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After buying your vacation rental, its very common for someone to convince you to part with a significant amount of money so you can rent your villa direct to the masses that are out there on the internet. Good idea - in theory.... I say in theory because its a good idea - you can do what everyone else tries to do and that is, to sell direct, avoiding agencies and comissions. Unfortunately that's what everyone else is trying to do! In fact, if you search on Google for 'Florida Vacation Rental' you'll find that Google estimates there are some 13.2 million pages with which you are competing! So how are you going to get noticed?? Some people spend a lot of time and effort on getting noticed! A page one ranking on one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo or MSN) is possible - someone has to be at the top. However, its not an easy, cheap or quick process. In fact you could and should budget for several thousand dollars of expenditure to get onto page one and then several more thousand per year to stay there. OK - but that's yet another expense! I already spend thousands on my rental every year hoping to get some renters in to help me support this drain on my resources. Well, that's true but you have to get noticed - its called marketing and the myth is that the internet is 'free marketing'. It isnt. In fact, whether you create a web site yourself or pay someone to do it, the chances are that you'll get very little traffic of any value for quite a long time unless you promote it. If you can wait for people to find you on the internet, then get a web site. If you can't, consider joining us. Our sister site is well placed for a number of search terms and gets good traffic. To get an idea of the traffic that the major sites get, take a look at their stats on Alexa (owned by Amazon.com). Here are the figures for the tope five sites for the search term Florida vacation rentals on Google:
The lower the Traffic Rank - the higher the traffic to the site. So why is the #3 site actually getting much more traffic that all the others?? The answer is simple, That site - our Europe-focussed site is generating traffic from other sources such as personal referral, press advertising and our network of offices on the high street. So although it might seem like a good idea to have your own web site, its a far better idea to advertise with an organisation like ours. One that has a rounded program to actively promote your vacation rental so you can reap the rewards. Check out our vacation rental marketing program. |
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