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 probably true, but what you want is results, and in this business that means visitors and bookings.

Here are nine reasons why your own site design will get you something a little better…

1. There’s too much competition so you need to do everything you can to improve your visibility on the internet. You simply can’t afford to miss out on your own site.

2. You can show your unique difference. Your property is uniquely different, right? You can use your site to highlight this, rather than fitting in with a bunch of other listings.

3. You’ll be more credible as a true online business with a brand, since you can choose your own logo, style and tagline.

4. Site tracking and analytics are way better. Actually they are probably non-existent on the free sites. Analytics allows you to make wise choices based on where your visitors come from, what they are looking for, and what leads them to a conversion.

5. Build as many pages as you want. Content is free (kind of) and there’s no restriction to a single page advert.

6. You get your own domain name. Good for branding (see above) plus you get to build your own Page Rank rather than contributing to someone else’s.

7. Choose your own conversion – whether it’s a contact form, advertising, newsletters, or a free brochure. You’re not restricted to a single form, and you’re free to build any combination of these to suit your website goals.

8. It’s stickier (I borrowed that term). In other words, you can layer more pages of useful information on your readers and take longer to convince them that you have a great place and offer unparalleled customer service. Compare this to a single page listing on a shared site where your competitors are just one click away…

9. Change your mind any time. Some listings sites only allow infrequent updates or may charge when you want to make a change. With your own site you can make adjustments and improvements any time.

One final thing. If you do decide to design your own vacation rental website, please don’t just buy a clone (unless you want to look like everyone else of course!)

Email marketing is a great way to keep the conversation flowing 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 friend with a vacation home the other day. She said that she thought her email newsletters were doing well because she doesn’t get many unsubscribers (in other words, people opting-out from her email list).

I thought that was an interesting point of view.

Maybe you’ve been in this situation too. If your readers aren’t opting out from your list, you must be doing well, right? I’m not so sure…

Does this really mean that the people on your email list like your stuff? Does it mean that they are reading it? Enough to keep in contact with you and maybe book your place again?

Maybe they ignore your messages and don’t have the motivation to unsubscribe

You probably subscribe to a few lists yourself. You know the ones – they fill up your inbox and you may get around to reading them once in a while. You might even decide sometimes to clear things out a bit and to unsubscribe from a few of the lists. Do you ever get around to this? Or, are you buried in email?

This is probably a familiar story for many of your contacts.

Here are a few things to think about:

• Is it easy to unsubscribe?
• Are your message titles interesting enough for people to open them?
• Are your messages interesting enough for people to look forward to them and open them?

So let’s talk about some better ways to measure your list. You should definitely find a way to measure it – otherwise how do you know if it’s working?

Most email marketing systems (e.g. AWeber, profollow, constant contact) allow you to measure your delivery rate. How many times have your messages been delivered? This is a good first step.

It’s even better if you can measure the open rate. Which messages are being opened (and therefore read) by your contacts? Which ones have a low open rate? Why don’t people open them? Maybe the titles don’t look interesting or relevant to the group of people who signed up to your list. Can you improve these?

It’s even better than this if you’re measuring a conversion event, such as clicking on a link, or signups to another list, or even bookings (in other words, sales!) This allows you to measure whether subscribers are actually reading your messages all the way through to your links.

Should you measure your unsubscribe rate? Certainly. If it starts to go up then this means you may not be providing something valuable for your readers. Maybe you’re sending out too many messages. You should check to see if readers are unsubscribing after a certain message in your queue. If this message causes problems, take a good look at it and think about why you might be losing readers at this point.

Just make sure that the unsubscribe rate isn’t the only metric that you use.