Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. With over 1.5 million downloads, this is the place to be for all your short-term rental knowledge as part of the Vacation Rental Formula Business School.

Mike Bayer
This episode is brought to you by the kind sponsorship of PriceLabs, who will help increase your revenue and occupancy with their dynamic pricing and revenue management tools. PriceLabs have just launched their 2023 breakthrough release of the next generation of revenue management. This brand new cutting-edge solution leverages hyperlocal data to optimize rates and increase your revenue like never before. Visit the link in the description of this episode for more information.

Mike Bayer
Without further delay, here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
In today's episode, I am talking to serial entrepreneur, property manager, airline pilot, author, land developer, and ultramarathoner, David Angotti. You might know him for smokymountains.com and StaySense. But if you haven't heard about him, this episode will ensure that you follow what he does in the future.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of The Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. As ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again and coming to you from my winter home in Alabama, in Gulf Shores. Very, very happy to be here. It was a long drive down, but it's all well worth it. It's nice sunshine and walks along the beach and not a thought in my head about shoveling snow. That's it. I promise. I'm not going to mention this again. I might say where I am, but I'm not going to mention any weather. Well, maybe just occasionally, particularly if it's bad, if there's a hurricane or a tornado, I might just touch on it.

Heather Bayer
But no, I heard last year, somebody said that from last year, I was overdoing the I'm out of the snowbelt thing, so I promise I won't do that this year. Well, only to a small degree anyway.

Heather Bayer
Anyway, what are we talking about today? Well, there's some people in this industry that don't just make a mark, they carve their own niche. Today's guest is one of those. I've known David Angotti for quite a few years now, and I never fail to learn something new from every encounter I have with him, whether it's face-to-face at a conference or in a blog post or a podcast episode.

Heather Bayer
He's got such a sharp insight into the industry. He's got laser focus on expanding and improving the guest experience along with a very humble approach, and he just delivers inspiration at every level. So wait for it. We're going to be talking about being exceptional, being dream makers, and creating lasting memories for guests.

Heather Bayer
Along the way, you'll hear about developing the best content for attracting those guests. Then there's The Leadville [Trail] 100, a very strenuous event for even the super, ultramarathoner. He's just completed that too. You might hear a little bit about that as well, and anything else that comes to mind. Because when I've got David in the studio with me, I want to learn and I want to hear about everything that he's been doing and share all that with you. Without further ado, let's go straight on over to my talk with David Angotti.

Heather Bayer
Well, I'm super delighted to have back with me once again after quite some time, David Angotti from StaySense. David, thank you so much for joining me. I can't remember the last time we had you on here.

David Angotti
It's been a while. I must have worn out my welcome, Heather. Thanks for finally having me back. I think.

Heather Bayer
It must have been around about the time of the Vacation Rental Success Summit when we were doing our conferences, and you keynoted. Yeah, it must have been around about that time.

David Angotti
Thanks for so much, so much fun with you and Mike and everybody else out at these conferences. Some of the best conferences I've been to in this space.

Heather Bayer
I know. It's like this podcast. When I started the podcast in 2013, it was the only one out there except for 'Get Paid for Your Pad'. So me and Jasper [Ribbers] were the only ones out there. Now look at the space. When we did the Vacation Rental Success Summit, it was the very first independent conference outside of VRMA and the other supplier-run conferences, and now look at it. Every weekend there's another conference.

David Angotti
Constantly, constantly. It's always good because you get to connect with people, but in ways those were simpler and more fun times to plan your schedule for fall or spring when you only had a few events.

Heather Bayer
I know.

David Angotti
At the last, we get to where we're going.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, but it's interesting. I've been going to the Scale Conferences. So I went to The Direct Book Show in Miami last year, and then again in Barcelona and the Scale Conference in Barcelona. And having just said yesterday, I'm not going to any next year. Now I'm planning on Barcelona '24 for the next Scale Conference. So yeah, you get this FOMO, [fear of missing out] right? If you just don't do any...

