Is Twitter the answer for those missing bookings for your vacation rental? Maybe, but you need to use the right approach. Now I’m not going to go on here about how you started using Twitter and immediately got sick of hearing about what people ate for breakfast. I’m assuming (hoping?) you’ve got over this stage already. People join Twitter because they’ve seen other people using it. It’s a great story and this is certainly true around vacation rental owners. Once... Read Full Story

There’s been a flurry of news and activity on the net about Facebook and URLs, but in case you’ve missed it or think you’ve missed the boat, read on. Facebook announced recently the option of registering a unique URL for your account. This gives you a unique and readable URL for your Facebook profile page, like this: http://www.facebook.com/drrichard …which is much nicer than the old version. If you are already a Facebook user, you can register yours now. You’ll... Read Full Story

Three words long, right? I read this on a forum the other day and this got me thinking. Are people really that confused about long tails when choosing their website keywords? OK, so what about ‘apple store locator’, or ‘bmw financial services’, or ‘american idol 2009′? They all have 3 words too, so are they long tail keywords? I’m [...] Read Full Story

It’s hard to find inspiration for your vacation rental website if you’re looking for new products for your customers or new stuff to show on your site. After all, you’ve only got your property to offer, right? Sometimes we miss the obvious stuff though. Instead of trying to dream up brand new products or topics to write about, try combining existing things or find ways to adapt or improve the stuff that you have already. In the business world it’s often the innovators ... Read Full Story

Website Stress Test just got even better. I’ve been busy recently adding a pile of useful new sections, expanding the existing tips and making the whole thing even more useful for your website. The updates are free if you already own a copy. The downloadable guide has a brand new revision and I’ve updated it so there’s now over a hundred pages of checks and tips that’ll help to beef up your website, get you more visitors and more conversions for your online business. E... Read Full Story

If you’re a vacation rental property owner and you want to get bookings for your site then it’s certainly wise to promote your place on the internet. But should you build your own website? Why bother to go to all the hassle of designing your own website, coding it, promoting it and supporting it? Surely it’s easier and quicker to advertise on one of the vacation rental sites, or even to use one of the free listing services such as Google Base or Craig’s list? This is p... Read Full Story

Website Stress Test by Dr Richard Powerful Techniques to Check and Improve Your Website Performance Website Stress Test is a downloadable guide which shows you whether your site has the vital components it needs to be successful on the internet. Spend a couple of hours running through these simple checks and you will get the best picture possible of how your site is doing for SEO, traffic, content, keywords, visitors and conversions. Each of the checks is carefully described in an accessible,... Read Full Story

So What’s So Special About Vacation Rental Website Design? Why write a whole section about it? Isn’t it just a case of building a website and adding some photos of your property? Not really. There are some special things about vacation rental websites that make them different to other websites… You’re selling something valuable. OK, there are lots of websites out there that sell stuff, but not so many where individuals sell something that’s quite so valuable. You... Read Full Story

How do you measure success in your email marketing campaign for your vacation rental website? Do you measure it with your unsubscribe rate? If you do, you may not be as successful as you think you are. In fact, you may be wasting time writing messages that your renters aren’t reading! Email marketing is a great way to keep the conversation slowing with your list of contacts. You can offer something useful to encourage people to sign up, just like @craigmcginty does. I was talking to a f... Read Full Story

I’ve been thinking about SEO for vacation rentals again. I know it’s a popular method for promoting your place, because it’s free, easy to do and pretty successful. Or is it? In case you haven’t heard, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a technique for making your site appear prominently on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc). Let’s start with the free bit. Tweaking the tags and the pages and collecting links are great free things you can d... Read Full Story