Great Glen Direct Value Added Services
on The Scottish Great Glen Travel and Information Index

If you clicked an image to get here it means that slot is available to advertise your business. You can find out more about banner advertising opportunities below.

Aside from re-inventing web visibility for Tourism in the Highlands of Scotland, the Great Glen Direct team aim to provide a rapid, efficient and comprehensive range of services to help you in your promotion both here on this website and through your own website.

The following value added services are available:

• Subscription Services to get listed on Great Glen Direct
• On-line availability and booking for your own booking office open 24/7
• Virtual Tours to really sell your facilities and location.
• Search Engine Optimization to get you found on the top Search Engines.
• Opt-in Web Marketing Software to help keep your customers informed.
• Banner Advertising on Great Glen Direct.

Subscription Services to get your business listed on Great Glen Direct:

We offer a complete range of FREE and paid subscriptions with a choice of payment plans to suit your budget.

Find out all you need to know about adding your FREE, PREMIUM or SHOWCASE Entry.

Setting up On-line Booking and live Availability Checking:

Experience and research shows visitors like on-line booking with a rapidly increasing volume of reservations being made this way. The whole concept behind the web is seamless ease of use. If having attracted and interested site visitors to the point where they want to book your facilities then the easiest way of closing the sale is to provide the means to check availability and complete a booking on-line.

From the supplier's view point on-line booking saves on administration and gives you a booking office open 24/7. Customers also love being able to book anytime any day and the facility to easily explore and compare what's available at what cost.

Great Glen Direct supports searches specifically for this purpose. By offering this service you can get your business to feature in these searches.

Great Glen Direct uses Globekey™ one of the best established worldwide suppliers of on-line booking facilities.

We can provide two levels of on-line availability and booking facility:

1. On-line booking through Great Glen Direct.

In the next week or two visitors will be able to search for availability from our home page and all accommodation pages. Visitors will be able to say what they want and when they plan to stay and instantly see all the accommodation available for immediate booking.

Costs from just £7.99 a month

no commission charges

free set-up

You can see this same system working elsewhere here.

2. Your own on-line booking system.

Visitors will be able to book on-line with you direct from any of your promotions here as well as through the shared availability search described above.

Your booking system only shows your availability - it's ideal for guests who have already decided where they want to stay and wish to secure their booking without delay.

You can link to this from your other web promotions outside Great Glen Great such as your web site, other directory entries and Pay per Click promotions.

You get special attention grabbing instant booking links on Great Glen Direct.

Costs from just £25 a month (includes Option 1 above)

no commission charges

plus free set-up, free configuration till end May 2006 worth £150!

You can see this working here.

At this stage you might be wondering what's the difference between set-up and configuration?

Well, set-up is the work we do to get you included on our system for on-line availability and booking searches. It includes creating your access to your administration system.

Configuration is what you do to tell the system about your accommodation, your rates, occupancy levels, terms and conditions, discounts and seasonal offers etc.

The Globekey system is highly flexible and be configured for almost any imaginable business rule you wish to implement. In other words special offers, seasonal rates, minimum advanced notices, arrivals on specific weekdays, charges by room occupancy or length of stay and much more are all supported. Globekey works how you work - not the other way way round.

Configuration is actually all pretty simple and most people manage this themselves just fine, but we're always happy to advise for free.

If you want us to do your configuration for you our charges start from £150 for 5 or less rooms.

What's more with this system and Great Glen Direct you're not tied to us and you don't have to dedicate a split room allocation to the on-line booking system further fragmenting your availability which is the major drawback of other supplier's solutions like Visit Scotland - aside that is from the cost of these alternatives!

Virtual Tours:

Snapshot360 is sister company of Great Glen Direct dedicated to providing high quality virtual tours. All the virtual tours currently shown here were taken by Snapshot360.

However we can publish anyone's virtual tours provided you can supply us with a suitably sized QuickTime VR file (320 pixels wide or less).

