THE BOOK DIRECT VIRTUAL SUMMIT - Tuesday 25th June

Put direct Here are the words in the podcast that's what comes next.

If you want my respect, you'll better.

But direct Here are the words in the podcast that's what comes next.

If you want my respect, you'll better.

But direct Here are the words in the podcast that's what comes next.

If you want my respect, you'll better.

But direct Here are the words in the podcast that's what comes next.

If you want my respect, you'll better but direct mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast that's what comes next.

If you want my respect, you'll better but direct mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast that's what comes next. We have some breaking news now. The Boostly podcast is about to begin. Make sure you like this post, comment bookdirect and share this video in Facebook groups.

But now let me hand you over.

To your host, Mark Simpson.

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome one and all. We are on day three, Wednesday 26 June. I just had to double check then and let me know who is with me live. Let me know where you are tuning in from around the world. We had people in yesterday from all over and I anticipate we will have exactly the same again. We've got Zoe down in Sunny Forest of Dean, got Mel, Renata, Natalie Laurie from Nash, Vegas again. Hello, hello, hello, Laguna Beach, Suffolk, you name it. We've got people here, which is fantastic to see. Number one, yes, we will be doing Spin the Wheel, so make sure you get your numbers in between one and 10. Number two, yes, we are going to be having some fun this evening. And number three, of course we have got some things to learn. Not one, not two, not three, but four sessions we are going to kick off. Let me share my screen and just walk you through the agenda for today. So we are going to kick off with Mr. Ger Jones. This is Ger's first ever time doing anything like this, so I do want everybody to pay attention. Show girl some love throughout. He was super, super nervous doing this. It took him a bit of a kick to get over the line. But I'm so excited to showcase this to everybody. Then after that I'm gonna come back and we're gonna line up Mr. Craig Webb, our SEO guru. Craig Webb has very kindly sponsored this event to help put this together. So again, thank you very much for that. And he has got a fantastic session on SEO Search Engine optimization. If you struggle with that, let me know then. We've got Mr. Philip Canard now A lot of you may not know who Phil is but you will do. After his session he's going to walk you through the full direct booking loop. It is one heck of a session and I am ready for you and I hope you're ready to get involved with that. And then afterwards, Mr. Matt Metros is going to show you how to build a team, how to build a virtual team, the blueprint, the software to uses, the tactics, the tips, the pros, the cons, how not to do it. He lays it out fantastically which is, which is going great. So we've got a lot packed in today. I hope you are all excited. Keep getting in your numbers in for spin the wheel also as well. Let's welcome. We've had a lot of people join, I think we had 36 people join literally over the course of the last couple of hours. So welcome Madeline, Kim, Della, I got Jordan, we've got a lot, a lot of people that have joined in the last 18 hours which is fantastic. Welcome, welcome, welcome one and all. It is great to have you in here. And of course we have got the Boostly bingo card. So even if you've just joined, even if this is the first time you are checking out the summit this week, you can still take part in the bingo, win some big prizes. So Madeline, I know you've just joined but if you go ahead and watch back the replay of the launch party you can tick off bingo if you go and upload a picture to Instagram and tag in@Boostler UK and I've seen this happening which is great. So go ahead to Instagram, tag me in in a post in a story, let everybody know what you are doing this week, document this week if you go and hit the invite button and invite people in. So if you click on that it'll say invite Facebook friends even if you're doing this on your phone. So I'll go ahead and click on Shari, send an invite to Shari, then you can take off. That simple. If you missed yesterday's session, go back and watch it on the replay. You are all tuning in now so you can go and tick that off. We've got tomorrow the wrap up party and then subscribe to Boostly and then fill in this post sermon survey and you'll be able to do a full house. Message that to me by the 1st of July, email that to me, I'll put you in the prize jar for some big boostly bundles of prizes and I'll let you know what that is on, on, on Friday. So that is still active and up and running, running. This is, of course, the main place to come this week. Anything that you need is in here. All of the replay is in here. I'll let you know at the end of the week where all of this is going to get moved to. But for now, this is the place to come. So make sure you store it, save it, add it as a shortcut. I'm sure you can do that here. Turn on notifications if you're not in the chat, come and join the chat, do all the cool things and make sure that you are here every day. All right, final chance now. Let me flip over the screen that I am sharing and we'll go over to spin the wheel. Right, let me just explain what this is. For those that haven't tuned in before, number one, you need to give me your lucky number. Between one and ten. You have got one minute to do so. The number will spin if it hits on your lucky number. That doesn't mean that you are automatically winner. What happens is that if, let's just say it's number six, you'll message me on Facebook and go, hey, Mark, I was looking. Number 6 on Wednesday 26th June, I take all those information and I go and pop it into a hat and then I'll pick out a winner and then I'll send you a message. I'll try and get it done before I get the kids to bed tonight. If not, it'll be a later on message today. And again, we've got a copy of Hospitable Hosts book, kindly donated by Jody, the head of of Hospitable Hosts. You will get a book sent to you in the post, which is fantastic. All right, so last 10 seconds, get your numbers in between one to 10. Dala. I can see he's gone with a strong four. Mirror seven, we've got Fiona on eight, James gone for four. Richard's 10 fives. Got a lot of numbers flying around. We've got one of all. All right, everybody, let's go ahead. Final numbers now. Final chance. Pop it in between 1 and 10. And also before we go ahead and do this, if you can just do me a favor, if you're watching on your phones, tap one of these emoji buttons as many times you can go and tap it like 20 times. That tells Facebook that we are here, that tells Facebook that we are live and it informs other people in the group that we are up and up and running so we can get going on this day. All right? Let's go ahead and do this, shall we? Let me spin this wheel. There we go. Number one. If you got number one, if you predicted number one, remember, send me a message on Facebook, say, hey, Mark, I was looking number one on Wednesday the 26th. Fantastic. And again, it doesn't automatically mean that you have won. It just means that you get to put your name into a hat and I'll pick out a winner later. Well done, everybody. Okay, with all that being said, before we go any further, I just want to thank the sponsors of this week. Future stay aperto social Media had Tele aka Mr. Paul Anderson, Craig Web SEO and Price Labs. Without you guys, we could not have put this week on. It takes a lot of time, effort, money, resources to spread the word about what we're doing getting everybody into this group. And I just want to say thank you. We literally couldn't make this happen without you. So let's just see if this works. Big applause and also as well, a massive thank you to all of the speakers today. G, Craig, Phil and Matt. They're given time out of their busy worlds, out of their busy lives to do this. And I am really, really excited to kick this off and to start with our first speaker. Now, a lot of you will know who our first speaker is. A lot of you will have chatted to G. A lot of you will, will have been on the receiving end of a little bit of love and a bit of Mr. Motivation from this chap. And about, I want to say, a couple of months ago he started to do marketing courses and he was sharing me the updates and I said to him, listen, the next time we do one of these, I want you to be a speaker, I want you to record a video. And he said, yep, didn't say anything else and went away. Obviously had a little bit of anxiety, very nervous about it because, you know, he's putting himself out there to the world and but he's gone ahead and done it. And the topic today is all about guest avatar, which I know so many people struggle on and I'm so excited to showcase this human to you. So can we please all, before we get going today, tap this love hat emoji button as many times as possible. Show girls some love in the chat, but most importantly, pay attention and if you have questions, drop them in. It's going to last about 20 to 30 minutes. I'm going to come back afterwards and I'm going to line up our next speaker. But can we all please, one and all say hi to the amazing Gur aka Mr. Motivator. Let's go ahead and do this, shall we?

My topic today will be do you really know who your customer is? I will be discussing the very important topic of customer avatars. Well, who am I? Well, I am Gerain Jones, otherwise known as Gerains Rossid, Bach, Ger, Ger G or Big G. I run a small development of Holy Cottages based on Penlyn which is the Llyn Peninsula in North Wales and have done for the past 20 years. I joined Boos Lee about four years ago where I learned so much about marketing and loved it every single minute of it. Learned the art of getting direct bookings and not to be over reliant on the OTAs. Within months of joining, Mark asked me to help out on some training sessions and asked me to become moderator on the Team Boostly Facebook page. To be honest, this has been one of the best business decisions I have made in life and I really never looked back since. I enjoyed I enjoy every single minute of it. Enjoy interacting with with people, with clients from the UK and all over the world. It's a very very special group in my mind. Many of you know me for my daily posts on Boostly about marketing, positivity and relevant news stories. I'm a very very positive person and positivity in my mind is paramount in our lives. Try and avoid negativity because it will eat you alive. I then went on to study a Level 3 qualification in marketing and Digital Marketing with the Charter Institute of Marketing which is known as CIM where I passed with a distinction. Again, I've learned so much and I'd open my eyes to the bigger world. I'm planning to start my level four this September and then hopefully complete with a level six the following year which will be equivalent to a degree in Marketing. I recently set up Brandware Marketing, my very own marketing and social media company. Well that's me. In any case I hope you enjoy the presentation. Thank you. I know we are more than likely covering existing ground here as avatars have been discussed time and time again and have been around for a while. I'm sure many watching this already putting it into practice but from my experience the the majority of us are not. Now who is your customer avatar otherwise known as Ideal guest Customer Persona Perfect guest Ideal guest Target markets There are many phrases used and banded about to classify this particular person but for today we will be using the phrase Customer avatar Defining targeting Understanding your customer avatar Essential if you are to maximize the impact of your marketing and attracting your perfect Customer. Most people still believe that their ideal customer is everyone. And why wouldn't it be? After all, most of us don't really care who we sell to, it's just sales. Right? Today we're going to blow that myth wide apart and explain to you why your customer avatar is so important for your business. At the end of the day, if you try and target everybody, as in mass marketing, chances are that you will actually reach a very little or even worst case scenario. No one. No one. As you have cash, your net far too wide, you just imagine a fisherman going to sea, dropping his net just outside the harbour on a whim and trolling around for about five hours in a very random way. What do you actually think his catch will be? Not much. He might get a few bits and pieces in there. Nothing sellable. Random, random things. Quite underwhelming, I would have thought. Now, any decent fisherman will make plans, as in any businessman will, before setting to sea, work out what species of fish he will target and what he wants to catch, where they are and plan a strategy to maximize his catch. And no doubt he will return to port with a hole full of fish which he will have already had a customer for. Now that, that, that's a good plan. When it comes to marketing, it really is all about planning. A question people ask me all the time is why I have a customer avatar. Well, there are numerous reasons, the main ones being, number one, target your ideal guest. It's a proven point that some ideal guests are easy to work with. They're clean, they're tidy, tend to be lowly people at the end of the day. That's why they are our ideal guests. Number two, increase customer attention. At the end of the day, we are targeting ideal guests. They're the type of person who will like your accommodation and if they like your accommodation, there's a good chance they will return time and time again, maybe sort of rebook for the same time next year. They might even decide to come for an autumn or a winter break. Number three, more referrals of existing guests to friends and family who are in similar demographic, social and cultural sets. At the end of the day, if your ideal guest likes you, they will tend to be mixing with people of a similar nature, similar backgrounds, similar work, similar social standings. So there's a good chance they will tell their friends and associates and they will come and stay with you as well. Four, create a marketing strategy around your avatar. When it comes to creating strategies, sometimes it's difficult to know what to do, what to post, where to post it. If you've got a target in mind, you've got an avatar, then it's easier to tailor content around that person. All of these will lead to increased bookings. Increased bookings means increased turnover at the end of the day. Increased turnover means increased profits. And then that's what we're in this business for, to make money. Either to enjoy yourself for a pension, for the future, or just improve your properties. Once you've created your avatar, you can then create your marketing strategy, your content and base it around your avatar. This is a quote I came across, must be last year now during my CM level 3 and I just love it to bits. It's very, very simple, but it's quite effective. Now it's a case of how do you know how to sell something if you don't know who you're selling it to? Now think about it. That's a very, very powerful quote and it's very, very true. How do you know how to sell something if you don't know who you're selling it to? That's so powerful in a way. And you do. You know, you need to understand your customer avatar. You need to know how, how he clicks, what he does, when he does it, this and that. You need to understand all these things before you can actually put your goods in front of him to try and sell them to him. Most big multinational companies such as Coca Cola, Pepsi, McDonald's, Premier Inn, Booking.com, they all understand their avatars. Believe it's a not they. They have a quite a list of them. They will design all their social media posts, blogs, content for your landing pages, websites with their avatar in mind. What will happen is you will find it much, much easier to create content when you know exactly who you're targeting and who you're creating the content for. Question I get asked all the time, how many avatars to have? How many avatars should you have? What's the ideal number? It all depends on the size of your business and how much time you got to sort them all out because they can be quite time consuming to set up and work around. Ideally, start with one and craft them well. Crafting very, very well. Get the details done, do your research as we will show you later on. It's best to have one good one rather than three mediocre ones. Some people have different ones for different seasons. One for spring, one for winter, one for summer, one for autumn. Some people. Some people's businesses tend to vary. They have one one set of clients for midweek and one for Weekends. Well, that's the case. You'd have two. You'd have one avatar for your midweek sales and one for your weekend sales. So ideally you can have two or three, I would say maximum five. But say once you get to, and once you get to know how to work out an avatar, you're creating content around that avatar. All your marketing is designed around that one. One avatar. Then if you, if you're running five, it can be, it can become very, very time consuming. Remember, each avatar will need a separate marketing strategy, separate content and marketing approach. There will be instances when, when you'll get some overlaps, but you could say each avatar, it's his very own business. Now here comes the interesting bit, creating your customer avatar. First of all, most information you will need if you've been trading for a while will be your past existing customer base. Look and evaluate your existing customer base. This is very much down to you as it's your product, be it B and B, small guest house, hotel or self catering. Most of us will have a good idea by just looking at past guests. Have a look at your past database, old booking forms, see where most your existing bookings come from. Are there any patterns in your past guest history? Who stays with you, who enjoys staying with you and returns every year, year after year? Who respects your property, leaves it clean, who is never a problem, always leaves you good reviews. That's a good one. People leave you good reviews, they love you. So basically that is a brand ambassador. So always, always look for people who leave good reviews. Your ideal avatar will be well matched to your property and everything you offer. You will no doubt have a few similar people who will account 50, 60% of your bookings. Make some notes of the traits and incorporate them when creating your avatar. Now we might have some people in here who are not actually trading yet who are thinking of buying a property, going into B and B or self catering and they might say, well, I've got no past data to go on, so what do I do now that's the case. You're in an ideal situation where you can actually choose your ideal guest before you start trading. Now again it'll be, it'll a lotta will be fixed to your own property. What you have if you buy the seaside, you're not going to target mountaineers. If you live in the city, you're not gonna, you're not gonna target people who like to go foraging. So it's a case of you know what, whatever your, your business is, whatever your property is and you're not started trading yet. You'll have an idea who you were trying to who attract. Now this gives you an ideal opportunity. If you hone down, you can actually decide before taking anybody who you actually want. Who do you think will be the easiest client for you? So again, don't worry about this, but about your past booking forms. Just think hard. Who would you like to stay? Who would your friends be? Who ideal guests? And just, just think hard about it. When creating, when creating him or her, be very specific. The more specific and detailed they are the avatar, the easier it will be to create content around them. Who are they? Are they singles? Are they couples? Family units, Divorced? Do they have extended family? Grandmas, grandpas? They travel with them all the time. Do they have children? How many? 1, 2, 3? Stepchildren? Do they have grandchildren? How old are they? 3, 4, 5? 15, 16, 17? All these things really do count. Do they have pets? Are you pet friendly? If so, then that's a fairly obvious one for you. Pets. How many pets? Big dogs, mainly cats. Some people have budgies and parrots and all sorts. How many of them? How big are they? Are they Chihuahuas? Are they big dogs? Again, all this fits into what you want as well. Remember, your avatar is not about them, it's about you. What would you like as your ideal guests? The demography. Where do they live? What part of the country? Have a look around. I'm sure you'll find when you look into your booking forms and databases, you will get 40, 50% of people from a certain place. We do down here in North Wales. We get a lot, lots from Cheshire. Majority of our people come from Cheshire way, Derbyshire way, Lake District and sort of, you could say the north west, you know, a bit from Manchester, Liverpool, that way. Work. What do they do? How much do they earn? I know you might start thinking, and this is getting a bit personal now, why do we need those details? Well, you do, because people, people fit into, people do fall into brackets. You need to understand what they do, why they do it and where they go. And again, earning wise, you need to understand, can they afford to come to you? Are you going after the bottom sector, middle sector, top sector? Some people will be letting their places out for sort of, you know, 70 pound, 80 a night. Other people are going for 500 pounds a night. Now, then they, you know, it's quite important to understand what they actually earn, what their interests. All these people, they don't work seven days a week. Most people tend to work 35, 40 hours a week. So what do they do in their time off, do they go fishing, do they play golf, are they very sporty, do they go to the theater, do they read books? Again these questions that they're open ended so and again try and sort of think who you like, who you would like staying with you and, and curtail, you know, and curtail to that. Then they what makes them tick, what makes them go to work in the morning? Why do they still go to work? Are they income driven? Do they want fancy cars or do they like holidays? That's, that's, that's the big one for us now. Do they like traveling? Where do I traveling to? So again it's so important. The more you know your guest then the easier it is to sell to sell to them. Niche down as much as you can. Here at Sausage Bach we have four avatars. Our main avatar we use for all school holiday dates, weekends, May, June, July and weekend September, October. Our other avatars are fit as one is specific for contractor stays and the other two for weekend stays but we won't go into that one. Our main avatar, we've named them as we all, as we always say, Jane and John, mid-30s, early-40s, two children, 8, 10ish, one dog wear, Hunter wellies, barber jackets. Both professional. People say one works full time, maybe an accountant, solicitor, sort of manager. One part time. Again professional household income 50 to 80k a year. Again not too high. Average wage now is 20. Well the minimum wage is 24,000. Average wage about 35. So yeah we don't aim too high. Our cottages are pitched middle, middle topish sector. So you know, yeah, that fits as well. Jane and John enjoy spending time as a family unit. The great outdoors, walking mountains, coastline, beaches, coastal path go down to love going to the beach, not bothered about sunshine. They just like sort of fresh air and just running around somewhere to take the dog, let the dog run free and just, and just taking in the area. They enjoy eating in occasional barbecues and occasionally eating out. They're not too wealthy so they can't be eating out every night. So they, so, so hence they come on holiday and they spend their time as a family unit spending time in the cottage, eating in. Now we match these to our cottages. Our cottage is stylish but simple, very much country styling. We embrace dogs, have a dog run, dog bulls, etc, numerous paths around the play. We love kids. We've got small play area for the children. We've got some swings, some slides, some tractors. Now the cottages themselves have good well appointed kitchens for cooking. We have outside Cooking and eating areas, barbecues, fire pits. We're close to some lovely walking. We're literally five miles either way from the north and south coast of Tyrn. Coastal path and mountains beaches. Also got some good restaurants in the area. Locally, our cottages are set in about eight acres of our own land, young woodland. So again there's plenty of place for the kids to go and explore, climb trees and just, just be, just, just be free and just be around the place. Now can you see now how my avatar is matched up to our cottages? So when our avatar arrives he says, well, first thing he says, wow, this is perfect. Just what I wanted. And you know what I think to myself? Yep, I know that because I've targeted you specifically. Now if this happens and you get this is what you'd call the ideal guest. Somebody turns up and they just wow, this is amazing. I love it to bits.

