I loved the photo posted by Rebecca Brigolante on her Facebook page recently. It’s not just an outdoor photo but an experience and reminded me how important it is to stage photos to evoke emotions. Her web site at Brigolante Apartments shows a real grasp of how important it is to create images to capture interest.

We’ve been blessed with a last blast of summer here in Ontario. The trees are beginning to change with the reds and orange of the maples giving a hint of what is to come in the next few weeks when full-blown fall will spread across the countryside in a riot of colour. It reminded me to get out and get some great photos for the Flickr albums I’m putting together to promote Osprey Cottage in different seasons.

If you are marketing a cottage or vacation rental throughout the year, it’s important to show images of what it will look like at different times. Because you may have a limited amount of photos on a listing, using Flickr to create additional albums you can link to can be just what you need to show off all your seasonal images.

If you can get your potential guests to imagine what they will experience if they stay at your property, and what they’ll see in the local area, you stand a much greater chance of getting them to hang around on your listing or site and convert them to paying guests.

I asked the question on Twitter a few days ago because I was seeing a few of the prolific Facebook owners promoting their new additions. When you make an improvement, add a new facility or update a feature, why not shout it to the rafters?

Adding something like a hot tub, a canoe, improved entertainment features or new kitchen appliances, is worth telling people about. That’s why Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In are such great networks for getting the message out.

I’m noticing that more vacation rental owners are creating Facebook Fan pages and using Twitter as a solid business tool for promoting their properties.  I’d love to hear how it’s working for you. 

I spent a great day at the weekend with Darren & Lucie Brand of Designed to Sell – a design and staging company from Toronto.  This dynamic duo spend much of their time creating fabulous spaces to help people selling their city condos.  A quick check of their web site at Staged To Sell shows how creative and skilled they are at transforming rooms from drab to fab! We spent most of the day filming at two cottages for a DVD collection called Staged To Rent.  This will be a tour through the staging process of several properties to showcase what can be done to achieve great rental results.  That’s in the pipeline though so I just wanted to show you what they did in a 20 minute demonstration for us.

Here’s a picture of a cottage bedroom before the Brand touch….

and here’s the same room 20 minutes later……..

            …..

Darren and Lucie are our Staging experts at www.rentingforprofit.com and will answer any questions about staging that are asked on the forums.  They are also offering reduced pricing for online consultations for members so why not head on over there for a look at our free articles and videos.  If you like what you see, it’s only $5.95 per month for unlimited access to all the downloads, videos and expert advice.

Have you ever read a description of something, watched a video or heard something on the radio, and felt an immediate pull to purchase it or to find out more? Of course you have….it’s something we all experience at some time and companies spend billions finding out what motivates consumers to choose one product over another. I’ve found it fascinating as I search through the net looking for good vacation rental web sites to review, to see what it is that draws me in to a site, and stimulates my interest.

The photos you use on a listing are the most important – without them no-one is going to stop and look further. However, creative use of words within the descriptive text can be the anchor that holds a visitor to your web site.  Getting them to hear what you have to say and see the full picture of what you’re offering is the key to converting a casual surfer to a confirmed client.

I’m a kinaesthetic person. I learn best by doing something rather than hearing about it or reading a book. It’s the hands-on experience that works for me. This also means I respond well to words in web copy that make me feel something:

“End your active day by relaxing in the muscle-soothing hot tub with its 36 jets and shoulder-massaging waterfall feature”

“Our beds welcome you with fresh cotton linens in summer while the duck-down fluffy duvets surround you with snuggly warmth in winter”

Visual people might be more attracted by words and phrases that stimulate their visual cortex such as:

As the sun sets you’ll be treated to a gloriously colourful sunset across the shimmering lake. You’ll need your camera close by to capture the unforgettable images

Those people who respond best to auditory experience will want to know what it sounds like:

“Waking up to the sound of loons calling across a still and peaceful lake is an experience you’ll never forget”.

Well written copy should capture as many senses as possible using feeling, hearing and visual words. Here is a great example from an owner’s site. I’ve highlighted just a few places where the words used could stimulate different preferences. It’s a great web site I’ll be reviewing soon.