The Snapshot360 solution has many advantages:

• One click system means improved clarity, quality and the ability to take pictures with movement and people in them. The multi-shot alternatives all involve taking multiple images and stitching them together - which degrades image quality but more importantly precludes any movement in the shot.
• Generation to Quick Time VR format supports the highest quality most compact format currently available which ideally suited for the web.
• In fact the format is so ideal that you can simply embed the images direct in your web pages of your gallery here on Great Glen Direct.
• Unlike other suppliers, Snapshot360 provide you with all the image files (sources, panoramas and QuickTime movies) to do with them as you please.
• No additional hosting charges are involved to publish your Snapshot360 virtual tours.
• Snapshot360 take more tours than you need letting you decide which ones you wish to keep.
• Being local to you we can visit at your convenience and to suit the weather for outside shots!

Click this to view some Snapshot360 virtual tours.

Prices for 4 virtual tours is £250 - plus travel time and costs.

Search Engine Optimization:

There is absolutely no point whatsoever in having a website if it can't be found.

Typically 85% percent of new customers will find you via Search Engines provided of course you're indexed with them reasonably high for at least some functional searches.

Yet most web designers omit this crucial feature to your disadvantage!

Why? - well there can be many reasons, many customers and designers alike fail to appreciate the return on investment this offers.

It remains a well established fact that done properly Search Engine Optimization offers a higher return on investment than any other form of promotion.

Getting a site indexed with the search engines isn't that difficult - you simply submit your site to them or wait for them to find you - though the latter could take quite some time as Google recently admitted it won't be till 2025 before they have indexed all the sites currently on the web - let alone all those new ones yet to be added in the on-going exponential growth of the Internet.

Getting a site to rank well for relevant searches requires time, attention to detail, experience, all the best tools, research and analysis.

4-impact Scotland is our sister company specializing in Search Engine optimization.

To learn more why not check out our free guide to Do it Yourself Search Engine Optimization, or our various optimization plans if you wish us to do this for you.

Our optimization plans start from just £200 and cover you for a whole 12 months.

The best time to optimize a site is while it is being built - this affords you the opportunity to plan every aspect of your site to include optimization criteria. However, recognizing that most optimization is required for existing sites, 4-impact specializes in an optimizing technique which does not disrupt your existing web site content but rather works with this to get the best results from what you already have.

4-impact also always performs a detailed ranking report of your existing site to see what's already working. Suppliers who omit this step can cost you existing traffic!

Web Marketing Software:

METAm8 our sister company who built Great Glen Direct offer a collection of powerful tools to support your web marketing requirements at highly competitive prices all for immediate download.

These include:

• Server based opt-in HTML email marketing software.

Uses pre-built templates to send attractive personalized emails to selected contacts on your database.

You can manage as many contacts records as you like.

Complete with list importer.

Easy email targeting to get the best results.

Price just £39 available for immediate download.

The professional version costs £99 and includes:

Live campaign tracking - watch your results live as your emails get sent and opened. One of the few solutions which does all this for you automatically.

Automatic unsubscribe links so you stay anti spam compliant.

Campaign manager so you can run email mail shots for others.

Find out more here.

• Data Importing Software with web mining capabilities.

This versatile tool not only allows you to configure your imports eliminating most of the need for painstaking editing before hand, but it can actually add value to your lists from the web while it runs. The more you can enrich your customer data, the better you will be able to target and personalize your future campaigns.

Find out more here.

• Date Integration Software.

With this you can run METAm8 applications off your existing databases eliminating the headaches of data replication and synchronization.

No more copying data from one source to another, no more worries about keeping all your copies up to date.

To find out more please visit the METAm8 Advanced Business Software website.

Banner Advertising on Great Glen Direct:

Banner advertising slots are available in various sizes on the home page and all category pages.

When visitors click your banner advert they will be taken to direct to either your SHOWCASE Entry Page within Great Glen Direct or any other web address of your choosing.

They are a highly effective way of generating business. A number of our image slots receive a thousand or more clicks every month - these could be future customers for your business.

Slots can shared between multiple advertisers based on a frequency weighting of 1-10. Prices are available on request.

In addition all our Premium Placement SHOWCASE subscribers have access to our FREE publicity services which include:

• EXTRA FREE publicity SHOWCASE entries (lasting 3 months)
• Inclusion of your publicity in our News Feeds for re-publishing elsewhere on the web and direct delivery of your promotions onto visitors' News Readers

We also offer targeted opt-in email marketing services. This facility is extremely powerful supporting highly customizable eye-catching emails based on templates which we can supply or of your design with personalized text and multi criteria targeting. Prices available on request.

Please contact us by email or phone +44 (0)1456 450152 to discuss setup.