I’m wondering if you are able to share your other channels though maybe Airbnb will block your response.
This forum is not controlled by Airbnb.
I am from Seattle…home of Amazon? I used to work for Amazon when stock was $23/share (too bad I sold it at $29). I saw Jeff Bezos talk. He made Amazon what it is today by always letting the customer be right at first (I was a CS rep). If people called up and said their packages were stolen, he replaced them.Naturally, scammers got wind of this and would constantly order stuff and claim it had been stolen. So what? He replaced them. He provided excellent customer service. He wasn’t haggling over every penny because he knew the good reviews would make people use his service. Their company was in the red for YEARS and YEARS. He only hired the best and the brightest people he could lay hands on…I had never been through such a stringent job interview requiring 5 references in my life up to that point. It was a competitive, merit-based culture and he exhorted everyone working there to treat his business like it was their own family business. So, in running an Airbnb, like any business, it is all about how hard you are willing to work for results.
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Now this is something I hadn’t seen suggested before!
How does one promote their listing away from AirBnb? I have looked into doing that, but I’m not a techie and haven’t found my way to that.
Thx for sharing.
There are lots of teckie ways with social media but away from the internet, there’s still plenty you can do. I’ve had success with contacting local event/conference organisers to let them know about our rental. If you’re in an area where people go to work, then contact local companies.
I mostly email them and find that they are grateful to know about good, reasonably priced accommodation in the area. There might be other organisations locally that would be interested too. Anything from art fair organisers to wedding planners. It’s a good idea to have a good think about why people might be visiting your area and contact anyone who might be expecting people from out of town.
It’s a good idea to email them initially and follow up with a phone call.
When I had my traditional B & B it wasn’t in a tourist area at all but nearby was a) a specialist hospital and b) a training centre. Most of my guests came from those two sources.
You can also make some flyers or business cards and make sure that they are on noticeboards in public places. You can make flyers on your computer and have them photocopied. Often local people have friends and family coming into town and are looking for accommodation for them. Business cards aren’t expensive and online you can get short runs of only twenty or so, so there’s no huge outlay.
Bear in mind too real estate agents as they sometimes have people wanting accommodation in the are for a few days while they are looking at houses or for longer if there’s a gap between selling their home and closing on the new one.
It might sound crazy but I also get referrals from a company that does termite tenting. When a place is tented, the residents have to move out and the company recommends our rental. A company who rents our watersports stuff nearby also sends people from time to time. (I don’t pay them or give them commission! Although a bottle of their favourite tipple occasionally is a good idea 
) You can either contact strangers or think if anyone you know is in a position to recommend your rental
It’s a great result if you can get any of these people round to see your place. Have coffee (and cake!) ready, make friends with them and explain why your place is so fabulous for their contacts.
Cards are also a good idea to give to your guests when they are leaving, as they can pass them on to friends.
Then, there are the online ways too!
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I have an instagram account for my airbnbs and note it in the listing. I’ve actually had people book mentioning that they want to go to some of the places on the account. It is a really easy thing for me to manage and I’ve seen a great return on it. I also had business cards made up through Moo cards. I have 4 different style cards, all pictures of the area that I took, and hand them out to guests at check out or if I meet some cool people while I am on vacation. I’m in Hawaii and am still getting bookings, American and otherwise, so I wouldn’t blame the economy. Hawaii is still America and we use the same dollar.
I saw a huge increase in bookings by changing my pictures around. I also repainted and revamped one of the units a bit and since then bookings really picked up. I do have to say that more people are opting for the individual space instead of shared.
Also, network a bit. Put yourself out and lowering your price isn’t a bad thing. Get competitive. The more bookings you accept, the higher you are in the airbnb shuffle. They learn your pattern.
Look at what other people are offering in your area and either you 1) make the space better 2) make it cheaper.
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Totally agree with @jaquo about the events. I had a similar idea (though not as broad - going to start researching what else is nearby now!) as we’re near a big concert venue, so have started trawling Facebook event pages for upcoming gigs to see if anyone is coming from out of town and looking for accommodation, and leaving them a comment or sending a PM when I find them.
I think the key, though, is to have your own website to refer people to, then you can take the bookings directly. And @CarolinaFran, as for not being techie - neither am I - but its really not difficult to do with the modern website builders available out there. It gets you visibility, and you won’t have to pay the air booking fees either. This could be even more relevant if you’re contacting with the professionals who organize the events/conferences because sending an Airbnb link to them doesn’t look half as professional as your own website does (IMO).