How much have you thought about the words you use in your listings?  Is your text evocative like this? Why not take a fresh look at what you are saying and see if you can tweak it a little to capture more interest.  Let me know what you think.

The image on the home page of pureholidayhomes.com caught my attention today. I was looking for the sort of evocative shot that would stop a potential renter in their tracks and cause them to hang about for a bit. The photo did just that for me.

When you are designing your own vacation rental web site it’s worth spending a lot of time getting this right. These are the sort of images that will cause your site visitors to pause and imagine themselves right there in the photographs, or pull them in to look further. I think I like this so much because it includes people, and it feels real – not a staged photo. The one I’ve used on this post is similar.

What photos do you use to draw your visitors in? How evocative are they?  Send me the links so I can share them.

  Having a web site and/or a good listing on a major site may be enough to maximize your vacation rental occupancy , however most owners can do with a little extra help in filling up low and shoulder season availability. I have been a Twitter devotee for a few months now and already reap the benefits of this mode of social networking, so for those of you who have never thought of jumping on this bandwagon, here’s 25 ways to use Twitter as a promotional and networking tool.

There’s lots of beginner guides to Twitter and you may have come across some already. This one from Lifehack is one of my favourites:

The most popular Twitter users are the ones that understand the networking potential of following and being followed. They strike a great balance between self promotion and marketing, and support and help for others. They ask questions; reply to questions posed by other Twitter users; link to a wide variety of interesting things; retweet (RT) messages to generate buzz for their followers, and are generally active and supportive. If you create this type of Twitter persona, you will attract a lot of followers, who in turn have their own followers who will hear about you. That is the power of Twitter.

1 Follow other owners

There’s lots of owners on Twitter and they’re a helpful, friendly bunch. You can find them by searching for ‘vacation rental’ on Tweetdeck or checking owner signatures on the Lay My Hat forum.

2 Tweet about what you are doing.

This doesn’t mean telling the world in 140 characters what you had for breakfast or are watching on TV, but if you are doing something of interest related to your vacation rental business, write about it. There was a recent conversation spawned by a Tweet simply saying. “Heading off to buy a decent knife set for my holiday rental”.

3 Ask for help

Twitter is a great place for finding help and there’s plenty of other owners willing to offer help or answer questions. If there’s lots of Twitter users in your area, they are a great resource for local knowledge.

4 Announce an event

Let potential renters know of an upcoming event in your area, and include a link to your vacation rental for accommodation.

5 Provide a link to a golf course in the area

Linking to local attractions, golf courses, restaurants etc are a great way to generate some interest in your property.

6 Recommend a listing site to other owners

If you find something good that other owners may find useful, tell them about it. Share the good stuff

7 Provide a series of renters tips

Offer a regular tip for renters – either specific to your place or general suggestions and advice. For example: “Make sure you buy a fishing licence before you cast your rod – don’t risk a fine”. These types of tweets will get retweeted which will get you more visibility and followers.

8 Post a picture you have just taken

Use Twitpic to  post a photo you have just taken of something in and around your property. Wildlife, a beautiful sunset, someone fishing off a dock etc

9 Recommend a guide book of your area

Don’t miss the chance to make a little money by using your Amazon associate link to promote a guidebook of your area. You could even write your own.

10 Link to a video

Use YouTube to video your property or just to talk about an aspect of your location. Keep it short and interesting. Make sure your YouTube channel clearly shows your web address or links to your listing

11 Tweet about things to do

Make suggestions and recommendations for things to do in the area of your property. Attract outdoorsy types by tweeting about hiking trails; cycle routes and cross country ski areas. Using keywords in your Tweets like hiking, biking, golf, geocaching etc, that will be picked up by others searching for those words. This can boost your follower count.

12 Say thank you to people who retweet (RT) your posts or mention you in their tweets

Tweet love is created by being polite and courteous. Saying thank you to a tweeter who has taken time to RT one of your tweets is a polite gesture to make. Just make sure you put the @ symbol before their Twitter user name to ensure it gets to their Twitter stream.

