I think this is a nice way to read all of these posts, and it saves you looking back through my site. Print out the guide and you’ve got a free book for the shelf!

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 you’ve joined though, how do you actually use it to generate bookings?

Most people try the direct approach first:  ‘my vacation rental is available on 15th December’. Where are the inquiries though? Why doesn’t it work?

The problem is that your customers may not be using Twitter,  so they’ll never get to see your direct Tweets. Even if they are on Twitter, do they use it to look for your vacation rental?

Maybe.

Maybe there’s a small slice of people who search for info about your area. You might be able to pick up some interest that way, but may find that they are just looking for tourist info.

The best approach is to use something a little less direct, much like other forms of marketing. Here’s the plan:

Phase 1: Seek out relevant travel writers and tourist info websites with Twitter accounts – if they are savvy Twitterers they’ve probably published their address on their website or blog, so you can easily follow them. If not try the Twitter search facility (it works).

Phase 2: By following these people they should follow you in return and start paying attention to your work. It’s a pleasant surprise to see how many people follow you back, and it’s not all from auto-follow tools. If you are creating interesting and relevant Tweets then they may pay enough interest to retweet you, reply in public, or even write a blog post or article about you. If you’re feeling really brave, ask them!

Phase 3: This will increase your profile a little bit. If you do this enough you’ll start getting more attention. This is the best kind of attention – when other people start talking about you (and your wonderful vacation place of course)

These are just small steps, and don’t expect success overnight. The key is to start on the right path and take a long term approach.

PS. You can follow me @DrRichard42

There’s a brand new Squeeze Guide available for vacation rental website owners. This builds on my original free guide, Squeeze More Results From Your Website, but adds a lot more focus on some of the issues that make vacation rental websites unique.

Speaking from experience, you might find:

- SEO is tough because you’re competing in a high competition market

- visual style is very important as people often choose a vacation rental based on the pictures

- it’s a true online business where conversions = bookings = money!

You can download the Squeeze Your Vacation Rental for free – just click on the orange!

A couple of people took this the wrong way and said it was inappropriate to poke fun at guests.

That wasn’t the point. Here’s my view:

1. Adding a blog to your vacation rental website is a great way to build interest and personality (and pages) to your website and online presence. You can blog about the area, about tourist attractions, special offers, or updates to your property. Oh, and you could also tell the story about the guest who complained that your Florida place was too hot in the summer.

2. Feel free to be funny anywhere you like on your website. People remember when they laugh. Humor helps to break down barriers and shows you are a real human. Keep it clean and don’t overstep the mark though. If you are not naturally funny, this might be a risky approach.

So which place would you rent? The one with a website with a few pictures and some descriptions of the rooms? Or the one which also had the author’s blog which told you all about the area and some of the great experiences they’d had working with guests?

I know which one I would choose!

If you’re thinking of looking into long tail searches (eg vacation rentals) for your site, where do you go to find them? These are the odd combinations of keywords that Googlers look for such as “vacation rental with extra barbeque”. They give you insight into what people are looking for.

There are some great resources for this, such as the free version of Wordtracker or Google Suggest. Just type in your basic keyword (vacation rentals here) and you’ll get a list of combinations. The many long combinations at the end are the long tail.

The problem with this idea is that you get a public list. It’s also a list of general searches, rather than something specific to your site.

It’s better to look at your own website visitors. What combinations are they looking for? Your analytics tool such as Google Analytics will tell you what keywords brought people to your site. That’s the big difference

This information is incredibly valuable and you can use it to find out what makes your site unique. I’ll bet there are some combinations in there that you never expected!!

Have you heard of the long tail? It’s the wacky combinations of words that people search for, such as ‘vacation rental with easy walk to beach’, or ‘vacation rental with extra kitchen equipment’. Although not many people type in these terms individually, the combination of all of these different searches adds up to a lot of Google searches per day.