David Angotti
Spain's never bad. So even if you end up over there and miss some of the sessions, there's worse places to spend time.

Heather Bayer
There are definitely worse places to be. Yeah. Anyhow, for anybody who doesn't know who you are, and I'm sure there may be some of my newer listeners who maybe don't know you David, can you give a potted history of your path through this business? I'll give you 40 minutes, all right?

David Angotti
No, I'll do it real briefly. Basically, if there's a seat in the industry, I've probably sat in it now, most of them by accident.  I started out buying some vacation rentals. We put them with property managers and that didn't go so well. Then we did the rent by owner thing and that went well. Then we decided to start a property management company. It was a lot of work, it turned out, but it went really well and grew really fast. We sold that property management company to Steve Milo over at VTrips. But along the way, we'd built this really good book direct brand. That good book direct brand we kept when we sold off the owner contracts to Steve Milo and it became smokymountains.com, which was our first OTA. Then that OTA turned into three OTAs with floridapanhandle.com and hawaiianislands.com. Then it became an embedable booking technology that we can put on websites like destination marketing organizations and CVB [Conventions & Visitors Bureau] websites to bring more bookings in. Then along the way there too, in addition to that, I've sat on some boards and built purpose-built homes, a whole neighborhood out of those had the acquisition of my current company, StaySense by Guesty that happened earlier.

David Angotti
So now I'm on the supplier side with property management software. I've seen all the tech sides, all the operational sides, the headaches of this business, M&A in the business. So I've seen a little bit of maybe every angle. So I like to think that really what that's given me more than anything is empathy for most of the people in the space, regardless of what seat they're in. I've cleaned a house, I've fixed a toilet, I've met with the government or an owner and had my phone ringing in the middle of the night, I've done all of it at this point.

Heather Bayer
In the introduction to this, I said there are some people in the industry that don't just make a mark on it, they carve their own niche and you are one of them. So that was great. That was really great history. Before we get into it, I want to talk a little bit about you calling smokymountains.com an OTA, and how that lands in with direct booking and things. But before we do, when I did your introduction, I mentioned you're a serial entrepreneur. You've been a property manager, which you mentioned; airline transport pilot, an author; land developer, which you also mentioned. But also what I want to just touch on is that you're also an ultramarathoner, and from someone who's played around a bit with triathlons some time ago, I've got a very tiny piece of experience in that sport, the trail running. And of course, I was doing cycling and swimming, but you just go the distance. What was your latest distance?

David Angotti
It would have been the Leadville 100-miler out in Leadville, Colorado, back in late August.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so 100 miles. And it wasn't 100 miles on a flat surface, right?

David Angotti
No. So a few things make that race quite difficult. The first is the elevation. You're starting at almost two miles high. So the town of Leadville sits above 10,000 feet. So it's very difficult for most people to breathe at that elevation. You're talking double the elevation of Denver, and pulses become elevated, altitude sickness kicks in for about half the people that visit up there and stay up there for any extended period of time. But that's where the start line is, and that's basically the lowest point of the race because you're running up mountains and down mountains, from there river crossings, all kinds of stuff along the way. So it's not 100 miles on a track by any means, at sea level. It's a very challenging, but also a very rewarding and fun race.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Well, if anybody wants to learn a little bit more about that race, you can go to davidangotti.com, and there is a really great article that takes him almost step-by-step along this journey. I got totally immersed in this, and I felt for you... I mean, yeah, altitude does things, and I think you left quite a lot along the trail.

David Angotti
Yeah, it was a lot of fun and it's one of those things where these passions always keep growing. I think that ties back into vacation rentals, right? We can't just stay in one spot else we get stale. So what's challenging one day may not be the same challenge the next day for any of us. And so those goals keep growing. I think that while maybe some people feel like, Oh, 100-miles, I can't identify with that. Hopefully they can identify with those goals I had last year that I achieved are too small this year, and we need them to be even bigger next year. So I would hope that somebody reading that would take that away and would just take that mentality of perseverance and that grit that you go after something and you stay after it.