13 Recommend people on Follow Friday

On Friday’s you will see plenty of posts with #followfriday included in the text. This is the day when tweeters recommend their followers to others. It works best when you describe why you are recommending them.

14 Answer someone else’s question

If you come across a question someone has asked and feel you can provide them with a worthwhile reply, go ahead and offer your response. It will be welcomed.

15 Create an offline network

Tweeter meet-ups are a great opportunity to get together off-line with people you meet on Twitter and can create a valuable off-line network. Mastermind groups can develop from these as you all share your expertise.

16 Use Tweetdeck to create groups so you can follow topics

Creating groups is a great way of keeping track of what is being saying on a particular topic. It’s best to be more specific in your topics such as ‘vacation rental’ and ‘holiday rental’ rather than ‘travel’ for example.

17 Use hashtags

Hashtags are another way of tracking topics and making sure your messages are being seen by your target audience. Check out this Hashtag tutorial for more help on this one.

18 Keep your Tweets shorter than 140 characters if you want them retweeted

When a message is retweeted by one of your followers, they may want to put a brief message at the end of it, such as ‘I liked this’, or ‘Check this out’. You want that to happen as it is an endorsement of your message to their followers. However if your original Tweet takes up all the characters, there’s no room for this, so it’s good practice to leave 20 characters or so to spare.

19 It’s OK to self promote occasionally

Marketing yourself and your property is what it’s all about but make sure you don’t bombard your followers with self promotion messages. Intersperse with chat, questions, retweets and information sharing.

20 Find travel writers to follow

Keep in touch with travel writers and journalists on Twitter – when they are looking for sources or references for a travel story in your area, you will be remembered and noticed. Follow them and they will usually follow you back. If your place is family friendly you should be following all of the Traveling Mamas:

21 Link back to your blog

If you have a blog and post to it regularly, use Twitter to let your followers know when a new post has been published. Shorten the URL of the post and add it to the end of your brief message promoting it. Watch your site visitors grow!

22 Recommend great resource sites for your area

You are the expert on your area. Share the knowledge and recommend sites that will help your guests plan their vacation.

23 Let people know what’s new

Installed a hot tub or sauna? Bought a hammock or new kayak? Let people know what is new at your property. Even if you have just added 10 new DVDs to your movie collection, each little nugget of information will be spread among your followers and theirs.

24 Promote a themed weekend, special offer or discount

Create a themed package that ties into a local event or activity and use Twitter to advertise it. You could offer your Twitter followers a special discount.

25 Be consistent

Like a blog, a Twitter stream needs consistent attention to keep interest going. When you tweet regularly, informatively and with a variety of posts, your followers will stay interested in what you have to say.

Twitter will never take the place of your listing, blog or web site, but it is a very useful addition to your marketing toolbox, and used well could have a really positive outcome. Let me know how it works for you.

OK – I have just shut my Tweetdeck down, finished all the @replies and retweets I’m doing this morning and am working on getting my followers up to 500 by the end of the week. I am suffering badly from TMT (Too Much Twitter) and bad pun syndrome having just read a post called Twick or Tweet! And probably half my readers have absolutely no clue what I’m on about.

It’s Twitter folks – my latest addiction, and in fact if you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s time to come out of hibernation. It seems it’s everywhere and everyone is talking about it, so I thought I’d wade in and share my experience of the past 4 weeks as a ‘Twitterer’, and offer some thoughts on the value of using it as a part of your vacation rental marketing.

I’ve been signed up for Twitter for quite a while now but hadn’t used it because all I was seeing were posts telling me what people were having for breakfast, watching on TV, or planning on having for dinner. I found a site where I could put in a keyword and it would bring up all the Tweets that included my chosen search word or phrase – ‘cottage’. You would not believe the discussions people have about cottage pie and cottage cheese! So, Twitter got put on the back burner for several months – along with all those cottage pies.

Then a friend urged me to give it another whirl and I got stuck in. I found a few beginner guides that weren’t written in geekspeak; got connected with some folks who had been tweeting for much longer than me and seemed to know what they were doing, and am now reaping some benefits of this way of networking.

