Are You Losing Money on OTAs? Here Is How to Fix It [LIVE TRAINING]

So everything that we're going to discuss over the next 3 days, the common question that I get is, is this going to be recorded? The answer is yes, 110% it is. Uh, if you miss anything, if we go a bit quick, then it will all be recorded and you can come back and get it at any point at any time. Welcome one and all. So you should see, if this is your first time in a Zoom room, hello, there is a little button Just below you, and there's a chat button. What I would love for you to do is just to tap on the chat button and it will open up a box. What I'd love for you all to do, if you can please, is just say hi in the chat. That's all I would love for you to do. Just say where you are in the world, the name of your business, um, let me know about your business, how many properties you have. where you are in the world. Um, all of that would be amazing. The second thing that I would love for you to do is just to turn on your cameras if you are up for it. If you want to turn on your cameras so I can see your faces, because otherwise I am just staring at myself on a screen. And, uh, just say hi because we're going to be getting to know each other this week. We're going to be finding out more about each other's businesses. We're going to be delving into the topic, which is Something that is very important to all of us here, which is direct bookings. How can we get direct bookings with this new age of SEO and this thing that we're going to discuss in more detail called GEO? And we've got a guest expert who's going to be joining us on Tuesday and Wednesday as we're going to dive into this. So let's just see who we have here. So first and foremost, uh, Elenia, Jennifer, Carl, John, hello. Deborah, who's in Connecticut. John, who's in Utah. We've got John, another John. We've got Steve. We've got Liam in Manchester in the United Kingdom. We've got Scotland. We've got Galveston, Texas. Hi, Gareth. We've got another Texas. We've got the Poconos, Pigeon Ford, Guilford. We've got County Antrim, Isle of Man. Alabama, Charlotte, North Carolina, Orlando, which is fantastic. So for those of you that are joining this for the first time, we like to— I like to do these 3-day boot camps at least once or twice a year. The reason being is I don't think there's any better way to learn than by getting a collective of people into a Zoom room where we all talk about one topic. I've done this for 10 years, uh, and there's just no better way. Because for whatever reason, if you are just left to watch a YouTube video, if you're just left to, I don't know, read a blog or listen to a podcast, the information may go in. But I find that when we can actually implement and make a difference in our businesses is when we get a load of people together. We've had a lot of people register for this 3 days. And, you know, I totally get that some of you may come in today. Some of you may not make tomorrow because of life, whatever reasons. You may come back Wednesday. It's absolutely cool. Like I said at the very beginning, this is all going to be recorded. I'm going to pop it on the YouTube channel so you can watch it back at a later date. But to get the most out of this, I love it when people get to join us in live. So before we get going, let me just ask a couple of very quick questions. And this is another thing as well. If this is the first time that you're tuning into one of my trainings, I do really love it when I can ask a question and you all just respond in the chat. You know, I don't ask for any money at doing this. All I ask is your conversation. That's literally it. I really love it when people join in and, you know, type in questions, etc., and join in and don't sit on their hands. So my question to you all is this. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your Um, SEO and AI ability. So, um, you can be— 1 is the lowest and 10 is the, is the, is the best. Like, you basically, I don't know, Sam Altman, Elon Musk. Uh, 1 is the lowest, 10 is the best. Okay, cool. That's nice. I was hoping for quite a lot of midways between 3s and 4s and 5s, and that's what we've got. Here's the next question. If I was to say GEO. What do you think that means? You don't have to, you know, spell out what each letter means, but what do you think that basically means when I say GEO? Okay, there's a lot of question marks. We're going to come to that. Okay, so what do you think SEO means? What do you think SEO means? Put that into the chat. Search engine optimization. Search engine. Okay, so this is good. So everybody knows what SEO means, and in the most simplistic way possible, It's when your future guests or your potential clients come onto, uh, the internet, type in something on Google or Bing— who remembers Bing?