Campgrounds of Canada

Celebrate Spring and try campgrounds of Canada for free!

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:21:32 -0700

Hi Canadian Campground and RV Park owners! Now is a great time to start your full listing! Not just because this is the best time to start promoting your business for the camping season 2012, but also because you can try out our site for free!

Use coupon code: SPRING2012 to receive $CAD24 off - which means that if you choose a one year period - your listing is free!

Please note: this coupon code is valid until May 1st 2012; coupon has no cash value and you can only use it once.

As you already have seen - we did a complete redesign of our...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:12:11 -0700

As you already have seen - we did a complete redesign of our site. I know - the blog is still wearing his old jacket. It was a lot of work - but I really like it! What do you think?

So what is changed ? Well all the graphics have been replaced. The listings are presented in a whole new way - and we implemented a lot of ‘under water’ improvements. Most of them for SEO - like all our static content is coming from a cookie-less domain. And all the JavaScript is at the bottom of the page. Technical stuff like this will make the whole experience even better!

In the coming weeks we will tell you more about the new parts of the site - one new feature I would like to point out right now: coupon codes! When a you claim a campground or add your outdoor business to our site - you may enter a coupon code. Be sure to read our next post as we are celebrating spring and our new website with a special coupon code! :)

Where are you going camping this summer?

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 12:26:00 -0800

It may seem early and you’re probably still enjoying the ski season to the fullest. Good for you. But as you’re recovering from a day in the powder, it would be a good idea to start thinking about where you would like to go camping this Spring and Summer.

Many campgrounds fill up quickly. People start reserving a spot as early as March. Especially the weekends fill up fast. And July and August are usually busy all week long. So if there’s a specific area or campground you would like to visit, why not look into it now? Most campgrounds and/or RV parks are happy to take your reservation now.

Welcome back! It is February 2012 and we are getting ready for a...

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:13:00 -0800

Welcome back! It is February 2012 and we are getting ready for a brand new camping season. We are working on lots of different improvements - more about these later. For now, as you might have seen already, I changed the campgrounds of Canada graphic a little bit. Hope you like it!

Payments

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 21:56:00 -0700

If you claim or add your Campground, RV Park or Camping related business ( more about these later; for now you can read more on the Commercial Listings page ), you will pay using PayPal.

PayPal is secure, fast and easy. Even if you don’t have a PayPal account, you can use your credit card to pay. Payments are processed real-time - which means you can start your listing within 2 minutes!

But, since you asked, you may also pay by Cheque. This payment method is not real-time, but it will get you your Full Listing!

How does this work?
Start with finding your city and see if your business is already listed. If it is - click Claim and pick for how long you want to claim it (we offer 1 year, 2 years and 3 years).

If your business is not listed yet, then add your business yourself. Then choose how long you want it.

Finally click ‘Claim’ to review your order. On the bottom you will see this:

1) Click on ‘Pay using Cheque’.
2) Click on this link to email us all the information we need. The message body is already pre-filled. If you want you can add more information.

Email the request and we will contact you! Awesome. Pay by Cheque. It can be done now! :) Please note that it can take up to two weeks before you can actually start with your full listing if you choose to pay by cheque.

Edit your listing - the Listing Wizard

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:29:00 -0700

When you claim a listing and the first time you edit your listing: the Listing Wizard will help you out to get the most out of your listing.

In 9 easy steps you will see your listing become a ‘website on a page’ !

STEP 1 - Overview / main data

STEP 2 - Short and Long description

STEP 3 - Upload your logo

STEP 4 - Google Maps and Driving directions

STEP 5 - List and Describe your Sites

STEP 6 - List and Describe your Amenities

STEP 7 - List and Describe your Activities

STEP 8 - Your Rates

STEP 9 - Upload your Photo Gallery

Edit your listing: step 9 - the last step!

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 16:11:00 -0700

Step 9 is the final step of the wizard. And it is a fun step: uploading your photo gallery. Also it is an important step because a picture is more than a thousand words! Visitors to your listing page will check these photos. So use your best ones!

STEP 9
You may upload .jpg, .png and .gif images. Make sure that the photos are landscape oriented and at least 800x600 pixels. Don’t upload photos bigger than 2000x2000 pixels as that will take a long time. Photos are scaled automatically after uploading. Also you can provide a name and description for each photo!