Heather Bayer
Well, I think just to take that one step further, there was a previous post on your site which talked about an earlier, The Leadville 50, I believe. You said in there that you started feeling an imposter. You got that imposter syndrome. But when you turned up at the start line for the 100, you felt like you belonged, and I think that the analogy of that to our industry is very clear.

David Angotti
Yeah, for sure..... Man, you did your research. You went way back there. That was a few years back. But yeah, in the same way that sometimes smaller goals seem unattainable, those larger goals, as you get experience under your belt, seem very attainable. And so that's why we have to keep pushing and getting better and better each day, regardless of what it is we're working on, because we have more capacity to actually change the world in a more meaningful way the longer we've been here and the more we've accomplished up to this point. So we don't want to waste that experience by any means.

Heather Bayer
I wanted to talk today about being exceptional, because that seems to be the theme of... Because I know a personal goal, personal mission of yours is to be exceptional. I think we all need to be doing that within this industry. It's not an industry for sitting back and just letting things go forward without some superior input. So I want to talk about being exceptional. I want to talk about being dream makers and creating lasting memories. I'm going to go back to your site again, because there was another story and this really resonated with me.... I don't know, I could read it out or you could tell the story about Mary. What would you like to do?

David Angotti
Yeah, I can tell it briefly. But basically, Mary is this individual that writes us at smokeymountains.com, and she thanks us for what we're doing. That's not our normal email. We get a lot of customer service emails or inquiries about properties and other things. It's very rare that we get a thank you note. This thank you note was not even from somebody that had stayed in a property with us. It was from somebody that had visited Gatlinburg many, many years ago, and she'd come to Gatlinburg during a very happy time of her life. She had her very young daughter with her. Her husband was there with her, and it ends up being one of the happiest times of her whole life, and this memory that she reflects on, and in her email she tells us this, that she reflects on this memory every day. And she thanks us for putting pictures of the Gatlinburg Skylift on the site and a review of it, because she relived that experience through the content that we had put out there and she'd happened to cross our website and all this information. And so this picture that she sends into us, she tells us is the most valuable possession that she has.

David Angotti
And it's a picture of her, her daughter and her husband on the old-time  Gatlinburg Skylift, which has changed quite a bit since then. And she recounts that since that time, her husband has passed, her daughter has grown up and no longer lives with her. But every day she looks at this picture multiple times, and it's the most important possession or one of the most important possessions she has in this life is this photo and this memory. And she basically talks about how we're dream makers. And from that, it really changed the 'Why'. The why is not any longer, Oh, the Gatlinburg Skylift has this search volume on it, and I'm going to rank in spot three or higher, and I'm going to drive this number of people every day to the site and then maybe one of them eventually is going to book and I'm going to make a little money.

David Angotti
The why became much bigger than heads in beds, which if we wanted to do that, we could start a mattress factory. We want to do more than that. We want to actually change lives and be a dream maker that helps people be that better husband, that better wife, that better parent or grandparent, whatever it is.  And when we do that, that's where the dream maker idea comes in. And we can make a difference in people's lives like Mary. And it's easy to lose sight of that in the operational day to day.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. And I think this is something that you were bringing up way back in 2017/2018, and you came out with it. It was when the Book Direct movement was really getting into gear. It had just kicked off getting into gear and everybody was talking about price. It was Book Direct and Save. And really not a great deal more than that. You wrote a couple of articles. There was a long post on Matt Landau's vacation rental marketing blog, VRMB. There was a post, and I remember this post coming out on VRM Intel, and it was called Long Live the OTAs. That was really poking the hornet's nest. You said, Long Live the OTAs: 5 Major Issues Marketplaces Solve for You. There were some really good ideas in there, and it all came back into this dream making, making experiences type of thing. But nobody was hearing that, or it seemed like a lot of people weren't hearing that. They were simply looking at the headlines and jumping on you about your position on the direct book movement. You recall that time, right?