— and then they, uh, come up a load of search results. Now, this has been pretty much Google and Bing for the last how many years? Okay. And you either pay to play, pay to be at the top, or you try and get in there organically. Obviously, in the world of short-term rentals, you've had the ability for Google Maps or Google Vacation Rentals. Obviously, if you are in Europe, you'll know that Google Vacation Rentals is no more. For those of you in America, just to give you a bit of a catch-up at what's happened, Google Vacation Rentals is no more in Europe, which is a bit crazy. But for years, you've been able to either get there organically, which is normally free, or pay to get up there. Ever since the turn of this year, there's been a massive shift. And I don't know when the last time you were on Google, but Google now has changed. So let me just share my screen quickly. So this is a Google search. Can you just give me a yes? Can you all see my screen okay? So now, when you go onto Google, when your future potential guests, when your future potential clients go onto Google, this is what they see now. And as you can see on the screen, it no longer says search; it says AI mode. I went to the cinema last week to watch Odyssey. What a movie, by the way! But during the trailer for Odyssey, there was a Google advert that was promoting AI mode, and everything now is being disrupted with these 2 little letters, AI. And so just in pure simplistic way to describe it is SEO is obviously search engine optimization, GEO is How can you be seen when your guests or your potential clients and your potential customers are searching on Google Search Now or ChatGPT or Claude, Perplexity, Grok? You know, all of these different large language models that are being set up. So here's my next question. In the last 6, 7, 8 months, who here has had a guest or a client come to them, whether you're a management company or whatever, when they said, oh, I found you on ChatGPT, I found you on AI? Cool. So we've got Bob said no, Jen said yes, Sam said yes, Dana says yes, Felix has said yes. Edmund had a month-long stay from Grok. Okay, so the reason why I wanted to do this training was about this right here, is that more and more now our guests, so the general public, are starting to use ChatGPT, Google Cloud, etc., to discover travel or discover property managers or discover whatever you're trying to get in front of. And now is the most important time to act on it because now is the best time to get in front of your future potential guests. And the reason being is this: I guarantee you, in your area or where your properties operate, 99% of your competition are not doing this. So you have got a fantastic opportunity to take advantage. Now, that doesn't mean that we just stop doing SEO, okay? SEO in itself is such a complicated beast, and we're going to talk about it tomorrow more with our guest expert that is coming in to help us educate on this. Because at the end of the day, and you will realize this by the end of Wednesday, is that good SEO is just good GEO. Okay? And whether it's Google Gemini, whether it is ChatGPT or Grok or Claude, Perplexity, whatever they are using, if you do your SEO right, You are more than likely to be appeared when somebody does a search on an AI. So that's the foundations of this week. So again, out of a scale of 1 to 10, I'm going to do a little temperature check. 1 being the lowest, 1 being I cannot believe that I've put my name down to sign up for this, to 10 going brilliant, this is me, I'm all in for it. Where do you rank 1 to 10? And again, I'm a big boy. If you want to put 1, leave the Zoom room. Never come back. I'm all right. Okay, good. There's a lot of tens. That makes me excited. So again, just to give you a quick catch-up if you've never seen one of these before, my name is Mark Simpson, founded Boostly 10 years ago. I've been involved in hospitality since, well, since birth really. I was born into a, a family hospitality business, came full-time in 2011, started doing Boostly 2016, and over the last 10 years I've just Absolutely devoured, loved everything about direct bookings, and most importantly, teaching and showing other people how to do it. And why now? Why is a really cool time to do it now? I don't know if you saw the news 2 weeks ago, uh, it was everywhere on Facebook groups and anywhere that I turned online. Airbnb announced something called direct booking links, and that was music to my ears because for the last 5 or 6 years, Airbnb have been very dismissive about direct bookings. Brian Chesky's been on stage when the moderator asked him about direct bookings. Now not only are they on it, but they're calling their own links a direct booking link, which we all know, every single one of you here, the Airbnb direct booking link, it's not a direct booking. But it's music to my ears because now Airbnb have actually given it a name. What's really, really important is we don't let Airbnb claim that name. And every single one of you that is taking part this week, you're ahead of the curve. It makes me excited that we can start doing this, doing this now, because when we crack SEO, when we crack GEO, that booking is direct. And that's what makes me really, really excited about it. All right, so before we properly get started with this week, I just want to lay the foundations and just make sure that everybody understands where they are and where they need to be. Um, and also as well, just to let you all know, this room is now at capacity. I've only got Zoom room for 100 people. 