Aside from listing your property on a free or low-cost vacation rental directory such as www.free-rentals.com, the key to marketing your vacation rental property can be summarized as follows:

1) Use the signiture of your email to market your rental in every email you send. At the bottom of each message of your email, contain a short blurb in the signature regarding the property, a website showing it, and email contact and phone number. Regardless of if you use this email to answer booking inquiries or to socialize or for any other purpose, continually get out this free advertisement to each person you email. You never know, many email’s are forwarded to others, and it helps people keep track of where/how they can contact you.

2) Post on Craigslist.org, Kijiji.com, Oodle.com, etc.. There are many free advertisement websites allowing you to post for free. Take advantage of this often by having a canned pitch prepared with links to your website and canned images ready to be uploaded. Just post to these free advertisment websites once per month or so.

3) Throw an Open House party. Perhaps once a year or so, throw a homewelcoming party to friends and relatives, and get the word out that the place is available for short term holiday rental. Perhaps it’s best to throw these social gatherings everytime you visit the property for your own personal holiday. Have business cards stationed next to the food offering your rental, encourage guests to take several cards and keep them on hand should they find people in search of a rental.

4) Create a website for your vacation rental. Basically, if you own a vacation rental home, there is no reason why you shouldn’t also own a website that promotes that vacation home. You can have unlimited pictures, answer questions, post all of your availability calander info, your cancellation policies, terms and conditions, etc. When people email you asking for more information, it’s easiest to just point them to your website and let it do all the selling for you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 31st, 2008 at 3:26 pmand is filed under Advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.