Wow.

So lucky to find you. This is perfect. I just love barbecues. Wow. I love the kitchen. Oh, what a place to take my dog for a run. The kids can relax in the play area. It's, it's no coincidence it's been tailored for that. And that's what you should be doing when you are designing your custom avatar. The more you niche down, the better your product, it suits your avatar. The more you master the avatar and you get your ideal guests arriving and they think it's perfect, the more the price becomes irrelevant. And that again, that is, that, that is a good place to be. Because when people book on your properties, your ideal properties, your ideal avatars, price becomes secondary. It's a case of like we're going there, right? What does it cost? Fine, doesn't matter. Let's get it booked. When it comes to marketing, the more you know about your avatars, the easier it will be to create content around them. And trust me, this is so very true. By now you will have honed down and created fairly basic avatar of your ideal guest. Now it doesn't stop there. We need to get some more detail in there. As I said before, the more detail, the more niche you can get, the better it is. What you need to do now is get inside the head of your avatar. What we need to do now is create a set of questions relevant to the avatar. Marketing is all about creating solutions to problems. Once you understand in greater detail what your avatar wants and needs are, it will be much easier to solve its problems. The main wants and needs will be which are relevant to our avatars will be time off, relaxation time with the family, time enjoying doing what he wants to do, those are his wants and needs. And his problem is, how does he get to do that? How does he get to find time with the family? How does he get to go to the beach? How does he get to go walking? How does he get to relax? How does he get a holiday? Now, as marketers, we're here to solve that problem and it has to us to present a solution to that problem. And our solution is, well, we've got some lovely properties set in lovely areas close to the beach, close to mountains, city center. One of his wants might be, I want to go to the theatre. Well, if you've got a property in London close to the theater, then again, you can solve his problem. If one of his wants is to go running in the countryside and you live in the country, you got a, you've got a rural property, you can solve one of his problems by showing him pictures of nice rural lanes, tell him where there's a park run running again. That's what marketing is all about. There's no point in me creating content about lovely beach swims and coastal rambles to somebody who spends most of his valuable time in the theatre and dining out. Again, in the same way, there's no point somebody with some lovely accommodation, say Kensington or Chelsea, creating content about mountain walks and best beaches in Wales or the south coast because they're too far from there. It's fairly common sense in a way. It just gives you a targeted approach. You trying to put stuff in front of your avatar which they want to buy. In simple terms, if you can nail your customer avatar avatars and then learn to create content around him, this will certainly help you develop your direct booking strategy. Bringing you in better guests more suited to the market. Offer more and better guests means an easier time for you. More bookings, increased turnover and the end of the day, increased profits. And at the end, that's what we're all about. And finally, it's time to humanize your customer avatar. It's important to humanize your avatar. Give them names, John, Jeremy, Jane, Lucy, give the kids names, print their details out and pop it on the wall of your office. I'd even go as far as creating a virtual interpretation of your avatar. You've spent hours collecting and collating all this data about them, now it's time to use it. It's a bit like goal setting. They always say, when you come to setting goals, make your goals visual. That's why you know, if it's a goal setting, you know the score. 3, 6, 9, month goals. Put photos of what you want, be it a holiday, a Ferrari, whatever, on your fridge door because it's there. You look at it every day and it reminds you what you're doing. In a way, it's the same with an avatar. Do a sheet like like in the bottom here. How are the details down there? What brands they follow, what their demographics, their hopes, hobbies and interest, their fears, holidays, ideals. And have a photo there, pop it on your wall. So every time you come into the office and you might be creating content, you think, right, what shall we do today to try and get this avatar of mine here for next weekend Again? Have a quick look at it and if you get inside their mind it just makes creating content for them that much easier. If you need any worksheets on creating customer avatar, pop onto Google and just type in custom avatar. There are dozens and dozens of examples on there which are some are good, some are bad, but go through them and download them and work on them. It'll be well worth it in the end. Hopefully this short presentation has conveyed the power of avatars and how important they are to your business, how they help you understand your target market and get inside the head of your ideal guest, which is a very important perspective when crafting your message to your target audience and market. Again, thank you for watching this short presentation. This is my very, very first attempt at creating a presentation on PowerPoint and at times I'm sure it's a bit clunky, but as you can imagine I'm quite nervous doing it. I think it gets better towards the end as it flows a bit better. If anyone ever needs a chat about marketing then I'm more than happy to give you an hour of my time to discuss any aspects of your of your marketing or social media. Just send me a message on WhatsApp on 079-610-56444 or otherwise just DM me in team Boostly or all through Boostly. I'm around most the time. Again, thank you very much. Bye.

Now.

I didn't realize that Ger was going to give away his phone number at the end of our presentation, so please be respectful. That is his actual phone number which just sums up the guy that he is. Please don't bombard him with messages because I don't think his misses will be very happy. But again this is just the guy that he is. Can we all please show some love in the comments? It is not easy doing this right and I have definitely on purposely pushed girl out of his comfort Zone, because I know what he's doing. I can see what he's doing and what he wants to do, but sometimes you just need a kick up the ass to get there. And this is my kick of the ass to go with. I was talking about this. And you know what? He delivered it on time. It was perfect. Everything that I wanted and more. And so can you just all please now show the love again? He's got just an unreal human who has consistently and every single time just stepped up, stepped up, stepped up, stepped up, and never asked for anything in return, which is a sign of just an unreal human. So I know that I'm very appreciative having him in my world and I know there's so many people part of Boost Lee that are. And then, yeah, go reach out. Go reach out to Ger. He's available. He's in the group. He's probably in here now, but yeah, fantastic. Well done, my friend. Okay, let's move on. We've talked about guest avatar. Now let's switch over to the world of SEO. Mr. Craig Webb is one of those amazing humans that came and helped put this event together again. These events are not free to put on. He has helped get this visible and visible and through his company. So Craig has been in the world of Boostly for many years. He came in because he was managing and a hotel, a hotel chain. Craig brings such a vast amount of experience and his niche that he's dropped down in his SEO. But I've been working closely with Craig over the last couple of months and, you know, he's more than just somebody who knows a little bit about Google and being an SEO, his systems and structures. And like I say, we're working closely on a few projects and the. The advice that he's given is phenomenal. Again, I. Please make sure that you pay attention to this. It's the topic that always gets asked about, but it is always the one that people just glaze over. He has got a course available as well, which you'll find out more obviously through this. But can we just all please show Craig some love and let's get on with this, shall we?

Hey. Hey, Craig here. Today, I'm going to be talking about SEO and explaining what it is and give you a little demonstration as well about how you can do some SEO and keyword research to help improve your website's ranking. Now, that's the idea. Let me just first explain what SEO is. So SEO means Search Engine optimization, and it is the practice of getting your Website ranked more highly on search engine. You're optimizing your website for search engines and for search. So I've done a little search beforehand. Afternoon tea in Chipping Camden. That sounds beautiful, doesn't it? The reason I've done that is because I used to manage this hotel and we served afternoon tea and Chipping Camden. Good time to tell you a little bit about me. So I have been in hospitality or had been for 30 something years. I know, I know I don't look it. And I was a general manager of hotels for bespoke hotels for 17 years. I retired quit January 23rd and set up my own digital marketing agency. So since then I've helped hospitality people get their websites found online and help people update and maintain their websites. So I'm well placed to understand your business needs as an ex hospitality business manager. And I understand how difficult it is to get direct bookings etc etc. So let's talk about SEO and how it can help us. So this is called a search query. My search query on this occasion, Afternoon Tea and Chipping Camden. And as we can see we've got some shopping elements and sponsored listings and then we've got the top ranking item was the hotel I used to manage. Now it ranks well because it matches very clearly the search term that I put in Afternoon Tea and Chipping Camden. And we've set up the page title Afternoon Tea Chipping Camden Cotswolds and the meta description underneath. That doesn't give you any sort of SEO juice we call it, but it does help people click through or not. Now we don't want people clicking through that are not interested in our property. We want people clicking through that are interested. So we need to ensure that these 150 characters try to entice the person to click through to our listing and then that obviously they'll click through. And ideally the website then the page will be structured in such a way that Google likes. So as you can see if we hover over the bar at the top it says Afternoon Tea, Chipping Camden, Cotswolds and gift vouchers. Our URL also includes the term afternoon tea. H1 which is H1 is the most important title header 1 says afternoon tea and subheadings H2S. H3S also include the term afternoon tea and different types of terms around the same subject. We can see also if we scroll further down this website, the images are about afternoon tea. The text talks about sandwiches and cakes and that sort of thing opening times. It answers the question that the searcher was Intending to find. Okay. If it doesn't do that, the client will bounce away, go somewhere else. The page needs to say or do what it says it's going to do. It has to do what it says on the tin. Right. And that's what SEO is all about. So we can do all sorts of things there. We can take action, reserve a table, look at the menu, et cetera, et cetera, put gift vouchers. Yeah. So we have to make sure our website pages do what we need it to do and that's different for every single page. Now, I want to talk you through. I'm going to take an example. We're going to go over to one of my clients, Flowerydale Lodges. So they're hot tub lodges up in Yorkshire. We're going to do some keyword research for this client and talk you through how I would start that process at the very start of the SEO journey. And whilst I'm flicking around between web pages, I'll pause the video and just move on. So hopefully you'll, you'll keep up. But this is a, is a lovely video, a lovely property. It's got about 30 lodges, each one with a hot tub. They're very pet friendly, so they've got a specific niche, sort of families and couples, romantic stays, obviously, hot tubs and pet friendly. So their target audience is quite specific and they do very well. They're always very busy. So what I'm going to do is do a bit of key search around, keyword research around that. Now, a good place to start with keyword research is Google. So we should be typing into Google the thing that we are, the thing that we offer, the type of customer we want to resonate with and we type in that search and we see what else comes up. We can. It's giving us clues. This is our keyword research right here. Cheap. Well, if you're not cheap, don't include that. You might switch cheap for luxury log. Cabins. Lodges. Luxury lodges. Okay. We're getting some really good information here. So we look down the SERPs. These are called SERPs, search engine results page. This is a sponsored section at the top. They're all paid parts. Then we've got Google Maps and then we've got the natural listings. So we've got hot tub hideaways, hoe seasons, just Lodge and then Flowery Dell. That's our client sitting just above booking dot com. That's nice. But if we go further down to the bottom, we can see some other related search terms. And these are again, all pertinent to us and our business. So what we need to be doing is making a record of these. And this is just one way of finding other terms. We really need to be switching around these terms. Yorkshire, you might replace it with a town name or a local village name, something like that. Or you might just say instead of hot tub, you might say pet friendly romantic lodges. So you're changing and switching up the search terms to see what other results come up to give you some ideas. And this is all content for you that you want to add onto your pages, but you should only add that content if it resonates. There's no point adding content that your competitor is getting loads of hits on, but actually it's not something you offer. So if you're not pet friendly, why would you talk about pet friendly? You don't want those people inquiring.

