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Books and Blogs for Vacation Rental Success
By CottageGuru | January 1, 2008
Listing your cottage rental on a couple of good sites should bring you a good amount of enquiries for the high season. However, to market effectively and achieve out of season occupancy, you’ll need to go beyond the basics. So, here’s a review of some of the books and blogs that helped me to boost my rental income last year.
When I started to review the books I’d read, and the blogs that I’ve subscribed to this past year, I wanted to evaluate what had the most impact and share that with you. In my review I’ve looked at how valuable the information has been to my primary goal, which is to improve the profile of cottage rentals, and to help owners increase their effectiveness in marketing their vacation homes.
Life Hacker - 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day
This was one of my favourite books of 2007 and although there’s some techie stuff I didn’t quite understand, most of the tips and tricks were explained simply and clearly and were easy to use.
Just applying three of these ‘hacks’ have made a huge difference in the way I manage my workload. The most effective was found in Chapter 6 - Control your Email. Even with just one cottage to manage, the amount of enquiries and email messages can clog up your inbox and the tips here are so useful to organise them all. Since every enquiry is an opportunity to create a new rental client, having an effective way of filing them is invaluable. Chapter 9 - Mastering the Web - has many time saving ideas for making your web use simpler and faster, and helping you find competitors.
Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies
I’m a great fan of the ‘for Dummies’ series, and this one is a great read if you are new to blogging and want to use the medium to make an impact. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts on blogging you’ll know I believe that this is a great marketing tool for vacation home owners to promote their property as well as events and attractions in the area.
There are opportunities to make additional income in a variety of ways and Chapter 14 of the book - Making Money with a Blog - gives some ideas. The only drawback with the book is the 2005 publication date which means some of the content is already out of date. For example, in the section on setting up a blog, there is no mention of Wordpress, which is arguably the best free blog platform. This aside, there is still much to learn from the book.
Ebooks
I like to download ebooks. It’s that need for instant gratification I guess - I want it now! That said, there’s so much good stuff that is only available in this format anyway. Here’s my favourite downloads from 2007:
Zen to Done: I’m one of life’s procrastinators and have read many books on time management, or at least I’ve bought them only to put them in the ‘get around to reading it one day’ category. The difference with Zen to Done is that I read it from start to finish then went back to it and read it more slowly. In my view, it’s by far the best I’ve bought, with simple, useable ideas that can be applied straight away. It has been particularly helpful with how I organise the marketing ideas I have for the cottage and the blog. It’s very reasonably priced too!
Make your Words Sell: Ken Evoy writes some great books as well as being the brains behind Site Build It. Make your Words Sell uncovers the secrets to copywriting and getting people to buy from your site. For cottage owners this means using words to describe the property and location, that wows visitors to your web site and converts enquiries to bookings. When there are so many properties for rent, owners must find the edge to beat the competition and using persuasive language could be the key.
Killer Flagship Content: Chris Garrett’s free ebook is a great primer on creating good content for a blog or web site. If you plan on creating or revamping your web presence download this free pdf book.
Blogs
I read lots of blogs, and subscribe to feeds so that I can check daily to see what’s new. It’s simple to do. Signing up for a feed reader such as Blog Lines or Google Reader means that new posts to your favourite blog are sent to your reader and you can peruse them at your leisure. I use iGoogle to customise my home page so that the latest posts on my favourite blogs are listed when it opens up.
Zen Habits:Author of Zen to Done, Leo Babauta, has a neat blog where he posts articles on time management, lifestyle issues. Often thought provoking and always of use in some way, this blog is one of my first visits in the morning.
Penny Caldwell’s blog touches on anything and everything cottage related. Penny is editor of Cottage Life magazine and her posts are often personal commentaries on life at her own cottage, and make great reading.
Cottage Daily is written by Julie Nelson, a BC based author and she posts on every aspect of cottage living. Her own experiences of cottage life in BC, Ontario, and at her brother’s cottage in Saskatchewan bring a very personal touch to her cottage knowledge.
Chris Garrett on New Media brings me up to date with anything new in the internet marketing field. His posts often include useful links to other blogs or ebooks - I’ll be touching on this later this week.
Copy Blogger has some great tools for those of you looking for hints and tips on good writing for your vacation rental web
site or blog. I’ll be covering more of what Brian Clark has to offer in a post later this week.
Topics: Great Cottage Links, Useful Resources, Marketing |
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