The upload process:

Select your photos. Start with at least 6 photos. But more is better. A good number is around 15 photos. But use ONLY your BEST photos.

Select your photos and it will look like this:

List of selected photos.
If you want you can remove a photo from the upload queue.
Click ‘Start Upload’ to start the upload. If you selected a lot and/or large photos - this can take a while.

Wait for all the photos to be uploaded. When they are ready you will see thumbnails of the uploaded photos:

But don’t click on ‘Save’ just yet!

Give each photo a name.
Enter for each photo a short description
Use the ‘X’ to delete a photo
use your mouse to drag and drop a photo to change the order of the photos.

Photo names and descriptions are good for your visitors - but also good for the search engines - so do not skip!

And then you’re done with the wizard! Click ‘Save’ to finish and congratulations: you have an awesome listing on campgroundsofcanada.com !

So what’s next? Well, you can edit your listing 24/7. Just login; select your listing and edit. You will see that the edit form is all these steps in one big form. Couldn’t be more easier !

Edit your listing: step 8

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:49:00 -0700

Step 8 is all about your rates. We’re almost done! :)

STEP 8
All our fields are optional , so if you want you can choose not to show rates. In the form you will see three types of rates: Unserviced, Electric + Water and Full service sites. If you want you can select the correct price range. Since rates change in time ( high season, low season) you can also use the free text field to write down the rates.

These steps are already done!
The current step in the wizard is orange.
Rate ranges.
HTML editor to write down your rates in your own words.
Click ‘Save’ to save and continue to the last step
This is the last step! :)

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 9 - the last step - automatically.

The next step: ‘Photo gallery’

Edit your listing: step 7

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:41:00 -0700

Step 7 is listing and describing your Activities.

STEP 7
It is almost the same drill as the amenities from step 6: first you select which activities can be done. Select ‘yes, onsite’ if this activity can be done right on the campground. Select ‘yes, nearby’ if the activity is nearby.

List of activities
Your own Activities description text. Use the HTML editor to tell more about activities (and events) for your guests.

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 8 automatically.

The next step: ‘Rates’

Edit your listing: step 6

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:28:00 -0700

Step 6 is listing and describing your amenities.

STEP 6
We have quite a long list of amenities. These will be used in the upcoming search form - so make sure to check all amenities that your campground has to offer! If you have amenities that we’re missing in our list - just let us know and we will add them.

List of Amenities - check all that apply
Your own Amenities description text. Use the HTML editor to tell more about your amenities.

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 7 automatically.

The next step: ‘List and Describe the Activities’

Edit your listing: step 5

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:20:00 -0700

Step 5 is listing and describing your sites.

STEP 5
List the types of sites that you have. Use only digits and please note that if you have 10 sites - and all of them have 15 Amp and 20 Amp service; you would end up typing 10 in both these fields.

Site types - only use numbers
Your own Sites description text. Use the HTML editor to give extra information about your sites.
Click ‘Save’ to save

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 6 automatically.

The next step: ‘List and Describe your Amenities’

Edit your listing: step 4

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:12:00 -0700

Step 4 is the Google Maps location and driving Directions.

STEP 4
Your address and postal code from step 1 are used to get your Google Maps location. But you are in full control and in this step you can drag the marker to a specific place.

Best way to do it is:

first zoom in using the + button (left upper corner)
drag the red marker to the correct position
zoom out again so that the visitor sees where you are located
drag the map to create the best view

If you don’t see a map here - it means that your address could not be found. In that case: finish the Listing Wizard. When you are done - Edit your listing. First edit the address: remove the street and postal code. Then check ‘Update Map’ and click Save. The Google Map marker should be in the middle of your town. Update the address again (this time do not check ‘Update Map’) and then update your Google Map as described.

In the screen shot below:

The Google Map and the marker
The HTML editor to write your own directions text.

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 5 automatically.

The next step: ‘List and Describe your Sites’

Edit your listing: step 3

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 15:04:00 -0700

Step 3 in the wizard is Upload your logo.

