Here is an objection we get often concerning why owners of individual websites that promote their vacation rental units will not link to the free-rentals.com website…. “I will not link to a site (such as Free-Rentals.com) that offers hundreds of competitors for a potential guest to view”.

First, for some background… When you sign up your vacation rental property listing on Free-Rentals.com, we offer you the chance to list a link pointing back to your own personal website, which further promotes your vacation rental.

It is important to note, when you post your vacation rental ad on Free-Rentals.com, you post it free, we do not try charging you for your rental listing ad. Furthermore, we give you a field where you can post a link in your ad, back to your personal website, and again, we do NOT try charging you for doing so. We also do NOT require you to link back to us in exchange for us linking to you.
Let me make this very clear: You can post your vacation rental ad on Free-rentals.com for free. We will not try to charge you for it. And your ad can include a link back to your personal website, again for free, we do not try to charge you for it. Nor do we require a donation, nor do we require you to link back to us from your personal website.
 
All we do, is kindly request you to *consider* linking back to us, if we link to you. There is no requirement, it’s just a request…. AND, we offer incentive, and benefit to those who do link back to us, by giving them points. You can read elsewhere how points benefit those members, but that is not the purpose of this post.
 
The purpose of this post is to diffuse the objection of… “why would I link to your vacation rental directory, when you show all my competition?”.
 
The main reason WHY you would link to us, even though we display your competition, is because it earns you 1000 points. And the more points you have, the higher up your listing appears, and the more traffic you will get, the more prospects you will get viewing your holiday rental.
 
Now, we do not have exact numbers on this, but for sake of discussion…
 
Assume Person-A with Vacation Rental Property A has a link on his website back to Free-Rentals.com, and therefore has 1100 points. Perhaps he gets 100 people viewing his listing each month.
 
On the other hand, person B with Vacation Rental Property B has only 50 points, because while we link to his website, his website does not link back to Free-Rentals.com. So therefore, his listing is at the back of our directory, and he only gets perhaps 10 people viewing his listing each month.

In this scenario, those who link back to Free-Rentals.com will get 90 more visitors per month than those who do not. 
 
The question is…. at what price does it cost person A? And is it worth the price?

We can not answer this question, because it vary’s for each vacation rental owner with their own website. We will address this topic in more detail once we get some concrete datapoints established on it.
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 4:09 amand is filed under Customer Support, FAQ. 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.