100 people are in, so you're the lucky one. So please don't leave because you might not be allowed back. Okay, so every single day this week We are going to— well, when I say every single day, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we are going to be in this same— this Zoom room at this time. Give me a quick yes or no, have you seen this link before? Because I sent it out to everybody, and you should have all had this via an email or a WhatsApp or seen it on Facebook. Phenomenal. So please come on to here and follow this calendar. When you click on follow, all right, what it will do is it will add it to your calendar, whether it's a Gmail, an Outlook, an Apple, whatever you use, it will add it. So it means that you will get a notification just in case for whatever reason tomorrow hits and you're running around and you're like, oh crap, that's coming up. It will send you a notification. All right. Like I said, we only can tap out 100 people in these Zoom rooms and we're at capacity now. So you want to make sure that you get in and you get in on time. What is going to be happening tomorrow? Well, we've got a guest expert coming in this week, a phenomenal person called Chase. He's been in this game for a long time, and in the background, Chase and I have been working together on a couple of Boostly clients on their SEO and GEO with a tool that he has. So I've known Chase for a while now. Um, we've, you know, he knows SEO inside out, and we've been in the same WhatsApp group when it comes to AI and all of these complicated things that I don't want to completely have to explain to you all about. But I said to him, listen, in September I really want to do a session on this. Can you come in and, and help explain it? So he said yeah, which is really cool because he's very busy. He's going to come in tomorrow, and what we're going to do tomorrow is we're going to take one of your websites. And if you want us to audit your website, please drop the link in the chat now. I'm just going to pick somebody at random later and we're going to audit the website tomorrow. So what we're going to look at tomorrow is we're going to show you what you need to be looking at when it comes to having your website set up. All right. Even if you have a Boostly website, you need to be paying attention to this because obviously what we do and what most website designers will do, we'll just have the basics in there just to say to Google, hey, we're here. That is what's called a sitemap. But it, it's for what takes just a few minutes of your time. You can make sure that it's set up correctly so that not only Google and Bing, but now ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity can see you as well. So that's tomorrow. On Wednesday, what we're going to do is we're all going to work together, even if your, um, website doesn't get audited tomorrow. On Wednesday, what we're going to do is we're going to all work through this tool together and we're going to show you exactly where your website needs improvement and how you can improve it. So that's going to be Wednesday. So by the end of Wednesday, so my Wednesday evening, your Wednesday afternoon if you're in the States— we've got a lot of people tuning in from Australia, so your Thursday morning— you will know exactly what GEO means, SEO means, how your website is standing up to the test, and then B, Or see the changes that you need to be making. My goal by the end of this week— so Thursday, Friday can be your action days, your get-it-done days— by the end of this week, your website should be set up or be on the way for when your potential guests are typing in places to stay in your area. You will come up. Now, I want to just emphasize a little bit more before I show you something else on this because it's just come to mind. Now, obviously with SEO, the reason why SEO was important, because your guests were coming in and typing in places to stay in Scarborough or accommodation or apartments to stay in Scarborough, right? What am I looking for? Where am I looking at it? That is what SEO is at a very small level. Now, what AI is is where your guest is going deeper. So for example, if you've been following my journeys on social media, you know that I've got 4 kids and we've been traveling around the States. Okay? So what somebody's typing in, they're going, I need a place to stay for me, my 4 kids. Their ages are 3, 7, 10, 13, me and my wife, we need to be able to make sure that it's got car parking, it's got to have good Wi-Fi, and ideally we want a place that is located near the beach or located near a lake, or we want somewhere quiet, etc. Now that is like SEO on steroids. It's like SEO, but it's like really long tail. And the reason why people are typing this in to Google, to ChatGPT, to Claude is because we all chat to AI like it's our assistant, or we chat to it like it's our best friend, or we chat to it like it's an intern. Give me a yes or no. When you're chatting to AI, whatever you use, do you chat to it like an assistant, best friend, intern, somebody like that?