Business cards are also so cheap with sites like vistaprint (I think ours were less than $10), so definitely have some of those for your guests to take away. Also, thinking back to your own website, it’s much easier to put your domain on a business card than your air listing with all those numbers on the URL!
I still haven’t got round to setting up Instagram for our rental (on the to do list for 2017!) but like @Brittany_Anderson says, it is such a good way to get guests excited about your place - especially if there are some nice sights nearby to take pics of. Also, I really like your idea of putting photos of the area on your business card … might have to make some new ones this year myself! 
As for online ways to boost visibility once you have a website, there is a lot you can do with SEO or even content, like starting a blog to get traffic to your site. I bookmarked this blog post the other day which has tons of ideas for this, so now working on my own list of posts I can write easily and pretty quickly just based on the area we’re in and stuff I already know about, so like top 5 steakhouses, best beaches, etc. Then when people search in Google for those terms, hopefully our blog will show up, then users will navigate around and realize we’ve got accommodation there, too!
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Great post! I’ve found that often people are researching an area before they decide where to stay. Sometimes it might be that they want to come to South Florida to get away from the weather in their home town but aren’t sure if they should choose Fort Lauderdale or Miami, for instance.
Writing closely focused articles can really help.
An article about the fact that it’s okay for them to take their dog onto your local beach (as an example) might sway them. Then of course, if there’s a link to your rental on the page they’ve killed two birds with one stone - decided exactly which location they want and found the perfect accommodation.
I wrote an article about writing articles to promote your listing and if any host here who doesn’t have a site would like to contribute articles, you’re more than welcome.
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Anecdote here.
This morning, in response to someone’s post, I took a look at my stats and then took a look at my listing to see how many people had saved my listing to their wish list. I like that number a lot. My conversion rate has gone up, but in the past weak-ish, the number of views has gone way down.
I also noted that I had two characters left to use in my listing title. On a whim, I changed my listing title from:
Private Floor with your own Bath, View & Parking
to
Private 3 Room Suite– bedroom, den, bath & parking
The fact that you get three private rooms is one of the things that makes my listing special and worth a bit more money and it was not a feature that was prominent.
Just checked again, and I am now on 323 wish lists! Is there anything in this anecdote that helps anyone else? I have no idea. My only take away is, keep tweaking.
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How many wish lists were in you on before the change?
266 to 323
2020202020
Rethink your entire listing. Go back and rewrite the listing, come up w more descriptive words. Take more photos and make sure to add an alluring blurb on each photo.take the best photo you can for your lead photo. Stage it , all my photos I took w my Iphone. It took me a long time to stage,I didnt think the airbnb photog would take the time to do that.Then use some aps like Font Candy ,photo editor,spaceeffect etc. You can ad layers of dreamy lighting and give photos depth. I rewrote my ad and picked a new lead photo and added special lighting with the photo aps and my views went from 10 a day to 30 overnight.Im averaging 3 hearts a day too. Changing it up really does work.
Ok …I’m on over 800 views and over 700 favourites. I really don’t know if it means anything.
It baffled me for a minute. 
I don’t think it means anything at all. Stars, hearts, it’s like a kid’s game. I never check stats or hearts or anything like that (unless some post here prompts me) because the only important statistic is BOOKINGS!
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Hallelooo! Can I get an amen up in here…
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Hi @KKC,
It sounds like you put a lot of working into your listing, though perhaps that’s necessary to stay on top. What is your average length of bookings? And do you get many bookings far in advance? You’ve probably answered this somewhere, but I don’t recall.
My typical booking is one night. I had one guy here on and off for 3 weeks for a job but that is unusual. I don’t get many bookings in advance. Right now I’ve got this:
The bookings for Feb and April have just come in the last week.[quote=“faheem, post:35, topic:10563”]
It sounds like you put a lot of working
[/quote]
It doesn’t feel like work to me. I sit in front of my computer hours each day and so checking my listing, tweaking it, checking my competition, changing my pictures…none of those things is a burden at all. It’s almost fun and as I think Sandy toes said, some of it is the thrill of hooking the guest and knowing I “won” the reservation.
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Wow, that sounds quite labor-intensive. I spent crazy amounts of time doing correspondence, and my average booking length is definitely longer than one day, though not much longer. Perhaps somewhere between two and three days.
Well, as long as you enjoy it. It definitely feels like work to me.
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