Did you get a premium listing? I ask because I went to see if we're on there and there are premium listings ABOVE the alpha listings for the area. And then non-premium (free) listings are alpha below that (for the same town)..
Premium listings are $399. For that money I would have stayed with bandb, I saw nothing about any $89 listings when I listed with them. I have a $189 version. It is my fault for making the assumption that paid meant placement.
Paid gets you listed above the other 2 or more inns
in your city. They do list you only in the city of your address (which in WV can be problematical as you may be 5 miles from the city on your postal address or closer to another city that is actually on a map). The reason I was unaware that paid would not get me placement is that there are NO paid listings in WV other that stupid yours truly.
This Forum is to help others avoid our mistakes - and this was one of my expensive ones.
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This Forum is to help others avoid our mistakes - and this was one of my expensive ones.
Thanks for taking the hit for the rest of the team. Sorry
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It is such is life. It was educational. Being a marketing type I think on the lines of pay for placement. What is so foolish is all the money they could be making if they thought about the basic principles of marketing. I still do not understand their reasoning. He says a few worked as pay for placement - there are only a few that do not do pay for placement!
Hi Kathleen,
Thanks for the email... I appreciate hearing from you on the Premium and Expanded Listings.

When we first created the directory, we reviewed a number of existing directories, and we found a few that worked exactly as you say - you pay for placement, and placement only. We found these to be extremely confusing - one had three or four levels of placement within each area page, so you'd start at a city that begins with a and work your way down to z. Then it would start all over again. And then again. And then again. And with just 10 listings to a page, this made it very difficult to view all the listings in one city together to see which best fit the traveler's individual criteria.
So we decided, from the beginning, to list properties in city order. We wanted to put traveler use of the directory first, believing this would result in a more popular directory, and ultimately in more traffic, which it has.
We also decided to list properties strictly by actual city, not by the nearest major metro area, etc. Again, we wanted to be honest with travelers, and not tell them they were staying in New York City, when in reality they would arrive and find that the B&B was actually in New Jersey.
Our Expanded Listings were primarily designed as single page websites, to be submitted to a number of search engines and directories and to become destinations in and of themselves, outside of the regional listing pages. That's why we spend so much time putting them together, customizing them and then submitting them to so many other directories - to build traffic to the full page listing.
These Expanded Listings do offer higher placement within city, which I understand in your case does nothing because you are the only one in your city. This does help a bit in more crowded cities, but the placement aspect was never the primary reason for the Expanded Listing upgrade. In fact, on average, 85% of the traffic that comes to an Expanded Listing comes from outside the site, and never flows through the regional page at all.
We did bend our rule, a little, with the Premium Listings. We had many requests, like yours, for higher placement regardless of city. We kicked this around for a couple years, and finally settled on allowing top of the page placement, but only for a maximum of two listings per page. One of the other problems we'd found with directories that allowed multiple placement levels was that it tended to lead to an arms race. Today you might upgrade your listing to level two. Tomorrow, your competition one-ups you and upgrades to level three. And the next day, another guy upgrades to level four, and suddenly you're at the bottom again, and still out the money, it's great for cash flow for the directory, but we felt that it was a very dishonest way of doing this that forced innkeepers to keep anteing up more and more money to stay on top.
So that's why we do things the way we do. it doesn't work for everyone, and results vary, but regardless, we put a lot of thought into the structure of the directory, and we also put a lot of effort into each Expanded Listing that we create.
We're sorry that it doesn't work for you... I'll be happy to mark you to not receive any more upgrade notices, if you'd like, and to note that you don't plan to renew - let me know?

--Scott, Purple Roofs