Yeah. Okay.

So we all do it. And that is how exactly your guests are typing it. Into the ChatGPT, Google Gemini, etc. Okay, now there's a little bit of homework that I'm going to set you. I'm going to set that in a minute, but before I do that, there's one more link that I want to give you. Now, this link here is for the Facebook group. If you are not in the Facebook group, please come and join it. The reason being is that all of the questions that we set will be in that Facebook group. All of the recordings will be in that Facebook group, and all of the next action steps will be in this Facebook group as well. We're nearly at 3,000 members, so please do come and join. And also as well, if there's somebody that you know who should be taking part in this training, please share with them, okay? Um, share that link with them, tell them to come and join the Facebook group. It's absolutely free. There's no pitch from Boostly coming in any way, shape, or form these next, next few days. I do this for free because I want to give back and make sure that everybody is taking full advantage of the free tools that are out there for y'all. So please do go and share it. Share it in Facebook groups. I would share it in Facebook groups myself, but I get kicked out of these groups by a lot of the admins because they know who I am. So please do go and share it. Tell people about it. Spread the word about what we're doing. That would mean the world to me. That's all I will ask from this week. Now, your homework. This is the homework that I want to set. Now, if you were to go into ChatGPT, okay, and if you were to very simply go and type in here, um, let me go to new chat. So, if you were to type in now, find me a, you know, a place to stay, or give me a recommended place in your area, or find me a property manager for a homeowner in your area. If you do it like this, it will give you your results, okay? Because everything on ChatGPT or Claude is all personalized. It knows everything about you. All right, now the purpose of this is to find how people are finding you. So the way to do that is to come into the top right-hand corner Here, and I want for you to tap on temporary chat. Now, when it's temporary chat, unpersonalized. So turn it to temporary chat and click here where it says unpersonalized, because now it's like doing ChatGPT raw. It's like doing it from the beginning all over again. Okay. So when you click on temporary chat and unpersonalized and you ask the question, now it will treat you like you've just come to it for the first time. And it's a really good way to understand who is coming up into your area. So let's just see now. Is anybody on ChatGPT? Who is coming on ChatGPT? Give me a yes in the chat. Now, if you go to the top right-hand corner, and again, if you're on mobile, figure it out. If you don't see it, ask ChatGPT and it'll tell you where to go. What I would love for you to do in the top right-hand corner, click temporary chat and unpersonalized and type in a search. It could be, you know, find me a place to stay that's and insert a couple of your niches. So whatever your niches are for your property or properties, whether it's family-friendly, for contractors, whether it's for, uh, people coming to events, whether it's for X, Y, or Z in your area, and tell me, do you come up? Does your business come up? Who comes up? You know, see what you can see in there. That is your homework for the next 23 hours because again, I want you to be able to get used to this motion. Really important. And I'll say it again one more time. Go to Temporary Chat and go to Unpersonalized. Question from DeeDee. Do you have to be signed up as I can't see the Temp tab? If you're not signed up, then yeah, it will ask you to sign in. But again, if you go in unsigned up and it lets you run it, just as good. And again, you can do the same in Google Gemini. Do it as a private tab and do the same in Claude or do the same in whatever is your, do the same in whatever is your large language model of choice. Okay. Which is good to be seen. So Dana, so Dana did it and Dana was first. So just pop in the chat. What did you type in? Because that's really cool. All right, good. I asked and I was first. Good. All right. Well, this is good to know. Again, make sure, please make sure that you turn off personalized. And make sure you turn off to put on temporary chat, because otherwise it will always tell you first. I used to do this for Boostly, and I got a massive ego boost thinking, oh my gosh, Boostly's number one. But I realised I had it turned on for my personalised, and it was always going to tell me I was, we were the best. So once you turn it off, it's really interesting when you, when you do do that. Okay. So if you've asked and someone else comes up, don't worry. Don't worry at all. Right? I wasn't going— I was, I was massively impressed that one of you came up. Okay, but that is your homework for the next 24 hours. All right, so let's set the scene. Tomorrow, 5 o'clock UK, 12 PM Eastern, we're going to be back here in the Zoom. I'm going to be joined by Chase Gilmore. We're going to be talking SEO, GEO, and I've also as well asked him if he can come in with, um, he posted on social media a couple of weeks back of a really good Verbo ads tip. Context caveat, I know that Verbo is not direct bookings, but if you can, if you've got the ability to look at Verbo ads and if you need bookings in the next couple of months, it is a, a hack and a half at the moment. So I want him to touch on that very quickly. Then we're going to go into the SEO and GEO. We're going to audit one of your sites. If you haven't already, pop your website link in and we'll add you to our list of ones that we may audit tomorrow. And then Wednesday we're going to show how we can all work on all of ours together. All right. Thank you so much for joining us. I did say the first session was going to be 30 minutes. Everything is being recorded, so if you've joined late— and we are literally at capacity in this room, so if you do not want to miss tomorrow, my advice would be join the meeting room about 10 minutes to 5 PM UK, 10 minutes to 12 PM Eastern, or whatever time it is with you. I'll open the Zoom room. Um, we'll start sharp on the hour and we'll probably be about 45 minutes tomorrow, 45 minutes to an hour. Uh, we shan't go too far over. Um, but good, good first day, good first session. Before we finish, do we have any questions? If you have a question, um, please let me know and you can unmute yourself. So let me stop sharing. So you can either type it or I'll give the ability for you to unmute yourself. Participants, right? If you want to, and if you've got a question now, just unmute yourselves and ask away or type it in the chat. Is there anybody with any questions? My property is not showing up at all. Don't worry, Maggie, if not. Yay, I came out. Carl, here we go. Hey, Mark. Yeah, I've been working with Anthony and, you know, trying to step it up a bit.

