Setting up a Boostly lite website live - Step by step

All right, everybody, welcome back to an episode of Boostly that I've wanted to do for a long, long, long, long time. And in this podcast episode, we are going to walk through how to set up a Boostly Lite website. And what I wanted to do is, like I said, I've been wanting to do this for, for quite a while now and I've been waiting for like the perfect opportunity to have somebody jump in who is new to the Boostly world, new to direct bookings, and somebody that has literally just come on board and joined. And this is who we have, the lovely gentleman above me or to the left or the right, however you're tuning into this and what we're going to do tonight or we're going to do today is we are going to go through a listing of Boostly website from scratch. And what we're going to do is we're going to put a Boostly website light together on the call. So I'm going to share my screen, we're going to go through it, and then Cole's got a chance to ask all the questions and we can do it literally live here and I can show you how easy it is. So that if you're thinking that you would like a Boostly Light website, if you've come in between one and six properties and you're wanting to up your D booking game and I'll show you how easy it is and we can get you on board, everybody at the end of this video. So Cole, if you're doing a massive favor, just little background where you are in the world, how many properties you've got, how many listings you've got and yeah, why did you feel like now is the time to jump on board and learn more about direct bookings? Sure.

So. So I go by a couple different names. Most people call me Kazu. Cole's my given name. So that, that usually throws people off. But I would say come whatever you want except for late to dinner. So whatever, whatever works for you, Mark. I'm based here out of San Diego, California. I'm originally from Long beach, but moved down here whenever I joined the Navy. While I was in decided to get into real estate and short term rentals. I ended up buying my primary residence, which is where my first short term rental is. There's one and then I got another one out in Omaha, Nebraska and then started doing property management mostly for guys in the military seasonally while they're on deployment. Most of my friends that I'm managing for are home right now. So Just managing for one friend. And so that puts us at a total of three under management right now.

Nice. Nice. Brilliant. Okay, so final question. Why did you want to now feel like this is the time to sort of stop being just on the Airbnb land and trying to build out your own direct booking platform systems? Yeah.

So I try to do my best to not get so scope blocked and, and look at the big picture. And right now the big picture is telling me that Airbnb is getting to a place where they are going to start demanding higher commissions. I also saw a lot of risk in my entire business relying on one platform. And then I thought, why pay Airbnb when I could be doing all the things that they're doing for me on my own while building a brand for myself? So I am at a point where I'm saying, hey, time to start taking things in my own hands. Let's build the website, let's get some traffic going, and let's start taking ownership of these. Of these properties that I'm renting out to folks.

Brilliant. All right, well, let's. Let's dig in. Thank you very much for that. So I'm just going to hit this button to share my screen. So, Cole, Kazoo, whatever we're going to go by, can you just see the screen? Can you confirm you can see the screen?

Okay, yep, I can see it.

And can you confirm you've not touched this website in any way, shape or form so far?

I can't confirm that.

There we go. Lovely. Okay, so what we're looking at, everybody, is we are looking at the behind the scenes of. Of a boostly website. Now, every single boostly website is built out on WordPress. And when you first sign up and when you first join and when you first get your login details, you'll notice at the top that it's got a pretty crazy domain up here. Now, this isn't Cole's domain that he's going to have. We're going to attach that later on in the process. This is literally a Cloudways website. Now, what that means is that we are building it on a dummy URL where nobody else can see. Just me and call right now. And when you log in, so you get assigned your booster login details, the first actual screen that you see is this. This is like the back end of a WordPress site. And I'll walk through all of those and I'll show you what all those means, but this is the bit I want to sort of walk you through first. So we have DIY websites I like to call them. D W Y done with you so we've got two options. Done with you or done for you. Now when you get seven plus properties in, that's when we go down the route of done for you because it's a much more expensive package. But it's because it's, it's pretty much done for you. When you're at one to six, we like to go down the route of done with you because it's a much more cost effective and much more easier to get started in the direct booking journey. And then we will grow with you as you go from 3 to 6 to 10 and above. But when it's a done with you website we have created 80% of the template. All we need to do now and that's what we're going to do today as best as we possibly can do. We're going to personalize it for your business and we try and make it as easy as possible. So it literally is click, drag and drop. Now I don't know. Have you ever had any experience with a WordPress website in the past?

No, this is my very first time.

Good. Which is perfect because a lot of people who come to this and they see this for the first time, they go okay this, this is pretty cool. This looks like a wix or a squarespace or it's like a drag and drop site like WordPress predominantly is not drag or drop. Normally you look at it and you think well I gotta need to have a degree in coding just to get this put together. And so we've tried to make it as straightforward and simple as possible so where anybody can, can get going and it is, it's practically impossible to break which is, which is even better. And the reason why WordPress this comes up a lot so why focus on a WordPress CMS which is content management system is that it's quite simply is the most used CMS in the world. Google loves it, Google recommends it. And for that being said, because it is the number one we focus on that the reason why we put this builder on top is because again we want to make your life as easy as possible. When it's a done for you site, we would ideally like for you to have this turnaround in a few hours. We've seen it in the past where a host would get access to someone like this and the site takes years to come to fruition. So everything that we do here is to try and make your life as simple as possible. So as you can see as you come onto the site and you're logged in. As you scroll down, you've got the ability to amend the wording in real time. So what do I mean by that is that, say, for example, we want to change this here to Cole, right? And we hit the preview changes button, which is going to come up here. What it should do ideally is open another tab, which it has done. The changes are being done in real time. So the changes that you make here, you'll be able to see that are replicated, which is pretty cool. Now let me just double back before we delve back into, into here. So this is the, this is the dashboard. So this is the thing that everybody sees when you, when you first log in and you've got all of these different tabs and settings on, on the left hand side. We're going to come back to boostly Airbnb in a second, which is a pretty cool new tool that we've, we've added in. But what you've got, you've got posts, media pages, comments, templates, listings, plugins, profile tools, settings, theme settings, and anti malware. Now, the good news is, is that you can pretty much ignore 90% of these options. You don't have to worry about them, delve into them. Everybody gets full admin access to their Boostie site. So if you want to dig into it a lot more and go down every single avenue and all that cool stuff, great. If not, you don't need to worry about it. There's only a few that we really need to feature and focus on now. The thing that I want to focus on first is going to be getting your listings on your Boostly website as soon as possible. Because one of the big problems that we had in the past when we had somebody come to us and they maybe had like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 listings or 6 listings max, they were wanting to add them to the Boostie site, but they didn't want to have to go and copy and paste and move things all over. This was a big bottleneck in getting sites live. So one of the things that we did is we have gone and created an Airbnb scraper tool. And a cool thing about this is that by simply coming onto here by grabbing your Airbnb listing and hitting the sync button, all things working well, within five minutes it'll all have moved over automatically. So anything from your Airbnb listing will show on your Boostly site. So in preparation, this Zoom call, I asked Cole to send me over one of his Airbnb listings. So We've got free, but we're going to take this one here. So this is what everybody can do. So this is, this is a cool bit of magic. This is one of my favorite things that we've done over the past 12 months. If I just go and grab the URL for the Airbnb listing. Now, what's really important here is that we're grabbing the listing. We're not grabbing the profile link or anything like that. This is the Airbnb listing. You want to stop just before it has the question mark. So you grab that, come back into Boostly, you paste that in there and you're just going to hit the sync button and it'll start, it'll start working its little magic. Now what it's doing is it is bringing everything in from the pictures to the description, all of the cool stuff. What it's going to do as well is that we're also going to bring in the availability. This is a cool thing, is that when somebody starts to land on your site, it will work with the ical that you, you have in your, in your Airbnb and it will present what dates are available and what dates aren't, which for a guest experiences is, is pretty cool. So let me just go back into here. I'm just going to hit the refresh button now. As you can see, Airbnb listing requests, we've got it sat right at the top here. Now with this process now, you as the host, you've got the ability to approve it, cancel or delete. And now we want to approve it. And again we're just going to go leave it for a couple more minutes and then when we come back in, what we'll should hopefully start to notice if all things being well is it will show in your listings section. So while that's doing that, I just want to come back into the boostly site. Now where will the listings go? So they will fit really nicely in here. So we've got a nice little moment while we're waiting for this to load to amend the top part. So just a quick question, Cole, what is the overall like business brand name that you, you have right now for what you create? Him, if you have one.

We are the Botanic Bungalow.

The Botanic Bungalow. Let me write that down. And that's the Botanic Bungalow brand. Yep. Lovely. Do you have a logo or anything yet in progress? Logo in progress. That's no problem. And would you say that you have a, like a, like a tagline catch line, like your elevator pitch, a 30 second elevator pitch about why someone should come and stay with Botanic Bungalow. If not, don't worry.

No, I don't have that yet.

Well, this is good because this is what we're working towards. So another thing that what we've done is there's a lot of hosts are in the same position, which is fantastic. Being able to do is that they don't have the words put down to be able to properly explain what they do. And we know that this is a big problem and, but we also know that there are some amazing tools out there that can help with the process. And you know, in an ideal world you would go straight to a copywriter, a branding expert and you would work directly with them to come up with your brand and all the cool stuff. But we also know that that is quite pricey, especially when you're getting starting out. So for everybody that's getting started out, getting going, we've teamed up with Listify, L, I, S, T, I, F, F, Y and they are tapping into GPT3 technology, which is AI creation robots and, and they are specifically created for the world of hospitality, which is awesome. And every Boostly member gets full access to this. So what you get to do is you log in and you can get your login details from Boostly. And when you log in it will help you with a couple of aspects. Number one, it'll help you with your about section of your website. So the tagline that we just spoke about then, but also as well it can help you with your Airbnb listing as well and your VRBO listing. So all you simply got to do is you got to come in and put your property details here and click next. Now we're not going to do that yet. What we want to do is we want to work on the about. So the name is Botanic Bungalow. Bungalow or Bungalows Bungalow. Bungalow.

No S. Yeah, there you go.

So about the business, if someone was to say, hey, so describe Botanic Bungalow to us, what would you say about the business? How would you describe it? Would you?

We are a hospitality based business that provides experience based short term rentals but provides experience forward. Experience forward. Short term rentals.

Like that. Short term rentals. Lovely. And about the properties, so the three that you've got, the properties that you have, what would you say about them? So obviously bungalows, I assume, are they.

Yeah, the og. The, the OG was a small studio bungalow type that's meant to provide a humble living experience while elevating the, the, the, the, the little things that matter. Sleeping and even showering. We've got a nice waterfall head. So I know this isn't exactly concise.

No, no, it's good that. Elevate. Elevate the things that matter, are they, are they all coastal based? Did you say they're all by the coast or do you got like spread around? You say Omaha as well?

They've got one in Omaha.

So bungalows are elevated. Things that matter, are they all two beds, three beds, one bed, four beds.

We're all over the place. The Omaha one is a five, two. Our bungalow is a studio and then our coastal property is a, is a two. One, two, two.

Excuse me. So location detail. Okay, let's just generate what we've got. Let's see what we've got. Location details. Let's just put USA location details. A mixture of sea and countryside. All right, so this is the. We've added it in. We're going to let the GPT3 kick in the AI tool. So visit Botanic Bungalow for a unique leaf unforgettable holiday experience. Our bungalows are nestled in a beautiful natural setting with stunning sea and countryside views. Our hospitality based business offers short term rentals that provide an experience forward from our location. You can enjoy all, all that the area has to offer including great beaches, delicious restaurants, plenty of activities. Our bungalows are perfect for couples, families and group of friends. We look forward to welcoming you to the Botanic Bungalow soon. How's that sound?

Sounds lovely.

There you go. Right, so this is a cool thing. Now you can copy that and we can come back into the boostly site and as you can see here, we've got the, the name and we've got the tagline here. We're going to park that for a second but we're going to come down to this bit here which is where you're going to talk about the business. Now obviously we've ran this through listify. Now there's a lot of hosts who may come to us and they may already have something that they can put down from a previous website or X, Y or Z. There's some hosts that may not. This is why tools like listify are amazing. But like I said, eventually long term you can go to a copywriter, a brander and they can probably build this out for you but obviously they're going to charge a little bit more. This is great for those that are just getting started. So again this can get changed at any time. This is a cool thing about the Internet is that it's nothing set in stone. When you want to change, you can change it. Now Next thing, what we do talk about changing is we want to be able to amend this main picture here, so we don't want to have the same picture. Now, do you call. Have that picture that just sums up Botanic Bungalow or just sums up the business like your favorite picture? Do you have one of them?

I've got. I've got one in mind. I've got one in mind.

Could you.

This is my hero photo.

Could you. The hero. Amazing. Could you send me over the link to that on Dropbox or G Drive just as I'm going and finding the Airbnb listing to make sure that's worked.

Okay, sure thing.

Lovely. All right, so like I mentioned, we have been doing the scraping in the back end to make the add in of the listing. So super simple, I've just gone into the listing page now, I've hit refresh and as you can see, La Casita, California, the cutest little bungalow on the alley, is sat nicely in the listings section. So all we need to do is we're going to hit edit and we're going to come in and have a look at the details that's been brought over from Airbnb. Now the cool thing is, is that as you can see here, we've got the featured image, we've got all the words coming in here. Listing price. We. We manually put in the listing price, but this says from. So let's just see here what is a. An average nightly stay in La Casita?

We'll say about 169.

169. So if I come back into the listing and I'm going to put in 160, which is cool, you can amend any of these details. Everything that gets brought over from Airbnb can be amended at any point. The only other thing that needs to happen, and again, we don't need to do that right this second. But there's the I Airbnb iCal import. Now, I don't get access to this. Cole, you'll obviously have access to this in your Airbnb. You go into your airbnb, you go to the listing and we just need the iCal URL. And then that is what imports and exports all of the availability from Airbnb into your. Into your listing. But let's just say we've done that. I'm happy with this. I'm going to hit publish. So what I want to do is I want to show everybody this. So as we're going through the process now, obviously we're doing this one on one, not Everybody who has access to Boostly can do a one on one with me, but we do have an amazing support group in the back end. So as everybody's getting started on the Boostly website, everybody gets added in automatically to here and in here we've got nearly over a thousand members. And this is where all of the Boostly support team sits and lives. So when you've got a question, you come in, you submit it. We have tutorial videos for days where it shows you how to look at every single aspect of your website, how to change things. And we've also dropped in some little SEO master classes, some marketing master classes, as well as obviously all of the tutorial videos that you could possibly, possibly need. But when you get stuck, when you get lost, we need a little bit of help and advice. You pop the, the, the question in here and a member of team will answer that as, as soon as possible. All right, Published. That looks like it's published. That looks like it's published. Let's have a little look on the, on the front end. So we're going to open up this. Which is there, which is there. Right, Fantastic. So the final thing that I'm going to do to this is I'm going to change out the image. So we're going to come into here. In my download section, I've got our HERO image, which is our unique selling picture, whatever you want to call it, and as you can see, it really nicely replaces the one that we had. Now if you want to, again, everybody, you can mess around with the wording, you can change it, change the layout, et cetera, but this is what we call above the fold. So let me just hit the update button. So the main thing is what you want from this hero image, or your unique selling point, et cetera, is you really want to make sure that this first image is the one that will grab the attention above the fold. So above the fold is the first thing that they see when their page, the website loads up, for example. And that's what literally what we've got right here. I've added in the little bit of the text and imagery here. And the next thing that we can do is we can amend out the name and we've got these book now links. Now the next thing, what we want to do, I want to come back into our Airbnb scraper tool. So we're going to hit publish. And as I can see, the Airbnb right now is logging in and it's showing me that the ICAL has been added in which is great. So if I come back into here now, if I hit leave, come into listings, we've got the property that is showing up which is. Which is all just good. So those are the, the two most important things. These are the most important things to start to edit is the. Is the tagline the picture. And then we're going to come in and amend these as well and obviously get the, get the listings all showing up. Now the, the next thing that we're going to go and have a little quick look at is the. The sort of the property highlights. Now the main thing that we talk about and we talk about this in the book is you got to try and eliminate having tons and tons and tons of text. More text puts people off because people don't read. So the way that we combat this is by having icons emojis with the text. So what would you say would be the sort of the. The business highlights, the property highlights that. That you've have. Do you have like a common theme that's running throughout? Is there like families or et cetera, et cetera. What, what can we be putting for these instead of the ones that we've got?

