookNow Button.:
