Vacation Rental Marketing Blog

A top client of mine recently asked me the following question: What is one thing every vacation rental owner could do to make the industry grow as a whole? My answer, without a doubt: Cooperate with one another!

You see, instead of working together, many vacation rental owners choose to compete with other owners in their region. Instead of suggesting a similar rental down the street, many owners choose to abandon traveler inquiries that don’t perfectly fit their calendar. Instead of sincerely wanting to help them succeed, many owners would rather see their competitors fail. Instead of trying to accommodate large bookings between multiple rentals, many owners just discard the inquiry as impossible.

But I hope to change all that…

Because the more cooperation the vacation rental community exhibits, the more press we get, the more tourists we host, and the more money we all make. Instead of trying to market our destinations all alone, when we join forces with fellow owners, we are a true force to be reckoned with.

When independent vacation rental players cooperate, everybody wins.

So below is a short but strong pledge I encourage every vacation rental owner and manager to sign – and their competitors to sign – to establish some solidarity, to make each other more money, and to develop the brand of vacation rentals as a viable lodging alternative in your region.

It is the first of it’s kind on the web…

The Vacation Rental Referral Pledge

By adding my name and my rental link in the comments section below…

1. When unable to accommodate a traveler at my rental, I pledge to personally endorse my fellow vacation rental owner(s) by sending reference links, contact emails, and complimentary reviews to the traveler in need. In doing so, I pledge to notify the host so he/she can treat my guest with caring hands.

2. When acting on the recipient end of traveler referrals, I pledge to personally document the vacation rental owner who has referred my property and to pay him/her 10% of the total price spent (cheaper than any travel agency referral commission) on a monthly or quarterly basis.

3. When appropriate, I pledge to share this mantra with as many members of the local vacation rental community that I possibly can.

You can “sign” this cooperation pledge by putting your name and a link to your rental in the comments section below.

Then share this link http://www.vacationrentalmarketingblog.com/pledge/ with your regional “competitors” on forums and in emails and get them to pledge along with you.

P.S. My goal here is to get 100 owners to “sign” this agreement. I will also give a free copy of my upcoming product, Conquering Googel Adwords for Vacation Rental Owners, to all the individuals from the one City with the most signatures! So let’s get to work and change this industry once and for all…

Let’s face it: consumer research these days is done on the web. So when travelers hear about your rental, or perhaps stumble across it on VRBO, you can bet they’re going to cross-reference those wonderful things you have to say against a more unbiased and public platform: Google.

So what if I Googled your rental right now?

What would I find? Would the search results be flattering? Would I be able to find anything at all?

If I were to Google your rental, there would be two routes I could possibly go: specific and broad.

1) The specific search: This is for people who know the name of your rental. Everyone on my subscriber list should have named their vacation rental by now. [If you haven’t given your rental a name, read Why Your Property Needs A Name? and get on it.] The name of my rentals fleet is “Los Cuatro Tulipanes,” so without even adding Panama to that phrase, when you Google us, here’s what you get: our personal website with all the most amazing information about our rentals and our region…

2) The broad search: In truth, specific searches are nice for owners who have great branding: perhaps a traveler has heard about your rental from someone else or read it in a magazine. Therefore, they know exactly what to search for.  But the large majority of searchers either don’t know your rental’s name or can’t remember it.

For these travelers, the broad search occurs when they cast a wide search net and hope to bring up something relevant. In my case, our neighborhood is called “Casco Viejo” so when you Google broadly the phrase “Casco Viejo rentals” here’s what you get…

You see we have great search engine optimization in place. We’ve invested a ton of time and money in ranking our website #1 over the past 8 years. Ranking first is a byproduct of several factors: coding, competition, relevance, and back-linking. And while my team offers a la carte services to our top clients, beginners would do just as well to pick up a copy of SEO For Dummies and jump on that bus.

Some basic SEO knowledge is better than none at all.

The point is, many owners seem to think that by “optimizing” their VRBO or FlipKey listing, they’ll be truly releasing the floodgates of eager searchers looking to book their rental on the spot. The truth is that major listing sites rank competitively for broad phrases like “Casco Viejo rentals” and “Panama rentals” but that’s for their category pages: you have to realize you are only one of a bunch of other owners listed on these category pages. So for a traveler, finding your unit is like finding a needle in a haystack.