I would say we on all of our properties we emphasize comfort big time. So especially when it comes to sleeping amenities.

So we can put comfortable beds. Lovely.

I would say we try to make every location easy to work from. So we have blazing fast WI fi and quiet environments.

So super fast WI fi. And if we want to change these icons over we click icon library. Uh, so if we put in work, see if it's desk. There we go. So for this one we could put. Do you have designated workspaces? Did you say?

Yes.

There you go. And again, if you want to have all of them, you can do. If you want to remove some, you can do. It's like whatever you want to be doing here. And the cool thing is. So I just made that. I deleted that there. It's like, oh, hang on a second. I really wanted that. If you just press undo, it comes back. So it literally is impossible to be breaking these pets. Welcome. Yes or no?

No.

So we're going to get rid of that one. Obviously we don't have breakfast included. So what could we replace? What could we replace this with? What else is like one of your features. Reasons to come and stay.

I would say probably proximity to things to do. Let's see what's a good way to say that.

So we've got great location. So we could have attractions nearby. There we go. So if we have attractions nearby and then instead of breakfast included, we change that to what's another one of the. One of the reasons why people love to stay with you. And if we're stuck, this is where reviews come in really well.

I would say attention to interior design is something that we're very design forward.

Nice. Okay, that's cool. So trendy.

I'm already seeing that I'm going to have to come in and update these. Update my photos. I'm saying my listing is designed forward and there's so much not even being shown in the photos.

There you go. It's a good exercise. This. So trendy interior design. And again, we can amend these at any point. Okay, so next question. Do you have like an email list or a newsletter or your business?

No, not yet.

That's cool. Well, this is, this is a cool thing. So what we can do right now is that if not what we can do is we can just make sure that we get rid of this section. So if we do this, then that's gone. Like a lot of people have it, a lot of people don't have it. But the cool thing is, is that you can remove it and bring it back at any point. And if you just want to get rid of something, you just tick on this little box here. And then if you want to bring it back into later time, it's so simple to do. Okay, so this services that we offer, we pretty much sort of looked over it slightly here, but it would be things that you could put in would be designated workspaces, superfast WiFi. You know, we're really sort of speaking to the person who's on a workation, you know, somebody like a digital nomad, et cetera. So this section here, what we could focus on would be your office on the road, for example. And again a copywriter would be able to fine tune a slower. But your office on the road, take your office anywhere. And then what I would do here would be focusing on the designated workspace. This one would be the super fast WI fi. And then this would be, you know, another one to, to. To go alongside near it. So then again, what's, what's going to start to happen here as you start to build this out is it's really started to focus on. Okay, well actually this is like, this is who my business is really catered for. This is the type of guest that I'm really catering my business for. And I can fine tune it and talk about it with my website. Because the thing that you want to get sort of start to think about as you're building this out, say that I'm on your website and I like the picture and I keep on scrolling down, I come to the next bit. It's like a nice little introduction to like yourself and your wife and you can have your picture there. So it like shows that personality. And then as I scroll down, I see one of the listings, I go, yeah, that looks really cool. And then I go, property highlights, like business highlights. That this is what we do, this is what we offer. And then you go to the next bit and by the time you get to the reviews you're like, wow, I want to be booking here. Now these reviews, we use a really cool tool. And what this tool does is it, it scrapes your airbnb, it scrapes your vrbo, it scrapes Facebook anywhere that you've ever collected reviews and it just pulls in your 5 star reviews and it showcases them on your site. Now the main reason why we do this is that one of the main reasons why somebody leaves a direct booking site is because there's no reviews on there. They're looking for social proof or looking for reasons why 95% of all purchases are based on a, a review base or a social media social proof. So this is why you need to have it on your website. This is why we include it in. Now you can't do this, but when you, when you message us and to support and say, hey team, I am ready for my Boostie website to go live, we do two slash, three main things. Number one is we go and find your reviews and we scrape and add it into your site for you so you don't have to do that, which is cool. Number two, if you look at the bottom right hand corner, you'll see that there's a little WhatsApp symbol. So the next thing that we do is we link up your website to your WhatsApp or your team members. WhatsApp. So if anybody has got a question while they're on your site, they can literally WhatsApp you directly or message your team directly. And then the third thing, what we do is that we connect it up to your domain of choice. Now Boostly doesn't go and buy your domain. Boostly doesn't take care of that. You have to go and buy that. So you can do it on namecheap and it's like three or four dollars a year, super cheap. And then you just say, hey, I've got my domain. It's Botanic Bungalow stays dot com, it's on Namecheap here's how to get access. And then all we do is we take this here, take that there, and we merge it all together and then we do all that for you, which is pretty cool. So the next bit, my favorite bit, the benefits of booking direct. Now, we've got examples here, but if someone was to come to you and go, all right, because I want to book of you direct, like, what's. What Benefits, like what. What would you say to somebody? Like, why would you encourage them to book direct instead of via Airbnb? You thought about this yet? Just need to. Yeah.

