I took a look at your site and a couple of things come to mind.

You seem to be targeting your primary audience instead of your secondary one. As an innkeeper I want your site to totally appeal to and attract potential guests. Your site seems more concerned with attracting innkeepers to make you money. I want you to be concerned with attacting travellers to make me money. As long as your site is targeted to innkeepers you show me you are more concerned with your money than mine. To truly attract innkeepers, you have to attract guests.

I realize your site is new, but you need more accommodations listed. No potential guest is going to spend much time on a site that only has one or no listings for each state. Again, you aren't offering much to travellers. You may need to forego the paid fee for a few years until the site is mature enough to have lots of useful listings in it.

From a Innkeeper point of view, your site doesn't show up well enough in search engines to justify the cost of listing with the site. Even the free listing you offer in exchange for a link back from a B&B's home page is too much. You are asking innkeepers to pay their webmaster to create the link (unless they manage their own site) and creating an outgoing link on a home page does harm to a B&B's website and does them no direct good. It only benefits you. If you allowed the link to be from another page other than the home page, then it would still benefit you but it would not hurt them as much in the process. Again it comes down to, are you interested in my business or are you interested in yours?

To win over innkeepers, you have to show that you are completely interested in their success and in attracting guest.
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Steve Wirt
Wine Country Cabins Bed and Breakfast in the Finger Lakes
and Inngenious Bed and Breakfast Website Promotion

Thanks Steve,

I have certainly considered the idea of offering completely free listings. My experiance is that the switch from a free to paid service seems to upset people.

Sites such as fool.com started out free and then switched to a paid service. A lot of people felt cheated by that. Other sites have had similar experiances. Users feel cheated because they go to the trouble of building a site only to have it become pay later... I wanted to make it clear upfront that eventually the site will be a pay site. I didn't really think a link on my home page was asking too much for a free listing.

Totally free signups can be accomplished by visiting:
http://www.bbconnector.com/adminsignup

Innkeepers don't mind paying for something of value. If you send them lots of guests, they will pay you for doing so. The problem is you are just getting started, so you have no quality content (yet) and no track record of being able to send anyone a significant number of guests. You currently have a cart/horse problem. You are asking people to pay to get in the cart before you have established that your horse can pull it. You might have better luck offering a free 12 month trial. Then if they get no appreciable traffic from your site in 12 months, they do nothing and get removed from your list. If you send them lots of traffic then they will join based on the value of the traffic. In the mean time it generates lots of useful content for you..namely B&B's that your site certainly lacks at the moment.

In the mean time you still have to show that you are focussed on guests more than innkeepers.

Quote:
I didn't really think a link on my home page was asking too much for a free listing.

1) You are asking for an innkeeper to give visitors a way off of their site on their very first page. General marketing and website advice is never never never give visitors a way out of a B&B site before at least having them look deeper into the site.

2) You look at it as you are exchanging a link for a link. The problem is, you want a link from my Inn's home page, in exchange for a link that is buried 3 pages deep on your site. In terms of search engines, I am giving you part of my home page's page rank (which is 5) in exchange for part of your NY page's pagerank which is 0

3) A home page is usually the most powerful page in terms of page rank (search engine value) and the best design is to try to pass that rank on to other pages within the bed and breakfast's site. Creating a link to another site on a home page gives away some of that value (to your site) without giving them the benefit of it. Outbound links on a home page should be avoided for Bed and Breakfast sites, and most other sites too.

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Steve Wirt
Wine Country Cabins Bed and Breakfast in the Finger Lakes
and Inngenious Bed and Breakfast Website Promotion

bbconnector,
You've made some nice changes in your site since my last post. For what its worth, I think you are headed in the right direction. Keep up the improvements, you are making good progress. :D

I'd suggest a link to member sites. You offer a counter but the reality is that innkeepers are busy and will not log into all the various b&b directory sites to check their individual counters. What most do check is their referral log. It's a one stop look where they can quickly and easily compare the number of referals from each of their listings. I review it at the end of each season and if one isn't sending me enough traffic, I drop them. You want to be as high up on the referral list as possible. If you provide no link, you don't show up on the list at all. We routinely ask our guests where they found us and very rarely are they specific about saying the directoriy's name, so if you are expecting them to say, "we found you on bbconnector" you'll have to send them 1000 guests in order for them to hear it once. And thats if they consistently ask.
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Steve Wirt
Wine Country Cabins Bed and Breakfast in the Finger Lakes
and Inngenious Bed and Breakfast Website Promotion

Thanks Steve! :)

I try to take all suggestions seriously and will add anything that people seem interested in. One of the next items on the list is a reservation system...

Members can already add a link to their site. All they need to do is sign up and add their B&B to the directory. After adding the site, click on the features link, create a new entry and type something like:

Code:
Our Website: www.bbconnector.com

Which would display as:
Our Website: www.bbconnector.com

As a point of interest I am working on a series of promotional articles highlighting each state in the US and each province in Canada. If anyone is interested in contributing something let me know.
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Shawn
The Bed and Breakfast Connector

bbconnector wrote: Members can already add a link to their site. All they need to do is sign up and add their B&B to the directory. After adding the site, click on the features link, create a new entry and type something like:

Code: Our Website: www.bbconnector.com

Which would display as: Our Website: www.bbconnector.com

That's good to know. Most directories won't allow that because they don't want you surcomventing their own links. You may want to mention it on your site. Or better yet, create a field for it. That way at some point when you have more content built and you do start charging, you can do a tiered system if you want. Many of the bigger directories do that. Something like X$ for a listing then X$ + something a bit more for a link.

It looks as though the B&B's you have signing up are missing the link creating opportunity so it might be worth the time on your part to promote the idea one way or another.
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Steve Wirt
Wine Country Cabins Bed and Breakfast in the Finger Lakes
and Inngenious Bed and Breakfast Website Promotion

My goal has always been to offer a lot of great features at a cost much less or lower than the "big boys". Not to make this sound like an advertisement or anything. Smile

I think offering a link to your website is a requirement not an expensive add on. I can't possibly include all the details you could want in a listing. This is where your website comes in. I look at a listing more as a teaser to grab a guest's attention rather than a replacement for a website.

To tie into that I do offer very affordable web hosting and domain registration features so anyone can get a website up. This forum is actually hosted with me.

Any suggestions. features and improvements people are interested in seeing no matter how big or small will be given serious consideration.
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Shawn
The Bed and Breakfast Connector