David Angotti
Yeah, I recall it very clearly, and I think that there were some things that were miscommunicated, either through the Clickbait headlines or through what people chose to hear or chose to read. I think if we rewind back to my time as a property manager and you look at what I did as a property manager, I built a very successful book direct brand. I'm passionate about book direct. I still speak about book direct. I help friends. They'll come into town and I don't charge them for consulting and I'll help them build a better book direct brand. But just because I'm passionate about book direct doesn't mean that OTAs don't have a place in the business model for most people that are operating businesses today. For example, I just led a demand summit that Matt Landau put on, was very well attended, 15 or 20 very influential property managers attended. And we talked through what is the perfect scenario from a demand, from a distribution, from how you get your bookings. Is it 100% book direct? Why? Is it 50% book direct? Why? And what we landed on, and I think that if we take off our bias hats and our emotion hats and actually think through this logically, this is the way we want to approach this.

David Angotti
We don't want to be 100% book direct because then, all of a sudden, something like COVID happens and changes the demographic that comes to our destination.  Something like a Google algorithm update happens and changes the amount of traffic that we've earned over time through really good marketing or an update to all manner of things. And all of a sudden, now we have a major hiccup in our revenue that could really hurt us. Whereas if we have a large percentage book direct that's augmented with a percentage that's coming from several OTAs, now we can dial those up to give ourselves stability, and in theory, additional demand should result in higher ADRs. What we want to optimize for is stability and maximum profit, not necessarily 100% book direct. I always give a stupid example on that. If I could give you the secret of being 100% book direct tonight, would you guys want it? Everybody's always like, Yes, give it to me. Then just set all your rates at $1. You'll have homeless people booking with you. You'll be full. But the idea is obviously silly, but there's an ADR we're all optimizing for.  The more demand inputs we put in, that's just supply and demand metrics. We're going to have a higher ADR. I think people lose sight of that. So we're optimizing for ADR and stability, not necessarily 100%.

Heather Bayer
You wrote in one of those articles, and we were talking about then, talking about that messaging of Book Direct and Save and being price-centric. And you said, in my opinion, price-centric messaging will self-destruct in the next 18 to 24 months. The vacation rental industry is maturing and eventually price parity will become a focus for our industry. That was 2018. What occurred?

David Angotti
So we've seen some of that. If you'd asked me then, I would have predicted more, honestly. I think it's been a slower adoption for a lot of reasons. I think some of that has to do with the non-homogeneous characteristics of our inventory. But what I would say is we have sites like booking.com with no service fees. We're seeing a huge push, whether it's Stubhub, Vrbo, MYSites, to move away from service fees, have the blended pricing where it's very transparent pricing, which honestly that's a good thing if we move to that for consumers. So we are seeing steps, very strong steps towards that. It has taken longer than I would have predicted though.

Heather Bayer
I want to move on to talking about this dream making, but coming back on what you're doing at StaySense because you call them OTAs, smokymountains.com, you call it OTA. But to me, it's a listing site that people would use, isn't it? Or have I got that wrong?

David Angotti
Yeah, it's transactional. It's very transactional. You're on there, we only charge for success. We're a two-sided marketplace, not unlike Airbnb, not unlike booking.com or these others. So is it the perfect name? I'm not sure. But OTA is what we refer to them here internally as, and those would be the reasons, and honestly, when I think listing site, I think more along the lines of the old school listing sites where you pay a set price per year and you're up there and you pay that price whether or not you have any success. With an OTA, I think more of like the models, like even the Expedias of the world, where Hilton is paying a set percentage per night that you put somebody in that room, and that's closer to what we do than old-school listing sites.