I—

my biggest competitor, which is actually Stratton Mountain Properties, they come up and, and we're probably maybe the number 2 or 3 outfit up at Stratton, and we aren't coming up. So could certainly use some help there because I have about 15 properties up there now. Amazing. That gets me excited for this week. Oh, actually, uh, Carl, thank you very much. We've got Chase. I've just seen Chase in the chat. Chase, if you can, if you want to unmute yourself and just quickly introduce yourself and just say a quick hi, um, and then we'll, uh, we'll, uh, sort of introduce what's happening tomorrow. So, hey, Chase.

Hey, y'all. Can you hear me?

Fantastic. We can hear you loud and clear. So, so Chase is here.

I didn't hear that question. If you could repeat it.

It's not a question. He was just basically— this makes me excited for this week, buddy, because Carl is saying that he's got a pretty big competitor in the, in the area who's coming up quite a lot on chat, and he's got 14, 14, 15 properties and he's not coming up, uh, which makes me excited for this week. So that's a good one. So Carl, just give us a quick, like, 2, 3 minutes, just introduce who you are, what you've been doing, uh, why you can talk about this topic, and then we'll get everybody whetting the appetite for tomorrow.

Yeah. So I've been doing this for 12+ years. I started my own agency after I worked for some big agencies. I actually ran some Twitter ads for Airbnb back in the day, but my agency did really well. I ended up buying my first property and that turned into managing for other people, doing revenue management for people, building websites and doing SEO for those websites. So, um, Over the years, we've been perfecting this of what's working for direct booking websites because, you know, it's very difficult to get traffic. Like traffic is key. If you don't have traffic, you're not going to get any bookings. It's just simple as that. So we've perfected this over the last few years with various clients and we have a pretty good idea of what will get you to rank on through standard SEO, which is a lot more difficult than you know, LLM AI search these days. So you could be a smaller company and rank in AI search, but if you try to compete with the big boys or big companies on through centered SEO, it could take a long time. So it's kind of a wild frontier, uh, kind of the new age of, you know, SEO. So it's super exciting time.

Amazing, Chase. Thank you very much. And can everybody in the chat please show Chase some love because this is the first time he's going to be doing a workshop with this. Uh, he was super nervous of it, and I said, listen, let me hold your hand, we'll get through this. But he's a super talented guy. I'm very excited to be, uh, to be showcasing his talents to you all this weekend. Like I said, you're going to be one of the first people to get to learn from him. So I hope you're all excited. Please do spread the word of what we're doing. There was a fantastic question came in from DeeDee saying, I received a link for today's workshop but not for tomorrow. The good news, it's the same link Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I'll send you a quick reminder tomorrow morning and Wednesday morning, but that link that I just put in the chat, add it to your calendar, it's the same every single day. I'm excited. I hope you're excited. 30 minutes, bang on. Thank you very much, Kyle, for jumping in. Thank you very much, Chase. Uh, we will see you all tomorrow. Any questions that you have, come in the Facebook group, pop it in there. The WhatsApp group is open. Please spread the word, take pictures, pop them on social media, tagging Boostly on Instagram. Let's get everybody aware of what we're doing this week, and let's go and show Airbnb what a direct booking link actually is. Take care, everybody. Have a great night. Thanks, y'all. See you.