Find out why your copy isn't booking — in about twenty seconds.

Most content in this industry does not fail because it is badly made. It fails because it is valueless — well shot, well written, correctly punctuated, and completely about the business. The new booking system. The award. The refurbished bathroom. The team photo from the Christmas lunch. None of that is bad. It is just information about you, published in a place where people are deciding whether to give you their attention.

There is one question sitting underneath all of it, and it is the same question that sits underneath every good sentence of sales copy: what's in it for them? If you cannot answer that in one line about the piece you are holding, the audience will not answer it for you. I've written about that instinct at length on the copywriting pillar and the content marketing pillar, so I won't re-teach it here. This page is what you do with it: the scoring instrument.

01The twelve attributes, explained

1. Tangible — is the value real and concrete?

Can they walk away holding something? A downloadable one-page packing list for a winter stay in your area is tangible. A post saying "we love welcoming winter guests" is not. The test: could the reader describe what they got, out loud, to somebody else?

2. Useful — does it help them do something?

Usefulness is measured by the task it removes. "The three car parks in the old town that don't get full by ten in the morning" is useful, because parking is a real job a guest has to do. "Our home is close to the old town" is a fact, and facts are not jobs.

3. Executable — can they act on it immediately?

The difference between useful and executable is whether they need anything else from you. "Book the harbour restaurant for 7pm and ask for the terrace" is executable. "There are great restaurants nearby" is not, because the reader now has to do all the work you were about to save them. Executable content ends with the reader able to move.

4. Inspiring — does it make them want to do or feel something?

This is the one that most vacation rental content is closest to and still misses. A slow shot of the lake at six in the morning with a line about the twenty minutes before anyone else is awake is inspiring. The same shot captioned "beautiful morning at the lake!" is a photograph. Inspiration needs a suggestion of the reader inside the frame.

5. Motivational — does it push them towards an action?

Inspiring makes them want it; motivational makes them move. "Half-term is eleven weeks out and the two river-facing houses in the village both go by mid-August — if you're thinking about it, think about it this week" is motivational, and it is honest, which is the only version worth using. Urgency you made up is not motivation, it's a discount on your credibility.

6. Insightful — does it teach them something they didn't know?

Insight is the attribute that most reliably builds authority, and the one owners are most nervous about because it means giving something away. Explaining why the rate is higher on a Thursday in your market, or what a cleaning fee actually pays for, teaches a traveler something they've wondered about and never been told. For an owner audience, so does a post on what actually drives direct bookings.

7. Funny — does it entertain, or make them smile?

Entertainment is real value and it gets dismissed as fluff by people who have never watched their engagement fall off a cliff during a month of earnest posts. The honest list of things previous guests have left behind. The ongoing saga of the heron that owns the dock. Humour has to be actually funny to score, though — "we're a bit quirky!" is not a joke, it's an announcement of one.

8. Practical — is it grounded and applicable?

Practical is the opposite of aspirational-but-abstract. "How to spend a rainy day here with three kids under eight, in order, with indoor options that don't need booking" is practical. "The area has plenty for families" is a sentiment. Practical content survives contact with a real Tuesday.

9. Interesting — does it hold attention?

The weakest-sounding attribute and one of the hardest to earn. Interesting is usually specificity plus surprise: the story of who built the house and why it faces the wrong way, the fishing rule locals argue about, the reason the street changes name halfway along. Nobody has ever been held by "a charming coastal town".

10. Thought-provoking — does it make them see differently?

This one changes the frame rather than filling it. For travelers: what a week in one place gets you that three cities in a week doesn't. For owners: why the platform fee you don't see is more expensive than the one you do. Thought-provoking content is what gets sent to somebody else with the words "read this".

11. Does it SAVE them something — time, money or hassle?

Saving is the most under-used attribute in this industry and the easiest to earn, because you know things your guests are about to learn the hard way. The ferry that sells out, the road that floods, the market that is cash only, the week the town does the festival and parking becomes impossible. Every one of those posts saves a real person a real afternoon.

12. Does it IMPROVE something for them?

The broadest and, in hospitality, the most natural. Does the trip get better, the decision get easier, or the day get lighter because of this piece? A one-page arrival guide improves the first two hours of a holiday. A straight comparison of booking direct versus booking through a platform improves a decision. If the answer is "their day is very slightly nicer", that counts — it is still more than most content manages.

02The ladder: what your score means

This is the actual scale I use, and I want to be clear about the shape of it: the enormous jump is from zero to one. Everything above that is stacking.

You don't need twelve. You need one that's real, and the discipline to keep adding.

The reason I hold the floor at one rather than three is that perfection is how content programmes die. An owner who publishes something genuinely useful twice a week for a year will beat an owner waiting to produce a masterpiece every time. But the reason I keep the ladder above it is that a one-point post and a seven-point post are not the same asset. One fills the week. The other gets saved, sent, and found in search two years later.

03How to use it in practice

1. Score before you publish, not after. The whole point is that this is a gate, not a post-mortem. Once it's out, the score is just a diagnosis.
2. Score the piece, not the intention. The most common failure is ticking "useful" because the topic is useful in principle. The topic isn't the content.
3. If it scores low, add a kind of value — don't polish. Better photography does not move a zero. Adding the three parking spots that don't fill up does. Ask which unticked box the piece could realistically earn with fifteen more minutes, and go earn that one.
4. If it can't earn one, kill it. Not everything deserves to be salvaged, and the time you save is the point.
5. Run your existing library through it. Take last quarter's ten best-performing posts and score them. The pattern that emerges is your actual content strategy, and it is usually better than the one written down.
6. Overdeliver on value and the rest gets easier. Distribution, timing, hashtags and formats are all real levers, but they are multipliers on the value in the piece. Multiply a zero and you still have zero.

04Where ideas come from, and the bigger discipline

This page is a filter. A filter is useless without something flowing into it, and dangerous without something bigger to sit inside. Here are both.