Right.

So it has to resonate with who you are. And I'd go as far as saying you need to think from the start, what is your aim as a business and how do you want your business to perform? Who do you want to attract? Now, if it was me, and I owned my own short term rental accommodation, I would want customers who perhaps aligned with my values. If I was interested in green issues, etc. I would want people to stay who are also interested in recycling, respecting the environment, etc. So the words we use on our website, I feel it's just more than. It's a little bit more than just search engine optimization and keywords. It's an emotion. It should resonate with your ideal audience and they should feel like they're being spoken to. And the reason for that is that they will value you far more if you resonate with them. I don't know if you know if I'm not a musician, but if you have two pianos in a room and you press a key on one piano, the string on the other piano will vibrate because it resonates, it reverberates. That vibration that they're giving out will, will resonate back to them and they will feel aligned to you and your values. So that's where SEO goes a little bit deeper than just research. And that's the difficult side for me. When I'm working for a client, I can do statistical stuff, but I don't know how a customer our how my client feels and who exactly they're trying to resonate with their audience on an emotional level. So that's where a little bit more needs to come into it. And that's where the copywriting skills come through as well. So the keyword research will get the client to your website and it's then who you want to resonate with to come through your copy and really speak to your ideal audience that that matters as well once they're on your website. So I've taken some of the searches from Google, some of the suggested keywords that, from Google, from here and from the drop down up here, and added them to a spreadsheet. I will share this spreadsheet with you, it'll be in the notes and we just add it into, into here just to make a record of it and you can just add in there whatever you like, keep changing the name, take Yorkshire to the local town log cabin, pet friendly, etc. And just keep switching words around that you know that you want to target and you feel resonate with your business. So what we can then also do is try to expand on this list by actually using some software to scan our website and tell us what keywords we already rank. For now, for that I use a tool called ubersuggest. There are others out there, but this is one, there's a, there's a good free version that can give you exactly what you need. Just go to ubersuggest or neilpatel digital.com and, and you can set up a free account in Chrome and scan your website for any issues. So this is actually a client. I didn't know this till I, I just, I knew that we had increasing their, their traffic but I didn't know how good it was. So I can't remember when we took over mid, mid last year, but we've had some really good increase in, in traffic, monthly traffic, since then. Anyway, I'm not here to show off, I want to show you about keyword research. So if we look at their dashboard and we go to the site audit, it will tell us the organic keywords that they rank. For now in the free version it will probably give you 20, 30, 40, but it's fine. And you could, you could perhaps do a different account and, and try again if you didn't want to pay, but it's enough to get you started and certainly for the next part I'm going to show you it's enough. So for here I can extract the keywords, so I can extract them all, click that, export all to a CSV file that saves me having to go through them, copy and pasting, etc. Etc. So I'm just going to skip on to the next stage and I'll Pause while I do that. So what I've done, I've just taken that exported CSV file and I've copied it. Gave me a few hundred words, but I've copied like the lot, the top 40, and just put those in here. Okay. And what we're going to do, we're going to go back to our Google search results and have a look, because our aim really, we don't want to be fourth, we want to be third or second or first. So what we can do is have a look at the people in position one and see what keywords they're ranking on. Now, this website, actually, it covers the whole of the UK and the Yorkshire part is just one page, so I can't scan one page, only the whole thing. But the keywords about hot tub lodges and hot tub hideaways will be similar. So I think that's quite relevant. We'll. We'll take that website and what we're going to do is go back to ubersuggest and scan their site to steal their keywords, of course. So let's go back over here and I'll just run that. Run that query to do it. We can actually just go down to this keyword ideas section on the left. Search by keywords or search by website. So we're going to put our competitor website in there. We need to tell it what country we're in because otherwise it won't pick up. It will think that it's not ranking in that site in that. In that location and then click search and then we're going to obviously discover what their keywords are. And this is going to feed into our system and get lots of keywords to add in. So I'll pause that while it's running. So I run that query, exported the CSV and again I copied the top 40 results and I'll paste them in there. Now, at this point, we need to be a little bit careful to now take words out that are definitely wrong for us. Okay. All looks like cottages. So I was looking here, that client, they're not really about caravans. Pretend they're not. They're not in Lincolnshire, so we'll take that out. They're not near Tattersall. We don't do anything with flights, so let's just move these ones up.

Get.

Rid of those and that. That's about right. Now what we're going to do, we're actually going to use AI as as this week was approaching, I think Mark posted somewhere about what you'd like to learn in SEO and someone responded, how to use AI. So I thought, good idea. How can I use AI within this training? Now I've talked about how we resonate on a human level, your emotional side of SEO, which I think is really important. But we also need to use AI because it's a language model and we need to use those, the technology that's available to us to expand on our keywords. So what we're going to do, we're going to run some prompts and expand on these keywords until we've banked up or built up a really good database of keywords that we want to use within our website. And let me show you on ChatGPT how we're going to do that. So I've added in here, in every section, in any column, there's the Chat GPT prompt and we'll go through the prompts and I'll show you what I've done. I'll pause the video so you don't have to watch me messing around. But in here, so it's, it gives you an instruction and the prompt and what I've done is copied the prompt into Chat GPT and also copied and pasted all the, all of these keywords from these three columns. It does say in the prompt, input keywords from the, from the first three columns into ChatGPT and give the following prompt. So let's go over this is a list of keywords pertaining to R and insert your type of business Hot tub Holiday Lodge business in Richmond, in Richmond, Yorkshire. Please act as a world leading SEO and keyword research expert in Every prompt in ChatGPT. You need to tell it who it is, what it is acting as. So if you just say give me keywords, it will give you keywords. You are now telling it to be a world leading SEO authority on keywords. Right. It's not just any keyword research. So add to this list LSI latent semantic indexing words and semantically similar keywords to expand our keywords for future SEO use. Our target audience is pet friendly hot tub stays. And then I've added in, in the brackets a list of all the keywords here and we'll just run the prompt. Now that will normally be pretty fast while it's running. Let me explain LSI and semantically similar. If I search for an Apple, I might be talking about a Granny Smith, but if you search for an Apple, you might be looking for the latest iPhone 15. So our content needs to have alternative things meaning the same thing. Yeah. And that enables Google to really understand what your product is about. So you might say hot tub, but also within the content somewhere you might talk about the differences between hot tubs and jacuzzis and the, the cleaning regime for your hot tub and the safety rules for your hot tub and talk in different ways about that subject. So if it was. If I was looking to search on Granny Smith apples, I would write about recipes, Granny Smith apple diseases, where they're grown and how much they sell for, and all different types of content around it. Similarly, if I'm selling iPhones, I'm talking about hardware, software, prices, etc. So which we're ensuring that all different subject matter around the subject is discussed. Now, when I started earlier, I talked about resonating with your audience, which is really important. But we also need to ensure that, that every page of our website doesn't talk about everything. Every page cannot have all the content. We need to be specific about where the customer is on their buying journey. So at the start of the buying journey, they hit your homepage. That's a broad search to the top of the funnel. At the top of the funnel, when they hit your website and they're into your sales funnel, we're looking to create a domino effect, a domino belief that this is the place for them. And by toppling that first domino and having the right content on the right page, answering the questions that the customer has in the right order, their domino belief will ensure that they fall to the bottom of the funnel, get their credit card out and book with you. But the right question needs to be answered at the right time. So that's why this keyword research is important. We can't put all words on every page and we have to think at the start of the journey. It's broader, it's Yorkshire, it's county level. At the bottom of the sales funnel, it's a bit more specific, local, local knowledge. And the questions that the customer wants to want asking or wants answering are different through the journey. So at the start, they're looking for somewhere with a hot tub in Yorkshire. Then in the middle of the journey, they're choosing the property. So now they want one that is pet friendly and they can also bring their child. That's a middle of the sales funnel query. At the bottom of the sales funnel, when they're ready to get the credit card out and they said, yes, yes, yes, this does everything I want, they have a different set of questions. Can I trust you? What's your cancellation policy? Is this website secure? How do I contact the owner? What's the checkout time? So you wouldn't put that stuff right at the start of the journey. So just think about that as you're building up your content on the web pages. Okay, so it spat out our reply. What does it say? This is a list of keywords pertaining to our hot tub lodges business in Richmond, Yorkshire. So what we're going to do, we're going to copy all of these. Oh, it's a really long list. So I let go of my okay, that's original keywords and then we've got down to our LSI and semantically similar. Just try and copy what I need copy back here and paste. Now chat GBT always does this and has it in a large font. So as you can see, that's given us a different set of words and keywords we can use. But we now need to rattle through the other prompts so we can expand on this list and work through it. So my next prompt was again acting as in your SEO expert mode and as a highly skilled consultant in the short term rental industry. Put whatever you like in there. Please take all of the keywords we have given you above and those you gave me to produce a list of long tail keywords. My business. So now what we're trying to do is just expand that content and these are just the response can give you paragraph headings, subheadings, FAQs, anything. You can now start expanding your content within your website. So as you can see, it's all spitting it out now. And it always gives the sources, okay, so let's copy those. And we're not, you know, we're not too fussed at this stage. We're just trying to get them down into the spreadsheet so that we can come back to them at a later time and go through them. What I do when I go through them, I keep ones there that I like and I say, okay, it's green. We'll say green and we'll find what we don't like. I actually like all of those. But let's say for example, I don't like that. We'll turn that red and that one is okay, we're going to use that as a, as a blog page. So we've got a red, amber, green, green is our money. Key terms, red is definitely not. We're just going to ignore it. And amber, I think that can be a good blog title later on and that's just kind of how I tend to color coordinate things when I come back later. Okay, we're going to go on to the next prompt. So I mentioned a minute ago that we need to make sure the right content is in the right page. So what we're going to do, our prompt is now asking ChatGPT to sort the words for us because that's again, it's a language model. It helps us do it. So consider these website pages home about us book now our lodges contact and order my keywords into those headings as to which page they should appear on. Keywords can appear on more than one page, but please use all the keywords on at least one page. So that's been very specific. A lot of people tend to not give a specific enough prompt to Chat GPT. It's not giving it enough information, thinking that the longer it is, the more confused it will get. But actually the more specific, the better. So now it's splitting them all up for us. And it's given us some good ideas which again will copy and add into our spreadsheet. Now it does go on, you'll be surprised to know. So obviously I said you'll get a copy of this sheet. It will be in the. The notes, in the links, something like that. So we're going to see how much we can expand on this content and use our research to do some more content for us. What I would say is right at the start, I would add more words in there. I would add, you know, 20 here, 80 here, a hundred of your competitors. Yeah. And then this content will be much, much more to choose from. All right, so let's go to this one. We'll go over to Chat GPT. Right. So we're, we're asking a little bit different now. We're saying continuing as our SEO expert, but drawing on your expertise as a blog writer, please create five blog titles. Put 10, 15, whatever you like there, and breakdown of headings related to the above keywords and business details. Blog titles should aim at top, middle, bottom. So you choose. If you're going on your homepage, it's top. If it's pertaining to the property page, it's middle of your sales funnel. And if it's the bottom, it's kind of near the checkout page in of the sales funnel in order to attract clients looking for my product and service with great hooks and with intention of converting customers to booking to bookers with good CRO. CRO being conversion rate optimization. So now we're asking it just to expand on this and to give us ideas. It will spit out some blog titles, but with blogs, you don't Want to be just saying to ChatGPT. Oh, okay. Write a thousand word blog about this. It's, it's not good enough. You would need to do all of this keyword research, tell it to go and visit your business, drop the website link in there and teach it and keep it on this thread. And you can see on the left here, I've got different threads for different clients. And if I'm coming back to this thread, I wouldn't just, I wouldn't start, I wouldn't ask a new prompt in a previous client's or another client's thread. I keep it in, in the same thread so it understands and starts building its knowledge about you. So I pasted the answers into there and it's given me top of the funnel ideas, middle of the funnel ideas. Yeah. And bottom of the funnel ideas. So that gives you an idea now where to place the content on your website. But like I say, we're going to have more keywords. You know, you could even say 20 blog titles. You really want to do this for looking after your, your keyword research and your content for the future. Okay, so our next prompt, it's about creating a little bit more content. And I, I love FAQs. I think they're a really good way of adding content to your page, keeping things nice and neat. If you've got it on a, at accordion where it clicks, where it expands when you click on it. Got an accordion menu if the question and the, the answer expands. So it's a really good way of adding more content to your page without boring the customer and keeping it quite succinct and precise. It keeps them dwelling on the page longer, reading more, that sort of thing. So we're asking for FAQs for each page pertaining to each part of the sales funnel, utilizing our keywords from our previous lists. So again, it's separating us some, some FAQs for us now. This stuff is not going to be perfect. Okay, don't just copy and paste all of this straight onto your website. You need to go back and actually read it. Is it correct? You know, is it, is it, is it right? Yeah. You can't just put this straight on your website. You really have to go through it. This is, this is just chat GP to chat GPT doing its thing. And you can't just rely on its first take. You have to meticulously go through each of these and expand on it and make sure it's correct. The last prompt I'm going to put in for this for this session is to say, as our SEO experts, we would like to create any other search term you may feel relevant for this business. In particular, showing search intent for Hot tub stays in Yorkshire insert obviously who you are there please visit the website to gain more knowledge for the business. And you might do that as a prompt at the very start as well, just to tell chat GPT to go and look at your website, which we'll only do on the 4.0 version anyway, but it's worth getting it to visit your site to glean some more information. Okay, so it's given us our final prompt and we're just going to paste those in. And that again has just given us a little mop up session on anything we might have missed before. But like I say, more keywords at the start, the better filter them before you start this process because if you're feeding in wrong keywords at the start, it will keep spitting out wrong phrases towards the end. Okay, so now you've got a plan to start your SEO journey. I hope you've enjoyed that. This is kind of my, my go to thing. Me and all my staff. This is what we do when we start a client project. We would, we would compare at least five websites. We would go to competitor websites. Not, we don't, we're not pulling keywords from booking.com or Airbnb. We're looking at competitors that have a very similar business, preferably in the same location. But if it's not, we know we can switch the location keywords and that are aiming to deal or target the same audience as us. So that's really our starting point for everything. Now if you've enjoyed that, I do do some SEO training if you're interested. Let me just show you what that is. So there's a training course here. That's the back end of it. So how to use your computer. Introduction to WordPress, different resources, keyword research. That's a couple of hours there. Google Analytics bonus videos and all sorts. This has only been going about seven or eight weeks and I've already got loads of videos in there and it's going to expand on the way to, to give much more as well. There's also a community section where the members can ask questions. As you can see there, they can ask questions and give feedback and what things they want to learn. And I will add that to the videos as well. So if you want to sign up to that, that will be in the, in the links and I'll possibly email anyone that signs up as well. If you Want to find it and you cannot. It's on my website SEO course and just use the key, the discount code hospitality at the very end of the checkout page and that will give you I think £25 off a month for as long as you want to sign up for. Okay, let me know if you've got any questions and I hope you've enjoyed it. Take care, guys. Bye bye.