STEP 3
Uploading files is easy. Please do note that the upload form required flash. If your upload form does not work as expected - please check if you have the latest Flash version installed. Using an updated browser with updated plugins is a good idea anyway - as they are more secure than older versions. ( Flash update website )

The previous steps: all done!
Currently no logo yet
Click ‘SELECT FILES’ to select your logo. This should be a .jpg , .gif or .png file. Best results if your logo has a white background! If you don’t have a logo - you may also upload a nice photo of your campground.
After you selected your logo - click ‘Start Upload’ to start the upload (it all makes sense ;-) )
Click Save when you are satisfied with your upload to proceed to the next step
These are the next steps!

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 4 automatically.

The next step: ‘Google Maps and Directions’.

Edit your listing: step 2

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:45:00 -0700

Step 2 in the wizard is the Short and Long Description of your listing.

STEP 2
The short description is quite an important one. It is the first sentence your visitors will read when visiting your listing. Also for Google, Bing, Yahoo and all other search engines it is quite an important line: this is also your page description. So do not skip this one. You will have 156 characters and try to describe your listing using the most important keywords that identifies your listing. What makes your campground special? Your own beach ? Or always green grass? Pick the most important features and use them in the short description.

The long description can be as long as you want. Use the HTML editor to tell the visitors what they can expect on your campground.

Short description: do not skip!
Long description. When you edit this for the first time - you will see the generated text. You can replace this text with your own.
Click ‘Save’ to save and proceed to the next step

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 3 automatically.

The next step: ‘Upload your logo’.

Edit your listing: step 1

Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:25:00 -0700

We are live! Listings can be claimed from now on and here is how to do manage your listing.

SIGN UP
Sign up - activate your account and claim your listing. Payments are processed by PayPal and this is an easy process. Once your payment is approved you can edit your listing.

Right now I won’t discuss the sign up process as this is a rather easy process. Let’s step in right after the payment was successful.

This is what you will see in the right top column:

Click ‘Edit listing’ and since this is your first edit: the Listing Wizard will be started.

STEP 1
The first step in the wizard is quite a big step - here your main data will be saved. It is a long form - but all the fields are easy. Please do note that all fields in the wizard are optional: you may leave them empty. To get the best listing: fill out as much data as you can.

Type. Here you can choose:
- RV Park ( only RV’s are allowed - no tenting )
- Campground ( no RV’s allowed )
- both: Campground + RV park
Your address. This is your physical address : with this address we will try to get a Google Maps location.
Phone numbers and Fax number.
Internet data: your website and your email address.
Social Media data: if you have a Twitter account and/or a Facebook page - enter them right here. Just skip if you don’t have these accounts.
Operational current season: when are you open? Give start and end dates. Or click ‘Year round’ if you are open year round
Operational next season. See item 6.
Sites: How many sites do you have. Give the total number of sites. Use only digits here.
Vacancy status. If you want you can show your visitors is you have sites available. Once your listing is saved you can change the vacancy status with just one click.
Sanidump: do you have a sanidump available?
Languages data: do you speak different languages? Your guest would like to know that!
These are the next steps!

Click ‘Save’ when you are done and you will be taken to Step 2 automatically.

Your listing will be updated immediately. It is just that easy!

Next step: ‘Short and Long Description’.

Printed media

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 10:11:00 -0700

I was showing the upcoming edit module to a good friend of mine and he came up with something interesting. We both agreed that it is most likely that there will be campground/RV park owners who are going to use the campgroundsofcanada.com listing as their ‘website’. You will see for yourself pretty soon why they can do that - basically all the info you need to know about a campground is on there. So if you’re a small campground/RV park - this is a good choice.

Then his next question was - if they do that - they want to put their new ‘website’ in brochures, magazines, newspapers and business cards. Can they do that? My friend owns a graphic design studio here in Kelowna so he knows what he’s talking about. Look at the url your campground owners will get. Let’s take a campground in West-Kelowna:

http://campgroundsofcanada.com/British-Columbia/West-Kelowna/West-Bay-Beach-Resort.html

That is a pretty long url. For Twitter and email we created our own url shortener to make it easier to share your listing. ( see our article about campgrnd.ca ) However this is not such a good url to use in printed media as people need to type in the url manually. Typos will be made - this is not the best solution for this problem.