With the exception of long-tail keywords (such as “vacation property in Panama City Panama for rent” that have very little search volume) rarely do I see listing site SEO act as formidable techniques in owners marketing repertoires.

So if you read the title of this blog post and your answer was undefined, you’ve got some work to do.

For those of you naughty vacation rental owners who don’t use Google Alerts to notify you of stories about rentals in the news, you may have missed my article published this past Sunday entitled, The Vacation Rental Hypothesis.

It’s the first of many “pro vacation rental industry” articles I will be doing for Bigger Pockets, which is widely regarded THE most influential real estate blog on the web. It’s home to more than 110,000 members and more than a half million unique visitors each month!!!

As a central theme to my articles, I will be exploring the pros and cons of the VR Industry as they revolve around my particular area of expertise: marketing. This will give the vacation rental industry (and more importantly, me) a new pool of investors to educate.

Anyone who wants to share their story can be featured in my next article, Vacation Rental Beginners: Where Are They Now?

This past weekend, I was on Maryland’s Eastern Shore when, flipping through one of those simple beach newspapers, I came across someone renting their waterfront home. The picture of the house was lovely, but it was the big punch line at the bottom of the ad that really caught my attention:

Visit our Eastern Shore house for lazy afternoons of boiled crabs and buckets of cold beer!

Now, this may seem very simple or ignorable to you. But to me, it was a GREAT piece of marketing!

I can think of a million other ways the owner could have phrased that line and they would all be less effective. Why? Because imagery is so damned compelling.

Immediately after reading that ad, I envisioned myself sitting on their porch, tearing into a heap of steaming crabs (which I don’t even really like!!!) and drinking ice-cold beer.

Let’s compare the above tagline with a few others I saw in the same newspaper, even on the exact same page, for other rentals of similar caliber:

Spectacular waterfront home with new dock

Newly renovated cottage with kayaks and bikes

Our bayfront home is your home away from home

Breathtaking views in resort setting

Private waterfront cottage, summer weeks open!

You get the idea.

Concrete descriptions (like Exhibit A) are specific, definite, and vivid, especially when put up against general descriptions (like Exhibits B, C, D, E, and F) that tend to be more ambiguous and generic.

Concrete messages are more richly textured than general or vague messages. They are more vivid, more dynamic, and more interesting, thus, they tend to make readers (like me) more engaged. It’s the perfect tool to compliment my point in this article, How To Pimp Out Your VRBO Listing Title.

Concreteness and imagery effects (“lazy afternoons” and “boiled crabs” and “buckets of cold beer”) evoke sensory images in the mind. So when you’re marketing your rental – be it on listing sites, on classifieds, on your own site, or in press releases – be sure to point out truly authentic objects to your region and then describe them in descriptive, truly memorable ways.

If you can’t do it yourself, get Christine to do it for you.

If you read my blog regularly, you know that I am an advocate of DIY PR for vacation rental owners. None of us have the money to hire expensive advertising agencies or PR experts. But we do have the time and, as we say in Spanish, the ganas (more or less, the drive) to reach out to journalists and propose interesting story ideas. A perfect example of this is Panama City Rising in The New York Times this coming weekend.

It’s a front-page Travel article, 3-pages in length, and I’m quoted along with a link to my rentals on page #2. I can pretty much guarantee this article alone will MAKE our low season (which we need right now because of all the construction keeping people out of our neighborhood).

When I met the author of The New York Times piece, I tried to more than just sell our rentals (remember, Help, Don’t Sell). So I took him on a few outings: we walked early morning to the top of a rainforest and saw toucans, I helped translate an interview with a former gangster turned musician, we explored some of the ruins in town…etc. The point is, being your own publicist is about as challenging as it is rewarding. Hitting home runs like this one will produce bookings, quite literally, for years to come. [Check out Matt's Private Press Contacts]

Some of you might ask, “why are you advertising gangs and shootings in The New York Times?” to which I can only suggest you read this article about our quirky, cool, and sometimes dangerous neighborhood. 

When I recommend people start writing articles for their own blog (or perhaps for guest blogging) I typically get three kinds of excuses:

1. But I don’t know what to write about (said in whining voice)
2. But I can’t think of a good title (said in grouchy voice)
3. Once is fine, but I don’t have time to write on a regular basis (said with a groan)

So I am here (for better or worse) to give you three tools that will totally alleviate your worries. They correspond with the excuses above.