All right, welcome back. Fascinating. And can we all please again just show Craig some love in the comments. Put tag Craig in and just say thank you very much. Craig, please drop in the web link for your academy. I can speak firsthand how important it is to have multiple revenue streams for your business and making sure you've got multiple marketing streams and SEO is definitely one in 2016. When I first started Boostly, I made a very deliberate route of doing blogging because I knew that in the in the future if we do say a thousand blogs over the course of four or five years, then it will come back in spades and we in consistently get thousands of people coming to the website every month. And that is a large part of it. But you've got to start. People procrastinate so much with this and the SEO Academy is fantastic for this. Craig also offers a done for you service. So if you just want to skip the academy, just go straight to them. He's got a team which is phenomenal for it. Please do go ahead and leave some love in the chat And Craig, please do go ahead and in the comments put the links to it and if you've got any questions, pop it in because obviously we have got all of our speakers are here in the chat and as we move swiftly on to Mr. Phil Kennard now this is going to be a big session. Then I think that you'll realize how cool this is. Today is a big one. This is a big session. This topic, this next topic we're going to talk about is going to be even bigger. You're going to need to get your pens and papers because you've pretty much got the direct booking loop. It's about to get laid out. The direct booking process, the guest flow, whatever you want to talk about is going to come back quickly. So Future State, which is Phil Canard's company again has been working with Brucely for a while now. We've got very important launch and a thing that we've been working on behind the scenes we're going to talk about later on. So come back for that. But also as well, this session is is massive future State have very kindly helped put this event together. So please do go and check them out. F U T u E E R-E-S-T-A-Y.com Even better, go to this one. Boostleague.co.uk forward/sorry food futurestay.com forward/boostly Go there, check them out. Loads of good things are coming and you're going to find out more about this company massively. So without further things being said, let me just hand this quickly over to Phil. Get your pens and papers out, which is going to be a good one. I'll be back at the end of it to introduce our final speaker and then we'll let you go for your evening, your afternoon or your morning, wherever you are in the world. Before we do handover though, here's what I would love to know. Let me know in the chat, just put one answer. Who do you currently use as your property management software tool? Who do you use? And if you don't use any, just put none. I would love to know for everybody that's tuning in with us live or on the replay.

Hey guys, welcome to the Direct Booking Loop session at the Book Direct Virtual Summit. I'm so excited that Mark invited me in future state to come talk about this really, really important topic. But before we dive into building your own direct booking loop so you can get a repeatable source of bookings for your short term rental, I'm actually going to bring Mark back in because there's a key topic I want to address with everyone here and I know Mark's an expert on this. Together we've helped hundreds of thousands. I know I have a hundred thousand plus vacation rental websites built at Futures Day and Mark has thousands and tens of thousands. So I want to just dig in from two of the most experienced website builders in the industry on a critical topic. Mark, join us in here for a second. I want to talk about a really critical top. Most people believe that direct bookings are a zero sum game, that either you have no direct bookings or you have 100% direct bookings. Nothing in between matters. But the reality and the way I see it is that just starting out, just getting a few direct bookings, if you can get to 10%, if you can get to 20%, those are steps in the right direction and especially if you're operating a low margin str like many of us are right you're at 10 or 20% yield that can, getting, getting 10 direct bookings can give you 25 more profit or 50% more profit if you're at, you know, 5 to 10% margin.

Yeah.

Mark, do you have a quick story that you want to share about someone that you've seen? Just start at the beginning of their direct booking journey and how much that's changed their trajectory with str.

Yeah. And I guarantee there's a lot of people who are in here this week watching who are, you know, like you say, maybe you know, 100% reliant on, on, on a platform to bring in their bookings. And I say this to everybody who always gets overwhelmed. And it's very easy when you're on a week like this and you're with hundreds of other people that are also taking part as training to get that comparisonitis. It's very easy to fall into a trap of going, oh, they're in here but they're already at 50% direct bookings or they're in here and they're already doing really well. How am I going to be able to do this? And I feel like the first bit of advice I always give to people is don't worry about anybody else, just focus on you. And you have a bit of advice that I give to people is now when you start going to the gym, you know, you've obviously got these fitness goals that you set out when you, when you join, like I want to get a six pack, want to get more, more muscles, etc. You don't go on the first session and walk out with a six pack. It's like nigh on impossible. You've got to get better every single day by 1%. And if you can get better 1% every single day, you'll achieve your goals. And if you stay dedicated and disciplined and consistent then you, then you will get there. And it's the same with what we're talking about. So number one, don't worry about other people are doing focus on yourself. Number two, try and get better a little bit every single day. And, and you're right, there was a, there was a host that we had who's probably been now part of Boost LE for four years and when she originally joined massively over Reliant on one ota like crazy Amount didn't really understand marketing, didn't really understand what they were doing, but they just started and after a six months they were able to come back into the community and said we've gone from 93% on this one platform and now we're, we're down to, I think it was 80 on that one platform. So after six months 10% made a massive impact on revenue, but also as well, it made a massive impact on her belief and her own self confidence. So yeah, it's huge. It's a huge, huge part of it.

That's super helpful because I think people look at it like this big mountain you have to climb and the reality is it's just one foot in front of the other. And so with the direct booking loop today we're going to talk about exactly how to put the right pieces in place and systems in place for your str so that it's not a massive effort to make that one step per day and get closer and closer to your goal of making more money and keeping more of it with direct bookings. Mark, thanks for joining in telling that story. Okay guys, now we're going to dig into this session. So the first question is how many direct bookings do you need in order to make direct bookings meaningful? And let's start here with a double up direct booking income calculator. And we're going to drop this link in the chat for everyone so you can understand, you can do this on your own and understand exactly, you know, what your target would be. So there's a lot of numbers here. This is a calculator for you to do kind of like a pro forma. Obviously your numbers are not going to be the same numbers. You take this sheet, you copy it and then all you have to do is fill in these blue fields. And so for most short term rental owners, most of us don't have high, we're not running high margin businesses, right? You're not making a 50, 60 margin unless your home's been paid off for years and so on. Most, most owners are making somewhere between a 10 and 20% margin. And what you see is at something like a 15 margin, you can buy by getting 25% up here in the top right direct bookings, you can make literally double 193% of your current income. And the reason why this sounds crazy, right, because that number's so, so high. Why can you double your income by just getting 25 direct bookings? Because OTA bookings have built into them a commission. OTA meaning online travel agency, the Airbnbs, the Verbos and the Expedias of the world, they are great and those OTAs should be a part of your strategy. In fact, we're going to show you how to make OTAs a part of your direct booking strategy. But OTA commission is very, very high and that's because they have to pay to keep the lights on. They have to pay for all that advertising, they have to pay for all that technology. They've earned that money for sure. And we'll talk about how those can become a part of your strategy without breaking any rules and without kind of stealing bookings from OTAs. That's the last thing you ever want to do. Those are your partners. But because their commissions are so high, they charge fees. And the fees can either be passed on to the guest or sometimes people build them into their pricing. And, and either way, what happens is the price of your property on OTA is typically anywhere between 15 and 23% higher than what you would think you should charge if you had a direct booking. But here's the problem. The price that anything should be set at is always what the market is willing to bear. So that means if people are on Airbnb or on vrbo, on Expedia, and they're going to pay your price that you were asking, let's say it was $1,000 a night or $1,000 a toll, first day, and they're willing to pay $1200 because Airbnb tax on a fee or VRBO tax on a fee and it becomes $1,200. Guess what that means? They'd be willing to pay that on your own website as long as you make the right case and as long as you build in your direct booking loop. And that's what we're going to show you how to do today, right? That $1200 is a 20% margin. And if you're talking about a business that Normally has a 10 margin or 15 margin, what do you think happens when you add another 20 margin to that business? Now you've more than doubled the amount of money that you're putting in your pocket at the end of the day. So that's why with the direct booking loop, when you start thinking about direct bookings, that's why we call it double up. Because we're trying to get you to the stage where you can double your take home income by just adding a small percentage of your bookings direct. Right? That small percentage, how do you get from zero, which, which you're probably at today, Nothing wrong with that, to 10, 15, 25%. That's a process that we call the direct booking loop. At the core of the direct booking loop is obviously having a direct booking website. And so we're going to talk about that in one second. See, a couple new people have jumped in here. And just let me see here.

Let'S.

Go into Slideshow mode. Cool. So getting your first direct booking, that's what we're all here to discuss. Just, you know, by show of hands in the chat or by yeses or nos, who here has gotten their first direct booking? Give me a, give me a thumbs up if you've gotten a direct booking. So, okay, here, here's what, here's what I want to share. People think direct bookings are again, a zero sum game, but they also think it's, they think it's a holy grail. Like it's impossible to get direct bookings. And direct bookings only represent a small share of the short term rental industry. Well, this may be surprising, but direct bookings are incredibly valuable. Right? That's why everyone wants them. Right? They are literally for direct booking, people that book directly. And this is a little bit older data here. We this, this the source key data hasn't updated this news, but these trends have generally continued. Direct bookings are valued at almost twice the amount than a booking on Airbnb, about 10% more than a booking on VRBO, and about 15% more than a booking on another OTA, another online travel agent like a booking.com. why are direct bookings worth so much more? It's because people that book directly are booking with you because they found what they believe to be the perfect place. They're willing to pay more because you're one of one when they're doing it, when they're making that decision, and we'll tell you how to become that one of one to them, they're not just looking at you as another listing on the page. So they're willing to pay more. It's the opposite of what everyone thinks. Everyone thinks. Oh, the way you get a guest to book directly is by giving them a discount because you're saving money on the commission. No, your price should be the same that it is on the ota. There are other reasons to get them to book directly. And we're going to show you how to use three psychological effects to make that loop happen. So they're booking, they're willing to pay more, number one. Number two, they stay longer. They stay for more days. Think about it like this. If you're just looking for a place, if you're a guest, and we're all guests, just as well as we are. Just as well as we are posts here, right? I'm sure everyone here stayed in a vacation rental. If you're looking for someone to stay somewhere to stay for one night, maybe you're in town for work, maybe it's two nights at the conference. A hotel can be very convenient. Maybe you're going to go on Airbnb and say, I really have a bunch of people. Be easier if we do, if we do an Airbnb there. But when you're looking for that great family vacation, or you're looking for a place where you're going to stay for a week or two, you want to really make sure it's perfect. You want to close all the loops there and make sure that you're getting everything you want. So just booking that longer, more expensive stay on an Airbnb listing or a verbal listing, that might not be the right, the right play for you. You might want to be able to dig in a little more and learn about the person, learn more about the area, see why you should trust them with your really important, more expensive stay. So that's why direct bookings are more valuable, because it's the same guests that will book on Airbnb, VRBO or other, but they're thinking about your stay and your property differently. Now. Here's the crazy part. And these numbers did continue. So we're down now in 2024, we're down to 32% of all bookings are direct. And why are 32% of bookings direct and not 60, 70, 80? Because consumers really like to book on platforms. We all know this, we all do ourselves, where they can compare lots of information and lots of properties and everything standardized. But most importantly, where they can trust that they're going to get what you say you're going to give. Trust has become paramount for getting direct bookings. What was different in, what was different in 2021, 2020? That made it easier to get direct bookings then than it is in 2024 or make more direct bookings happen in 2019, 2018, 2017? In those years, direct bookings were more. Were more popular, because even if you were using a site like Airbnb, VRBO or others, and look, we can see Airbnb's numbers, you were likely doing a request to book process in 2019, 2018. Right. And so if I'm going to go to Airbnb and I still have to make a request, I can't book instantly because the host isn't using instant book. You know, I don't really. There's. I'm getting no benefit from Airbnb. It's just matchmaking me in a host. I could do that easily somewhere else. Airbnb isn't protecting me as, as a, as a traveler, as a guest at that point in time. But as Airbnb, as you can see here, they're the, they're the 1 number on this chart that has gone up at a steady pace and has continued to. They solved a lot of the problems around bridging the trust gap between the host and the guest both way. It's a two way trust gap, right? The same way that we're all sitting here thinking direct bookings are great, but, you know, I, I don't want someone to come in and trash my place. How do I close that, that trust gap? We're going to talk about that in a second too. Airbnb did a good job of setting a new standard in the industry for how trust should operate between a guest and a host. And we can see here that trend continued as well. They're now outpaced VRBO and outpaced all other sources except for direct booking, still a higher percentage. By really bridging the trust gap, winning the traveler over. So they have the highest source of the biggest source of demand in the space and winning a lot of the hosts over. Especially in our segment, the rentalpreneur segment, between people that have kind of like one to five properties and really doing it themselves for themselves. They're not doing it for a job. I'm sure. You know, if you're on this webinar and you're listening, you're not working at a short term rental business you own or you operate a short term rental and you're doing it because you want to change your life, you want to take your life to the next level or you want to take the most expensive thing that you purchased in your life and turn it into an income generating asset. And so that's what direct bookings help with. So we see direct bookings on the decline and we see Airbnb and other OTAs on the incline and say, oh, maybe it's over, maybe we missed the window, guys. Maybe there are no direct bookings for us in the future. No, no, that's not the problem, guys. Most bookings are still the right. That's not most, but the highest number of bookings per source. The single booking source has the most still direct. The difference is that if you can figure out how to make sure that trust relationship exists between the host and the guest, you and the person that's looking, you can still be one of the ones that's getting direct bookings. And it doesn't take a big marketing budget. A lot of times you go in and you learn about direct Bookings, people are going to say, I'm going to go run ads. You know, running ads works well if you have a lot of properties, you have 20, 30 properties. So that way you're running ads across all your properties. And someone sees ads, they say, oh great, I want to book on July 1st. Oh my one property is busy now. You wasted however much it costs to get them to come to your website, right? You got 20 properties, you probably have some availability on that date. So where ads work? Well at scale, we're not talking about scale here. We're talking about real rentalpreneurs, people like you and me that make up 95% of this industry. And you know, make no mistake, rentalpreneurs like you and me, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 properties do make up 95% of this industry, not just the big guys that you often hear about. And so the way we do this is we build a website that has the trust in it. We're going to talk through this, in this process in a second. But then we create, we use psychology, three core principles psychology, which we'll talk about to create a loop so that once you have that website that meets all the criteria, your direct bookings continue to flow on your own. Okay, so now we know direct bookings are not a myth. Let's talk about they're not a myth. And they're, and they are attainable, right? They're still the number one by source type of bookings that happen in the US right? Here's a tactical view of what happens in a booking. Now I'm saying tactical because I want you to understand this is not how we're going to be thinking about bookings. But this is how when you look at anything that is being sold online, you can put it into what is called a funnel. Right? How's the funnel work? Big at the top and it gets narrower down at the bottom. And then it finally goes out to the thing that it, that it's supposed to go to. This is how when you sell anything, I don't care if it's a hot dog and you're selling it on the street or if it's a website, a direct booking website, and you're selling a 10 day stay for your property for $10,000 or if you're selling a software product like at Future State where someone's going to come purchase our software in order to make their, their short term rental more successful, you still have a funnel. Regardless of whether you want a funnel or know that you have a funnel or are running it and managing like a funnel, it's still a funnel. And so the way funnels work is people start at the top of the funnel. I know this is you guys, we pretend we lay it on its side here for ease of viewership. Right. But the biggest part is discovery. People have to find you. And this is again how people typically think about these things. This is not how we're going to teach you how to get your first booking. They start out with discovery where they have paid social. This is a lot of times people will say go ahead and run some paid social or they have paid display ads and they'll say go on display ads, you can go on Facebook, you can do it for a couple dollars a click and get traffic to your website. And then they'll say word of mouth from prior guests and so on. Those are ways that you can get discovery. Not the ways that we're going to suggest here, but those are the conventional ways that you get discovery for your website. Then people get on your website and they either are going directly to your home page or they're going to a landing page. This is actually pretty important. You know, people think, well, if my website is, you know, Phil's vacation rental.com if I'm going to run an ad or I'm going to tell someone to go to my website, I'm going to send them to Philsvacationrental.com right? That's my website. Well, the challenge is that the way funnel works, as we can see here, every step is smaller than the last step. What does smaller mean in this case? It means that a hundred people saw my ad and entered the discovery stage of this funnel. What percentage of those people, how many do you think are going to actually make it to my website just because they saw my ad? I mean, it's not 100, right? So some of them are going to drop off at each step. If 100 people see my ad, maybe 30 will go to my website, right? Maybe, maybe if I'm doing great, maybe it's 40, who knows, right? But it's, that'd be a very high click through rate actually. And so if 100 people go to my website, or let's say 40 now, now I'm already down to 40. If I'm at 40 people that go to my website, how many people, if I sent them to my home page, billsvacationrentals.com how many people are going to actually click into the one particular property that I had an offer for in my ad? Right. Maybe the offer is July 4th weekend, we just had a cancellation. Maybe the social post, we just had a cancellation, come check it out. Right. Well, I'd be better off sending them directly to my landing page for that property with the dates already filled out. That would take me right to a place where that transaction could happen so I wouldn't lose people on the way there. So that's kind of when you think about where to direct people. That's an important tip. No matter how many properties you have units, just one. And so now you have search searches where you're in the stage where you're getting. People are searching on your website and we'll show what that looks like in a second. You put the dates in and you search and then you get to the page that, where you actually, what we're saying here is booking engine. This can be a part of your website or it might be a separate tool that you put on your website that has all the dates in it for booking. Then you check out, you're looking for the details, you're, you know, you're making sure how much cost, you're reading it and then you're getting. Then you send a receipt email, right? And I'm going to go back here and I'll show you kind of what some of some kind of like a kind of best practices example of this. A best practices example of this here. And this is a future stay powered website. One of our customers, you're here and we're going to go, we're going to hop back and forth a little bit. So you're at the discovery stage. Maybe you found this in an ad, maybe someone emailed this to you and you're looking at an ad for Mountain Lake Cottages. Or maybe you saw something about it, you end up on their homepage because you click on that ad and so now you see the properties, you see that you can click through to everything, right? And you can also then of course see your own website. And now you can search. Now here's the point that I was making about this before. This obviously looks great, right? But if I wanted to sell a vacancy on the mountain on this particular main house on the dates of July 1st to July 7th, I'm better off sending someone directly here than sending them here. And the reason why is there's so many ways they can get tripped up. They can start searching and putting in dates and availability and they're. Now that date's not available. These aren't available. Now they're getting confused. They're going to Camp Suite 3, which isn't what I was trying to sell. Although it's lovely, lovely property. Right. That wasn't what I was trying to sell. And they can very easily end up in a situation where they missed the offer and they didn't go down my funnel. Right, right. So again, that's just a general tip. That's not what I'm going to teach you about the direct booking loop and how to get your first direct booking. The general tip for thinking about the funnel, right? Then you get to the property page, which we showed, and you get to the Book now button. So we'll go here, we'll look at a Book now button. So this is what I'm referring to as like the booking engine, where you can see dates so you can select availability. Right. This property is obviously pretty well booked up because they use Futures Day, so they've already gotten plenty of direct bookings. But let's go ahead and, you know, enter our stay here. No pets allowed here at this particular property. But we're going to say we got two adults and two children. And this takes you to obviously, a place where you can see the fees and you can go ahead and book right now on Future Stay. And there are plenty of ways to get great websites on Future Stay. As you can see here, there's no guest fee or something like that like you would have on Airbnb. That'd be that. Or VRBO or Wikipedia.

