A Year of Vacation Rental Learning – Part One

January 25, 2012

The New Year is always a time for reflection and now that January is just about gone, I’ve already applied a lot of the learning points from 2011 to our marketing and operational plan for the cottage. We kept a log of things that happened during the year as a reminder of the good and [...]

Read the full article →

How to Attract More Guests to your Vacation Rental with Beautiful Bedrooms

January 8, 2012

  If you want your vacation rental to appeal to potential guests, your bedrooms must look inviting and appealing. I’ve been blown away by the poor standard of bedrooms being offered in some listings and wish I could post the photos I have found online to demonstrate just how bad they are. An example I [...]

Read the full article →

Chasing the Long Tail of Vacation Rental Keyword Research

December 29, 2011

I’ve been doing some research this morning on long tailed keywords and how they impact traffic to vacation rental sites, for an article/ebook I’m writing for Renting For Profit. In the course of checking out material related to this I found a ton of resources on Aaron Wall’s SEO Book (which is a web site [...]

Read the full article →

How to profit after rental income is maximised

December 28, 2011

We are in a happy position with Osprey Cottage – sort of….because we seem to have reached our maximum occupancy potential. Over the last two years income has been pretty steady with 44 bookings in 2010 and 42 this year. Considering we had closed the place down for renovations for a couple of weeks each [...]

Read the full article →

How to Rent More Weeks with Images that Sell

December 22, 2011

In just a few weeks I’ll be flying to Costa Rica for our annual escape from Canadian winter and even though the snow and cold temperatures have yet to arrive here, it will be a welcome break from the dull colours of our seasonal landscape. We booked our stay at Flying Toucans in February and [...]

Read the full article →

How to Welcome Your Winter Guests

December 18, 2011

Winter is a little slow arriving here in Ontario with Christmas fast approaching and no sign of a white Christmas yet. However, that doesn’t stop us from preparing our vacation rentals for the snow and arctic temperatures bound to come before too long. Our guests will arrive wanting to kick back and enjoy their weekend [...]

Read the full article →

A vacation rental listing is not enough to attract traffic

December 8, 2011

I’m often asked which listing sites are the best to use to attract a particular target market and my answer is usually the same – if you have invested in a couple of major sites that get a ton of traffic, and one or two free sites that may be rising in popularity, the next [...]

Read the full article →

Tapping into Anticipation Happiness for Vacation Rental Marketing

November 24, 2011

  I’ve been following Vanessa Warwick’s blogs and posts recently. Vanessa is co-founder of Property Tribes – a UK based landlord and property investment community and owns several holiday lets in the UK and Cyprus. This post caught my eye this morning as it mirrors my philosophy on marketing vacation rentals and references a great [...]

Read the full article →

31 Days to Build a Better Blog for Vacation Rental Owners

November 16, 2011

Writing this blog has created a lot of opportunities for me. I get contacted by owners looking for advice and consultancy, journalists needing material for a story, and a lot of interest in my membership site, Renting for Profit. Consequently I believe wholeheartedly that blogs are here to stay, they work to create credibility and [...]

Read the full article →

Blogging – How it Works for this Vacation Rental Owner

November 14, 2011

I’ve written several times about how important it is to keep your vacation rental site refreshed and up to date, and to make it ‘sticky’ – as in encouraging people to stick around. One of the best ways of doing that is to install a blog on your site, so I tweeted a few days [...]

Read the full article →