I just found a good 7 step article that emphasizes taking good pictures of the inside of your vacation home, and the outside of your vacation rental including all of the various on site amenities.  Then take more pictures of area sites, beaches, parks, or whatever your vacation area is known for. A picture is worth a thousand words. The author recommends first preping your unit to make sure everything is neat and clean, then using a high quality camera and taking lots of quality pictures. My personal experience is that even photos from a cell phone do a decent job if the image is going to be used for the internet.  As in my entry yesterday, he recommends VRBO as the first place to list your vacation rental home online.  VRBO charges more for your listing as you increase the number of photos.  This is a reason to also use your own website where you can have unlimited photos, or a reason to consider alternatives to VRBO that offer more free photos with the vacation rental by owner listing.  How to advertise your vacation rental on a shoestring.

Prospective customers want to see what the place looks like.  When you publish your photos, include good, keyword rich desriptions of your photos that tell the prospective vacation renter what they are looking at.  What is the view from your lanai?  Can you see the mountains, river, lake or ocean?  If so, get some pictures.  People like to go to beautiful places for their vacations.  Show pictures of people having fun, relaxing, or doing things.  

Want to increase the bookings at your vacation rental home or condominium?

1.) List your vacation rental condominium with one of the major vacation rental websites owned and operated by industry monster Homeaway.com.  The largest of these include www.vrbo.com, www.vacationrentals.com, www.homeway.com, www.holiday-rentals.co.uk, and  www.cyberrentals.com.  The cost, and features of the various homeaway vacation rental listing websites are vary so you should review them carefully before deciding which one to subscribe to. 

2.) Create your own website.  Don't overlook the benefits of having your own website with its own domain name such as www.myvacationcondo.com.  You can get your own domain name at godaddy.com or any of many other domain name registrars for about $10 per year or less.  Once you own your own domain name, you create and host your website at a hosting company.   A hosting service that varies in cost from free to less than $10 per month will satisfy the needs of the majority of vacation rental owner needs.  Most hosting companies have a do-it-yourself template so you can easily create your website. 

3.) Make your website search engine friendly.  Make sure that each page of your website is designed to send out a specific mesage.  If you have a great beach, create one page about your beach.  If your vacation rental is in a bike friendly community, create a page about biking opportunites when vacationing at your vacation condo.  Once you have created lots of meaningful and useful content, get some help to make sure each page is technically search engine friendly.  You can find many tools to help with this at www.submitexpress.com

4.)Include an email campaign as part of your marketing program.  Keep track of everyone who ever sends you an email regarding your vacation rental. Send out an email at the beginning of each rental season or more often according to a schedule. Include your friends and other business associates in your emails.  Have a form on your website, to allow interested parties to give their email address.  Get creative.  Have a special promotion available only to people on your email list.

5.) Include a link to your website as part of the signature for all of your outgoing emails.  You will be surprised how often someone you know will ask about your vacation rental because your email signature peeked their interest.

6.) Create a blog and update it regularly.  Write an article for you blog at least once a week.  Include separate articles about the area where your vacation rental is located, restaurants, things to do, beaches, nauture, comments from your guests, area events and so on.

7.) Get involved with social media... facebook, twitter, and the like.

Bob Collett

440-457-7209

Bob is an emarketing specialist who helps owners market their vacation rental condominiums and vacation rental homes.

This morning I was at a Mindshare meeting with some business owners.  We get together once a month to talk about things important to our business and to share ideas.  We function similar to an informal Board of Directors.  Much of today's discussion covered marketing issues.  Each of the businesses represented in our group have a website, but only the business owners with an IT background said they use Google Analytics on their website or even knew what it was.  I have found this to be quite common among small business owners and even larger companies that do not have web development staff.  Even among companies that do have an IT staff, it is not unususal for the senior marketing manager not to be using this outstanding FREE tool.

Google Analytics is free, very useful, and easy to implement on your website. 

Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and follow their instuctions to sign up.

You will need to have access to your website code, so you can cut and paste the Google code to each page of your website.  It is easiest if you can just cut and paste it to your footer, that way it will show up on every page.

Once done, you will have access to a lot of interesting data about how many people are coming to your website, how long they stay, if they come back, and what they did while they were there.  From this data, you can get lots of ideas about changes that might convert more visitors into customers.

Welcome to Rank High Today

Our blog is a resource for clients and anyone else who would like to increase the traffic to their website.  In my practice I focus on using ethical e-marketing techniques to bring highly targeted visitors to client websites and convert those visitors into customers.  An effective e-marketing plan encompassing a solid search engine optimization effort is one of the most cost effective marketing endeavors your firm can engage in.  It's also a lot of fun.

SEO Tip #1 - The Title Tag

<Title> Your Title Goes Here </Title>

The first thing you should look at is the Title Tag of your home page.  Before you check out your title, take a minute to consider what you think the title of your home page should be.  It should certainly include the name of your organization.  Then a few more words that describe your website or business... but not too many words. You might include a couple of words about what you do, and your city and state, or your industry.  Keep it short and sweet.

Now if you use Internet Explorer, you can look up at the top of your browser in the blue area, and read the title of this page.

Go to your website, and see what is in the blue border at the top of your home page.  That will be your title.  Click on Edit>Source and you will see your HTML coding for your home page.  Look for the title tag <title> right underneath the <head> tag.  If your title is more than about 80 characters its too long.  If there is none, you have lots of company, but you should fix it as soon as possible. 

Each page of your website should have a unique title tag that describes briefly what that page is about.   

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