Right?

Those kind of 15 to 20% fees that get tacked on on top of the booking. So what that allows you to do is make sure that that is. That, that, that which is. That's what the guest would pay. You can build that into your cost. And that money, that additional 15, 20% goes right into your pocket. Right? And so that's, that's what's happening here. So, you know, this is obviously where someone would. Would complete their transaction and they would book it. I want to point out a couple of things here, right? Because now that was the. That was the clear process. We're going to move into the strategy around the booking in a second. Right? And the strategy is where all the real detail happens. When we're looking at the tactical view of booking, it's very, very dry and makes sense. Everyone gets it. But, like, what do you do? How do you get there? It's the strategic view that makes sense. And then we'll start talking about how to actually get direct bookings right after this. You start out by thinking, what are you actually doing? What gets the people to go from the discovery phase, meaning they saw an ad or they heard about it to the web, to the actual website. How do you close the gaps in the first two? It's what's called an offer. An offer is anything. It's saying, I'm giving you 20% if you book through my website. Now, I'm not suggesting you do 20% discounts and that says you do any discounts. That's an example of an offer. It's something as simple as we do free wine tastings for people that go through the, through the website or hey, this is a great weekend because this festival is in town. You don't even have to do anything. You made an offer just by referring to the fact that something else was happening at that point in time in your area. You created a unique bespoke offer. And the offer is what drives people from discovery to actually taking an action to your website. This is when you start, it's like really what the phase in a funnel will be called interest. It's from awareness to interest. That offer piques their interest. Do you have to make an offer? No. But guess what's going to happen? You're going to lose more people if you don't have an offer. So if not, come check out my website. It's on these dates this thing is happening. You should book it. That's what offer is. That's the general structure. I want to sell this thing to these people for this reason. That's how you make an offer. Now they're on your website. Right. So that's not covered here. We're not looking at ad, but let's just pretend that someone has done that and we'll talk about how to get them to do that in the next step. But now that they're on your website, what's really happening here is they're not going to book right that second. They want to evaluate all this. Don't forget, the people that are booking direct are going to spend more money and they're going to stay longer. So they are not good. This is not an impulse buy. Well, it's not a one visit buy. You, you're going to want to let these people save your address. There needs to be something memorable here because I mean guys, how often have you bookmarked? But you do bookmark stuff online a lot. No, you don't bookmark stuff online. No. No one does. Right. Very rare. What you really do is you come to a website, you check it out and you're like, oh, that's pretty cool. Oh, look, I'm gonna go I'm gonna follow them on Instagram, I'm gonna follow them on Facebook. That is how people are saving your website to come back. So you have to let them recapture. Because if they forget your website, maybe they were on their work computer and now they're at home. That's going that. What was that great side I saw? I don't remember. We let them save it through the way that they saved. There's a million ways to do it. It doesn't have to be just that copy link right up at the top. They're not ready to message you yet. They don't have a question yet. They haven't even asked their husband or their wife or their friend or whoever they're traveling with whether or not this even looks good. They still have to do that before they ball, right? So we're going through the psychology of what they're thinking at each one of these steps. The way you get them from website to the search, where they're actually going to come back again and again and again. Really think about it is by capturing their information, or in this particular case, letting them capture yours through things like the links, through the social media, etc. Now this is when it gets a little bit tricky because now they're like consideration. That's the step at this funnel. We've gone from interest and now we're actually considering making a purchase at this search step. What we have is socialize. That doesn't mean you're hanging out with them. They are socializing this opportunity with the people that are in that group. Right. We can use me as a real world example. I'm gonna have a birthday party later on a few months from now. It's a, you know, we wanted to do it in a nice place by the water. We found a great place. It's got a great rooftop deck on it, nice seating areas and so on. A little bit pricey. It's not too bad. Perfect for a birthday party, right? Oh, I gotta see who wants to go. We're not gonna book a property that has five bedrooms and just my wife and I stay there the whole, you know, three days, three nights. Right? Let us see if anybody wants to go. So now we're sharing the links, right? We found the website because the website has more information than the OTAs. We'll talk about how to get people to find that website in a second. And we're gonna. And we not going to. We did book directly, right? In this particular case, we. We book directly because when you book directly, this person has Two properties in the same area and they have a little bit of an offer where you get a social area that both the two properties get to use if you book directly to the website. So they gave me a little added value and I paid the same amount what I would have paid on Verbal. That's an additional thousand dollars in this, in this host's pocket anyway. So that socializes letting the person, letting your potential guest socialize this concept with others so that they can share it. Right. And what that means is they have the links, etc. Now here's what's happening at this point in time when they to get them from socialized to the, from the booking engine, which is where they've done now go on the checkout process. You got to let them de risk this deal. What does that mean? Well, first of all, let me ask you a question. If we're staying in a six bedroom house with all everyone here, we're all going to go on vacation together, we're staying six bedroom house. The first thing I'm thinking is, well, who gets what bedroom? Everyone thinks this every time, right? This is one of the series of questions that you ask who's sleeping where, which couple or friend or family or son or daughter or nephew gets to sleep in each room. You need complete clarity on what the actual room is set up. Like what an actual house set up, like we call it. And this is just one example of the kind of clarity that you need this about parking, you need this about all these different things. This is why people leave your OTA listing to come to your website. And I'll tell you how they get there in a bit. They come because they want to know exactly how it's set up. They want to know that nitty gritty that says, well, hold on a second, I can't put Charlie and Susan next to to Rick and Jenny. They're gonna fight like dogs and cats, right? I gotta make sure they're on those two bedrooms on two different stores stories because we're staying for a week. That's that high value booking. They're looking for that level of granular detail in order to make the decision and come stay with you and book directly for those higher value direct bookings. So anyway, what we're talking about here now is just making sure as you're going from the, the booking engine to the checkout process, you're de risking that for the guest. Because they're now saying, hold on a second, I am not booking on Airbnb. Airbnb was going up because the trust has been built. You need to rebuild that trust. That trust that is not, that is not found on your direct booking website because you don't have. You don't have the, the force of a large multinational corporation behind you saying, hey, guest, it's okay, we got your back if anything goes wrong here. So you got to rebuild that trust. And the way you rebuild the trust, how do you build trust in real life? Transparency and repetitiveness. You say it here. You say, hey, I'm going to show up at 12 today. You show up at 12, you show up at 12 the next day. You show up at 12 the next day. Repetition and transparency. You say what you're going to do and then you do it. You do that on your website, right? Your website has all the information people are asking for. If you say you got six bedrooms and I click on the photos and I can't tell which bedroom is which or if there's six bedrooms, I'm. Now, I don't know if I trust your pricing. I don't know if I trust your cancellation policy. Look at these captions, guys. These are perfect. They look. Is that an exciting caption? No. But does it, does it. Is it transparent? Yes. Same kitchen, other side. Kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. We're not selling. This person already wants to book your property. You're just letting them know that it's exactly as you said it was going to be. Right? We already got them where they're. They're looking for a reason not to buy at this point in time. If they're already on your website, they're looking for a reason. A red flag that says you can't trust this person. They want you to. They want you to. They're. Well, they're expecting. It's not. They want you. They want to book your property. They're expecting that you're not going to be able to live up to the picture that's painted in their head. And they're skeptical. That's how we are today when we look online. You solve that by over delivering on trust. And look at these. Great. These are textbook captions. Trust, explanation, clarity. That's how you do it. So you do that on your pictures. You make sure that your amenities match what's listed in the photos. Right. If I see the word hot tub down here, you better believe I'm going to go up to the photos and look for the hot tub. Right. I hope no one feels called out if that's not happening on your listing. But I guarantee you this is what guests do. They are looking for not just how cool it looks or how pretty is this Looks like a great house. I haven't seen this hot tub yet. Right? Beautiful. Now I got a map. Even better. Now, you don't always have to do this. It depends on how you're structured. Right. And so do you see a hot tub yet, guys? I don't see a hot tub yet. I see that there's a lake overlooking. This is actually really important too. You see this very frequently. When people have lakefront property, it's very unclear as to how close they are to the lake. When people have property that's close to an amenity or attraction, very unclear. Make it really. You answer these questions and you build that trust. Right? So I'm still looking for this hot tub. I'm gonna give five more photos. But I love, I love the bedroom photos. I love the fact that every single bedroom is completely enumerated. Right. People are coming back every year. That's awesome. That's what you want to see, right? These guys are having a great time. They're fishing. I didn't see the hot tub, guys. Right. So now. And so this is. This is how you make sure that your website is building the trust. It says it's going to. You say you have this amenity. You show it. You say what your cancellation policy is. They're going to go back in here and we're going to. And we're going to pick some days, right? Great property for. This is a beautiful website. Beautiful property. Every website can always be optimized, guys. So there's nothing wrong, nothing wrong with missing a photo here and there. Our. Our team actually, when you use future stay use our Amplify, which is our. Our. We have two products that you just say. One is called Flex, which gives you a direct website, direct booking website and the Google Vacation Rentals connectivity. The other is called Amplify, which helps you. Which does everything Flex does, but also helps you make more money. And we do that with some technology like our, our dynamic pricing and market data, but also comes with the guidance from our team. They do what I'm doing right now for you. They go through your website, they go through your Airbnb listing. They help make sure that you. We have a 48 point check that we do and make sure that we score your book ability, we score your desirability and then we score your clarity to make sure that guests are going to go on that journey with you correctly. So you come in here and now. Now we're seeing. This is the this is the nitty gritty. You know how many people. We go back to this funnel, how many people stop when they're right at this checkout page? The conversion rate on the average direct booking website checkout page is less than 10%. So you spent money, you got them to your website or you got it referred from a friend. They went all the way through everything we did, and they got to your checkout page and they bail. And they bail because they're not sure, not because you're not great. They're thinking, man, do they really have a hot tub? The other one I saw on Airbnb or on vrbo, they had the hot tub and the hot tub looked perfect, right? What they're. They just want that clarity. Oh, the cleaning fee is this. Is this per night? Is this. Am I going to get any additional fees? What are the things? They want all this detail, and here's the real one. They want to see the cancellation policy spelled out clear as day because. Or if there's a rental agreement, they want to see the rental agreement and the house rules. There we go. That's what they want to see. They want to make sure they're not going to book this, send you a check for or pay on check, Pay online for 6K, and then be told, oh, you couldn't do this, couldn't do that. They want it clear as day. And so all of this, everything from the security links to explaining exactly who's running the payment, what the credit card statement will be, all of that information is what gets you through the funnel. That's exciting, right? But guess what? That is not enough. That is how direct bookings work. That's not how you get your first direct booking, and it's not how you build the direct booking loop. So we're going to dig into that in a second. I see more people joining in. I also see some more people in the chat here. And so let's see. I see some, some. Let's. Let's go ahead and pull this open. All right, let's get some applies. We got some feedback. Thank you, Bari. Appreciate that. Thanks for