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How Viral Marketing Can Bring More Traffic

Saturday, August 30th, 2008

Marketing your vacation rental does not always mean spending money. There are lots of ways of getting traffic to your listing or web site without parting with a cent, and this is all possible because of the way people use the web, particularly through social networking.  Social scientists tell us that each person has […]

How Effective Was Your Marketing This Year?

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

The end of the summer season is coming up and with it comes the opportunity to review your marketing strategy for the past year, and make some changes if necessary. Evaluating how effective your vacation rental listings have been is important, particularly if you are using a number of paid sites to advertise your property. […]

Is Your Vacation Rental Last-Minute-Ready?

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

It seems as if more people are taking vacations at the drop of a hat than at any time before. The last minute vacation rental market has always been there, but this year it’s been the most active I have known it.  We had several cottages vacant for this upcoming week last Wednesday, and […]

Vacation Rentals Are Not Just For Summer

Thursday, August 14th, 2008

With commercials for back to school products in full swing, it’s time to firm up the plans for fall and winter marketing of your vacation rental. This is the time to be creative and aggressive as the balance turns from low inventory and high demand, to a high number of available properties and a […]

Does Your "Luxury" Cottage Deliver It’s Promise?

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

What do the terms, “luxury cottage”, “upscale cottage rental” or “executive property” mean to you? Do you use any of these terms to describe your cottage, and if so, what criteria do base your description on?
Craig and I were driving up to Fenelon Falls yesterday to view a ‘luxury, executive’ cottage, and as […]

How to Create a Web Site Your Visitors will Love

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

With the Cottage Life Show fast approaching, I’ve been spending the weekend doing some research for the seminars I will be presenting. Since one of the presentations is on Marketing Your Cottage Rental Profitably, I used a couple of hours early today to take a look at some cottage web sites to see what […]

Are Your Rental Guests Happy?

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

In an increasingly competitive vacation rental market, you have to do things differently to help you stand out from the rest. That might be a matter of using well staged  photos on your web site, having features and facilities that others don’t offer, and making sure your rental rate is set fairly. But, there’s […]

5 Tips to Boost your Bookings

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

It’s that time of year for vacation home owners when the first flutterings of panic can set in. Maybe you’ve got a week or two booked; perhaps you’ve had lots of enquiries but few conversions so far; maybe you are already fully booked, in which case read no further!  If the first two describe your […]

Choosing a Domain Name for your Vacation Rental Blog

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I’ve finally got around to thinking about the domain name for my new cottage blog. Over the past couple of years I’ve come up with names for web sites and occasionally got around to registering them. From around $8 a year if you go for a 3-year registration, it’s not a big amount to […]

The Big Vacation Rental Blog Experiment - Part One

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

  I’ve been talking for a while about the value of using a blog to promote a vacation rental property, in place of a static web site. I wanted to demonstrate this from the beginning so have decided to use my own property as the guinea pig, and my ever patient husband as the guinea […]

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