One of the most rewarding things about doing your own vacation rental marketing is getting featured in magazines and newspapers.  Not only is it emotionally rewarding (you get to show it to all your friends!!!) but it has a tendency to drive up reservations big time. Here’s how I’ve gotten my vacation rentals featured in the The New York Times, US News & World Report, GQ, Business Week, and Travel+Leisure, among a slew of other major publications; and all without spending a dime!

Enter HARO: the greatest PR secret known to successful vacation rental owners.

HARO (short for "Help A Reporter Out") is a free service that connects reporters with news sources and small business owners. If a journalist from, say, Conde Nast is looking to do a story on a weekend in Whistler, HARO is the platform through which he/she can solicit advice or locals for their story. If you’ve ever wondered how tiny boutique hotels or vacation rentals get featured in big-time publications, now you know. It’s one of those covert resources most PR agencies keep under wraps and you'd be doing yourself a disservice by sharing it with your competition.

So how do I have so much success with HARO?

Well, first, I sign up on their website and select “Travel” as my area of expertise. I also recommend selecting “Business & Finance” since some of the story topics overlap. You can also get creative, catering your story pitch to their particular readership. This is to say, my rentals have no business in Forbes Magazine but I pitched it properly and it worked.

Next, watch your inbox for the daily emails.  They will be composed thrice per day of various story leads and reporters looking for helpful sources. When you find one that might apply to your vacation rental business, jump on it.

In my experience, your email pitch is the most important thing between you and getting featured in a major publication. While you want to respond swiftly, reporters are always on a deadline, you also want to put enough thought into your pitch so that you set yourself apart from the rest. It is here where the email subject and the first line of your message itself need to be catchy and to the point. Here are three examples of my subject lines that have caught the reporter’s eye and elicited a response:

“Quotes For Your Vacation Article -- With A Tropical Twist!”

“Matt's 5 Reasons Vacation Rentals Trump Hotels”

“Why Are Vacation Rentals Not For Everyone?”

Once you’ve gotten good at the email subject lines, making sure they are action-oriented, compelling, funny, etc., make sure your message is short, interesting and to the point. Remember that the reporter is probably receiving tons of pitches so yours needs to be unique and relevant. Getting the pitch down won’t happen overnight. But over time, you’ll start to see more and more reporters responding and asking you for a quote. In a recent seminar, I gave out this tip and wasn't surprised to hear from three owners who, not one week afterwards, were featured in Home & Garden, Budget Travel, and Destinations Travel Magazine respectively.

If you are interested in seeing some samples of Matt's emails (and subject lines) that have resulted in major publication inclusions, you can sign up for his newsletter on the Vacation Rental Marketing Blog. Matt is on the eternal search for the best ways to increase vacation rental occupancy. He also once hosted a surprise birthday party for his mother, in which Oprah Winfrey was a surprise guest.

Everyone wants to improve their vacation rental’s online presence, but not everyone knows where to turn. In addition to spending your valuable marketing dollars on annual memberships, here are 8 cost-free online hotspots where you can submit your vacation rental website – whether it’s a listing page or your personal homepage (preferred) – and see immediate results. I like to suggest owners spend one hour every month searching for (and applying to) new sites like these. They are worth their weight in gold...

1. Dmoz:  The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as Dmoz (from directory.mozilla.org, its original domain name), is an open content directory of World Wide Web links. It is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors and it’s the database from which hundreds of thousands of other directory websites draw their data. Which is to say, once you submit your vacation rental site to Dmoz (and get accepted) the amount of residual links to your property will increase monumentally.

2. Google Places: Google Places is a free web mapping application and you may have seen it pop up on your Google searches or perhaps embedded in other websites. Once you submit your vacation rental company to Google Places through Google’s Local Business Center, your contact information (email, phone number, address, etc) will display on all kinds of hyper-local searches meaning, if someone is looking for a place to stay in your area, they’ll be presented with your information almost like a phone book listing.

3. Yahoo! Local: Much like Google Maps and Google Places, Yahoo! Local is a platform that’s still worth your vacation rental site’s inclusion. With their free basic listing, you can submit your contact information, select 5 categories in which to list your rental, as well as list any services you may offer on top of a traditional nightly stay.

4. Purple Roofs: Gay travel is an ever-expanding industry and lots of vacation rental owners report tremendous results when posting on sites like Purple Roofs where your free listing submission will most likely make you the only “gay friendly” accommodation in your area (a huge boost for bookings). The only requirement is that you are actually friendly towards gay travelers: easy enough!  

