A great deal of effort is required to arrange suitable marketing for your holiday cottage. The aims of the marketing and promotion are to

• Find the right kind of people who will appreciate the cottage and its location and leave it in a good condition

 
A couple of decades ago, before the days of the Internet, printed brochures were the main method of marketing holiday cottages. These still have a place, indeed there is still a percentage of the population without access to the Internet or who prefer to sit down and browse through a brochure in comfort.
However, the majority of people are more likely to sit down and search for a cottage on the Internet. Internet advertising is cost-effective and flexible. Data and images can be changed at any time by simply logging in.

Inevitably, as the owner of a holiday cottage, you require a good understanding of the Internet and the IT skills to be able to manage your adverts online.

Your own holiday cottage website

Most owners of holiday cottages have their own website. It is usually something that they pay web design companies to develop and manage for them. A website of your own can provide the majority of your bookings if you work at it and have the means to develop it yourself. A web site is essentially interlinked pages of information; electronic paper, designed to be indexed by search engines and provide sufficient information for people searching to produce reliable results.

Many people think that by just presenting information in the same way that they would in a paper brochure, everything will work well and the bookings will come flooding in. There are an awful lot of disappointed people who have paid for beautiful websites only to find that as attractive as they are, they don’t actually work for them and they have to rely on advertising in portals  to promote them. Because of a lack of knowledge and understanding, cotatge owners underestimate the amount of work (and investment) required to produce and successful site. The short cut is to produce a web site which displays your cottage well and allows you to personally edit it and change photographs and to rely on advertising portals to present it to lots of people.

I would recommend that holiday cottage owners initially learn how the web works before embarking on a web site of their own.  Practical skills required to develop and run your own website can be enhanced by experimenting with your online advert.  Go to It classes to develop a good skill base to get the most from your Internet Marketing. 

 
Essential skills in managing online advertising
 

• Understand email and spam filters so that you manage to send and receive 100% of your email correspondence
   
• being able to send email attachments is a bonus that will enable you to provide pdf brochures and booking forms quickly and cheaply
   

 Key phrases

Learn about key phrases for your adverts and web site. There is a mass of information about this on the web. Google also  offers informative guides.
 The key phrases that you use in your advert make a massive difference between success and failure. Learn how the web works to produce good results.
Your web designers and advertisers can help point you in the right direction. You just need to ask the right questions about key phrases.

 
Present your holiday cottage at its best

Once you have sufficient people looking at your adverts and web site give them beautiful photographs to grab their attention and make them want to stay in your holiday cottage. Even if they cannot afford to book your holiday cottage themselves they may tell their friends about the lovely cottage they found on the web.

 
Web advertising for those with their own holiday cottage website

As an online developer, the main things that I look for in terms of advertising my own holiday home are whether:

• Do I get a link included to my own website?
• Does the website cover the type of property (the site might specialise in say 5 bedroom properties) or an area related to my holiday cottage?

Unless I can answer yes to both these questions I wouldn’t advertise.

 As a person involved in the running of an online cottage portal I would offer the following advice

• Ensure that your advert looks as attractive as it possibly can. Improve your photographs to present your cottage at its best
• Use a good sprinkling of appropriate keywords
• Be accurate
• Talk to the people running the portal occasionally and discuss your advert. Always remember that you are dealing with people behind the web site and not just a faceless entity. It’s the people behind the website who can tweak things to make your advert more successful. Develop a good understanding of how the web works and you would be able to optimise your advert yourself. Do offer your advertisers feedback about how your advert is performing and they may be able to make suggestions about how to improve your results. It’s all about key phrases, great photographs and links with appropriate text.

It really is all about understanding the web and checking those statistics for your own site. Never ever cancel advertising without having looked at your stats first and especially not in December or early January before the main advance booking surge. And if you don't have or don't use the statistics you're working in the dark and cannot possibly make sensible or accurate decisions.

Most web sites come with a user guide that explains how things work. Web naive cottage owners think that by just adding an advert, all is hunky dory, and indeed it may work reasonably well, but not necessarily at its best. Read that user guide and maximise those bookings.

I could go on at length at some of the really daft things that cottage owners have done simply because they do not understand the web. If you rely solely on web advertising you need to know or you're wasting money advertising on numerous portals when you could maximise your returns using say one to three.
 

As someone who works in the business I frequently despair at the sheer stupidity of some cottage owners. We have deleted entries which had numerous direct links to cottage owners own websites. They therefore were not usually receiving email enquiries from the advertising portal because visitors were going through to their own site which not only gave them direct custom but also improved their positioning in search engines. One person had paid a web engineer  to add links using speciifc anchor text for Search Engine Optimisation and then deleted it a year later because they simply did not understand. Because of their own ignorance, some cottage owners are their own worst enemies. A few months down the road they would be wondering why their own web site is not performing as well as it used to.