The good, the bad, and the ugly: How social networking sites are affecting small business

My name is Shannon Russo – and I’m a recovering social network-aholic… The Ugly Yes, I admit it. After losing my job and deciding to make a go of freelance writing from home, I realized – a couple of months later – that roughly 3 hours of my day went into my socializing: catching up [...]

Written on December 7, 2009 | Posted in Advertising & Networking,Advice,Tools and Software | 1 comment

Two not-so-new Google web tools that keep vacation rental home and portal owners at the forefront of the industry

Google Alerts Google Alerts allows users to easily receive customized email or RSS feed alerts for free based on keywords entered and the type of alert selected. Excellent for tracking the competition, following industry news, monitoring the appearance of your own website’s online exposure, and much more. Why use it? For maximum benefit, sign up for [...]

Written on November 30, 2009 | Posted in Advertising & Networking,Advice,Tools and Software | No comment

Two new Google web tools to improve your vacation rental marketing results

Rich Snippets Google’s latest experiment, Rich Snippets, captures a web page’s structured data and displays it as snippets within the Google search results listing. Using microformats and RDFa open standards, webmasters can mark up Google-provided templates to aggregate their page’s own structured data. Currently Google is only capturing data on People and Reviews, and not [...]

Written on November 23, 2009 | Posted in Tools and Software | No comment

5 ways to avoid rising vacation rental fraud and bans

Everyone involved in the vacation rental industry is being impacted by the rising numbers in online vacation rental fraud. Some become victims, losing precious money and pride, while others are cut off from a valuable income source after being banned from renting their home out at all. Here are five tips for approaching and maintaining [...]

Written on November 17, 2009 | Posted in Advertising & Networking,Advice,Photo Gallery,Vacation Rental Fraud | No comment