Online Marketing Today

BREAKING NEWS:

“Duncan, I have a niche market, I rent Condos in Puerto Vallarta Mexico. I do most of the rentals from my website. The problem I‘m having (not a bad problem) is I have way too many people that want to rent condos and not enough condos to go around. I rent over 35 condos in the Puerto Vallarta area and because my sight is listed in Google’s fist page for several key words and phrases I get a lot of visitors.

I am looking to monetize the site some how to turn all the visitors into money but I am not quite sure how to do it and I need to do it in a way that does not disturb the main theme of the website and that is to rent condos. Any input you have would be great. Thanks” ~ Jeff Musto

Hi Jeff,

That’s an excellent problem that you have there mate. More of a challenge than I problem I would say – and one that most people would enjoy having.

It’s not really clear whether you own all of these condos yourself, if you broker for the people that do own them (or a company that manages them), or if there are actually other condos available in the area. I can’t say that I’m familiar with the place, but it looks like somewhere I’d like to visit from the photos on your website.

Without knowing any of that it’s a little hard to make any suggestions.

So I’m just going to go out on a limb and assume that there are other rental / accommodation options available in the area. Perhaps there are other condos, perhaps hotels, houses, bed and breakfast accommodation etc.

That being the case I would look to work out some sort of brokering deal with the people / companies that manage the alternative types of accommodation – perhaps focusing on one alternative to begin with.

The primary focus is of course to get your condos occupied.

Now I know people arriving at your site are specifically looking for condos – but if you can’t provide them with any when they wish to stay, it’s not going to hurt to offer them an alternative. Worst case they’ll say no – best case they’ll take an alternative option and you can take a cut of the deal.

I imagine most people who plan to visit Puerto Vallarta have already made the decision when they’re going to visit, and only then start looking for suitable accommodation. I know that’s they way I make my travel plans.

So my initial thoughts on this would be to modify how your visitors interact with your website. This would likely require some custom programming and isn’t a small task but it’s not likely to be a major task either.

I guess what you would want to do (without changing how the site currently exists) is to ask your visitors when they are planning on arriving, and then presenting them with the condo options you have available for them.

You could also ask them how flexible their travel dates are in case they might be prepared to come a week later or arrive a week earlier etc. That would make a difference in the options you could provide them with.

Assuming you don’t have anything available for them during that time period – and it’s outside their flexible time frames – that’s when you would hit them with your alternative options…

“Sorry but all of our condos are fully booked during that time frame. However there is an excellent hotel / bed and breakfast / house etc that matches your criteria (rooms available etc) that we highly recommend. If you’re interested in this alternative accommodation we can offer you a 15% discount off the nightly rate…”

You get the idea.

You could get really carried away with this.

Developing a full blown database that visitors can search on, that automates the bookings for the 3^rd parties, taps into their own time tables of availability, and so forth, but that would require a lot of work.

As a really basic alternative what you could do is present them with a message similar to the above, with a free phone number to call…

“Let me do all the work for you and find you a suitable alternative. Call me now on…”.

…then when you have generated the lead (they will be very warm and receptive if they call you) you could go out and approach other accommodation options based on their needs and broker a deal then and there.

This way you wouldn’t have to directly approach or form immediate partnerships with the alternative accommodation suppliers right away, and can test the waters to see how well this works for you.

If you want to flip it around a bit and deal with the less “warm” leads you could try to capture the visitors email address and accommodation specifics, phone number etc. You could then call (or employ someone to call) every lead generated that doesn’t book accommodation through you, and offer them the alternatives.

There are quite a few possibilities here and many ways it could be worked.

If you’re scared about modifying your website too much and impacting your search engine optimization – I would say leave it as is but try to integrate the above functionality somewhere where the visitor’s attention is always drawn to.

Either first thing on the page, using a pop up, or somewhere prominently on each page etc. Once a visitor checks out two condos they like, only to see they are fully booked, they’re going to see it makes sense to use this feature and see what is actually available when they want to stay.

Anyway, hope this give you some ideas. Again, it’s a little hard for me to be any more specific without knowing exactly how you operate the business.

BTW – again not sure how you have things setup but I would definitely work the backend of all visitors staying in your condos. If you have over 35 condos pretty much fully booked all the time – you’re going to have anywhere from 60-100+ people that you’re bringing into the area each week.

I would definitely be brokering deals with specific restaurants, bars, attractions (diving, fishing, golf etc) in the area and pushing those to the visitors via brochures or coupons in the condos.

You could then take a cut of almost anything those people end up doing when they stay. Heck, it might only be a $5-10 commission, per person, per “activity”, but that would soon add up with the number of visitors you’re dealing with.

You could even leave a survey card for visitors who have stayed that actually asks them what they did when they were there to help you target key activities to negotiate.

(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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