This is no longer the world in which we live. More and more the deck is stacked against us. You have to pay more and you have to play by the listing company's rules or be an exemplar host as determined by listing companies. Don't play by their rules, they will "bury" your listing into oblivion. Btw - ask anyone, it is easy to come into the crosshairs and have your listing suspended, even for a simple misunderstanding.
Our properties are just a commodity to the listing companies. It is like going to a large university and you are known only by your student number.
I feel the OTA's are orchestrating a hostile take over of my personal property and business. They want to control how you do business, how you interact with guests, when and how you receive money.
Most of us on Houfy should be on a mission toward becoming listing independent. What does that mean? It means no longer solely reliant on a large listing company to get prospective guests looking at your listing.
I see Houfy as becoming our best friend and instrument toward this aim. You need an independent listing. Check. You need your own website presence. Check. You need a platform to create engaging content about you as a host, about what makes your place special, about the location to give prospective guests a sense of place. Check. And collectively, the listing, content provides an ability to interact with guests and take reservations. Check. Check.
And is Houfy your only friend? No. You make more friends with other tools and resources too. And you introduce your friends to make even more friends. What I mean is you take the content you are writing on Facebook, your own blog on your website (I.e. your friends or other property support sites) and you do things like import a post in Houfy to ensure you have content there about giving vacationers a sense of your place and location.
The more you are engaged in posting blog posts in multiple places, the more likely it gets indexed by the search engines. And get ranked high enough for some of your content you begin to drive traffic to your own listing. Drive enough traffic you begin to get inquiries. And with enough inquiries you begin to get your own bookings. And what a feeling that is!
As you progress on this listing independence journey, you will no doubt realize how many other things you can do with content. You can reshape it; re-package it into ad campaigns or online newsletters. You will find that a group of blog posts (I.e.posts. 😉) are similar. Maybe they can be put together in a collection (I.e. collection. 😀).
And imagine you can enable this content as part of your property listing built right into Houfy (without being flagged as a trouble maker and suspending your listing like the big listing companies).
My Houfy property listings are now fully embedded in my website (see above link). I still have my own blog on my website but that's great too. It isn't either this or that. It's all of the above. I even created an ad on the homepage for Houfy, which I'm calling "Powered by Houfy." I'm linking to the Houfy sign up page. I'm setup to accept payment through Square and I have tested the experience from end-to-end as guest and as host and it works seamlessly.
More and more I focus on ensuring my content is good original content. I work hard to include meaningful videos and eye-catching photos. Don't just insert a link to a video and think that's content. I am looking at what is getting searched and writing strategically for generating traffic as well.
So up, up and away (insert Houfy superman photo)!
