How to promote your property or business on myharbourisland.com

This website is visited by an average of over 200 people each day, and the majority of them are people who have never visited Harbour Island. (See below for more details about our site statistics.) We receive about a half dozen emails a day from people asking for advice about visiting, and especially about where to stay or where to hold a wedding. And so far we have been able to answer most of those with a cutomized response. Soon we may be looking into hiring someone to help us as the emails come in faster than we can answer them.

In our first year, we didn't offer any paid advertising: everything was free. Now that we've seen how many people are visiting us, we're ready to begin expanding our site to offer more info about individual businesses. If you would like our visitors to be able to directly access information about your property or service, we have a choice of ways for you to go. And at the rates we're offering, just one customer will pay off your costs for a year. (Discounts available for locally owned businesses.)

Listing hotels or B & B's

We already have a brief description of each hotel on our hotels page. You can augment that with the following:

Listing rental houses or apartments

Listing other businesses or services

We plan to eventually say a little something about almost every interesting person and their business or service on the island. If we haven't gotten around to you yet, feel free to give us a little nudge. And just as with hotels or rental properties, you can boost the power of our mention by adding a link for people to contact you directly. Here's the cost.

Site statistics: Who visits this web site?

When statistics for Web sites talk about "hits," that normally means the number of times the serving computer was asked for individual pieces of information like a photo or a section of text. So each time a person looks at a web page, that can require 10-100 hits, depending on how the page is designed. And thus, a more important factor than "hits" is the number of individual visitors to a site. Our statistics show between 150-350 visitors a day. The high numbers are in December through March as you might expect, and the low numbers are on Saturdays!

The reason we believe most of our visitors have not been to the island or have been only once or twice is that our pages for hotels and rental houses average about 200 visitors a day -- so the vast majority of visitors are looking at those pages.

Search results

People who search the internet for travel info usually start at one of the two major search engines: Google or Yahoo. And if they search for terms related to Harbour Island, our website comes up at or near the top of the results. Here's the results from a test we did on March 2, 2002:

And just one more bit of anecdotal evidence. About 50 people a week walk into the bakery and tell us how much they love our site. Sure is a good thing we like to schmooze!