Top 6 Ways to Advertise your Self Catering Holiday Home Online

When you own a self catering holiday home, it is important that you give it enough exposure in all the right places in order to receive lots of enquiries and bookings.

With a worldwide audience of literally billions of people in hundreds of countries, the internet has now become the de facto when advertising anything from your second hand guitar to your holiday home. With the internet, the barriers presented by more conventional style advertising such as newspapers and magazines have been torn down, with advertisers now having the ability to advertise to a worldwide audience via the internet.

There are many places that you can advertise your holiday home online including the following:-

Holiday rental listing sites

There are many Holiday rental listing sites on the internet that enable you to advertise your self catering accommodation for a small yearly fee or even for free. Most provide you with the facility to upload around 10 photo's of your property, to give a good description of your property, including location, local events, how to get there, testimonials, rates and an availability calendar.

The many advantages of the holiday rental listing site is that it is easy to set up your listing in a matter of minutes, have the ability to change your ads photo's and text 24 hours a day, control your own availability calendar and keep track of how many enquiries and bookings you have had. Most sites have an email form whereby enquirers can contact you direct meaning that there is no middleman involved, such as a rental agent.

Most owners find that advertising their self catering property on a number of paid sites and as many free ones as possible, helps to give their property plenty of coverage.

Blogs

Web logs or Blogs as they are more commonly referred to, is a content management system that enables you to add postings to your site and have them listed chronologically and placed into certain categories. They are mainly used as an online diary but more and more people are using them to advertise their own private holiday rentals, talking about their holiday home, the local area, travel news and other relevant subjects.

Blogs are very easy to set up. If you have your own private website with a hosting account you may like to check your control panel for your site as a lot of hosting companies do a one click install where you can install blog software such as Wordpress to your website and be up and running in minutes.

Another great place to start a new blog is by using Googles blogger.com. You can be blogging in minutes and the service is totally free.

The most important part of using a blog effectively is to provide your viewers with lots of original interesting content so that you become an authority on your holiday rentals area. So, say you owned a self catering holiday home in Normandy, you could blog regularly about local news in Normandy, restaurants, places of interest or special deals on offer for your holiday rental.

Don't forget to add your blog to as many blog directories as you can to give it lots of exposure.

Personal websites

Another relatively cheap way of getting your self catering property even more exposure is to sign up a hosting account and domain name and design a simple website advertising your property. You can then submit your site to hundreds of web directories on the internet, helping to improve your rankings and generally putting it in front of even more prospective holiday home renters.

Forums

Internet forums can be found all over the internet and can provide you with the opportunity of advertising your holiday home. Find a forum on a subject or topic that interests you and get chatting and answer as many questions as possible. You will also need to update your profile details which gives you the opportunity of advertising your holiday rentals website or the site that lists it within your profile.

Free classifieds

There are many free classified websites on the internet, just Google for "free classifieds" and you will find many just waiting to be explored. Setting up a classified ad for your self catering holiday rental can be done in minutes and is another great way to get even more enquiries and bookings. You can even mention your web or blog address if you have one, so that you can provide viewers with even more information and photo's.

WOM

The forgotten art of Word of Mouth is something that is not used enough. It is an extremely effective form of advertising and is totally free. One of the benefits of word of mouth is that it is normally done between friends or family meaning that there is obviously a lot of trust involved in the recommendation. Word of mouth alone could bag you a few more rental bookings every year. So go on, tell the world about your rental property!

This is just 6 of the best ways that you can advertise your self catering holiday home. If you put these into practice you shouldn't have too much trouble filling that availability calendar.