1. Don’t know what to write about? Hop on over to the Yippy Cloud Creator. This free tool allows you to type in the name of your city or town or topic related to your rental. It then spits out all the relevant tangential subjects users are searching online. So for instance, if you type in “Vail vacation” you will find that those same searchers are also searching ski resort, Beaver Creek, weather, employment, photography, Summit County…etc.

Simply use these topics to start your brainstorm. Maybe write an article about “getting a job in Vail” or “the best photograph spots in Vail” or “Vail ski resort secrets.” You get the idea. If you exhaust your search, do another one. No lack of ideas here.

2. Can’t think of a good title? You have to check out Portent’s Content Idea Generator. It’s one of the funnier and most useful tools I’ve seen for this type of task. Simply enter your topic in the search bar (Aspen Rentals) and see what the machine spits out. When you’re ready for another, just hit the refresh button. Here are some great blog titles it came up with…

• Where Aspen rentals are headed in the next 5 years
• What experts are saying about Aspen Rentals
• How Aspen rentals can help you survive a filibuster
• 12 unexpected uses for Aspen rentals
• 14 ways Aspen rentals could help the Cubs win the World Series
• 10 facts about Aspen rentals that will impress your friends
• 5 BS facts about Aspen rentals everyone thinks are true

Creating eye-catching and enticing titles for your blog posts has never been quite so simple. And in case you couldn’t guess, the strange and enticing title of this blog post itself was created using this tool.

3. Don’t have time to write supremely interesting (and original) articles on a regular basis? Who does!?!? So I shall introduce you to The Best Article Spinner. Now, as a disclaimer, this one isn’t free (it costs $7 up front) but the technology is pretty darn useful.

What is an article spinner?

Basically, this tool allows you to paste in the content of your article (let’s say you wrote a great piece about Breckenridge Ski Rentals). It then twists and turns your words around until it has rewritten a new version of the same article, just using different parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, pronouns…etc.).

This is ideal for multiple website or article directories that will not (by rule) allow you to directly republish the exact same article twice. Now, you are, of course, recommended to proofread the product that it spins out. But if you have read my book 100 True Readers, and you’re in the process of link building (submitting to article engines) or if you just want to distribute one spectacular article to a number of websites, this tool will sidestep any dreaded duplicate content penalties. Taking one article and spinning it into 5. What could be better!

Guest blogging is a topic that I speak very highly of in my eBook, 100 True Readers: How To Go From 1-100 Daily Website Visitors In 6 Months. The reason I think it is so useful is because a) it applies to owners of all levels (you don’t need your own website to guest blog, just send the web traffic to your listing page!), b) it takes something everyone can do (write a quick recommendation) and leverages that advice into inquiries for your rental, and c) it doesn’t cost a dime! If you haven’t read Guest Blogging Gets Bookings, it’s proof that vacation rental owners should be using this tactics on a regular basis.

So I approached Thomas R. Coffee, who’s a veritable expert on the subject, about writing a quick crash course for my readers. If you’re not familiar with it, guest blogging is the process of writing a useful article, then submitting it to a popular blog. When the owner of that blog publishes your piece (like I am doing here for Thomas) you get to enjoy lots of referral web traffic! That and the owner enjoys it because it’s free content for his blog. It’s a win-win! Here’s Thomas’ advice…

Guest blogging in the .com blogosphere is a very popular tactic. Business owners (like you) write guest posts for blog authors to reach new audiences, win new inquiries and to increase their own credibility and authorship. Guest posts work very well, especially since not every vacation rental owner or manager is willing to resort to such tools (meaning you’ll be in a league of your own).

If you are in a serious competition and fight for bookings, why not try to use the most effective tactics that do not require a costly resource allocation for you? In order to succeed in your writing venture and to increase the amount of visits to your website or VRBO page, it’s highly recommended to make use of guest blogging.