Heather Bayer
But the difference is between you and let's say Airbnb, so your smokymountains.com or your floridapanhandle.com, it is not just a raft of properties and that's it. If people want to find out more about the location, they've got to go elsewhere. I've spent a lot of time on smokymountains.com over the years. I followed it for a lot of years, because I was always so jealous about your Fall Foliage Map, that was so great. But you've got a... Is it about content?

David Angotti
So if we're like, Hey, what are the differences between Airbnb and the brands we operate? We have a very different mission than Airbnb. When we started the company, we weren't sure how we were going to monetize the company, but we were sure, at that time, of the mission.  We wanted to positively impact every vacation to the area. And what that has looked like for us is hiring 100 plus freelance photographers in Hawaii at times, full-time photographer in the Smoky Mountains for years, and these databases of millions of high resolution images that the company owns.  All these original articles from where we've gone into restaurants and tried the food and photographed the food, or hikes that we have aerial footage of. And all of that is very different than Airbnb. They can't do that at scale or have chosen not to. The reason we have gone that direction is tied into the mission statement. But then the byproduct of that has been additional visits to a lot of these areas, because people that are maybe visiting for one night start to see the potential of the area, book come back for a week. Or people that are researching between a few destinations will even tell us, hey, we saw how much there was to do there, so we booked there instead of over here, and we booked for longer.

David Angotti
And so we hope to drive additional value of these additional visits to a market, almost like a CVB would or a DMO would through content and through reaching more people.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. So let's stick with that topic of content because it ties in so well with the whole direct booking type of marketing, because there is no point in having your own website if you don't have the content that's going to keep people on it. You may as well just link people back to your Airbnb listing. So let's just talk about why content is so vital, so valuable for hosts and managers. What types of content are most effective?

David Angotti
So it's easiest to talk about what not to do and a little bit more difficult to give the recipe for success. So at a very high level, what not to do, and then we'll dig into what to do, is don't think this is 500-700 words and I need to publish three times a week, and I need 100 of these total before I'm quote-unquote, done. You're never done. And I want them to have this and the title tag and I want to........ Stop thinking that way. First off, most of the people listening to this podcast probably aren't SEOs. They probably are going to start tuning out when I say the word SEO, and that's okay. The way you want to think about this first is, I don't want to create a piece of content unless it's better than everything that's ranking today. If you can't do that, you're just throwing up more garbage on the internet. There's plenty of content out there already. This is not about quantity. It's not about, Hey, I want one more thing up there. This is more about, what am I a subject matter expert on, where I can add value really to the internet, to the audience that's looking for information on this topic.

David Angotti
Funnily enough, that's exactly where you're also going to rank. So you don't have to even get down into the weeds on what SEO is and all of that craziness. A good place to start for most property managers are the questions they're getting. Those questions can take all forms, but some common ones that we've seen is like, Hey, what should I do? I'm stuck here on a rainy day in the property and the kids are driving me crazy. All of a sudden, that becomes a post on the rainy day items to do in the Smoky Mountains. We're subject matter experts on that. We've lived there. I lived there with kids that I was stuck in my house with, so I knew I wanted to get out and where am I going to go? I can't handle this for another day being stuck inside. That same stuff turned into a post and it now ranks. There's going to be questions around, I want to have a rehearsal dinner here. Where are the places where I can get a room for 25 people? Because I have all these people in town and everything here is crowded. Now we make a post about that or what's open on Christmas Day?

David Angotti
What hikes should we do if we're not in great shape or if we are in great shape? All of these different things together become these really topical clusters. Those topical clusters can become the different pieces of our content strategy as we start out. You don't have to be an expert at anything to do this. You can have an iPhone and go out and take photos, videos. You can write this up yourself. Everybody listening to this is a destination expert, or they should be if they aren't, because that's what we're doing, is we're selling our destination. We're selling the idea of visiting to where our companies are. And that's the beginning of a content strategy, is just knowing that destination really well.

