This article is taken from the popular Eye on Spain ebook “Top 10 Strategies To Explode Your Rental Enquiries”. Find out more about the ebook here.

This may seem obvious and you may have already created your own website, but having your own website to market your property for rental is, as they say, a no-brainer!

However, having a website is just not enough. More and more people are starting to do it and soon everyone will be doing it, thereby increasing competition.

At the moment there are still huge opportunities with having your own site. Let’s take a look at what they are:

1. You are not limited as to how much information you can put on your site. You are limited when you list your property on portals.

2. You can generate traffic to your site from paid search and from natural search engine rankings.

3. Competition is generally low so it’s easy to do.

4. Websites can be built for free, you just need to buy a domain name.

5. You don’t have to pay anyone to build a website for you.

6. You have full control over what you want to show and how you show it.

7. You can incorporate some marketing initiatives into your site (we’ll cover this later).

8. If you generate your own leads then you don’t have to pay any commission to a rental agent. You get to keep all the money.

9. Once you build it and market it, it will always be there for you working away bringing you leads. It’s mostly in the initial effort you put in.

If you are serious about marketing your property then you really do need to consider building your own website.

Why do you pay website rentals portals to list your property?

Why do all rental agents have websites?

Because that’s where most enquiries come from…the Internet.

If you don’t already have a website then here’s some help to get you on your way:

1. Visit http://sites.google.com. Google Sites allows you to create your own website with an easy to use graphical user interface. It takes a little bit of time to find your way around and understand all the features but it is free and does allow you to create your own site quite quickly and easily. They even host it for you for free.

2. Although Google Sites does provide you with a domain name, it’s in the form of http://sites.google.com/mywebsite. This is obviously not very good for various reasons. You really do need to register your own domain and there are many companies that offer this service. http://www.godaddy.com is the biggest and cheapest for registering .com type domains. If your intended audience is predominantly, for example, in the UK, you should look to register a .co.uk domain name (I will explain why later). You can use a service such as http://www.123-reg.co.uk to do this.

3. Choose a domain name that means something and is not too long. Try looking for a domain name relative to your community name or the area where it is. For example, if you have a property at Roda Golf, you may want something like www.rentalrodagolf.co.uk. I’ll discuss this further in strategy 3. In Google sites there is a section that allows you to tell it what your domain name is for your website and then tells you what to do next to point your domain to your new website. It’s all very easy to do.

4. In the next strategy we’ll be discussing forms. Forms are important on the website as they allow you to capture enquiries which are what you are ultimately trying to generate. Google Sites makes this easy again with what they call a “spreadsheet form”. When someone fills out the form on your website it automatically places the details in a Google spreadsheet, in real time. It’s all very clever and it’s all free. So setting up your own website is not that complicated and you will see in the following sections why this strategy is so powerful.

If you use a free service such as Google Sites to host your website then your only cost is the domain name, which for less than 10 Euros per year is nothing really. There really is no excuse.

What are you waiting for? Start building your website now and get more rental bookings!

This article is taken from the popular Eye on Spain ebook “Top 10 Strategies To Explode Your Rental Enquiries” which offers the top methods you can use to generate more enquiries and more money from your rental property.  Find out more about the ebook here.