Marketing your rental cottage as a dream destination
By Michelle Warren • Bankrate.com

When it comes to operating your own cottage-rental business, marketing is a key component -- no matter how lovely or well-situated your property is, if you don't promote it, it's going to sit empty.

You need a plan to address how you'll reach out to potential renters, field their inquiries, sell yours as the optimum vacation option and manage bookings.

When Nicolas Pham-Dinh bought his parents' cottage four years ago, it wasn't a case of nostalgia. Instead, he and his partners took it on as an investment -- they wanted to generate income by renting the Quebec chalet year-round. The first year was slow and bookings sporadic before they found the right recipe of management and marketing.

"When we started out, I tried newspapers, and it was really expensive and it didn't work," says Pham-Dinh. Now, he's registered with two online listing companies and availability is so scarce he can hardly carve out a weekend for maintenance.

Marketing the web way
Newspaper ads, posters in local supermarkets, word of mouth -- these were the methods for marketing a cottage way back when. These days, everyone agrees that advertising on the Internet is the best way to showcase your property and reach a mass audience. In her book Renting Your Recreational Property for Profit, Heather Bayer, CEO of CottageLINK Rental Management, says 90 percent of inquiries for her rental properties are generated by from an Internet search. "To succeed in renting a vacation home, you will need to have a Web presence -- either by using one or more of the vacation rental advertising sites to market your property or by setting up and promoting your own Web site. In fact, if you build your own Web site you will be placing links to it from many other websites to maximize your exposure."

Building your own site has an upfront cost (unless you have the talent and patience to do it yourself), as well as nominal hosting and updating expenses, but in the long-term it's a relatively inexpensive marketing tool. A lot of people opt to pay for listing sites, some of which have user-friendly tools for building a mini site or allow you to showcase your property and provide a link to your own website.

"What's really important is good pictures," says Pham-Dinh, who uses one of the most popular listing sites, CottagesinCanada.com, which accounts for more than 90 percent of his annual bookings. The site is heralded for its clean, smart, user-friendly design, fair pricing and ability to attract legions of renters by being the top hit when one searches Google for "cottages Canada." It costs $75 a year and there are no hidden charges for managing the listing -- in other words, you are in charge of your information and can update your availability calendar, add pictures and change your text without being dinged for every move.

Another high-profile site, Cottages on the Web, charges $75 for a listing, which includes all pertinent data, plus two photos (additional photos are $10 each). Users pay an additional $30 to list a link their own web site and $85 to have their cottage featured in the annual print directory.

Listing companies can't guarantee your cottage will rent. However there are a few that offer money-back-guarantees should you not get a minimum number of visits or inquiries. For example, Canadian Cottage Holidays will refund your $99 should you not receive five inquiries from potential renters during a 12-month listing.

Some people turn to online community networks with free classifieds, such as Craigslist, which also allow you to upload limited photos. There are also plenty of free listing sites that focus specifically on vacation homes and get their funding from outside advertising.

Pham-Ding tested a few sites before settling on his two favourites. In his experience, "Most of the ones that are free don't give the best results, probably because when you search Google, you don't find them."

It's not enough simply to be on the web -- you need to visitors to generate rentals. When signing on with a listing site, be sure to ask for statistics. Cottages In Canada, for example, boasts an average 3,500 visits per day, 30,000 page loads per day and more than 10 million page loads per year.

How are you booking?
Once you've generated buzz, how will you handle all those queries?

"It comes in waves," says Pham-Dinh. "March is very busy because everyone is calling for summer." In fact, his summer was fully booked back in March and now he's working on the rest of the year. But, just because your property is booked, it doesn't mean the calls stop; and then there's handling the dozen or so queries that can come before a booking is confirmed.