the love there. The checkout page does look clean, and it's got to because of the checkout page isn't clean. I'll pull that up. No one's going to book because they're not going to know what to do. Right. Jim Davis says no website. My direct stays, which now amounts about a third or so from repeat business. This is super. Super. This is part one of the three secrets of the direct Booking loop is repeat business and we're going to talk about how to build that repeat business. Now that we looked at how a direct booking works both strategically and tactically, we've also looked at why direct bookings are so important and valuable and how to calculate how much more income you would make at a certain percentage of direct bookings. You can grab this spreadsheet, copy it for yourself, you calculate your double up number. Your double up number is, it's the percentage of direct bookings that you need in order to double your income that how much you're actually making for your short term rental. We'll go ahead and pop that in, please, and then we're gonna head back here. Now let's talk about why people actually book your property direct. Okay. And the answer is not because they are going to save money. Yeah. Look, if you want to give it away, you can give it away and you're going to get direct bookings that way. That's fine too, right? If you're, if your goal is just to build independence and get your own book of business, that's one reason to do it. In fact, actually, let me ask a question to, let me ask a question to, to Jim. Jim, thanks for the message earlier. If you, you taught, you're talking about your direct stays, which are about a third or so of your business from repeat business, I'd love for you to just pop in how you're getting that repeat business and how you're getting in the book. Are you taking credit card over the phone? Are you doing a Venmo? All these things are really important. That's also good guidance and good feedback for everyone else on the call. If you could just drop that in, please, please go for it. So, and also why do you think they're booking directly with you every year? Because we're talking about why people do direct bookings. The reason, the number one reason why people make a direct booking instead of making a OTA booking, an online travel agency like Airbnb or Expedia is because they believe they feel better about themselves and they believe they're going to have a better, more unique trip if they book directly. That makes zero sense. Right? It's the same property. Why is their trip going to be better? They believe that they are closer to you, the host, and closer to the unique experience that they're going to have on it with a direct booking. 78 of travelers. This is a, this is a study of Gen Gen Y, Gen Z and millennials and those generations. I'm Gen X Right. So we travel for different reasons, but most of the people are traveling today, millennials, Gen Y and Gen Z, 78% of them said the number one reason they travel is to create unique experiences or one of a kind experiences that they can share with their friends and family, really on social media. Right. They really are humble, bragging that's the reality. They want to have a good trip, but they want it to be unique. The only thing more unique is finding a cool off the beaten path property on Airbnb is finding a cool off the beaten path property and making a booking directly from the owner who you chatted with and tells you about why he or she loves that area. You feel closer to the actual property. You feel like you're really getting back to the heart of short term rental bookings. And so how do we create that connection? So that's why the direct bookings happen, is because you can offer something Airbnb or VRBox or booking.com never can. You can offer a true connection and a true experience with a local. Right. And a, and a true authentic way of staying in that property. It's a slight distinction, but that's the real reason why people are booking directly. They want that one on one story. They want to talk to you on the phone. They don't want to do. They don't want any of that. They just want to be able to feel like and say that they had a real authentic relationship and a real authentic stay. And so we're going to talk about the kind of four main components of this and how to kickstart this journey for yourself. So the first is, we've already gone over the file. You got to have a trustworthy, you got to have a clear. You got to have a competitive. And it's got to be targeted to the right customer. Right. We didn't get to talk a lot about that. That's really a whole separate topic on its own webinar, which is called creating your stay story, where you identify who your target guest is. You literally write a story about their journey, why they're going on their trip, who are they traveling with? Is it friends as couples, is it, is it parents as a kids, why they're coming, what do they do, where do they sleep, what do they do during the day? So you create your state story and you use that to kind of tailor your property. Right. That's a simplified version. If you have more questions about that, feel free to send me a DM afterwards or a message, an email, and we'll, we'll Send you a video on how to create a stay story. But now that you have your stay story and your clear targeted booking site, we use three psychological principles that we call the direct booking loop to get the direct bookings to happen, right? To make that feel like the authentic stay that you're, you're staying there not because you're saving money, but because you know that you're doing the right thing and you're gonna have a better experience. We're gonna start with the halo effect. Halo effect is an impression that's created in one area to influence another area, right. The most classic example of the halo effect is in. This is pop size numbers, right? But these are real things that in, in studies that have been done many, many times in America overseas, people assume that good looking or taller people are smarter. They're obviously not. That clearly doesn't make any sense at all, right? But if you, if you, if you look at someone that is tall or good looking and you look at someone that maybe isn't as much, there's a subconscious part of our brain that just attributes intelligence and other positive characteristics to that person. That's just one example. There are many ways we do this, right? It can be anything from, you know, a stinking. A celebrity is going to be a better person or whatever the case. This is a human. This is what's called a heuristic, right? We're getting a little psychology on everyone here. This is a heuristic. It's a pattern that we use subconsciously in our brains in order to make, to simplify decision making. It is in our lizard brain. This is not a conscious thing we do. If we did, it wouldn't make any sense. But this is how we press the world into these little bands and view things in very simple ways. The halo effect is a just human global phenomena. And so that means if someone, if you believe someone is good at this thing, then you're more likely to believe they're also good at this other thing. How do we take advantage of that for direct bookings? Well, I'm on your website, not just your Airbnb listing, I'm on your website and we're going to talk about how to get people to the website in a second. But on your website already, and I'm looking for that trust, I'm looking for that clarity, etc. What is the one thing that you have that I don't have? Maybe I have my own vacation rental. I do, right? It's maybe, you know, I'm not looking at saying, well, this. This guy or girl has this thing, and I don't have that. No, it's not about that. It's. You are a local. You know, the thing that I want to do, I want to go there and I want to have fun with my friends and family. I want to go have my family reunion. I want to go. Maybe I'm traveling for work and I want to have a great conference, or maybe I'm traveling with friends and I want to go and I want to explore downtown Nashville. You are from downtown Nashville or you move to downtown Nashville. You're the downtown Nashville expert, Right. And so you. The halo of you knowing that needs to flow through your entire website. We're going to go back to this website for a second because I want to show exactly what I'm talking about here. Right. And in fact, I'm going to go to one of the other ones that was put in the chat here. Jim Davis is talking about how he gets his book, and we're going to dig into that a second. Thank you, Jim, for, for sharing that. That's really. That's really good detail. So I'm going to pull up another website for a second here. Right. And thank you for sharing this. And so, Marilla, Marilla, Airbnb, your home away from home. Right. So this is actually a good example. We can go through this in a bit more detail later. But what I'll say is specifically around the halo effect, and there's probably a lot we can do to really improve this is I'm looking at, when I click on Explorer, I want to have the feeling that Mary Law, BNB and whoever runs this, this is being presented as a company. That's fine. It doesn't have to be an individual. It can be a company that knows a lot. I. They need to make me feel like they are the local expert and that if I book here, I'm going to have a better stay because I'm booking with the source of truth than I would have if I just booked anything else somewhere else different on Airbnb or vrbo. I'm seeing features, I'm seeing photos. We can always improve photos. That's fine. They're doing some detail. What's close, what's not, that's fine. But what I'm not seeing is anything that's positioning them as the expert. I don't even know who they are. Right. Again, it doesn't have to be about the person. It can be about the company. If you don't want your identity tied to it, that's Fine. But there's nothing that. There's no halo effect here. So to me, this is just as good or not good as anything else that is visible. Right. Any other listing? I don't have any more propensity to book this than an Air than an Airbnb because it's got some information on it. I don't see any halo effect happening here now. And let's, you know. And we'll go back to Mountain Lake Cottages. Not. Not sure that they've done it or not. But let's see if we've taken step. There we go. Okay, now. Now we're talking. Could this. Can we go further? Yep, we can. We could weave this story throughout the entire website a little bit more. But this is a story, folks, right? Todd Leone went to camp as a boy. He loved it, and he owned it. He came back and bought the camp, and now we can stay in the camp that Todd has been going to since he was a boy. Would you rather book this from Todd or would you rather book it from Expedia? I'd rather book it from Todd. I want to get on Todd's good side, because Todd's gonna tell me where I should fish when I'm out there. He's gonna come, probably hang out by the fire pit and light up a beer. Light up a. Light the fire pit up and have a beer with me, with me and my friends. Right? So he's even using it as at his own summer retreat. It's little. It's a little story, but OTAs by definition, Airbnb booking.com, etc, and, you know, actually, hey, Jeff, if you wouldn't mind just popping a. An Airbnb listing in here for me, like maybe one of the ones that we've gone over recently when we've done some of our reviews. I'll grab one. Actually, hold on one second. Airbnb. Give me one second, guys. I'm gonna screen share a really good example of this. All right, here we go. So this is a perfect example. This is a beautiful property on a screen share. Again, this is a beautiful property. And here's the challenge that we have with this listing. Beautiful property. We're. We're actually going to be optimizing this is a new future, say customer for Amplifier to be optimizing the property. This is great. The host that owns it, I had a conversation with him. He knows what he's doing. He's the exact right person to show you around this area. But it's not his fault. Airbnb doesn't want to tell you his story. Airbnb wants to tell you their story. Nothing wrong with that. That's their job. They want you to trust them because they're the person you're buying from. But that means that they want to minimize you in each one of the listings. You or me or any other host. Because they want the listing. They want the trust on the listing and the reviews to speak for itself. That's nothing nefarious. Guys, they're not your enemy. They're doing the right thing for themselves. But what they're not doing is giving you the space to tell your own story and create your own halo effect. That's why when. That's why there's so little information about you here. Yes, of course. They don't want people to contact you so they can get the booking on the channel. That makes sense. That's exactly how it should work. But when people. And, and I'll tell you how people go from here to actually finding your website shortly. But what you get to do on your own website is this. You get to make your website about you, your property, your journey, and the unique things that you can offer. And I don't mean savings. I mean the halo effect. Where. Now that you think, Todd, let's go back, make sure we're saying the right name. That's right, Todd. Now that I know Todd is the guy I'd way rather book from Todd on his own website than anyone else that I'm just finding where I don't know a thing about. I don't know from Adam on VRBO or Airbnb or booking dot com. That personal connection that stays going to be more real. Right? That's number one. Number two is. And, and so Jim talked about this earlier. He. And I'll. I'll read Jim's message. Thank you, Jim.

For.

For hopping in. Jim says, and this is. Guys, this is gold, right? This is gold. Jim has been. Jim has. Jim should be teaching this webinar with me. He's been. He's been doing this for years. I could tell already. Jim says if they stay once, 90% of his direct bookings, he's got about a third of direct bookings come direct on subsequent stays. 90%. Now, I haven't seen Jim's property. I'm imagining he delivers a good. A good hospitality experience. Otherwise 90% wouldn't come back. But here's how he does it. I keep their information once they come, and then I keep in touch. I build a relationship. He's on site, he collects, he collects Check and PayPal. That's pretty straightforward. He's, he's dropping his, he's dropping his listing here. Jim, do you mind if I click on that? I'm going to just show it up on the screen. I think he's giving me the thumbs up here. I'm guessing since he's dropping in the chat. Thank you. We're gonna pop this up and we're gonna, we're gonna, this is great. Thank you, Jim. We're gonna get Jim a direct booking website for free, by the way, guys. Jim, thank you for, for putting us in. So we're gonna get, man, look.

I.

