I was completely nonplussed yesterday when someone I was chatting to on the phone suggested that the ads on yours2share were an act of fiction. “They are too well presented, most with well sized good pictures and the titles are often the same format, so I was just wondering…”
My polite reply only just masked my indignance and I think he understood his error.
I explained that we check every ad that is posted carefully.
We resize images and often enhance them too. I’m staggered at how many pictures are so dark you can’t actually see anything: a quick lighten and all is clear. Others include wonderful homely details such as the overflowing dustbin, or have the road, complete with oil stains and sweet wrappers, in the foreground taking up half the picture. All of which is easily cropped without removing any useful content. So we do this.
All the keywords are in the description are checked: a feature (yes I was once an IT consultant) of the software I use is that the internal search engine only searches the description. So the location in particular has to be in the description in full, as well as in the Location field. I can’t expect members to do this, so we do it. Then we try to encapsulate the ad in the title tells you something. If it arrives saying “Fractional ownership” (and they often do), we will amend it, as appropriate, to something like “1/4 share, four bed villa, Denia, Spain. And this is why the titles sometimes look a bit similar.
Finally we check that the ad makes sense, that the values feel right. If necessary we go back to the member and check.
Why do we go to such trouble?
Because we want every member’s ad to have the best chance of being found by as many people as possible looking to share the same asset and this is dependent upon the ad being picked up by Google which ranks the title highly, and by yours2share’s internal search engine, which searches the description only. If visitors understand the ad, it increases the chance that they will reply. It’s off putting when it doesn’t make sense, when the images are poor or it’s so full of grammatical errors it’s almost unreadable (it’s easy to spot the members who are typing with one finger whilst frantically looking for the next key).
At the same time, we don’t edit for the sake of editing, we want the voice to remain unchanged. We do our best and most members are really pleased with this.
Finally we do have a few ads that are entirely made-up which I’ve created as examples when I start a new category to show people what and how they could share things. These have the word EXAMPLE at the beginning of the title, and clearly state that they are fictitious. They are hard to write as I have to invent a person, asset and situation before I can write them so that they make sense. This inevitably means doing some web research about the asset so each one takes a couple of hours. If I made them all up, I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.