Posts Tagged ‘increase vacation rental bookings’

Note Paper - Another Important Print Component for Your Property Advertising

Monday, September 28th, 2009

How to rent your houseWell, since I’ve been writing about the importance of print components in your property advertising, I thought I’d round it out with a comment about the importance of having note paper in your rental as well. When you print brochures and / or postcards, this is an easy thing to add on for little additional cost.

Hotels always have note paper in their rooms….it’s handy for the guest and it provides ongoing promotion for the hotel. The same is the case for your rental, it’s just another way to keep your name out there….and it’s very inexpensive. Guests appreciate the little personalized touches, and paper is something they always need.

Here you want to consider a simpler drawing or photo of your house….and you can go black and white or color. You could invest in a line drawing of your house, or you could use a black and white or one color photo (B/W or 1/C is typically less expensive to print).

Since notepaper is about giving the user space to write….I just include our address, phone, and web site along the bottom of the paper.

For specific guidance on creating a note paper for your vacation property marketing, check out the Booked Solid Blueprint, which will guide you through content creation as well as give you some great resources for inexpensive and quality production. Whatever you decide, make sure that printed materials are a part of how you advertise your property.

Post Cards - Another Great Communication Tool for Rental Advertising

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

Everyone still loves to send postcards to friends and family, and they’re also great vacation rental marketing pieces. You should have them available to your renters, and also use them as thank you cards and local hand-outs.

property-advertising-postcard

The example here takes the unique feature of the rental (staying on the water) and expands on that experience with additional thumb-nail photos. Depending on your location, you can include a picture of your house, or a key feature of your house.

You want to think about the one thing that will appeal to people renting your house (IE if it’s a condo at the base of the mountain, you might include a picture of the mountain with a headline over it that says “Luxury Ski-In Condo at Beaver Creek with Resort Amenities”.) Remember to create an experience for the guest. In this case, the name of the rental is not as important or memorable as the experience you want to create of staying on the water. That’s what will captivate them and interest them.

For specific guidance on creating a postcard for your property advertising, check out the Booked Solid Blueprint, which will guide you through content creation as well as give you some great resources for inexpensive and quality production. Whatever you decide, make sure that postcards are used in your property advertising!

An Activities Page on Your Web Site Will Enhance Renter Interest and Property Advertising SEO

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

If you really want to pump up your bookings and add value for your renters, you can look at adding a local Activities Page to your web site or blog. The reasons to consider this, are, you guessed it, search engine optimization and interest to your guest.

You’ll stand out from your competition because you’re offering guidance to them and providing local knowledge. And for most vacation rental property owners, most of the knowledge already exists in your head or in a notebook, you just need to re-purpose it into a web page!

Here’s an example of an Activities Page I developed. There were several goals for this page….

1) To demonstrate value to potential renters showing “local knowledge”
2) To increase average length of stay from 3 days to 4 by educating renters about all there was to do within an hour of the rental property
3) To rank for relevant key words related to vacation rentals and travel within the Bodega Bay and Sonoma County area.

Bodega Bay Vacation Rental Advertising

This Bodega Bay Vacation Rental Activities Page is actually quite lengthy, covering everything from dining, to bird watching, to golfing, to bakeries. All things local.

As an added benefit, Google loves relevant outbound links, so I rank well for my targeted keywords because my information is deemed of value by the search engines.

Of course, there are tradeoffs to any choice…in this case it’s the time and effort required to set up the activities page. However, I have found great value in my this page….it’s one of the most visited pages on the site. Not only do our renters comment on how helpful the information is to them (some show up with it printed out already!), I also rank very well for my targeted keywords as a result. Building your activities page is not really hard to do, it just takes focused effort. You’ll actually save time in the long run, we point renters to that page as well in our confirmation emails to help them plan their trip.

Have fun with it!

Welcome

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Hi and welcome! My name is Jayne Brodie and I’ve owned vacation rental property for over 10 years now. I have tried just about everything you can imagine to keep my properties booked….and spent a whole lot of time and money in the process! The end result is that I’ve developed a simple system that works, and I want to share that system with you. If you invest just 10-15 minutes a day in actively promoting your property by following this easy plan, I guarantee you’ll see a huge increase in your bookings. And you’ll have fun along the way! So join me and book yourself solid!

– Jayne