Here’s some links to useful stuff that helped me get off to a flying start:

This Guide to Getting Started is simple and specific and following the recommendations will get you following and being followed fairly quickly

50 Great Travel Tweeters – This list from the UK Telegraph isn’t exhaustive in any way but it’s a good start if you are stuck for people to follow.

After you’ve got set up on Twitter, sign up for Tweetdeck to manage your account. This list of FAQs is really helpful.

And if you are wondering why no-one is following you, the reason could be here in The Top Ten Reasons I Will Not Follow You in Return on Twitter

OK so if you are now thinking that this all seems pointless, why not follow some other vacation rental owners and see what they are doing market their properties:

Windermere Lodge uses this media at its best and has a dedicated Twitter page on the award-winning Windermere Lodge website

Bavarian Forest posts interesting facts and snippets of information on the area.

TorreviejaVilla uses her Twitter account to chat with other owners; promote special offers and give suggestions on activities and attractions in her area of Spain. She also posts as TorreTwit  so follow both to keep up with her.

La Vache posts on a whole range of topics relating to the vacation rental industry.

Frenchywilson  markets the lovely Peyrenegre  with a web site run on the Wordpress platform ( I admire this one but that’s another post!)

Rentfrance  offers great tips like this one: “Knowing the difference between “tailler” (to cut back) and “élaguer” (to thin out) is crucial when dealing with French tree trimmers.” Should be in the Twitter bible under “ How to offer value content in under 140 characters”!

Basse Copette joined Twitter a few days ago and is already in the swing of chat and @replies.

If I haven’t listed you here, drop in and comment and I’ll add you to the VR Twitter List and keep it updated.

As a vacation rental owner, much of the value is in bringing information on my part of the world to the attention of people who may not have thought of coming here before.

I’m also learning a lot from people who post links to things that interest me Around 40% of my follows are travel writers or connected with travel in some way; 30% are directly involved in the vacation rental industry and the remainder are in the networking/internet marketing/blogging world. And apart from anything else, it’s a lot of fun. 

It has to be used well and integrated with your blog or web site. A constant stream of links to your site isn’t going to win you any followers, while a balanced mix of personal comment, @ replies, interesting links and retweets of posts you have enjoyed and think others will find useful, will get you a loyal band of followers. Asking questions is a good way of becoming involved too.

A few more links if you haven’t enough already!

List of websites that interact with Twitter

Thanks to Ryan Scott Miller for this one on How to Create a Makeshift Address Book on Twitter

A website run by vacation rental owners – you should get listed here Your Holiday Matters.

I’m told that Holiday Crunch will be the place to list last minute offers, special deals etc.  Check it out.

Finally, you can even go on a cruise and talk Twitter at sea

And let’s not forget Slow Travel

There is so much more to Twitter than the first glance shows – give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

Image by Futileboy

Every day I talk to people who want to rent a vacation home. Mostly, they are frustrated and confused with so many sites; so little information and so much uncertainty about the choice they are making. As one lady said yesterday:

“I’d love to go back to the good old days where I could talk to a travel agent who had been to the place I wanted to go and could give me an objective opinion. It’s so difficult to tell what is truth and what is embellishment on these listings”

I can understand that point of view. The monster rental site Home Away lists over 18,000 properties in Florida for example. I’m sure if a renter knows where they want to go and has some strict criteria to work from, they could drill down and shortlist a few hundred before they finally made a choice. But, if your property is in that few hundred, how can you make it stand out from the rest?

I’ve talked about making sure the photos are wonderful, the text is accurate and informative and how important it is to have a good looking web site to capture the VR surfers on their trip through cyberspace. That’s not enough though, because if there’s a ton of listings just like yours, it could be just the luck of the draw that brings a potential renter to your door.

Could Twitter be your answer? Since 50% of visitors to this blog are now coming via Twitter, I could be preaching to the converted here, but since this is a new medium for me, let’s just go with it for a moment.