Mean I want to, I want to stay at Jim's property, but so this is, he's taken these listings, he's taking his listing, he's delivering on a good experience and he's staying in touch with that guest. He's doing, he's, he's doing this, what we're talking about here, but he's doing it in person and he's building himself up as that guy that they, that the person knows. Right. I'm going to tell you, this is the, this is the structure around it. We all know why social networks and social media became so popular. It's not because we just mindlessly like looking at cat videos, right? It's because people like to see what their friends, their family, celebrities that they follow, anyone else who like to see what they're doing, like to see what they're up to. We trust word of mouth because we inherently apply the halo effect more to our friends and family than other people. If a guy that you've never met before on the street says, hey guys, check out Futures Day. It's great. Their website's excellent. I mean their website builder, well, it's not a builder automatically creates website for you in six minutes, but their website tool that creates websites for you is excellent. Great. You don't know that guy from Adam. You don't really care. But if your friend, your family member, someone that you trust says it, that's a different story. And now you want to give it a shot to the tune of, you know, somewhere between. Say we have two different numbers here somewhere. That's a lot of people. 77, 88% of people cross word of mouth and they want, they're more likely to buy it if a friend recommends it. So that word of mouth of having, of giving your prior guests either from you or from other people, they know a way to keep putting your name in the market over and over and over again. And Getting their friends to talk about you. That is what I like to refer to as the I got a guy effective. It ties into the halo effect. But it's like this. It's actually because. And we're going to go back here because Todd is the local expert. If Todd tells me there's the register. You guys already did that. If top. Because Todd told me to go and fish at this spot, I'm going to assume that Todd's fishing spot is better than the one I read about on Yelp because I've given him the halo effect and he's a local expert. So now that same effect, that friend family word of mouth is all compounding in and making it so that you give your prior guests that's. They have the ability to say, oh, you got to go back and stay with Tom. You got to go back and stay with Jim. So Jim's guests are coming back, but Jim's guests are also telling other people why to come stay with you. And why are they doing that? Because everyone would rather if. I know you're coming to my. Like, I'm in New Jersey, right? We're born and raised in New York in Central Jersey, right? Now, if anyone's flying into New Jersey or New York and they say, I'm going to be in town with. With. With my family for three or four weeks, what do they say to me, hey, Phil, where should I go? Not because I know more about this area than anyone else, but because I'm a local. And so they're going to ask me because they think that the local recommendation is always the best one. So you use that and you say, oh, you get your. You get your prior guest to say they're going to tell that halo effect story as long as you've put it into your journey and your brand. Jim is a perfect example of this. He gets to see them and he gets to build that in person. You may not get to build it in person, and maybe you don't want to. That's okay. You get to build the story on your. On your website. Right? And so that's the. That's the way you do that. You build that story on your website like Todd is doing here. But you really can go even further and you can tie it into the home page and the descriptions of each property. Right. Maybe the main house is the property where Todd, you know, caught his first butterfly. Maybe the lake house is where he and his friends had a fishing competition. Right. It's little nuances that tie back in to the, to the Big story. And that story creates this ability for people to have these repeatable word of mouth stories on their own so that, you know, Jim's guest doesn't just come back, but Jim's guest says, oh, you got to check this out. Because of this reason, when I met Jim, he told me about this other thing. You're going to love it when you're there. That's how that works, right? And now last, and this is the most important one, because this is actually how you get your first direct booking, right? Now, we told you how to close, how to make that happen, how to resonate, how to create the loop. But the way you actually get your first direct booking, sure, you can do it the way Jim did, which is the right way to build it big. But to get your first, the way you first do it, honestly, the easiest way is there are already people looking for you that want to book directly, but they need to be able to close the gap between your OTA listings and your website. I'm going to say this for the record, you are not allowed to steal bookings from your OTA listings. Steel means someone comes on, they're inquiry inquiring. Hey, hey, Jim, you know, hey, Lexi, right? How do I book you directly? You don't say, go to my website and book. That's, that's the opposite. And the reason why you don't want to do that is the okay is not your enemy. They are your partner. They're your distribution partner. They are saying to you, hey, I'm going to promote you for no upfront cost. I'm going to willing to take all the risk on myself, not you, for no upfront cost and let millions of people from all over the world come find you and book your property. And I'm going to make them trust you. And I'm going to handle a bunch of logistics for you. So you don't worry about that. You're my partner. You don't want to mess that up. You don't want to break that trust. But, and they know this, they even advertise this, the OTAs will say this to big corporate customers. They'll say, someone's got 100 units, 200 units, thousand units. Why should I list on Airbnb? Why should list on Expedia? I already have plenty of bookings. You know what the OTA executives will say? The billboard effect. Even if people are already booking you think about how many more people will come look at your listing, see the name of your listing. Let's pretend that. Read that, that the name here was, you know, red Carpet. Red Carpet Residences. Because it's in on Rodeo Drive, right? Red Carpet Residences. So they're going to look at the red carpet residence, and what's the first thing they're going to do, guys? They're going to go to Google and type in Red Carpet Residences. You're not stealing it. That's part of the game plan. It's literally called the billboard effect. This is in the OTAS handbooks. They teach their sales team this. Everyone knows this. That's fair game. It's completely fair game for someone to find you through one of those channels, do their own search and make their own booking. They all know what happens. You're not stealing it. That's fair. How do you actually get it to happen, though? This is where it gets a little tricky, right? We're going to go back and look at this Airbnb listing. And the challenge here is what do you write on your page so that people can then Google you? And then how do you show up high enough in the results so that when they Google you, they can find you? Two step process. The first is understanding a little bit about SEO, right? And so when we at Search Engine Optimization. So the first is making sure. You see, I'm mousing over this tab. The name of this website is Mountain Lake Cottages. That's the title, right? I'm not going to get in, get crazy and get in, pull the code up. But you just need to know that's the title of the website. So when Google, when someone types in Mountain Lake Cottages, Google thinks about this website, they probably think about a lot of different things, but this is one of the things they think about, right? Because it's in the title. Guess where else it is. It's also in the domain name, an abbreviation. Google smart enough to know that's an abbreviation for mountain, right? And so. And it's also up here. This is the textbook way to build. To build the billboard effect. So when someone comes to the listing, and we don't have the Airbnb listing right here, so I'm going to go ahead and assume. I'm not looking at it right now, but they've done such a good job and I know they're working with my team that's helping optimize. So if they haven't done it yet, my team will tell them, make sure you have the phrase Mountain Lake Cottages. Capitalize proper nouns in your Airbnb listing, in your verbo listing, in any other listing. That is going to be your second biggest Source of traffic for your website. People that found you on OTA and then started and the billboard effect kicked in and then they came and they got into your funnel and now you get to run them through the process that we just talked about.

Right.

So the first is make sure it's there. The second is when people inquire and they say, hey, I'd love to book directly. I know you guys get these inquiries all the time. I get them too. Hey, I'd love to book directly. I want to go off platform, blah blah blah, blah. Well, there's two parts of that. One thing is we talked about trust from one side. What we didn't talk about is how do you know that you can trust this guest. You don't know. You need to protect yourself. And so I'm a big direct booking proponent. As I started out the call saying at Futures Day we've created more vacation rental websites than anyone else in the world. We've built over a hundred thousand vacation rental websites. So I'm a pretty big advocate for direct booking websites for vacation rentals. But I would never let anyone, any of my customers or any of you on this call. Maybe not Jim. Jim's an expert, he could probably do it his way. But everyone else, let's say to you guys, do not take a direct booking online unless you have two things. We're gonna look at them here. And you don't have to use future state to get these things. You can do these things other ways. You just say makes real easy. It's automatically built in. But you gotta have some kind of damage protection. That can be either you take a security deposit, security deposits are a little bit falling out of favor. People don't want to pay 5,000 or 2,000 or $500 or whatever up front and then hope to get it back later on. That's kind of a little bit of an old school way of doing it, but people still do it. But it does decrease your conversion rates, especially on a website. Because now people are like, well I'm booking this thing up, my trust levels are even lower. The spidey sense is tingling. Damage waivers, the way we recommend doing this damage waiver is a third party account. It's like a savings, it's like a health savings account. Every time one of these happens, the guest pays into an account that all builds up across thousands and thousands and thousands of rentalpreneurs worldwide. And then when a problem happens, this, the damage waiver pays for the damage. This one is a 1500 dollar one as an example it's not an insurance policy. It's the pure damage waiver. So it's not. There's no fault. It's not like, hey, prove why the couch got damaged or who did whatever. No couch got damaged. Here's receipt. It was the $800 couch. You get a check for $800, right? You have to have either a damage waiver or some other means of safeguarding your property. You cannot just go out on a limb and do that. And people will say, well, hold on a second, I'm on Airbnb. I have Air Cover. Air Cover is not an insurance policy for you. Air Cover is an insurance policy for Airbnb. They are the named insurer on Air cover. And then they become the arbiter to decide whether or not they're going to cover your claim. There's nothing wrong with that. Of course, they can't insure everyone's home. That would be impossible. Right? That's not their job. That's your job. You need to make sure that your home is protected, and you have to protect it. Regardless of whether or not you're getting an Airbnb booking or a direct booking, you still need to protect it. Now, the thing that Airbnb does do super well, better than anyone else in the industry, and it's actually why vacation rentals grew so much. One of the reasons why the industry became with a complete trajectory, even pre Covid of instant bookings, direct or instant bookings, you know, supply growth in the industry growing at 20 year over year over year for almost a decade straight. One of the reasons why is because Airbnb realized really early on, if they can get a host and they can get a guest to trust each other online, magic will happen. They created a mutual review system very similar to ebay. They're looking at eBay one, so let's do that here. And they really created a model for the sharing economy, like an Uber or a doordasher or whatever, where anyone can trust anyone else because we can mutually review each other. Great model. Worked on ebay when they were selling, you know, doodads and widgets. Works or used goods or whatever the case is. Works even better when we're talking about people and stays and trust. You don't get that on your own direct booking website. So you have some options. One is you can require everyone speak to you on the phone and you can screen your guests. That ranges from being illegal to annoying. You know, that's not the best way to do it, but whatever you do, it'll. It will Reduce your conversion rate some because as you can imagine, if we have a funnel like this and we start adding a step here where people have to talk to you on the phone, you know that that doesn't help the conversion rate and you get even less people through. But what you can and should do is have some automated guest screening built into your process. At Future State we have automated guest screening. Automated guest screening. The way it works is every guest that books automatically, they go through a process that runs an anti fraud check on their property. It runs anti fraud, I'm sorry, on the property, on their, on their credit card. It makes sure that they're not on any known watch list or anything of that nature. It just checks them against FBI watch list, all the kind of stuff that you wouldn't want someone booking your property. And it also checks the risk level of a transaction. So if someone is booking same day and they live down the street, that's a house party, that's not a guest. Right. It catches these sorts of red flags. Any red flag that gets caught automatically gets escalated to our team, a real team of real people who confirms the bookings manually. And if there's anything that even smells fishy with a booking, our team sends out a selfie ID verification. So they actually have a secure, we'll send them a secure link where they have to go upload id, look at the selfie. Our, our, our partner or our banking partner stripe does a match on that and if they pass the check, good. But the reality is normally by the time a booking got to that stage is someone you don't want in your property anyway and they usually, they're a scammer. They won't even finish the link. So we, you, you have to have that trust on both sides when you're doing any direct bookings. So do not take direct bookings without tools like that. You can go buy them, you can get them built into future stay. There's no additional cost for those things. There are a lot of ways to get them, but you have to have those if you're doing direct bookings to protect yourself. I cannot in good conscience, unless you're an expert like Jim tell who. I'm sure he already knows these people. So he's getting direct some people year after year after year. I wouldn't, I wouldn't wish direct bookings on anyone that, that isn't doing that sort of thing to protect their property. If you're doing that, it's great, it's perfect. Go for it. Okay, so now we have the billboard effect up and running, Right where people can find us, they can search and they enter into Google where we feel safe and comfortable taking that booking. But in order to get them to actually find us. Right. One of the challenges today is have you done a search on Google recently? I don't care if it's a vacation rental. Wherever else you're looking for, by the time you get to the first organic listing, you're on page at the bottom of page one or you're on page two. So even if you do the billboard effect, this isn't like five or six years ago where you might show up on number one or two. Even for your own branded name, you're going to show up below because there's so much AI and all these other results that are better put in there. One of the core results. And we'll go ahead and just use an example right now. We can type in, we'll type in New Jersey Vacation Rentals. What do we see at the top? I mean, if you, if, if your title were New Jersey Vacation Rentals number one, that wouldn't be a good title for your website. But if it were, I mean, you're, you're underneath this, you're underneath sponsored ads, you're underneath all sorts of things. Booking.com Expedia before you even get to the stage where you're going to show up. How do you solve that problem? This thing at the top is Google Vacation Rentals. Future stays partnered with Google Vacation Rentals to make sure you show up at the top because you're in this list, right? You cannot list on Google Vacation Rentals by yourself. You, it's not like Airbnb. We can build a great profile. You have to be working with a Google partner to get a bookable listing in Google Vacation Rentals. And so we take your website, we create a go, we list it in Google Vacation Rentals and we sync the two up. So, so that when someone searches for you on Google Vacation Rentals and they click through, it goes directly to your future stay powered website, like the one we showed you earlier. And you have all the trust signals built in so the booking can actually happen there. Right? That is how, in a nutshell, how you create the loop. Now let's tie that all back together and talk about the first one. First, you need your direct booking site. It needs to be trustworthy on both sides. You need to trust the guest enough to let them through the funnel and they need to trust you enough to complete the booking. That means they need complete clarity about what they're going to get when they stay there. More clarity than your listing on Airbnb, because Airbnb is already building and buffering that trust up. So things like, you know, let's go back here for a second. Things like reviews are critical here. If you think they're important on Airbnb, they're even more important on your. On your applicant website. You need to have the halo effect in play. You are establishing yourself on your website as you're giving them a reason. They want to book with you because they want to know that you are the best, that you're the special local expert, and you're closing that in with the halo effect. They want the network effect of having friends telling them to go to the website in the first place. So, like Jim, when someone comes and they stay, Jim's guest is going to go tell their friends and family about how much Jim is a local expert and how great his property is. The halo effect. And how do they find you in the first place? They found you in the first place because in your Airbnb listing and your verbal listing, you're not breaking the rules, but you are using improper nouns. The name of your business, the name of your rental, and the name of your rental has the name of your website in it. And then Google Vacation Rentals is putting you up to the top because you're working with a website provider that's partnered with Google Vacation Rentals. There's zero reason the Google Vacation Rentals. There's no commission. It's literally a question. Do you want to get listed at the top of Google or not? So if you don't want to get to list at the top of the. Of Google, you know, then. Then you can stop, right? You can just go do it on your own. But, Jim, thanks a lot. There we go. We got to get Jim set up. I think we're. I think we're getting the. We're getting the free side out to Jim. So someone please reach out to him, and either Jeff or Felicia, please hit him up. Thank you. Oh, perfect. Jeff, thank you. Because we're wrapping up in a minute, guys. Thank you. And so you have that loop all completed. They find you on your ota. The name matches your website. They search for it. You're in Google Vacation Rental, so you're already up at the top. Above all, all of this stuff. This stuff is useful, too, but that's not you. You want to be in here. You want to be. When they click View all Properties, If. If. So you're right. There at the top of that. And that's where we put you in this list, right? And this list is every property is not in here. It's hard to get in here. So we put you in this list. And then once they're there, once they're on your site, you're, you're crossing all the the T's and dotting all the eyes with your offer, with your ability to recapture through that share link or through that copy link or through social media so they can socialize it with their family and their friends, whoever they're traveling with. You're de risking them on the journey by telling them exactly in painfully obvious detail. How many photos of that kitchen did we see? Right? That's where you're, you know, the hot tub, all the different things, the rules, when they're going to, what the cancellation policy looks like, what the taxes are, everything you can all in the same process. Right? And then you get to do something fun at the end, right. Which we didn't talk about. This is a topic for another webinar now that you're building this local, this relationship with you as a local expert, right, where you're telling your story. You get to upsell. You get to say, hey, thanks so much for. Because you have their email because it was a direct booking, right? Hey, thanks so much for coming to stay with me at my. At my rental. Coming to stay at my, at my rental. By the way, just so you know, this is what's happening this weekend. I would suggest that you and your family maybe stay an extra day or maybe you guys want an extra early check in, right? We can make that happen. I'm going to send you a link where you can pay that difference. It's just going to be $50 or for an effort, early check in for everyone or we're going to give you an additional night at a promotional rate because we want you guys to be able to enjoy the festival that's in town that week.

Right?

So, okay, that is how the direct booking loop works and that is how you guys go can go ahead and get your first direct booking. Okay. We're going to go ahead and close it out. If anyone has any questions in chat, feel free to to just pop them to me directly. Jim, thank you. But feel free to pop it directly. You know you can pop. I'll put my email right here in the chat p canard at Futurestay. You can just email me anytime. Like it's really me. Like you'll not gonna be a bot. I will actually I'm the founder, but I really will respond to you and, and if you need to hop on a call, I can hop on a call with you and I'll bring some of my team members along and we can get you all squared away to get you set up. Because the most important thing to me is that you guys are set up to that. You guys. Thank you, Jeff, for putting that in. I put that on channel that you guys are set up to get your first direct bookings and really start hitting the goals that you want as a rentalpreneur. Okay, guys, we're going to close out. Thanks again for being here and, and we appreciate, we appreciate your feedback and your, your participation.

To the Batmobile.

Let's go.