And so I've got kids running around in the background trying to keep them out of that. So I would say, yeah, definitely. Rate is the biggest one you get to cut out. Especially here in San Diego, we have a huge service fee that Airbnb charges, and it's going up to, I think, over 20% here soon. So, 20% discount right off the bat. And because they're communicating with us directly, we can do things like, I mean, you have it right there on the website. Early, late check in. And I think above all else, whenever you book directly with somebody, you get to really communicate with the hosts and their team. And with that comes a lot of benefits which all revolve around the sense of hospitality and kind of bringing back that old school BNB feeling.

I like that. So benefits of booking direct. And again, we're speaking directly to the user here. So directly to your future potential guests. And they're going, right, Benefits of booking direct. Best rates, early check in, late checkout, and then whatever you want to do. Like, I call it a welcome hamper. So where you just got like a little bottle of whatever in there. Yeah, a little gift. Just the benefits of booking direct is like a. A welcome amber. And then again, you can customize it, make it sound cool and whatever. Ready to book direct. And then if you've got this Book now button. Now, are you in the process of setting up with a. A property management software tool like Lodify or Guesty for Hosts?

You are guesty using guests. I've been using Guesty per host for some time now.

Yeah. Guesty for Host. So that's fantastic. So what you can do is when they click the Book now button here, you can have it where it goes to any link. So if I click on this black box now, you'll see it says here, internal link. Or if I change it from being internal, we can change it to being an external link. Now, an external link could be anywhere, including your guesty for Hosts booking page if you, if you have one set up with them, which is pretty cool. So do you have that for and for the business?

I don't have direct booking link yet.

Okay, so what you need to do, go to Guesty for Host and just say, hey team, I'm working with, with, with, with Boostly, we're creating our direct booking website. I just need to have a link where I can send somebody to if I wanted to book direct with me. And then what they'll do is they'll generate for you and they'll give it. And then where it says here book now you would just paste in your direct booking link there. Same thing up here. So we've got at the top of the page, there's the book now button, which is in, which is in the header. We would just amend that link there. Now talking about the header, this is a pretty cool thing. Oh, hang on a second, I'm going to save the changes. When we click on this button here, it will take us away from editing the main body of the site and it's going to take us up to the top once it's finished saving and we can actually edit everything that we see in the top here. Now the brand name, this is what we talk about here. So it's Botanic Bungalow and if we didn't want that little section there, we can just remove it now in this section as well. If you wanted to add in your logo you could do, you can fit it in nicely in there. But what we've also got the ability to is to change this link. So again, what we, what we'd ideally like for this to do is when somebody clicks here, it will go straight off to your direct booking link which is with Guesty for Hosts. Now the reason why this is important is that when your website loads up, our eye naturally gets drawn to the top right hand corner of a website. I don't know why this is on a desktop. It's why Amazon have got their buy now button at the top right. It's why everybody's got their car options. At the top right is because when and night a website loads up, people want to know exactly how to give you money. So there's three main obstacles. You've got to be able to explain who you are, who you serve and how to give you money. That's literally what, what a website needs to do within three seconds. This is why this button is all important to have. And again when you click on here, you can keep our very simple theme or if you wanted to get a little bit fancy. You've got the ability to change the color of that box. So if, if I scroll over here, I click some of these buttons, the, the box color will, will start to amend and change. So you've got all our options as a, as an admin access of this site, you can change as much or as little of this page as you wish. And again, if you ever get stuck, you've got the ability to come into the group, come into the guides, ask the question. Right. Any questions so far? I know I've thrown quite a few things at you. Is there anything that's on your mind from just going through all of these bits and bobs?

I don't think so. I think you should have done a pretty good job. It's pretty clear.

