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Our story so far on internet

Parul Srivastava

April 15, 2008

We started website www.payingguest.in to help youngsters get safe, secure, comfortable accommodation in metros. Especially the campus students, who graduate, get new jobs or perhaps are in search of a new job in metros. If they can find a nice PG / Paying Guest Accommodation with the help of our website, our objective is met. We think ours is a women friendly site. Almost 70% of the traffic seems to be from young women who search for a PG / Paying guest accommodation. It is easy to adjust boys / men / gents anywhere. They can share a room, rent a place in a jiffy and may not be as interested in references. However, for young women, it is so important to provide a safe, secure, comfortable, convenient & affordable accommodation. Whatever said and done, in India, parents tend to worry a lot about their daughters from a safety and security perspective, especially if the daughter is living in a different city. Often, in the initial stages parents give their approval for a particular PG for women, however, in the case of men; parents get informed of the address.

The all important one word in internet space is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), especially for a website which wants to increase its page rank and reach the top of free search, just to get eye ball attention of the net users.

The website, though complex, was probably easier to make and manage. The launch was even simpler – we just hosted it and made it available in big cities - Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chennai. Launch, in our terminology meant making it available for people to use. There was no hoopla around that. We are not a social networking or free e-mail site. Ours is a serious site, which helps people find suitable PG / Paying guest accommodation. So, building community around content and servicing people with right information is most important for us. More than generic traffic, it is the right user profile traffic that we are after.

Somebody told us that Google had two programs - Adwords and Adsense. Adwords helps you advertise, in other words, google makes money for putting your website up on the sponsored links. Adsense helps us get money if somebody clicked on ads on our website. The latter sounded pretty enticing. Adsense is pretty, just insert google generated code on your site and the trickles will start pouring in.

It was the Adwords program, which we realized was the real complex one. One had to run a campaign based on several control functions such as - city, budget, keywords etc. While most parameters are pretty easy to choose, it was the keyword selection which was the most complex of the lot.

One has to bid for a key word for a price and every time a user clicked on that keyword, we had to pay money to Google. Uncanny of Google, but zany for us – not because we are cash starved, but because one can have a tons of key words. For example, some users click on PG, some on payingguest and some on paying guest. Some would suffix the city name before and some would after (examples – PG Bangalore, Bangalore PG, Payingguest Bangalore, Bangalore Payingguest, Paying guest Bangalore, Bangalore Paying guest, PG Chennai, Chennai PG, Payingguest Chennai, Chennai Payingguest, Paying guest Chennai, Chennai Paying guest, PG Hyderabad, Hyderabad PG, Payingguest Hyderabad, Hyderabad Payingguest, Paying guest Hyderabad, Hyderabad Paying guest, PG Pune, Pune PG, Payingguest Pune, Pune Payingguest, Paying guest Pune, Pune Paying guest, PG Mumbai, Mumbai PG, Payingguest Mumbai, Mumbai Payingguest, Paying guest Mumbai, Mumbai Paying guest, PG Kolkata, Kolkata PG, Payingguest Kolkata, Kolkata Payingguest, Paying guest Kolkata, Kolkata Paying guest, Kolkata, PG New Delhi, New Delhi PG, Payingguest New Delhi, New Delhi Payingguest, Paying guest New Delhi, New Delhi Paying guest, New Delhi). That is totally 6 words per city for 7 cities, totally 42 words just trying to work the variation. Probably we got it all wrong and the website just springs up with one word from here and one word from there. But, it shows the geometric progression of numbers.

Besides, paying guest as the key word prefixed or suffixed by the name of the city, people suggested other key words which we had to bid for. Paying Guest is a generic name – means a person who is stays short to long while and pays for that. So, both who stay in a hostel and a hotel qualify for it. Well, we shouldn’t forget the Service Apartments, Service Homes, Guest Houses, Guest Rooms etc. Besides all this, students are constantly mobile, so somebody vacates a twin sharing basis room and the new name “room share” got coined. While, all this was going on, landlords of independent houses, decided to rent a portion, or perhaps a room to young students, trainees or whoever was interested in it. So, the phrase “rent a room”.

Let us conclude on variations - Renting room to a person is “rent a room”. Renting on sharing basis is “room share”. One can rent to a couple or a family or families who share a place or to a group of singles, bachelors etc and the word is “let out” “or “rent” or “rental” or “rent out” etc. How about describing a place, this would be – home, house, apartment, flat, villa, condo. Some use short forms like “apt” as well. So, here is a summary of place and context driven key words - Guest house, Service Home, Service Apartments, Rent a room, Room share, Guest rooms, Hotels, Hostels. Hopefully now, people see our site more often and www.payingguest.in finally got its due.

Keywords apart, somebody said, let us study user psyche. So, it boils down to figuring out - how would a net user thinks when searching on the net for say paying guest accommodation? He or she would definitely type either of the following words – Paying Guest, payingguest or PG. There is no other option, unless somebody is looking for a service apartment stay for say a few days, in which they would type “service apartment”. Next was city, it is better to pre-fix or suffix with a city. Probably, some would even suffix it with male or female. Now, male or female would have its own other variations such as – men and women, gents and ladies, boys and girls (especially after the song in Om Shanti Om). So, all these instantly became additional key words.

So, we discussed key words driven by site, then key words driven by user psyche and now the only thing left is to figure out where our users will be found on the net. A user can be anywhere on the net world – all pervasive. However, we had to understand our own users. Our users are two kinds, people who post and people who search. People who post, according to our assumption is - mature property owners, perhaps in their mid-thirties looking for the right tenant. People who search are youngsters in the age group of 18 to 30 or so who are early into their jobs or looking for a job or are from campus. So, we had to attract them to our site by appearing at those places where they would be often found. India sells on cricket and bollywood. So, we started driving key words around these emotions. So, music, movies, films, cricket, job, training, trainee etc all became our keywords. Some say, darn it, these people aren’t even searching for a PG / Paying guest accommodation, then why attract them in the first place. Probably true, but our assumption is that “context and content go hand in hand”. So, this is an experiment and let us sees if the word of mouth spreads. Our prime purpose is service, and to create a community around www.payingguest.in

We just discussed so much above, but it is just one side of the story. There is so much more how to make a successful website – content management, website design, simplicity of indexing, query management, user management, domain name, sizing, access, IP address, forwarding, density, logging, tracking, linking, forum management etc. Read Brett Tabke’s blog on how to make a great website -http://learningseo.blogspot.com/2006/01/brett-tabke.html . We found the blog an essential guide and we are following each one of the recommendations as diligently as we can. There is no simpler way than staying steady and serving people.

There is one thing which you can do to help – just inform as many who are serious about renting (singles, bachelors, couple, family) - PG, Payingguest, Paying Guest, Room Share, Rent a room, Service Apartment, Guesthouses, Lodge, Hotel, Transit House, Apartment, Flat, Villa, Condo, House, Home....whatever, about our website www.payingguest.in

If you have suggestions, write to [email protected]

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