Oh my gosh, Mr. Phil Canard. What an absolute master class. I'm exhausted. I don't know if you're exhausted. I'm exhausted. That was a long one. That was a long one indeed. All right. Absolute mind blowing stuff there. He literally laid out the whole diary booking funnel and process there, as well as so many business lessons. I mean, this is gonna be one you're gonna have to watch back for sure. Little takeaway. 78% of Gen Y, Gen Z want to share experiences. Basically humble brag showing. So they want to book a place where they're going to get an experience. They're not looking for your bog standard. If they want bog standard, they'll go to a chain hotel.

Right.

If they want to have an experience, they're going to book with you. And then I love it how we tied it back to what we talked about yesterday, which is upsells. When you become the go to, you build that trust factor. You can then give out the upsells, which is what we talked about yesterday. This whole week is tying together lovely. But wow. Okay, so Phil kept mentioning about websites and all that good stuff. Well, I've got a little announcement and we're going to talk more about it next week, but I want to give a little bit of a sneak peek now. You can go right now to futuresday.comboostly f u t u r e s t a y.comboostly because Phil has very kindly granted everybody can have a future day pms, a website and all that good stuff for absolutely no cost. There are some stipulations. Number one, you cannot currently have a pms. Number two, you've got to be currently in the United States, America. Number three, this cannot be a co host. It has to be your property. Those are the only stipulations now he is going to eradicate those stipulations over the coming weeks. But we are going to work with Futures Day to basically launch a new product which is Boosty Light. It's going to be a Boostly working with Futures Day to give everybody a free pms, which is something that I'm very excited for. You're going to get a free website that Phil talks about. It's going to be created in six minutes. We're going to talk about a little bit more about it next week in the coming weeks. But this is just the start of where Boostly is going to be working with as many people as possible to help as many people as possible. Obviously we've got our boostly WordPress websites. The main thing to mention with Future State is just a templated site. It does nothing more than just make sure things are just on the right places. It's got a very good flow to it, as you saw. But again, it is nothing more than a free website. Basically what we do is obviously WordPress websites that next step above. But for everybody who can't afford to work at our level just yet, this is a fantastic little stepping stone which I absolutely love. Plus you put into practice all of the things that you've learned in this free training. You'll get to the level where you can afford to work with Bruce Lee. But that was great. Wow. Okay. I feel like we need a bit of a stretch, a little bit of a breather. So let me very quickly just put a little ad break in now. Just a little chill out, all right? And then we'll come back and we'll finish off with the final speaker of this evening, which is Mr. Matt Metros. Now this is the, the finale. This is the showpiece of the, of the, of today of Wednesday because this is going to show you how to not only build your virtual team, but how to communicate and how to keep them. This is class, this is really important because at the end of the day we're all wanting to have our own business because we can escape that nine to five, we can, we want to be able to, you know, be able to take a break when you want to have a break, which you don't get when you're in, you know, full time employment. But when you start a business, when you start up, you're doing everything yourself because you have to, because you're scrappy. You're right at the very start. But there will become a case and point in time where you do have a little bit of extra money. So that you can employ somebody, you can hire somebody, and that can be either in person or it can be virtual. And Matt has created a fantastic company that helps you grow and scale that with people from all over the world. We work with Matt directly at Boost Lee and I know so many other people that do. And I asked him to put a little session together, which he has. But before we do that, let's do a little bit of a stretch. Let me just do a little bit of an ad break. Go get a cuppa, go get a drink. Somewhat fizzy, somewhat not fizzy, some alcoholics, non alcoholic. And then let's come back and we'll finish off this session. I'll come back at the very end just to recap what we did today and then showcase what we've got coming tomorrow. Because it doesn't stop here. We've got some fantastic sessions coming tomorrow. It's a freestyle. I mean, it's all made up. I'm thinking to myself, man, it would.

Be nice if someone gave me tactics, tools and advice tips for me to get me more bookings. Well, let me tell you what Mark's got cooking. The Boostly podcast will tell you what you need to know. If you're in the hospitality show, owning property and you're renting it out, or maybe an Airbnb or a hotel. Either way, he can really help book direct.

Yeah, you know yourself.

All right. Hey everybody. My name is Matthew Metros. I help companies outsource and build virtual assistant teams. Right now we focus on a lot of short term rental property management. We have about a little over 100 clients and we help them with everything from the customer service, you know, answering guest messages, vendor communications, you know, disputing negative reviews to things like marketing with graphic design, social media posting, email marketing, and, you know, bookkeeping. So sending out owner statements, reconciling the accounts, paying vendors, remitting lodging taxes. So we're a one stop shop for short term rental operators, you know, outsource and build virtual assistant teams. So with the intro aside, I created a document here where I just outline a lot of the common questions that I receive. And really when I'm walking through somebody who's brand new to the concept of outsourcing and building virtual assistant teams. Here are like the most common questions that I run through people to make sure that they're set up to get up and running. So I go through, you know, common communication tools, CRMs that are really helpful, how you should structure your organization. You know, you should have a point person internally that's, that's running point on these projects to make sure that you know, your outsourced team is getting the support they need. Common questions you should have, you know, answers to and then some other miscellaneous things. Like I have run into a lot of people that need managers and I have a strong opinion on how to create outsource management. So I'm going to run through this document and the outcome is that after this you should have a solid idea of what you need to outsource and build a virtual assistant team successfully. Let's start off here with the first question. Okay, so the first question here. Is your business software infrastructure in the cloud? The Internet, and can you get access to cloud based tools and platforms? So cloud based literally just means is your, you know, are your softwares on the Internet? Can, you know, two people log into the same platform and see the same information? So something like Microsoft Excel, that is something that's installed locally on your computer, right? That's not cloud based. Whereas something like Google Sheets is cloud based. That's something that is stored on the Internet and everybody can access it there. Another example is QuickBooks Desktop versus QuickBooks Online. Desktop is obviously not cloud based. Online is. So bottom line is if your systems are not online, then I would probably stop here and make sure that you get all your systems online. It's a prerequisite. I have seen people try and do this with storing files and installing applications on the computer. But there's also a security risk with that. Now you have files stored on people's computers and in the event that they leave, it's probably not a good idea to have a lot of sensitive information on someone else's computer. Whereas if it's in the cloud, something like Google Sheets, it lives there, you can remove access, it's a lot more secure. Let's move on to the next one. Are your internal processes clearly documented to make it easy to train new employees or could you create some. Where should I start? Creating business documentation, storing files. So documentation is so incredibly important here. And actually when you get started, a lot of people get on calls with, they say, hey, you know, I can only get going once I have all these sops and loom videos recorded. And you know, this whole knowledge base, you don't need that right away when you get started. A lot of this is something that your outsourced team can create. So you know, as they're getting started up and running in your business, just start off with, you know, maybe one or two or three tasks and to confirm their Knowledge, you can have them create the documentation, have them create the Loom videos, have them create the Notion library where you store all the step by step instructions. So common things you could do are create flowcharts. Like I said, recording your screen with loom. I really love Notion. It's a great place where you could create a knowledge base and store everything. It's very professional and I have seen a lot of people, you know, store things in Google Drive and I would say it's just a bit more difficult to navigate a large Google Drive. Whereas something like Notion, it's very clean user interface and I find that when documentation is easily accessible and organized and has a beautiful user experience, you just get a lot more value out of it. So highly recommend Notion for something like this for creating a beautiful knowledge base. And then I also provide in here some additional links you can access. Great templates if you need some thought provoking ideas on how your knowledge base should look. But overall, I think some combination of a place to store your documentation with something like Notion, recording your screen with something like Loom, you'll be in really good hands with your documentation. And one more note, why I suggest recording on Loom is because right over here, I put this here. Studies suggest that humans retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10% when reading it in text. So what I find with written documentation is that one, you end up missing a lot of steps. Two, when you're talking about, you know, a software and how to navigate the interface, it's very difficult to convey like where that specific button is that they need to click. Whereas like when you're doing it live in a video, you can easily convey where things are in that software, right? Like they're literally watching you click every button. And you don't need to worry about creating a proper intro and an outro. Just record a loom video of you doing your workflow and your agent can take that and then they can convert that into the procurement proper documentation for your business. So don't worry about perfection, just create a LOOM video of you doing your workflow and you'll just be leaps and bounds ahead of, you know, other people and you'll be able to get documentation out very, very quickly. It's very efficient. So, all right, let's move on to the next one. So are your CRM and business systems accessible remotely? So this kind of goes back to the first question, making sure that your systems are online. But in this I just go through, you know, some really popular softwares that I highly recommend and probably the most important in this list are going to be your communication and project management tools. So when you're outsourcing you really cannot be communicating via SMS email. Your day to day communications should really live in something like Slack. That's like the number one tool I recommend. It's great for creating threads, for creating different groups and just having access to the appropriate people. So I could create a bookkeeping group in Slack and then I can also have a customer service group in Slack and I just invite the appropriate people, create threads, upload documents you can jump on and do video conferencing there. So it's a great, great tool. Some honorable mentions would be here. You know, something like Discord Zoom is great for video conferencing as well. So that's, that's that with the communication tools. Now task and project management tools highly recommend Asana here. I've been using it for the past four or five years on our project and the free version has been able to take us very, very far. So Asana is a great way to get started. I know a ton of other people are using things like Monday.com, that's another great one. But yeah, I mean a simple Google search and you'll be able to find a lot of these different project management tools. But bottom line is with the project management tools you need a way to, you know, after you have a meeting with your team, you need to put the tasks that need to get done inside of a tool so that there's like absolutely 100% alignment on what was discussed during that meeting. Maybe you want to have a daily recurring task or a weekly recurring task or you know, every month or quarter, whatever it is, when it lives in the project management tool. There's no. Well, I didn't know. It's like, nope, it's in there. So you should definitely know. And this should be where people, when they log in, this is the first thing that they go to to start their day so that they understand how to start their day. And then you as the owner, you have a clear idea on what your team is working on, how efficient they are. Right, because you're able to see how many tasks they're completing. So definitely you need a project management tool. So you know, I also do want to highlight right over here some of the IoT home softwares. When you are doing remote property management, you want your team to be able to, you know, give people access to lock codes. So I recommend, you know, August or Yale Lock here Those are very popular. Or maybe you need the team to check cameras so, you know, ring or you know, maybe, you know, you need them to monitor the temperature in the home or reset it when people check out. So things like Nest are great. And then you know, things like noise, Aware and minute. Those are great for monitoring, well, obviously noise, but also if people are smoking like they have a bunch of different features on these software. So the IoT home softwares are incredibly important for our day to day operations with the operators that we work with. So yeah, I mean these are also other great softwares, but I don't have too much time to go into the nuances of all these, but definitely check them out. We use them on a lot of our projects. All right, so go on to the next question here. All right, so is your local onshore team ready? Is your offshore strategy ready? Well, let me update that. So pretty much here. What I want to highlight is the organization chart. You should have one point person that's responsible for overseeing the team. This person should have a really strong understanding of all the tasks. They should have, you know, daily and weekly meetings with the team. You know, in the beginning, especially when you're just ramping up team your VA team, you should really be there every single day until they're in a good place where they can operate independently. But especially, you know, I would say between 30 to 90 days, try your best to be accessible, you know, have, you know, daily stand up with them when they start their day, be available in Slack to answer any questions and have a weekly, you know, I would just say like a weekly management call where you just go over the big things that are going on the in the organization, you're giving an opportunity for people to express like what's going well and not going well. But you definitely need that one point person that's going to do the trainings, give feedback and is going to be the point person for your agents. Where I have seen some of our projects not go so well is where we don't have that strong leader that's like, you know, able to give us the exact, you know, feedback that we need to adjust, you know, whether or not we're up to the mark on the project. So definitely need that point person. Another thing that I want to go over is, you know, for your existing internal team, just make sure you explain to them why you are going to start outsourcing. You know, sometimes what I've seen is they think that they're going to be replaced and it ruins team morale. Create the Toxic environment. Your internal team doesn't want to help the outsource team. Just explain to them like, hey, maybe it's, we don't want you doing these types of tasks anymore. We want you working on the higher level tasks. That's the most common explanation that I see. But there needs to be some sort of explanation because think about it, if you're in their shoes, they're probably thinking, all right, they're going to replace me with this outsourced team that is just more cost effective. Just give them the knowledge and the reason and make them feel part of that decision. The worst thing that you can do is create a toxic environment. It's going to result in failure as you're creating an outsourced team. So let's move on to the next question here. All right, So I always get asked this. Somebody will have, you know, two or three virtual assistants and they say, hey, you know, I'm looking for a manager, someone that could oversee the team. And I'm personally at the point where I, I don't think you can hire a manager right away. I'm sure you could, but more often than not what I have found is you need to find somebody that has a higher skill set and then you need to start them off at the agent level and they need to understand all the low level tests, the guest communications, how to dispute negative reviews, Airbnb claims, process, managing vendors, scheduling them, all the nuances about the properties. But they really, my point is they really need to understand the basics of your business, how things function. And what I've seen in the past is we'll bring on somebody for a manager role and they don't know anything. And they're always asking your top virtual assistants, the top people on your team. And what ends up happening is those people that are, you know, your top agents, they're really the ones that are managing the show. And this manager is just very ineffective and your top agents are not going to have any respect for them and you're still going to end up relying on your top people. So a better plan is bring somebody in with a higher level skill set, right? Maybe they've done this type of work before or they carry better communication skills and they just have overall higher level business acumen and start them off on a plan. Three to six months of starting at the bottom, working on all the low level tasks and slowly start building up those management level responses. Responsibilities, start throwing bigger projects on their plate, running team trainings, doing one on ones with people on the team. But overall like, one, they need to earn their respect at the company, and two, they need to learn the foundational things that make your business. Otherwise they're not going to be effective managers and slowly start ramping them up into that management, you know, onto that management level where you want them to be. So it's not an overnight thing. But personally, this is what I've seen most successful. How do you manage security? And prior to doing any sort of outsourcing, I'm a software engineer and, you know, I've worked with a lot of healthcare companies and this is such a sensitive topic. So what I have come to realize is there's no bulletproof way to prevent a malicious employee from doing malicious things. Now, there's a lot of things that you could put in place and there's education, there's things that you could put in the contract. There are tools that you can use, things like 1Password. There are, you know, there's understanding, you know, the software security permissions that they give you. So when you're using your PMS or, you know, maybe it's QuickBooks, they all have profiles and permissions that you can set for people. So I highly recommend that when you're setting these profiles and permissions, you're just giving enough access for somebody to do the job. If something does come up, somebody will say something and then you will adjust. But just start off in the beginning with the minimum amount of access required. And you might not have it right, and you're probably not going to have it right. But then give people an opportunity to ask, like, hey, I can't see this thing, or I can't get this test done. There's an error popping up saying, I don't have access. And then from those, from that moment on, then you can add more access. But try your best to have a mindset of like, minimum access first. And then as questions come in, I will add more access. And then things like one password. You can still copy the passwords to your clipboard and people can still store them. But again, this is all about having all these different processes and systems in place to prevent, you know, passwords from being all over the place. And the next, the next very important part about security is have a very strong offboarding. I've had a couple of occurrences where.