Well it is less than a week since Hubdub went into private beta but we are already attracting some interesting comments from bloggers.

Tom Reagan seems to have created a new blog just to say that our model is flawed due to the market mechanism and the truth is under threat from 4 guys at Edinburgh University with a neat idea (Disclosure: I am an investor in Hubdub).

To be fair, Tom’s post is based around the issue of market distortion in news, using markets to rank news is new but not that new.

The difference he says is the market can be distorted, something that is true of any market, but let’s be honest if you are good at distorting markets are you not going to do something useful rather than effect a few thousand users on our site (Like use your intelligence to make money!).

It is well documented that market mechanisms are less open to distortion than most others, and since Hubdub is a equal market where everyone starts with the same stake it is unlikely to be distorted by large sums of money. True multiple account creation could effect this - but the team have identified this and have some ways of monitoring this.

So, Tom, what can I say, I sleep safe tonight that this technology is not likely to bring down Scotland, the UK or the World but in the spirit of fairness the team have created a market to hedge against this.

If you think that this is likely register for an invite code below.

Get your private invite code at www.hubdub.com and save the world.

Following on from yesterday’s post about Google Adwords, I thought it was worth looking at SEO techniques which I have found useful in generating more natural search traffic. The first thing to state is that working on a reasonably uncluttered and simple SEO target like “Nethybridge”, “Nethy bridge” and “Aviemore Cottage” was pretty easy as they are not competitive terms.

If focused on my header tags at first with Goal one to make sure i was picked up by Google. I added a sitemap to the site and also made sure that it was clear to Google that the main subject of the site was Nethybridge using the header:

Saddleback Cottage, Nethybridge near Aviemore

The Aviemore was actually added later. The slight issue is that Nethybridge could also be searched for as “Nethy bridge” with a space so I needed to target both. The competition on page 1 was fairly weak and I would never get ahead of the www.nethybridge.com website itself.

Google’s own advise to use clear references and good content paid dividends for me. I spent absolutely ages putting together a What to do list for the area featuring links to other sites but a lot of narrative copy. I updated this virtually daily so Google saw that content was changing regularly.

I was aided by Wordpress, which I used as a content management system and its great XML sitemap plug in. I have found that I can publish a post and within 20 minutes it was showing up within the Google index.

We are now on page 1 for Google for Nethybridge, Nethy bridge and Aviemore Cottage.

NB. It did take over 3 months to get there so don’t expect things to happen overnight.

I have now spent just over 1 year marketing and taking bookings for our cottage in Nethybridge it has been a very interesting experiment in niche web marketing. We decided that from the outset we would focus our marketing on families who were typically using the North of Scotland as a second holiday destination (they didn’t book this as their only holiday in the year).

As you would expect this did mean that most of our marketing effort was focused at selling the school holiday weeks. Having looked at a range of marketing options from becomin Visitscotland accredited to national newspaper advertising (the Scotsman has a good holiday section but only a circulation of 60,000) we decided to focus on online activity only.

Although a brave move at the time this has paid dividends. We have exceeded out annual expectation of rentals and have nudged the rental rates up a little for 2008.

So what have we learned?

We initially focused on Google adwords and here are the results.

We had reasonable traffic from Google adwords but we were focusing on a very small keyword “nethybridge”, “nethy bridge” and “aviemore cottage”. So anyone looking for a very small geographic area was shown an add linking to the site. The great thing is that this destination is really cheap costing less that 12p a click. Here are the clicks we had (only from adwords)

This gave us some reasonable volume of traffic and good conversion to enquiries. We have included a online calendar to cut down the number of enquiries that are repeat in late 2007.

The traffic source split was:

The referring site is the Nethybridge tourist association (www.nethybridge.com) who have an excellent site on Nethybridge but it is quite difficult to find out that you can find holiday homes etc on the site.

My second strand of marketing was on SEO which has really allowed me to cut the budget on adwords significantly without reducing the number of enquiries.

So here is the best bit. We managed to get the cost of booking (excluding time spent on online marketing) down to £3.00 per booking over the last 12 months, which is excellent and I am not sure it can be matched by any of the national campaigns. So for under £100 we generated significant bookings and a good database of family clients.

Remember we only started last year so I am very pleased - we had no goodwill or word of mouth that I am sure will help in 2008.

I am delighted that the team at Hubdub have pulled out all the stops (and eaten a lot of pizza) to get hubdub to where it is today. Having shown a select few industry experts the product we have been selected to launch at Demo 2008 (www.demo.com) - thanks to Chris Shipley the editor.

As we are in private beta head along to www.hubdub.com and enter your email address to get a invite code sent to you (select few!)

I have been heading along to a few meetings with Highland VC, an angel group in the north of Scotland.

They are a member of the Scottish co-investment fund and I have been really impressed with the quality of deal flow and investments they have made to date.

They didn’t have a website so I have created one for them using good old Wordpress, it is basic but holds all the information required for them.

www.highvc.co.uk

Take a look…

Well after a quick dive to Hillend on Thursday we were lucky enough to get a great dump of snow in the Highlands.

So we had a great day at the Lecht on Saturday the snow cover was excellent, well groomed and perfect (apart from the chilly wind - but it is Scotland after all!).

Freyja and DJ really enjoyed their first visit to the Lecht apart from the slight weight issue they had on the Eagle Poma. DJ was so light that he ended up doing a 1.5m twirling flight on a steep section of the Poma.

He tried a few times but it defeated him!

A big thanks to Winter Highland website that gave a great up to date report on the weather

I read a great article in NYT today about Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired magazine and his new obsession - chocolate! 

His startup Tcho is still in stealth mode, and his chocolate likewise is still in the labs (but just released into Beta). 

Interestingly he is actually manufacturing the chocolate rather than just remanufacturing as many brands (including the famous Green and Black’s) do. I am looking forward to Chocolate 2.0 hitting UK 2.0 before long! 

I have been reading  Yes Man by Danny Wallace recently and as a good social experiment someone I know has transformed their business effectiveness by starting to say YES. I am seriously considering starting a business fueled by the power of YES. The key to a success is by always saying YES, don’t argue with the client, even if you are tempted to as it will seriously impact your PE (Potential earnings). The great thing about saying YES is the world is your oyster. Whatever the meaningless task that you are asked to do (no matter how much you disagree) you say YES to.I am sure that most large consultancies employ the YES MAN strategy very effectively and never let sucking up stand in the way of making money!! SAY YES 

Well it seems to be a bit of a problem in the world of e-commerce to deal with recurring billing (without storing customers credit cards in a online database!) I have looked at most of the major online e-commerce solutions and it looks like custom code is the only option. xcart seems the best solution but I am waiting for a proposal to integrate a VSP into the solution (ideally Paypal recurring billing). Stay tuned for the solution 

We decided to pop into Cambridge today since there was work taking place on the Central Line.

Wow, we had a great day, we started off with lunch in La Tasca and then moved on to a gentle walk down the river. We managed to find an interesting boat trip and avoided punting our way down the river on the Rosie a barge that seemed to be the “punters” worst enemy.

Back in Loughton we had dinner with Ron, Rachel and Peht which was great and it’s off to Legoland on Monday. Wow its action packed.