Boost Your Bed and Breakfast Business with These Simple Tweaks - Expert Advice from Evan Carmichael

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. I believe that hungry entrepreneurs deserve to get help, and today, today I'm answering a question from one of my Facebook fans, Hafiz, who wrote in saying he's got a bed and breakfast in Amsterdam called Rise and Shine, wanted some advice on how to optimize the booking system, upgrade the property, anything that will help. Here's the website, hotelrisenshine.nl. So I loaded it up and this is what it looks like. So at first glance, this is not a very attractive website. If I'm coming to it, I'm considering booking a stay in, in Holland. So I'd look at making a better design. I would look to websites like 99designs.com. If you go to 99designs.com, you'll be able to get a whole bunch of designers from around the world to be able to create website designs for you. They'll give you a whole bunch of options, and you can figure out which one you want to go with or not. It's an awesome system that I recommend for all my graphic design design projects. So definitely look at that. The next thing is better pictures. So if I'm looking at this, the big picture here is of the cows. This is not that attractive a picture for me. You're showing the property here a little bit, the flowers are nice. I would really look at getting a professional photographer to come in and actually take some pictures for you. Even if it's on a contra basis, so you give them some space in your place for a week and they take some pictures for you. Because the pictures are going to be really what sells it, right? And these pictures are not too appealing yet, but I'm sure it's a beautiful property and it could be positioned a lot better. Scrolling down, there's not much content on this website, so if you want to get it ranked, if you're looking for people to search bed and breakfast Amsterdam, you want to show up. So you need to have more content on here. You want to update your, your title tags here. You've only got home, so that should be called something else. Um, again, not enough content on this page. You want to put testimonials on here, right? It's going to sell me that somebody came to this property and had an amazing time, and it's the best place to stay when you're coming to Amsterdam. I'm sure you've had a ton of people come through and love what you do, and put their, put their testimonials up on here, you know, put it on here ideally with a picture of them if they'd be willing to, but otherwise just their name and their glowing words. That's going to really sell people who are coming to your site. The top navigation, I actually didn't even notice it at the start. It's really hard to read. This grayed-out color is hard to read before you click on it. So you might want to make that a little more visible as well. So a lot you can do on the website. It doesn't necessarily have to cost a lot of money. You know, you may not be web designers, you're bed and breakfast operators. But just from a few simple tweaks, you could get a lot more people coming to your website and also converting a lot more easily. In terms of your booking system question, I don't know what the booking system is here. Um, if I click on apartments and rooms, it shows me some pictures. Again, these could be a lot nicer, right? This could be much better done if you had a professional photographer come in. I guess the only way is to contact me, so that loads up an email. And I thought I saw contact at the top. Contact. So there is no booking system, so I don't know what dates you have available or not. And, uh, you know, again, that will hold me back. If I could see if there's a date available, then I don't have to waste my time writing into you. So I would look at creating a booking system, and I don't know one that I could recommend personally. I'm not involved with bed and breakfast, but just do a quick Google search, you know, booking systems for bed and breakfast. You've got KeepMeBooked, you've got ResNexus, you've got a whole bunch of other ones. Again, I don't know much about these. I wouldn't recommend them necessarily, but do some research. You know, this— you need tools to keep your business as automated as possible. And you're also, you know, you're not only taking work off your plate, you're making it easier for your customers to do business with you, which is what you want, right? You don't want to create layers to make it hard. You don't want to make it hard for a customer to do business with you. So something like this, or like this, something like this could be really helpful in reducing the amount of time you have to spend and also making a better experience for your customers. This is great in terms of what I talked about for testimonials. See a picture, you see, you know, we love this software, boosted our sales, right? That's what you want to have, something ideally on your website as well to talk about it. The other thing you can use is, um, website called Airbnb. I don't know if you've heard of it, but this thing keeps popping up. Airbnb.com. And you can list your place. Since you have one house, you can list it, and people from around the world will be able to find it and, and book with you. And they can leave testimonials, and you can show what dates you have open. I haven't used it personally myself, but I know people have had some great experiences with it. And so it might be worth checking out as a, as a booking system and a way to promote your location as well. That people are coming and they're leaving recommendations and saying we had a great time here. It'll increase your rankings within the Airbnb system and you'll show up more frequently there as well. So hopefully that helps. I think it all starts with a, you know, better design, better layout here. And then definitely building a booking system in. Again, I wouldn't create it from scratch. I'd find a tool that is already out there. And even looking at resources like Airbnb that might help take your business to the next step. Good luck! I see a lot of opportunities. If I do come to Amsterdam, I will call you up and maybe we can meet and do some business too. For those of you watching, if you like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd also love to hear what you have to think if you want to leave a comment under this video or you have a question for your business. I always read those comments and love seeing them come in. So thank you, and I will see you on the next episode.