The key here is that these searches provide you with clues on what people are REALLY looking for and if you can act on these clues then you can find ways to make your vacation rental stand out from the crowd.

OK, so I’m not expecting you to relocate your property to the beach! There will be other clues that you can act on. Maybe people are looking for baby monitors, or quality bedding, or room to park their boat off the road. It’s amazing what you find out once you start looking.

So here’s a question: How do you find out what people are searching for?

Your contact page is the place where your visitors get the chance to interact with you and leave some personal info – maybe to request availability on a vacation rental home, sign up for a newsletter, or ask you a question.

Your contact form is a key part of your website since it allows you to meet your visitors. For many websites it’s the most important page since it aligns with your business or website goal. It’s the reason why your website is up there.

So here are some questions:

• How complex is your contact page?
• Is it easy to see what’s it’s there for (i.e. to get people to contact you), or
• Is it stuffed full of interesting, but irrelevant content?

Contact forms often get filled up with content. The reasons are simple. It’s partly because designers want to help their visitors: why not add some more information that they can read while they are on the page? It’s also because your contact page often ends up with a higher PageRank than other pages, so savvy SEO experts try to take advantage of this by filling up the page with some more target keywords.

My advice: don’t do it. Your contact form is there for one purpose: to get your visitors to contact you. Any distractions on the page can lead them off into all sorts of dangerous extra browsing. You need to catch their attention and get their details while they are on the page.

So, take a good look at your contact page. Is it 100% obvious what it’s there for? Are you sure there aren’t any other distractions? Check your site stats – do you get a high percentage of exits? You might be missing something.

This is a great example of ‘keep it simple’.

Once you’ve got their details, by all means offer them some more information. After all, you’ve got them over the final hurdle now!!

Whether it’s Florida, Italy, Las Vegas or Kauai, one way to think about this is to imagine what you would want from a site if you were searching for somewhere to stay. I would look for:

• Great pictures
• Guest testimonials
• Availability information
• Information about the location
• An easy way to contact the owner

…and finally…

• Something unique that makes it stand out above the other dozen sites that I’ve already looked at.

Of course you need all the usual boring stuff like info on the rooms, price, location, etc, etc. You’d also want it to look professional but friendly. But these things don’t get you noticed and probably won’t convince your visitors to click the ‘contact me’ button.

How does your vacation rental website look?

If you have a business with a guestbook (vacation rental, restaurant, tourist attraction) then this can be a great source for customer feedback. Other customers will read the guestbook and hopefully see all the positive comments from your satisfied previous customers.

If your guestbook is, well, a book, then the problem is that the only people who can read this are those who are already physically there. Those people are probably already your customers (or are likely to be very soon).

You can improve on this by putting a guestbook on your website. This makes those positive comments visible by anyone in the world who has an internet connection.

The problem with this is that your guestbook is probably written by you. Your customers might provide the original comments but you’ve probably entered them yourself. Did you make any changes? Maybe you left out some of the less positive ones. Even if you didn’t, there’s always a slight suspicion that this can take place.

If you have a blog then you can open it up and allow your readers to add comments to your posts. Why not create a post called “Guestbook” and invite your customers to start commenting. It’s a great way to get real feedback and your website visitors will appreciate your honesty and openness.

Does this make you feel slightly nervous? Are you worried that negative comments might appear in your guestbook?

Well, if your customers are complaining, why is this? Is there a problem with your product or your service? If so, you’d better get this fixed anyway. Stop reading this right now and go fix it!!

Assuming you don’t have a defective product, the best way here is to respond positively to the complaint. If your customer stayed in your vacation rental and there were no saucepans, tell them how you supplied some new ones immediately. If your restaurant customer’s food was served cold, apologize and say you reheated it immediately (joke). In general, customers understand that problems occur occasionally, and they will like you if they know that you correct problems for them.

So what do you think? Why don’t you throw away the old book and start connecting to your customers via the blogosphere? Positive comments only please!

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