Vacation Rental Marketing I’ve written several times about how important it is to keep your vacation rental site refreshed and up to date, and to make it ‘sticky’ – as in encouraging people to stick around. One of the best ways of doing that is to install a blog on your site, so I tweeted a few days ago asking for owners who blog to send me the URLs so we can focus on how owners use them. I was delighted to get a response from Heather Chapman at Beech Mountain Bliss, a condo on Beech Moutain in North Carolina as her blog is an excellent example of how to use content marketing effectively. The blog is simply presented on the Blogger platform which has a number of disadvantages over the range of options available on WordPress but, aside from that, it looks bright and easy to read. I liked the range of content that covers activities, attractions, events, restaurants and places to shop as well as a lot of other information on the area. It’s informative, has short posts that deliver just the right amount of detail, and plenty of links to help people find what they need to plan a vacation in the area. There’s a lot of SEO advantages is posting to a blog regularly and these post hang about for a long time. Let’s say I was looking for information on the Emerald Outback Trail System – putting this long tailed key word into Google pulled up 752,000 results and this one was at number 6 on Page 1. The post was written in March 2011 but still appears prominently for anyone searching for that term. Now, maybe I want to use the trail system but hadn’t really thought much about accommodation in the area, but linking to the blog post takes me to a page with a photo of the condo immediately to the right of the post. Mmmmmm…..now that looks nice – perhaps I should plan a couple of days on the trails… Another example was a coffee shop called Vivo in Banner Elk, NC. I used the Blog filter to Google “ Vivo Banner Elk” and Heather’s post on Vivo came up at number one: This is how people surf around the web and Heather has created the opportunity for people to find her condo regardless of whether they are searching for accommodation or for activities, attractions and events in the area. I do have reservations about the Beech Mountain Bliss web site and think there is a lot of room for improvement there, but this is about the blog, and it’s excellent. I’m looking for more examples of blogs and would be interested to know how they work for you and your vacation rental.