Cool. Well, the other thing as well, what I wanted to show you is that it's not just one page, this is obviously a website and so you've got multiple pages. And the beauty of this is that you can have as many or as little pages as you want on your site. So if I was to go through back to here again and just go have a look at what the guest facing site looks like, you'll have noticed in the top left hand corner was some little hamburgers, the three little lines here. So when I click on that, the other pages on the site would load up. So we've got home listings nearby. So if I click on nearby, it will open up something like this. If I click on blog, it could potentially open up a, a blog page. If you wanted to start creating content or if you wanted to find somebody on Fiverr who could start creating content for you and you've also got contact now there's gonna be a chance that you don't want to have for example, the, the nearby page. So all that we literally need to do is we would come to the front here and we've got all of these different sections now. So what we've got now is we've got this section here. Now this is the menu, this is, this is the hamburger. So if there's a page that you don't want, all you've got to do is you would come in and let's just say we don't need to have the management, sorry, the, the, the nearby section. So I, all I would do is I would come into here, I'd click edit, the page would load up and all we're going to do is we're going to change that from published and we're going to change it to Draft. By hitting draft. Now, that page would not show up on the site. Now you obviously offer a management service. So what you can now do is we've got a page on management. So if you wanted to amend that page, you can again go into pages, hit edit with elementor and then you would come onto this page in the background. Now you're going to have, you know, conversations with somebody that goes, you know, because we want to want you to manage our property for us. It could be, you know, an exporty from the, from, from the military etc and say, right, can you give us more information now instead of you just having to sort of say X, Y and Z, you can actually send them to your website and you can send them to this page and you'll be able to like customize it for you and your business and you can again, we've built it out to be 80%. You just got to personalize it for your business and in your brand, which is pretty cool. So it's like a, it's like a two for one. You've got the guest face inside and you've also got a page that you can send somebody to for all about the management model as well. Does it, does that make sense? Yeah.

Would you mind showing me how to, how to add that page again?

Yeah. So the pages is added automatically, which is cool. I mean if you were to go on the front end and click on management, it would, it would take you to there, but to actually edit the page yourself. So let's just say we're in the dashboard. All you do is you come to Pages, click all pages and you'd find the management one which is here and then come across to where it says edit with elementor and then the, the page would come up directly.

Perfect.

So yeah, and then you can go in and just like with the homepage, anything that you click, you can then customize. So you've got management property reviews, verified tenants, hey, you're a landlord. So we are urgently looking for properties in there. So you could just put San Diego. So if you click on it, this opens up the little box on the left and then this is how it would look on the front end. So it's all super customizable logo, what you do, etc. Etc. So you can have a good little play around with that. The most important thing is once you've made any changes, hit that update button which is there. And as long as you've done that, if you click away or disappear, it's still there. Um, the cool thing about this is like I say, if you, if you break anything or think you've broken something, you can just easily undo it within a couple of minutes. So it's. It's no problem at all. All right. I think we're. I think we're good. That's a pretty decent overview of, of how to add it in. I think the one thing I would say, if you ever come across a property that and you want to add it to Boostly that isn't on Airbnb, then you can manually add all of the properties in which is. Which is no drama. It's a couple of extra steps. For example, if you click Add New, you would just put the images in separately. You put the all the jazz in. It's just we created this so that it's so simple to just to sync in your property from. Straight from. From Airbnb. Which is all good. Right. Do you think you've got the tools to hand to be able to put this together?

I. I think so. I think I'm excited to dive in and give it a shot.

Go, man. We've got all the login details. You know what you're doing. The one thing I will say just ignore when this happens because what happens is WordPress want you to be updating your site. So it's like right at the very latest version we always say just to hang fire and let them update it automatically for you because sometimes when you click that update button, the template that we're using and the theme that we're using may not be ready to be updated. So just let these update things in in. In the back end. Don't worry about these red lines, etc. If there's anything that we need you to update. This is why it's really handy to keep making sure that this support group is in pin to the favorites of your Facebook so you know how to find it. And make sure you turn notifications on because if there's anything important in terms of notifications, then we'll be able to let you know about it. And then the other group to show you is the. Is the team briefly group. Which is. Which is this one. This is more of the marketing group. If you've ever got any questions about copywriting pictures, anything really when it comes to hospitality, we've got over 10000 years worth of experience in this group which is all good. So make sure you again pin this, favorite this and come and ask your questions when you've got anything questions regarding marketing and getting people onto your website.

Awesome. Thanks, Mark. Really appreciate the help. This has been, this has been awesome.

My absolute pleasure. All right, jumping back in. So a couple of weeks later, I checked in with, with, with Cole, with Kazoo, and I wanted to see how he was getting on with the, with the website. And he messaged back saying, listen, we're almost there, let's have a look. So I said, right, let's jump on a zoom call. And what you're going to watch next is the progression. And this has happened over a couple of weeks now. A lot of things have happened in Kazoo's world since we last spoke. He's. He told me that he's going to be a father. Just announced that he's going to be a parent in six months time, which is amazing. And now he's in the process of really ramping up his, his business, his systems and structures in place, and obviously the website as well. So it's great to be able to do this and chat to him. At the end of this, we're going to give him the finest, finest, final, final things that he needs to do to finish off the site. But with that being said, let's flip straight back in. We're going to speak to speak to Kazoo and we'll see where he got to with the site in just a few weeks. All right, fantastic. Okay, so if you don't mind, just walk us through and just explain what you've been doing over the last few weeks, what you found that you could easily do, what did you run into some struggles with, and then we'll look to see how we can maybe complete this as on the call today.

