The Master Plan

Project 1, February 2007

Waterhall Country House
Current status: n/a
Revenue to date: n/a

My parents own a B&B close to Gatwick Airport. It's a fantastic place and business is good, but there is room for improvement. This month I will focus on bringing in as many bookings as possible, for which I will receive 15% commission on every room booked (they currently pay as much as 20% to online booking agents).

Waterhall has 12 rooms. The average price of a room is £67.50. To succeed my target of £500 I need to find at least 50 bookings per month.

Gatwick Airport processes over 30 million passengers every year and the nearby town of Crawley is a hive of industrial activity, subsequently there is an abundance of people requiring accommodation in the area. At the same time of course, there are plenty of hotels, B&Bs and guest houses for them to choose from. Nevertheless, with only 50 rooms to fill per month I am confident of success.

Search engine optimisation will be key with this one. I will completely rebuild the website (I built the old one but I'm better at it now) with the focus being to lift the site from search engine relegation to Google champion.

I won't stop there however. I have several other marketing strategies up my sleeve, some internet based, some not, that I will reveal as the month progresses.

31/01/07

Before I begin, a quick word about me...

My name is David Marsh, I'm 28 and live in the UK. Right, that's enough of that, on with the money making...

01/02/07

Pre-Match Nerves

Right Marsh, this is it. This is what you wanted. You're jobless, you have nothing in the bank. The hand that fed you has been thoroughly bitten off and gnawed to the bone. It's time to step up to the plate!

Here goes nothing... er, everything!

09/02/07

One week in

First up, a massive thank you to everyone who has sent me a message of support and/or signed up to the mailing list. The response so far has been very positive and has given me nothing but added inspiration. I haven't yet responded personally to everyone as I've been very busy but will do so very soon. In fact, i'll do it now!

This week has been great. Admitedly I indulged in the occasional lie-in but ultimately I got a lot of work done and progress on the new B&B website has been good.

You can check out the work in progress here:

(site now live) - www.thegatwickhotel.com

Bear in mind it is still under development so don't expect every page to have full content or the forms to work and that sort of thing. Ideally there is only a couple of days work to get everything finished off and we can launch this mutha.

Any feedback you have about the design as it stands will be well received. Use the contact form here.

You'll notice that I have yet to update my 'Grand Total Thus Far'. This is not an oversight, it is because I haven't as yet made a single penny. At the moment my target of £500 seems a fair way off. However, once the new site has been indexed by Google I am confident of success. That might not happen this month so I will be looking for further ways to boost bookings in the following two weeks.

Thanks for your interest, stay tuned.

Dave

13/02/07

Site live!

www.thegatwickhotel.com

Just a quick one - off to Paris for some romance.

19/02/07

Paris is nice!

Hi all. Last week was something of a write-off. I was obliged to tie up a few loose ends for my former employer and then I was in Paris. All in all I've not been able to concentrate on The Master Plan for over a week.

My schedule is now free and I intend to push on with a vengence. The site is up and live and awaiting the Google-Bot. In the mean time I will launch a Google Ad-Words campaign. I'm unsure on the budget just yet but it'll be in the region of £250. Any money I spend will of course impact on my profits. If I blow £250 on Ad-Words I'll need to book 75 rooms to hit target!

For anyone who is unfamiliar with Ad-Words they are the ads you see to the right (and sometimes the top in blue highlights) of Google when you perfom a search. You bid for keywords and are ranked accordingly. This can be anything from 1p to £5+! Google only charges you when a user clicks on your ad.

The trick is setting a budget you can afford, being creative with keywords and writing adverts that appeal to your customers. I will need to convert as many clicks into bookings as possible - hopefully my efforts in re-designing the site will pay dividends here.

With this in place you should finally see the Grand Total start to tick up.

Onwards...

26/02/07

Time Flies

The month is rapidly nearing it's end and so far I have made a whopping nought hundred and noughty nought pounds and noughty nought pence!

Last week I dabbled with Adwords only to find it impossible to make cost effective when I only take 15% on every booking. Subsequently the £60 I made in the 3 days running the campaign was entirely swallowed by the cost of paying for the clicks.

I needed a new approach.

I'm still awaiting the Googlebot to come round and index the two new sites (should be any day now) and whilst I expect them to show an improvement on their previous rankings I'll be very suprised if they go to, or even near the top. I just don't have enough incoming links.

Now I could invest a few days researching URLs and spamming webmasters with requests for reciprocated links, but you know what? I can't be fucking arsed! What I need is a site that people link to off their own backs because they are excited about the content.

And that is what I am working on now.