5. Gay Journey: The gold-standard in gay travel sites, Gay Journey is the go-to site for many gay travelers and posting your rental on their site is guaranteed to bring in good new traffic. They even give you the option of registering as gay owned (in addition to gay friendly). Gay owner listings are highlighted with a rainbow flag and tend to get extra clicks.

6. TripAdvisor Forum: TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel review site so it’s not a surprise that their massive traveler forum is frequently crawled by tourists looking for new accommodations, especially alternatives to traditional hotels. By creating an account on TripAdvisor (if you don’t have one already), browsing the discussion threads in your area, and anonymously recommending your rental with a link, rental owners have reported huge upticks in bookings. 

7. LinkedIn: One of the most direct and no-nonsense ways of getting the details of your vacation rental in front of potential guests is using one of LinkedIn’s Groups. Joining groups like travel agents, tourism boards, specialty travel, etc and posting a simple introduction message to its members about you, your rental and your excitement to host new guests can do wonders to generate new bookings.

8. Thorntree: Imagine taking Lonely Planet’s loyal traveler following and consolidating the individuals who have area-specific travel questions all in one place. There might be no better place to plug your vacation rental as an authentic/private/alternative place to stay than Thorntree, Lonely Planet’s uncensored traveler forum. Thorntree also tends to be very easy on moderation, meaning as long as you’re not overly promotional in your posting, the advertising is free! I also recommend offering advice in your area of expertise as this tends to garner much more traffic. 

Matt is the author of the Vacation Rental Marketing Blog where you can find lots of juicy free tips for generating more bookings as well as his $77 report, which on average increases owners year-round occupancy by 10%. When he's not marketing his vacation rentals, Matt plays soccer with members of the US Men's National Team.

Nearly a decade ago I decided to trade three-piece suits for flip-flops and make the jump from corporate America to entrepreneurship in the tropics.

I landed in Panama City’s UNESCO World Heritage district of Casco Viejo: a Latin-American pastiche of New Orleans and, in my opinion, the most interesting neighborhood in Central America. It was here I began my career with vacation rentals; and it was here I learned how, with a shoestring budget, property owners anywhere can book their units solid using the right tools.

My typical days in Panama consist of lots of exploring: I have gorgeous beaches on both the Pacific and Caribbean coasts within 45 minutes of my front door. I jog every morning under a rain forest pantheon of monkeys, toucans and sloths. I eat way too much local shrimp ceviche, and I do all these things with the comfort in knowing that my rentals – a fleet of historic apartments known as Los Cuatro Tulipanes – are churning a healthy flow of vacationers through their doors.

But business wasn’t always this smooth.

Like a lot of owners or property managers, listing sites such as VRBO.com and HomeAway.com were the first places I turned to generate reservations for my properties. Inquiries were good, but with the recession about to hit, I thought I’d need far more creative exposure and promotional material if I wanted to achieve occupancy levels above 90% year-round.

As a general rule, 90% occupancy has always been my gold standard: it is a realistic occupancy level any self-respecting property owner should and can accomplish.

Striving for more bookings, I spent seven years analyzing my properties’ performance. I gleaned secrets from expensive advertising agencies, haughty PR experts and ultra-successful vacation rental owners, split testing every single minute technique against another to determine, statistically, the most effective way to spend my time and money. By the end of this journey (at a time when my own rentals started operating at capacity), I copyrighted my system in the form of a report: 30 Bookings in 30 Days - a recipe book of innovative ways to increase vacation rental bookings on a shoestring budget.

The report represents seven years of my own time, six months researching successful vacation rental owners and a collective trial investment of tens of thousands of marketing dollars. "30 Bookings in 30 Days" sold just under 500 copies in 2011.

As an example of the quick tips you can adopt from my report are the use of free services like HARO (the resource I used to get my vacation rentals featured in Conde Nast and Travel+Leisure) and ASmallWorld (an invite-only travel-minded social network that generates about 15 bookings each month). I look forward to opening my knowledge base and sharing with you many more valuable additions to your marketing arsenal.

I now enter 2012 with one very ambitious goal: I will participate in the Ironman Triathlon (my first event of this sort) on February 12^th, swimming through the Panama Canal, biking through the InterAmerican Highway and running on a historic oceanfront causeway. Throughout my training process, I have learned that the only people awake at 4AM in Panama are triathletes and insomniacs. And as motivation for this event, I have started referring to myself as IronMatt.

I look forward to sharing my knowledge for vacation rental marketing "on the cheap” and can’t wait to see more owners benefit from my tips and earn more cash!