The LiveRez.com platform can do a lot in one click. When someone books a property on one of our partners’ websites, the LiveRez.com platform kicks into high gear and automatically begins a number of tasks, saving our partners valuable time.

When a guest books a property through a LiveRez-powered website, our platform kicks into high gear and automates a number of tasks to save our partners time and money.

Here’s a quick breakdown of typically what goes on behind the scenes when a guest books online with LiveRez.com:

• The system creates a cleaning form and e-mails the cleaner assigned to the booked unit.
• If the guest pays with a credit card, the payment is automatically processed through our credit card processing integration.
• A travel insurance policy is automatically written, should the guest opt for travel protection.
• The system sends an e-mail to the guest confirming the reservation.
• Once the reservation is made, the dates of the stay are automatically blocked off of the reservation calendar, assuring the unit is never double booked.
• Finally, for those taking advantage of our QuickBooks integration, the system creates an invoice in QuickBooks.

Automation, like this, is just one of the many features LiveRez.com offers to simplify the lives of its property manager partners. We understand that saving our partners time also means saving them money.

To learn more about how LiveRez.com can help your company, visit our website, LiveRez.com, or follow us on Facebook or Twitter. And, check back here for more LiveRez.com news.

HomeAway Offers New Reservation System is not exactly news to those of us who follow the vacation rental industry closely.  But the press announcement is out today and it seems good time to pontificate on what this means.

The Good:
Attention, publicity, and more recognition of our industry.  This enables a large portion of vacation home inventory to potentially be booked online.  This may spur interest in vacation homes across all kinds of travelers.  HomeAway will continue to be a good sales & marketing channel for vacation managers.

The Bad:
Competition - one of the advantages the vacation manager enjoys over the 'rent by owner' has been the ability to offer an online transaction.  A question comes to mind (let me know if you have the answer) - as a vacation manager, how do I synchronize a calendar with HomeAway to allow me to take bookings?  Sounds like you have to use the HomeAway reservation system to be part of theonline bookings on HomeAway.

The Ugly:
Lots of individual, lots of individual home, lots of one-on-one transactions, lots of $$'s, ............ this could create an environment with more fraudulent activity and undermine the credibility and trust we are trying to build into the vacation home rental industry.  Especially as it pertains to online transactions.

A comparison also comes to mind.  A spent several years working fro an eCommerce solution named Infopia.  Infopia provide small online retailers an eCommerce engine that allowed them to sell via their own website and via eBay.  Starting see where I am going?  Vacation managers have a brand (a valuable sign of quality & trust) on their own website, but no identity on directories, such as HomeAway.  Just like online retailers have an online store with a brand, but are just another supplier for an 'I got it on eBay' - even with branding efforts.

Which of these online retailers were most successful ?  The retailers who saw eBay as a sales & marketing channel.

Which of these online retailers were least successful ?  The retailers who saw sales on eBay as their goal - they lost their brand, competed only on price, and could not build their own business.  They became completely dependent on eBay.

An interesting analogy I think.

Ralf
LiveRez

No vacation home rental sites in the Top 10! Got to change that. (back to the new years resolutions....let's make that happen)

On a more serious note, check out the traffic. Interesting downward or even trends on the various sites, except for facebook.com and wikipedia.com. Since all the traffic on wikipedia.comis probably people looking up 'stimulus package', 'depression', 'recession', and other uplifting economic terms, I want to focus on facebook.com.

Note the substantial increase. I have also see a substantial increase in activity on my personal Facebook page. I have had a Facebookpage for well over a year and until this summer, there was never much activity. In the fall, suddenly there were lots of friend requests, updated status (some of these updates really need not be shared), and I found myself searching for old acquaintances. I admit, I even started updating my status.

Why should you care? I think we should care about anything that is growing and capturing people's (potential guests) attention. Social media such as facebook can help us to reach our market and, maybe more importantly, to understand our market. What gets people's attention? What are the talking about? What do they have strong opinions on?

....and if you want, you can come visit me (Ralf VonSosen - only one there) and make me your friend on Facebook.

Ralf
LiveRez.com

 Targeting, segmenting, personalizing......whatever you want to call it, I am a huge fan and believe that much of online marketing success depends on the ability to do this well.  Following are 10 tips on how to look at the visitors to your website and how to target them with messages that will resonate wiht them.