Okay, sure thing. So where we left off, I had originally tried to create this site to encompass all of the properties that I was managing at the moment. And what I've decided to do was instead focus on the on location. One website for the location. So in this case it's San Diego. So we, we added one of the listings last time and you helped me walk through it. So I pretty much just did. I watched the recording that you sent me and I just followed it step by step and do the exact same thing with the, the second listing, which is the one on the right and fairly painless process. I just, I mean that your instructions were great last time. So what I ended up doing was. Well, I did. One of the problems I ran into was if you go, if you go back, if you go back one page under listings, the formatting was not exact. I think by default they're it's formatted to fit three columns and so the three. So look, it looked asymmetrical so I changed that and once I was able to figure out how that worked, it was really easy for me to kind of change the whole look of these buttons of the listings and general. So I changed the way they looked. I tried to make them more round and just whatever I wanted to. Then I went down here to Property Highlights and I though the two of us did get most of these together because I changed the way I was presenting the listings. I decided to come in here and change these for something that's a little bit more appropriate. I'm already seeing a mistake that I made. Fully stocked the kitchen. This has a TV next to it. So I'm going to come in and fix that. But that's a really easy process. The reviews. So I guess what I'm noticing is as what I was doing was just going through my website, looking through what I wanted to adjust and then once I found something that I wanted to change, I went into the backend and then changed it. Frequently asked questions. I added those. I made sure to connect the link to the all the book now buttons.

Yep.

And then change the footer. I changed the footer as well to make it, you know, my information and not boost Lee's.

Yep.

Edited this copy here. Elizabeth and Cole are me and my wife's given names, but we both go by nicknames. So I threw that in there and added a. A photo of ourselves with a circular mask on it.

Yep. Looks good.

Wedding photo.

And a quick question then. So Botanic Bungalow, now you've got two listings. Does is one of these Botanic Bungalow or are they both bungalows or is that Botanic Bungalows going to be the brand? Like what's the sort of thinking behind that?

The Botanic Bungalow is currently the mystery property management company.

Yep.

And originally the idea came because the, the left listing, that was my very first short term rental. That is a bungalow. The one on the right. Probably not so much.

Yeah.

So now there's a question as to whether or not Botanic Bungalow should really be the name of the company to begin with.

But that's something to think about.

That's what we're stuck with for now.

Down the line. Down the line. I like it. Right, yeah. So Botanic Bungalow Rentals, etc. Very, very cool. But there's obviously there's a lot of a way that you can tweak it as you amend, as you. As you grow. But yeah, from like I'm looking with my designer hat on and Sort of what we look for in a website. It's really clear. I like the customization that you've been able to do. It's an easy website to look at, which is what you want it to be. You want it to be welcoming with a nice image like we talked about the copy. You want it to be very easy to be clickable and then obviously at the end of the day you want it to be very easy to be bookable, which is like where we're sort of getting this towards and we're edging it towards it. So one of the things that we talked about before we we hit live was the other pages on the site. So we've got management which we're going to remove, we've got nearby and, and blog. So when you get a boostly site and you go in into these sections, what you're going to discover is it's going to be a lot of lipsyn which is right, right here. So what I wanted to do on this with you on the call and we'll do a little bit of it and then obviously we'll let you go away and complete it is I wanted to fill a little bit of this out and what I wanted to do is I wanted to tap into a tool that has only become available over the last few weeks. A more wider known is Chat GPT. So we've talked about it and I've talked about it a lot on the podcast. ChatGPT isn't like the be all and end all where you're going to rely on it, but you can definitely use it for inspiration. So when we're talking about things to do are the two properties kind of closely located to each other? Like where, what's the. How far is the distance?

They're about 20 minutes apart.

20 minutes apart.

So. And yeah, they, they do have. They are kind of completely different but people would say they're for different reasons, different avatars for each one. This is more of a coastal vacation right by the beach, touristy. The other one is more suburban living.

So. So with this then when we come to the things to do, we can talk about it in terms of splitting it down the line. But I think for, for to keep it simple, what we'll talk about is San Diego. So what we're going to try and do is we're going to come into here and create copy or our website or a things to do page. Property is based in San Diego and let's just say the, the coastal one, the property is based in San Diego. And appeals mostly to what's the most frequent type of guest that you've had come to stay or like the, the person that you're trying to appeal to the most. If you could pinpoint it to one type of guest, what would you say that would be?

I would say young adults vacationing. Is that enough context?

Yeah, I think so. Welcome something. Go vibrant, endless opportunity for fun and adventure. Whether you're a local or visit our thing to do pages. Something for everyone but a frillsea. Because we recommend taking a tour of this by Segway or bike. Is that a thing?

Nope. Segway. No. Bird scooter would be the replacement there.

Bird scooter. Or even try your hand at standby paddleboarding, kayaking in Mission Bay.

That. Yeah, that's a great suggestion actually.

If you're looking for more laid back experience, take a stroll through Balboa park. Home to 15 museums, multiple gardens and the Wolfhem San Diego Zoo. I've played soccer there for the beach lovers. San Diego. Okay. It's cool. So this is giving us tons of context.

Yeah, this is a great starting point. There are so many.

Yeah, great structure and you, you highlighted it perfectly. A great starting point. So you've got something here that you can then, that we can then work on behind the scenes to like fill it out. Obviously there's a couple of things that you said. Yeah, that's not right. That's not true. We can change that. So instead of segue, did you say it was something else now?

Bird, Capital B I R D. Bird.

Is that bird Scooters?