When someone first suggested I use Twitter, I scoffed at the idea. Telling the world what I was doing in 140 characters or less seemed a total waste of time. Who wants to know whether I’m watching Oprah or CNN; about to go shopping, or eating a cheeseburger? But I did register; I followed a few people; others started following me, and within three weeks I’ve discovered a whole new world of networking.

There must be something to Twitter when the Obama marketing campaign used it to such great effect by telling supporters where he was and what he was doing every day of the campaign. Major online and offline companies are using it to communicate with their customers at grass roots levels, and I was fascinated by this article on the Mr Tweet blog telling how an online invoicing company is using Twitter to demonstrate its customer service edge.

So, what good is this to the vacation rental owners? I’m still trying this out but just for starters, I follow over a hundred travel writers on my Twitter account. These people write blogs, articles and post on Twitter about the places they’ve been and where they are planning on going next. How good would it be if I got just one of them to take an interest in my neck of the woods and write a post or blog about it? I’m now networking with people who can talk about my cottage rental business and spread the word; they visit my blog and come to my website. This is so cool.

What is stopping you from trying this out? Why not give it a whirl? Here’s a great beginner’s guide to help you out. Let me know how it’s working for you.

Image by Pandemia on Flickr

Here’s some questions….

• Do you have a clear marketing plan?
• What targets have you set for occupancy this year?
• Have you got a budget for advertising and promotion?
• Is your web site working effectively for you?
• What strategies will you use to attract more visitors to your site?
• Are you ready to deal with enquiries professionally and promptly?

The vacation rental market is getting crowded. It’s busy with new listing sites, blogs, forums, tweets, Sqiudoo lenses and articles. It’s a great time to be involved in and influencing the market, but you need to be visible and proactive to stand out in the crowd.

It is not a good time to be complacent, haphazard and without focus, and if you are an owner looking at maximising your occupancy this year, it is going to take some work.

If you haven’t got your own web site yet – and by this I mean one with a unique domain name – then use a blogging platform like Wordpress to get one up and running. I have minimal technical skills but have started one for Osprey Cottage to see how far I could get without help. It is a work in progress but I welcome comments on my efforts so far. All it has cost me is the price of the domain name and hosting and the purchase of the Thesis theme which I feel works well for this type of site, and is user friendly.

Learn the basics of search engine optimisation. This is all about getting traffic to your site because its a total waste of time if you set one up and nobody comes. Read the Google SEO Starter Guide if you haven’t a clue, or just need a refresher, but don’t ignore the importance of creating a good flow of traffic.

Decide on your listing sites wisely and advertise on a couple that focus on your region, state or province, and one or two that market properties worldwide.  I’ve had success with Perfect Places but not much with Home Away.  This is a tough one because if your area is highly competitive, you may be jostling with hundreds of similar properties on the larger sites. Make sure wherever you list, that you can link back to your own web site that has an up-to-date availability calendar, otherwise your life will be spent updating calendars on a dozen different listing sites.

Plan how much you are going to spend and stick to it.  Between 5% and 10%  of your expected rental income is a good figure to be looking at to start with. Once your web site is established and you get a good amount of traffic to it (and you are adding value for your visitors), you’ll be able to reduce that figure.

There is so much more to all this than just throwing up a quick Kijiji ad and hoping for the best.  The big lesson is that if you really want to create some income, you have to work for it and earn the occupancy. 

A post by Scott over at Active Renter reminded me of the value of referrals and the benefit of setting up a loyalty programme for a vacation rental business. 

Rewarding your frequent renters for recommending your property has a double whammy effect in that it not only brings more clients to you – but those clients have already been pre-screened to some extent. We heard recently from one of our own regular rental customers:

“We’ve recommended you to a lot of our friends and told them how special your place is, and we’ve also told them they have to look after the cottage really well and leave it exactly as they found it. We don’t tell everyone about it – only those who will value their time there as we do”.

We offer a sliding scale of discounts that lead up to a 50% discount on an off season mid-week break.  And of course our most loyal clients get a lovely gift basket on their arrival too.

Every client you have has the potential to generate repeat business so it’s worthwhile giving them the opportunity to sing the praises of your property and reap the benefits of it.