I'll still maintain the two Google friendly sites but this will be something very different with a unique URL. This will be a three dimensional, Flash extravaganza!

This project is no small undetaking. If I were doing it as a paid project I would budget a good 5-6 weeks. I intend to do the whole thing in under 2. Work has begun and I will post a link tomorrow (ish).

Best get on it...

PS, as February is a short month (made even shorter by a week in Paris), I will be continuing with the B&B project until the end of the week. Project 2 starts on Monday 5th March.

01/03/07

3D Flash site, work in progress

Check out the latest version of the site. Loads to do, currently only 2 areas are working. I want this finished by Monday so I'll probably only be adding one more room - a guest bedroom.

www.the-master-plan.co.uk/waterhall3d

Content will come in the form of photographs and text tweened in from the side when the user clicks on a relevent window/door.

I've not looked at preloading yet so expect a bit of a wait for things to start working. Any feedback will be greatfully received.

Cheers,

Dave

16/03/07

I live and earn...!

Apologies for the lack of updates. The Master Plan is still very much a go bar a small hiccup - for all my good intentions in month 1, all I managed to do was break things!

Online bookings went from a steady 2-3 a day to an embarassing 1-2 a week. Whether this was a result of my redesign of the site or just a natural quiet period is yet to be seen. Nevertheless I had to scrap my plans to move onto the next project and fix things.

They still aren't fixed.

But they soon will be. I have finished an entire rebuild of the site from the ground up and hope that the fresher look, online booking system, extensive keyword optmisation and seasonal up-trend will all lead to an influx of bookings in the very near future.

Plus I am still developing the virtual tour of the hotel which will be up and running this month.

Despite all this I have made my first £500. This was offered as direct payment for my work on the website. Strictly speaking this goes against the principals of The Master Plan, but in truth I was happy to accept the money, particularly as I am already a month behind scedule. Any future payments will recieved solely via the commission agreement - no show, no dough! :-)

22/03/07

It's Ground Hog Day!

Guess what? I've redesigned the site!

This is the now the fourth incarnation or the Waterhall website in two months. For your viewing pleasure I have posted each of the sites so you can see my progression. Hopefully you'll agree that things are definately heading in the right direction.

The original site before I started this project in February:
www.the-master-plan.co.uk/waterhall/old_site_01

The first re-design :
www.the-master-plan.co.uk/waterhall/old_site_02

The second re-design:
www.the-master-plan.co.uk/waterhall/old_site_03

The third and (Lord be merciful) last redesign:
www.waterhallcountryhouse.co.uk

I never quite felt comfortable with either of the pervious two re-dseigns. Whilst I liked (and still do like) the first, with the black, reds and greys I felt I had created something more suited to a porn site than a B&B. This inspired me to try and brighten things up and sparked re-design two, but it was never really successful. The only thing for it was a total rebuild of the site from the ground up.

As you can see the new site is quite similar to the original concept but the design is much cleaner and far more proefessional. I really feel I have nailed it with this design.

And of course the new site is optimised for Google, which brings me to my next point...

The table below shows where were are ranked on Google before I started this project compared to where we are now:

Keyword	Old Ranking	Old Page	New Ranking	New Page
Gatwick B&B	25	3	9	1
B&B Gatwick	25	3	10	1
Hotel Gatwick	unlisted	unlisted	19	2
Gatwick Hotel	unlisted	unlisted	23	3
Gatwick Guesthouse	unlisted	unlisted	9	1
GatwickGuest House	unlisted	unlisted	17	2
Gatwick Bed and Breakfast	unlisted	unlisted	17	2
Bed and Breakfast Gatwick	unlisted	unlisted	19	2
Gatwick Accommodation	unlisted	unlisted	unlisted	unlisted

 

As you can clearly see the site used to have no virtually no Google presence to speak of. Now we are hitting the front page under Gatwick B&B and Gatwick guesthouse, albeit at the bottom. The others are not far behind.

The biggest achievement here has been taking the keyphrase Gatwick Hotel from total obscurity and promoting it to page 2. I am waiting (as always) for Google to index my latest optimisations and hope to see even greater advancements.

I have instigated a reciprocal link exchange programme for webmasters to easily link to Waterhall and hope to see the Page Rank increase over the next few weeks. We are currently only ranked 2/10. That will soon improve, particularly when I unleash the 3D tour. That beast will be finished next week.

I have taken 5 confirmed bookings since Monday (4 days). I need to average 2 per day to hit my £500 target but that is looking more and more likely.

I'll definately be moving off this project at the end of the month and hopefully will be able to consider it a success very soon...