Returning Visitors

Returning visitors already know the basics about your site. Help them learn more, have a richer experience, and convert faster by targeting a different experience after their first visits. For example, you might replace instructional or introductory language with more relevant content on a second visit based on what you want them to do next.

Frequent Converters

For frequent converters, give them targeted rewards – these visitors are the most valuable, and it pays to engage them more effectively.

Or, encourage infrequent purchasers to convert again by identifying them and then providing a more compelling offer.

Registered Users

Most sites devote a lot of real estate to user registration. If a visitor has already signed up, fill that valuable space with different content. A magazine site, for example, should remove the subscription sign-up content if an existing subscriber is visiting the site. If someone is already receiving your newsletter, use that sign-up space to promote something else.

User-Generated Content Providers

For visitors who contribute to reviews or discussions on your site, make it even easier and more rewarding to participate more. Highlight other opportunities to join your site’s community with layout changes or calls to action.

Weekenders

People behave differently depending on when they visit your site, so target campaigns based on day of week or time of day. If you have offers, promotions, or content that expire at certain times, targeting content based on time of day or day of week will give you an easy relevance win. Inform visitors of upcoming shipping cutoffs, show different content to lunchtime visitors, and try day of week offers to help drive conversion metrics.

Category Loyalists

Give your visitors what they are telling you they want. For the portion of your traffic that repeatedly visits the same category, make the favorite category even more prominent. Try changing navigation to put a visitor’s top category first in the list. Or deliver targeted calls to action and offers associated with the favorite category.

Searchers

Show returning visitors content related to their last site search. Or, make search functionality even more prominent for people who search frequently during their visits to your site.

Deciders

If someone provided job title as part of site registration or a request for information, focus your messaging based on that information. Create segments for different levels of responsibility to increase engagement and to identify decision makers or business owners. Speak to decision makers differently than decision influencers for greater relevance.

Locals

Even on the Internet, a visitor’s geographic location can make them likely to respond to different messages. Would you tell them something different if they were within a few miles of you?

Yahoos and Googlers

People who come from search engines may behave differently. They have used a keyword that you can use to align your solutions to their needs. For that matter, any traffic source may bring users with similar preferences. Use this knowledge to be more relevant to them.

 Ralf
LiveRez

Now this guys looks like he knows his SEO facts.

If you are like me, and most of the vacation home rental managers I talk to on a daily basis, you are always looking for an edge to get visitors to your website.  In the spirit of getting an edge, I ran across a great educational post about walking the fine line of kosher SEO tactics.  Beware the risks.

Dirty SEO tricks you should avoid by Rich Cherecwich

Getting reinstated in the search rankings takes time, and the search giant has a four-step process for getting back on track:

1. Determine what went wrong. In most cases, it's a Google webmaster guideline that has been violated.
2. Solve the problem.In the case of doorway pages related to domain buying, get rid of them. With link buying, it's a much harder and lengthier process. If you purchased links on a blog, you'll have to contact those bloggers, and they in turn will have to remove the links to your website.
3. File a reconsideration request.Within Google's webmaster tools, there are full instructions for a filing a reconsideration request. You'll want to explain what happened, notify them that it's fixed, and tell the search engine that you won't use that deceptive trick again. A team from Google then reviews the request and checks your website to make sure any violations have been cleaned up.
4. Stay away from the tricks."This is probably a given -- don't it again," Lasnik says.

Stay clean and say 'No' to bad SEO practices.  My advice. 

All the best.

Ralf
www.LiveRez.com

Today I had another one of those conversations I often have about online vacation rental solutions:

"Hi, this is Ralf"
"Hi, I need some help with getting online bookings.  I need to get SEO.  I need to get PPC.  I need to get more traffic to my site."
"Ok.  What do you know about the visitors to your site?  Where are they coming from?  What are the clicking on?  How many are booking?"
"I don't know.  I know I need more traffic"

This is when I take a long sigh, and start into my spiel about the importance of conversions.  Suddenly he says, "Well of course.  Kind of forgot about that equation."

The equation he is referring to is the "impressions turn into click-throughs, turn into site visitors, turn into bookings".  So it is as much about what you do with the visitors once they are on your site, as it is about how much traffic you generate to the site.  It is something that in the 'heat of the battle' is often forgotten because some of us are judged on characteristics such as number of visitors, or impressions.

So always remember, the key statistic is the number of bookings.  Work backwards from there and see how you can influence the numbers in the equation - whether conversion or audience.