Guest Blogging to me is very important because it helps me with the following:

*diversify content on my blog

*get access to new web traffic and new audience

*promote my other projects

*collect links from sites that depend a lot on SEO

*gain authority

*get free blog promotion

… And these are only a few points. Of course, all these also apply if you’re a vacation rental owner or manager, since all the traffic which comes from the guest blog will ultimately reach your desired landing page. Thus, you gain a lot of new potential customers, which otherwise might not have reached. So, what can you do to in order to become a successful vacation rental guest blogger? Here are 10 crash-course tips in this regard:

1. Write about what travelers are looking for

Before starting to write an article, study several other blogs and posts within the same niche and study posts that are most voted and commented on by users. These are the best tool for “selling” a product or service that is currently on the market. Another technique to attract visitors’ attention is to post information that cannot be easily found on other blogs and online publications. Always ensure that the content you post is original, since search engines won’t rank it well and the blog owner will probably reject it anyway. Whether travelers to your region are looking for ski information, tidal charts, or wine tour recommendations, always keep the “final reader” in mind.

2. Create a catchy title for the article

After establishing the subject you are going to write about, you have to find a suitable title for the text content so that it is easily found by using keywords. To attract visitors, a very common technique is to place the title within the following phrases: 5 Tips, Top 10, 3 reasons, or similar formulations which help ease out the finding of needed information. Inserting some information in a schematic form is a very popular style for many online readers, as it eases the browsing of texts. Thus, we must pay special attention regarding the choice of title because it should include the most important information covered in the article.

3. Ask some questions in the article

Answering questions from potential guests is a good tactic in guest blogging for VR owners and managers. Try to create questions whose answers would build up in the article’s body. If your title is going to make a claim, try to foresee questions that may be asked, to ask them out loud in the body of the article, and to provide the necessary data and answers to the visitors’ search queries. Always put yourself in the mind of the reader when writing an article.

4. Grammatical correctness

Before sending an article to the blog owner, it is essential to have it reviewed by at least one third-party person in order to establish its accuracy and fluency. Small grammatical errors can easily escape in the text, and a third person can easily detect their existence whereas you might fail. Another idea is to have it checked by a grammar corrector tool, such as the one found in MS Word.

5. Create keywords relating to an external link

It’s a good idea to provide as much information for the users as possible, but also try to create keywords related to your rental (which later redirect to other pages of the website). This provides additional complexity for the article and grabs readers’ attention when looking for similar information. Thus, the inclusion of links where appropriate makes users excited to study them. Use the Google Keyword Selector Tool if you’re unsure about choosing the right keywords.

6. Form partnerships

You should work along with the blog owner. Let him or her know that if they chooses to accept your guest post, then you will do your best to promote it via social means in order to bring more traffic to it and thus help both him and yourself at the same time. Discuss with the blog owner about what kind of content his readers are interested in, and also take a look at the other articles from his blog in order to form a better idea. Make sure that you are forming the right partnerships in the right niches (websites where your potential guests hang out) to maximize your efforts.

7. Search Engine Optimization (or SEO)

You shouldn’t leave only the blog owner to optimize your article for the search engines, but put some effort into it too. You can easily optimize your posts by inserting relevant keywords generously into the body and title. If your post ranks well in Google, then you’ll continue to receive traffic, and thus your sales are more likely to grow for a longer time period. By posting your work on other websites, you can “piggyback” onto their existing web rankings and reap the rewards.

8. Make use of images

You should enhance your posts with the help of images, including sketches, graphs, tables, or any other type of pictures which bring more depth to the content. This is particularly important for travel pieces like you’re prone to write. For instance, if you’re writing about an island, then ensure that your article hosts at least a high-quality picture representing it. This will grab readers’ attention and thus you increase your chances for the post to be read (Google Image searches are important too!!!) and for your article content to be consumed.

9. Write in a proper format

Discuss with the owner of the blog in order to find out which format he prefers for your guest posts. Some blog owners will ask you to use specific fonts, letter sizes, and so on. If you can reach their demands, then you’ll not only save them from a lot of work, but you also increase your chances to form long-term partnerships with them. This will benefit your vacation rental site, as more traffic will be directed to it.

10. Don’t be a simple poster

You have to show personality in each of the guest posts you submit. You also need to research the type of content that goes on that person’s blog. Make sure you add meaning and depth to your articles, and not just include a bunch of statistics which the user might find irrelevant. Furthermore, you have to find out which type of people commonly read that blog, and try to capture their interest in a meaningful way. For instance, if you’re writing for a marketing blog, then make sure to find a smart way to combine marketing and tourism. If you’re writing for a travel blog, try to combine adventure travel and vacation rentals. You have to know your audience in order to be a successful guest blogger. You also have to merge topics well in order to benefit most.