So I came up with another solution. Access your listing with the short-id link. There are three versions and the owner of the listing can choose the one that fits the best. For the ‘West Bay Beach Resort’ in West-Kelowna BC these are:

http://campgroundsofcanada.com/?listing=683
http://campgroundsofcanada.com/?campground=683
http://campgroundsofcanada.com/?rvpark=683

Every listing has their own unique ID number. Using ‘listing’, ‘campground’ or ‘rvpark’ you will be redirected to the listing page. Less chances of typos and short enough for printed media. As you can see campgroundsofcanada.com provides a complete solution for any campground or RV park.

Final steps

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 12:25:00 -0700

As you might have noticed, we made a lot of (little) changes on different pages in the last days. We’re getting so close now to finally open the site up to campground and RV park owners.

Sign up
Sign up is open on invite only right now. Why is this you ask? We use a small, dedicated and very capable test team to test the last parts of the whole sign-up + manage listing part.

Why does it all takes so long?
Well… this site is 100% custom built. We are not just taking some free program and modify it a bit (we’ve all seen those sites - using a general e-commerce site to act as a campground site… that’s just silly). Nope, this site is unique and a custom fit. Also, the listing page is quite big - almost like a complete website on a single page. Still it has to be easy and fun to create a listing page. I feel we did just that. Anyway all this code needs to be tested and fixed in case something is not working as it should be.

Browsers
Ah the browsers. If only we had just one browser! :) The site is tested on IE6 and higher, FF, Chrome and Safari. They all should work fine. If you manage a listing on our site you should use at least IE7. My advise would be any modern up-to-date browser. My personal favorites would be FF, Chrome or Safari (I am a Mac guy).

I will leave you with a small image. You haven’t seen this before - it is from the listing management form:

As you can see you will be able to tell your visitors what other languages you speak :)

Stay tuned!

Pagerank

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 10:15:31 -0700

According to our friends at http://www.prchecker.info/ we have currently a pagerank of 4.

And this is good news for a ‘new’ website like us. We will be working hard to improve our pagerank - but PR4 is a good start.

Why is this important? It is important for campground and RVPark owners who will have their business listed on campgroundsofcanada.com. On their profile page is a link back to their own website. A back link from a high PR website is a valuable link for SEO. The more profiles we will list - the more important campgroundsofcanada.com will become. And this will result in an even higher pagerank. And this will help every listing on our website.

We are not ready yet with the actual listing pages - but we are getting closer. Stay tuned!

Content is king

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:24:00 -0700

Content is king. Well nothing new here I guess, we already know this. But once in a while it is nice to see some kind of proof.

As we are a fairly new website - it is hard to get our (important) spot in the search engines to get visitors. But I feel you should build a website for your visitors and not for the search engines. That’s why content is really king. And luckily Google also thinks so.

Our visitors come here for information = content. While the profile listings will be maintained by the campground and RV Park owners (more on this pretty soon!), we also have 10 provinces + 3 territories and 3700+ cities, towns and communities online.

So that’s why we started working together with Tourism Offices and the Chamber of Commerce. We are still asking and getting promotional texts about provinces, territories and cities. And that is good! Good for our visitors and also good for the search engines. Look at our current top 10 for provinces/territories:

The first four have their own text describing the province, climate, things to do, etc… The other 6 have not.

Same goes for the cities. Our top 10 most visited cities looks currently like this:

Although here it is less obvious as 4 of these don’t have a text (yet) and amongst these are number 2 and number 3. If you are a lake you will get more visitors I guess! :)

More content please
So we will keep adding more city texts as we will receive them. We will ask for the other provinces and territory texts. Real content is important for our visitors. And as provider of this content we will link back to your site. It will help visitors decide whether they will visit your city, town or community or not.

But wait, there is more!
Campground and RV Park listings will get an additional month for free when they sign up if their city/town/community has their own text. Sign up will be ready soon - submit your city text is already done. Visit the promote your city page for more information or submit your text right now!

Blogs and other resources

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 08:55:00 -0700

There are so many blogs out there that I wish I had more time to read them all! :) Too bad I can’t but I can make a list of blogs I found and you can decide yourself if they are helpful for you.

I will update this post as soon as I find more blogs, websites or other resources that you might like!

www.money-saving-rv-repair.com
In the world of RVs, knowledge is not just power, it is money in your pocket. Check out this blog with lots of tips for RV repair and maintenance.

If you want to be on this list - just contact me. You can find the e-mail on http://campgroundsofcanada.com/