Enjoy Hebrides: Membership Benefits

Enjoy Hebrides is not due for official launch until early 2009 but due to the nature of the Internet it is necessary to get our sites online at the earliest opportunity. At the moment we are allowing a small number of accommodation providers to join so that we can assess the success and usefulness of our systems.

There have been a number of suggestions submitted to Enjoy Hebrides and most of them are based around the level of support we will be offering to our customers. One of the things suggested most is a forum for ONLY accommodation providers run by accommodation providers. As it is still very early days for Enjoy Hebrides we will not be able to add this facility until we have sufficient members to merit it. Unfortunately we have seen all but one forum related to the islands fail and we therefore have reservations about having one here. However we will remain open to the idea and would hope that all accommodation providers in the Hebrides could work together to further tourism to our area.

Save Yourself Nearly £2,000 A Year

Main Membership Benefits

Your membership will give you a listing on all suitable sites in the Enjoy Hebrides Network and all relevant Associated sites. If you wish to pay for these listings individually it could cost you in excess of £2,000 (based on a charge of £50 to £75 per listing). This alone equates to a minimum saving of around £1,400 a year (see "add your property" for further explanation).

You will also be given a comprehensive information page on www.enjoyhebrides.com which will allow you to include information that can not be shown in your main listings. Such things can be additional photographs or photographs of the local area.

Free SEO

As one of our members is well known within certain business circles for his knowledge of search engine optimisation we are in the process of negotiating a deal for him to provide some of his literature for free to our members. He has agreed to supply a FREE ebook covering some of the dangers that should be avoided when promoting your site or page. Although this ebook will not include any of his major secrets it will include information which is not generally known but highly relevant to those who own their own web sites. Such publications usually cost $97 and are only available only in electronic format (usually a pdf) but you will be getting it for free.

Free Monthly Promotion

The Internet changes all the time and while some sites remain at the top of the search engines other fall away for no apparent reason. The ebook mentioned above will help you to avoid the common mistakes that cause such failure but we hope to go one step further in helping you to promote your listings on Enjoy Hebrides and your own sites.

At the moment we plan to include a free service that will allow you to have an article submitted to between 100 and 2,000 sites every month. Although article marketing can be confusing and very expensive it's results can be spectacular. In each article you will be able to include what is known as a resource box. The research box appears at the end of your article and includes a link to your listing or site. Not only does this boost your search engine rankings but it can also generate traffic to your site as these articles often appear high on the search engines. We have several that appear on the front pages of Google and Yahoo for Hebrides related searches.

We will show you how to write the article which should only take around an hour a month. When the article is submitted to us we will submit it to around 100-400 specialist sites from a selection of currently 2,241 (as at March 2008) sites. We will then send you a list of the sites to which we submitted your article so that you can monitor your success rate.

This service can cost several hundred pounds a year and the cheapest it is available at is around £30 a month but we give it to you for FREE.

Free Web Space

If you wish to extend your information page on Enjoy Hebrides we will provide this for FREE however this may require the purchase of additional third party software if you wish to edit those pages. This facility would be perfect for those members who do not yet have a web site of their own. Even those who already have a successful web site can greatly benefit from additional pages and we will show you how and why such pages will boost your business and bookings.

Free Photography

If you are having difficulty photographing your property we will try to either provide a photographer or even loan you a digital camera suitable for getting wide shots of your accommodation. Wide shots are those that make the room look far nicer than ordinary photographs. Unfortunately we can not loan you the equipment that the photographer would use as a single camera and lense can cost several thousand pounds. We can not guarantee this service will always be available as it very much depends on how accessible your property is to the photographer and his availability. As this service would cost several hundred pounds we are sure you will understand that this service will be limited and only those who really need the service will be given it. All images would remain © Enjoy Hebrides and can only be used on our sites unless written agreement is obtained from Enjoy Hebrides.

Massive Savings

The two free services mentioned above could save you many times the annual subscription cost of Enjoy Hebrides Membership.

However we will not remain static. As we are, fundamentally a not-for-profit web site dedicated to promotion of tourism to the Hebrides of Scotland all revenues will be invested into promotion and improvement of the Enjoy Hebrides Network. Any remaining funds will be returned to the members in the form of benefits such as those above.

Members Only

We will be building a members only section for our members. We have decided to make such pages members only for a number of reasons. The most important is that we would like to be able to provide the environment for the free exchange of information between accommodation providers that will only be visible to other accommodation providers. Such information may be reports of scams and difficult customers that we feel should be kept within our circle and not be visible to anybody else on the Internet.

A members only section will also enable us to ensure that the free services offered are only used by members. As some of the tools we will be making available are in high demand and command monthly fees (elsewhere) we have to protect ourselves from other webmasters and site owners taking advantage of our services for free. After all why should you be paying for other people to benefit?

Further Suggestions

If you would like to see Enjoy Hebrides provide other services or have another suggestion please use our helpdesk.