Becoming renowned in guest blogging might require some time and effort on your side, but it’s ultimately going to pay off for both you and your vacation rental. Nowadays, blogs represent the most accessible way of doing marketing, and by submitting quality content to a number of famous blogs, you will increase the amount of visitors to your VRBO page or personal website and, when done properly, inquiries will follow suit!

This article was submitted by Thomas R Coffee, an expert content marketer that specializes in guest blogging; he runs Guest Blogging Tactics and can even be hired for your content and guest blogging needs. You can directly contact Thomas HERE.

I started the Vacation Rental Marketing Blog about 18 months ago and it’s been a roller coaster learning curve for me.

You see, I’m an expert in booking vacation rentals. I am NOT an expert in selling E-Books or video tutorials or affiliate memberships. That stuff was (and still is) brand new to me.

So in a lot of ways, the evolution you have all seen with my blog is very similar to the transformation you are personally experiencing with your rental marketing.

We both started with very little information. We both did lots of research and experimentation using trial and error. We both identified things that worked and used muses to inspire new ideas. So what you see before your very eyes is actually a parallel universe: it’s your learning curve in the works!

OK, so now that you understand we’re very much in the same boat, I wanted to share with you the most powerful secret I have taken away from this process thus far (and something which I really think resonates in the vacation rental marketing world). It’s only three words:

Help. Don’t sell.

This is a concept that seems to be pervasive with today’s top marketers, but it took me almost 2 years to figure out.

To elaborate, here are 3 facts that — if they’re not true already — will become more apparent with time:

1. Your competitors will have nicer properties (than you do)
2. Your competitors will have bigger marketing budgets (than you do)
3. Your sheer number of competitors will increase in volume

This leaves us with a natural dilemma: with all this competition, how does our rental marketing stand out from the crowd?

You’re probably thinking to yourself:

Yes, I have a great VRBO listing, I have a proper website, I have lots of Twitter/Facebook followers, I know how to convert inquiries into bookings…etc.

But here’s the thing: so will everybody else (if they don’t already)!

This brings me to the pre-thesis statement of this article: the most successful vacation rental owners and managers in the world provide one priceless variable when guests stay at their properties and that is the authentic experience. If you want to read more about how to do this, check out How Vacation Rentals Can Crush Hotels.

So assuming you have already embraced authenticity, the crux of your challenge (and mine in creating this blog) becomes abundantly clear: in order to leverage that authenticity (perhaps the only true, defining variable in the vacation rental game) we must help travelers (not sell travelers) to ensure their business.

Esthetically, the difference between helping and selling is no more than two letters. But in reality, the different is HUGE.

The best vacation rental marketers I have ever seen manage to “help” their potential guests far more bluntly than they do “sell” them.

The best vacation rental marketers are generous! They provide amazing free Insider Guides, they publish supremely informative blogs, they produce very sexy documentaries. They aren’t trying to sell you their rental – at least not up front – they are being helpful with useful, reliable and fresh free stuff! These owners are informing, they are revealing, and they are educating.

NOTE: Leave a comment below. If you can get me to reply, I’ll give you a FREE copy of 100 True Readers (in my opinion, the best eBook I’ve written and retail value of $140).

When you begin your marketing efforts by asking, “Who can I help today?”, you enter into an entirely different mental universe than if you ask, “Who can I convince to reserve my rental today?”

Here’s the whole point: you may be fine right now, but the vacation rental market will get more and more saturated over time, making your property (no matter how shabby or chic it is) just another fish in the sea. When this happens, there is only one thing that will distinguish you from your competition and that is the trust travelers have in your relationship.

When pitting you (the ultra-helpful owner) up against them (the profit-focused competitors down the street), who do you think most travelers would choose?

If you’ve ever wondered, How does Matt make any money by giving away all this free stuff?, you know now that I need first to form a relationship with my readers, before they believe the quality of my products for sale. Remember: vacation rental travelers don’t “shop” online. They “research” online. So get your act together and start making contributions to that research in the same way I give you free ideas.

What to do now? While you’re inspired, do the following. Make a list of ways you can help potential travelers to your region. Maybe this means designing fun interactive maps of your region. Perhaps you can create your own infographic to educate. Maybe you send out amazingly helpful newsletters every month?

Whatever you do, stick with this wholesome mantra – help, don’t sell – and your rental will be better for it in the long run.