Even though you have a vacation rental website, creating a blog can be a good idea to plug the gaps and reach out to travelers who may not know about your website. Actually by providing search engines with the fuel they love, that is, original, regular and fresh content, a blog can actually complement your website or your vacation rental listing because it’s one of the best ways to help you add more indexed pages to your vacation rental website, boost search engine traffic, and therefore, generate more inquiries from travelers. Today many vacation home owners have used blogging as a powerful inbound marketing tool and have succeeded immensely.
Still not sure? Here are some benefits which will definitely help you to make up your mind:
FREE TO USE: You need not spend a single penny to get yourself a blog for your vacation home. Plus, you don’t need to a techie to manage it. Just chose one of the many platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Live Journal, Weblog, etc. and get going! You can even have a url of your choice.
INFORMAL: The best benefit I find about using a blog to promote my vacation rental is that I can be informal about what I will write or post in my blog. It may be an event taking place in my locality, a cute image of my pet sleeping on the lawn or a couple of pics I clicked when the property was being given a new coat of paint. Ideally there are things you will never put or should not put up in your website or listing.
MORE INFORMATION: Although vacation rental websites give you a lot of options to provide a whole lot of information about your property, still you might want to give more to your prospective renters. And a blog can be a good option to provide extra information about your property. You can create a calendar of events/ festivals taking place in your locality, or write about the places the guest can visit if he stays in your property, etc.
DIVERT TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE: The best benefit about managing a blog is that you can easily divert traffic from it to your website. Because of the nature of the platform that offers you to create a blog, you need to do very little on the SEO part. Usually you need to invest quite some time and money to ensure that your vacation rental website is highly ranked on search engines. But with a blog, if you post fresh and original content regularly, it can reach out to a broader spectrum of people and by providing links of your listing or website, you can easily divert this traffic from your blog to your website or listing very easily.
FEATURE IN GOOGLE BLOG SEARCH: Google has a specialized service which is used to search blogs just like it has for images. So why lose out on this? Because blog posts are indexed faster than webpages (taking just hours to index against weeks taken in case of indexing webpages), many people look here for the latest. So by updating your blog on a regular basis, you actually stand to showcase your property to a huge audience.
That brings us to the question of what you should post in your blog. I would say, because it is an informal way of communication with your prospective guest, you can post anything and everything that give additional information on your property. Here are some things you can do:
- Post pictures and write about recent changes to your rental property.
- Attract visitors interested in the local events near your vacation rental. Write about upcoming events to add more interest in your location. Have you attended a recent event near your property? Write about it and about what you enjoyed at such events. And if you have images, even better! Post them too. Also post related articles or news information on such events from the web.
- Upload videos of your property. However make sure that they are not very amateurish.
- Add lots of information on the locality, links and travel resources. Write extensively about the area with regard to your property.
- Write about the different hues of the seasons – how your property and the surroundings look during the spring, winters and monsoons. Images here can really attract travelers to rent your property.
- Write about what makes your property unique, its history and some interesting facts about it.
- Post a poll question asking readers to rate your property based on the images you have posted. This will also help you to know what people think of your vacation home. Ask your readers questions. This is a great way to get your readers involved with your blog and create connections. Not to mention that you can get valuable feedback to your questions!
- Create a owner profile page. Travelers definitely love to know who the owners are before they rent a property. But be careful not to give away too much personal information.
I hope you are now convinced that a vacation rental blog can work wonders for you! So go ahead and create your blog today. Happy blogging!!
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