Holiday letting Advice, After Living in Crete - Section 2

Previous Page - Advice to Holiday letting BEFORE you Buy-to-Let.

Marketing Advice AFTER YOU BUY your residence
from the BritsinCrete Team and Holiday Lettings UK

You’ve put the finishing touches to your property, now how do you go about getting the customers through the door? The word 'marketing' may send a chill down your spine, but forget cold calling and unsolicited junk mail.

Marketing is all about helping the right people to find what you’re offering – namely your fantastic holiday home.

Forward Planning, Research
Forward planning and good research into the holiday market in your local area are important and if you have looked into our Buy to Let Guide you should have picked up the practice of thinking like a holidaymaker. Putting yourself in the shoes of your potential guests gives you the best insight into what they’ll be looking for and where they might be looking. You will need to spend some money on marketing your property and it is advisable to budget as early as possible for an annual spend on advertising and set this relative to your expected returns.

Set a Marketing Budget
Remember: holidaymakers will not be falling over themselves to stay unless they know your property is ready and waiting to welcome them. If you are looking to fill your property for 30+ weeks of the year then it is worth setting a marketing budget of between £300 and £500 for the first year. If you are not in need of quite so many bookings per year then a budget of up to £300 should be enough for some basic advertising to get you started.

Advertising
Advertising is the backbone of successful marketing and in our current climate of buying and booking online; the Internet is the ideal place to advertise. With millions of holidaymakers going online every day the Internet is a marketing tool that allows you to advertise to a worldwide audience from the comfort of your own home and at very affordable rates.

The best way to get your property seen on the web is to use a rental-listing site such as Holiday Lettings U.K.

Rental listing sites are great value for money because they do the work of bringing thousands of holidaymakers to see your property in volumes that you would struggle to achieve in printed adverts or world of mouth recommendations.

Your Own Website
You may be thinking that you ideally need to have your own website in order to get the most from web surfing holidaymakers. Stop and think this through first. The key to online advertising is to make sure that potential guests can find you through the main search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. Setting up your own website can be quite expensive and your new 6 page site will have to compete with thousands of others to attract visitors.

It takes a lot of time and expertise to get your site noticed by the main search engines, the great thing about rental listing sites is that they do this work for you. Sites like effectively offer you your own property portfolio page within their website.

They are designed for owners like you, and they’ll let you set up and edit your own advert page. Most charge an annual fee and direct all the booking enquiries straight to you to handle.

Advertising on one or more of the established rental listing sites is an easy way of getting a great number of people to your advert and you don’t need any knowledge of web design to get set up. Shop around for the best deal in terms of how many photos you can show, what extras they offer and what prices they charge.

"Special Offer!!" Holiday Lettings U.K. The Fastest Growing in Overseas Lettings Online. Get 15 months for the price of 12 when introduced by BritsinCrete - just quote code: 44883 when you register

When you are planning your advertising you need to think about realistic time scales. Setting up an online advert in advance of the first available date is a sensible idea to maximise the interest you get, but if you have builders working on the place until June for example, be cautious about advertising your home as available from July. If the work overruns, you could be dealing with homeless and seriously unhappy holidaymakers.

First Impressions
Finally, remember that detail and first impressions matter. Potential guests who are looking for the ideal place to stay will be put off very quickly if you only give details of last years pricing, misspell the name of your local town or only show grainy photos taken on a grey day.

In order to get the most from your advertising you’ll need to have good clear information on the property and location, great photos and a sensible pricing structure.

At Holiday Lettings U.K we pride ourselves on providing the best advertising package. Register now and start advertising your holiday home today.

We offer:
* More photos. Our adverts all have room for up to 16 images for no extra charge.
* More features. Free SMS alerts whenever you have a new enquiry – helping you stay on top of enquiries and turn more into bookings!
* Great online exposure. With more than 14,000 visitors every day and 4,000,000 page hits per month Holiday Lettings U.K brings you powerful Internet advertising for an unbeatable price.
* Great customer service. Our friendly and experienced customer service team are ready to answer your questions – contact us now on email or telephone 00 44 (0) 1865 201 444 quoting "britsincrete-44883" Remember, that bonus special offer is yours from a BritsinCrete introduction!

Find out the experiences of buying, selling and letting on Crete from other Brits who have a house in Crete who are doing it, or done it.

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