Yeah. Huh. Yeah, those are the, those are the scooters you can rent on your phone.

Yeah, that's the one. Cool. So we've got like the, the build out. I like, I like this as a heading. So again like this is the thing we can play with the edit, play with the, the design of it and stuff. But that's like a nice thing to fill that out. And then we can take the, the prompts from this and again, a picture of like Mission beach, picture of kayaking, some new kayaking, picture of whatever or whatever. And then you can sort of fill that out and then you know, within a couple of clicks and a couple of images that you can go find obviously make sure that they're license free. You don't want any photographers tapping you up saying, hey, use my picture. But a couple of those images in here and that. And then this page can pretty much start to fill out because you've got two properties that have got two different niches. What you can start to do is you can go, right, well this one is going to be for the coast and then this one could be for the urban. You could have like a bit of both. So like whatever your stay, whatever your reason to come and stay with Botanic Bungalows, we've got something for you. So yeah, I would definitely tap into that and sort of fill that page out and again with the, with the blog that we were talking about. So blogging is, is a fantastic tool. I really love it because it fills out a website. It's great for SEO, but also as well a website, a user that comes onto the website can make it stand sticky. So the longer you can get someone to stay on your website, the better your website will potentially show. And the types of blogs that I love for short term rental businesses is Listicles. So for example, top 10, you know, kazoo's top 10 recommended food trucks in San Diego. Or it'd be like top 10 guest recommendations. So we interviewed a hundred of our guests and we asked them where they visited when they come to stay with us. These are their top recommendations and then all you do is you fill out a blog. Now the cool thing is about this is that you don't need to, right? You can tap into chat GPT or what you can do is you can go onto Fiverr and find a blog content writer and you can just put in, you know, listicle content blog writer, pay them 10, 15, 20 max and they will fill out a blog post for you. You can maybe pay like $50 and book them in for like 10 blogs. You only really need 10 to 15 blogs and you can schedule them out once a month to make your site look fuller. If you have 10 blogs on your website, you've probably got more than 90% of other hosts, short term rental hosts in the world. So yeah, that's a super easy method and super simple one. They'll send it to you on a Google Doc, you copy paste and you add it in and you know your blog and your website's looking a little bit more full. But in terms of the overall design, we're very, very close to going live, which is exciting.

Awesome. Mark, can I ask you a question?

Yes.

Suppose I wanted to add a blog post in right now. I had one ready to go. Would you mind showing me on the back end how I would go about doing that?

Absolutely. So we're on the dashboard. So this is the dashboard that we showed you last time. You've got all of the, the little icons here on the left. All we need to do is come into posts and all posts. If you've got this one here that I created, you just click Edit or you can click Add New. All you would then do is you've got your title and you've got your body. If you wanted to do it straight in elementor then you just click on Edit with Elementor. The most important thing to do, make sure you add a featured image and add tags as well. So for example, if your blog was. Blog was talking about three food or it's talking about things to do, you just tag it up and then you would hit publish. The the next thing is, what we would do is we'd make sure that we'd come into our elementor and we're going to have the, the home page here. Now say you wanted to have your blogs flow underneath this section here, right? Let's just say this section. So you tap into here and you would click plus. So, so when you click on this, all you would do on the elementor section here you would type in posts and then the post that you create, you drag them in here, they would show in this section here and then you would give it a title. For example, blog posts, latest blog posts, recommendations and your. All of your latest posts will show up in here. You can choose if it's 1, 3, 6 can choose how many that you want to appear. You can have a card layout, you can have a full content classic image size. You can say if you want to have the text showing or if you just want it to be a box. It's, it's really is customizable of how and where you position this. If you didn't like it showing here, you can just simply get rid and you can move it elsewhere. So it's super simple to add in.

Awesome. Thank you very much.

No problem, no problem. I reckon we're like 90% done. Just a few more little tweaks, get the pages full and. And then we are all ready to go. How are you feeling? You feeling confident on it?

Yep, yep, feeling a lot better. You know, half the battle is just going in and trying your hand at it.

Yeah, well, the cool thing is is that you've got the, the website support group. When you're ready for this to go live, just email support boostly.co.uk we just need to know where your domain is hose housed. If you haven't got a domain, just go and buy one or Namecheap or reg123 or whatever you use. It cost a couple of dollars to do. Let us get the access to it and we'll get this live. And then once it is live, then, you know, you've got the, the full academy and the full content creator to start driving traffic to the site. So you've got all the videos in here, the tutorial videos showing you, you know, how to drive traffic to your site, how to, you know, utilize that, that blogging tactic that I spoke about and much more. So exciting times, exciting times.

Very exciting.

Cool. All right, thank you very much for doing this. I really enjoyed this, is putting together a website and being able to document it. If anybody's got any questions about the Boosted website, just please just go to boosted.co.uk it doesn't matter if you've got a ton of experience with WordPress websites or if you've got, you've got zero. We try and make it as straightforward as possible so anybody can have a go. And it's much more beneficial than just doing it for a free website with a pms, because you get the full control of this. You can add plugins, you can add the things that you can't add in on a free website. So I'm looking forward to seeing more and more. Thank you very much for this. And we'll be back very soon with another episode of the Boostly podcast.