Heather Bayer
Have you ever come across the book they ask you answer?

David Angotti
I don't believe so.

Heather Bayer
By Marcus Sheridan.

David Angotti
No, I haven't.

Heather Bayer
Just a brilliant book, which is just about what you've just said. And Marcus Sheridan was working for a pool and spa company, and he was involved in creating some content. And of course, the usual type of content, like here's what size pools you can get. Then he figured that there were so many questions coming in about pools and spas and where they should go. He started just answering the questions in posts. And within a year they had become the most sought after pool and spa company because they had... It wasn't just FAQs, it was complete blog posts on each one and they were comprehensive, and they answered the questions that their customers were asking. And how simple is that?

David Angotti
Yeah. And it's beautiful because when you answer the questions that customers have, you gain their trust right then. And this goes back to that original mission of, we wanted to positively impact people's vacation, and all of a sudden they're looking for a place to go have breakfast or brunch at, they happen across our site. They aren't staying in a property, they rented through us. But they, all of a sudden, have a good experience with my brand. Now, next time when they're looking to book a place, they're going to remember that they spent their entire vacation looking at the next thing to do on smokymountains.com. Then that impacts them and they come back and book. And we see that in the analytics, the return visits where then they book where they hadn't booked with us previously. But people come on a cadence to a lot of our markets every six months or every 12 months, multiple times a year. And you can take advantage of being that thought leader, that's an expert that reaches them long before they're ready to buy and then it will benefit you down the road. And this is again, like this natural byproduct of being helpful and wanting to help people.

Heather Bayer
I'm going to take a short break just now to hear about our sponsor, PriceLabs, directly from one of their clients. We're going to be right back with more from this great interview in just a few moments.

Lydia
I'm Lydia, and I live in Minnesota, and both me and my husband are pharmacists, and we still work full-time. We have young kids. And how we got interested in the short-term rental business was really just actually wanting a place for ourselves to go vacation. And so we looked at some destinations and some potential areas. PriceLabs Market dashboard was actually how we started gauging what area even makes sense. We can see on Zillow how much a house would cost, but how much would that house actually make and does it make sense? One market dashboard, it's a very upfront pricing. I really appreciate that. You pay your $10 and you get to see all that data for the month. What it tells you is, in general, what revenue a property would make on an annual basis. I think a lot of times, too, when people are starting to look for a property, they don't even know how many bedrooms, or what size house they're aiming for. We had actually some flexibility. Anything above three-bedroom would suit our needs as a vacation home. But as an example, Market Dashboard information told me that there is a huge jump from a three-bedroom house to a four-bedroom house in terms of revenue.  Jumps so big that is disproportionate to how much the cost of the house would increase if you were to buy a four-bedroom house versus the three.

Lydia
And so information like that helped me narrow down what I should be looking for as I'm purchasing this house. PriceLabs Market Dashboard is really helpful in determining what are the other competitors in the area, how many days they're hosting, what photos they have, what amenities do they offer and really find that match. And from that data, I was able to really narrow down what the projections like.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much for that testimonial. It was great to hear how PriceLabs is working so practically with their clients to help them achieve success. Let's go on right back now to our interview.

Heather Bayer
Years ago, I must be going back 11 years ago, I think, as a family, we were going to the Bahamas for the first time, and we wanted to go to Eleuthera, because it looked nice and it was a thin island that you could go from the Caribbean side to the Atlantic side in a matter of minutes. Have you ever been there?

David Angotti
I have, it's beautiful.

Heather Bayer
It is absolutely beautiful.  And somebody said, Oh, my God, there's so many beaches. You've got to go to the best beaches. Well, how do you find the best beaches? I Googled beaches of a Eleuthera, and up came this site and.... it was 11 years ago, it was a relatively primitive site, but it had a list of all the beaches and a picture of each one and some directions and whether it was quiet and whether it was busy and whether there were rolling waves or Caribbean white sand. It was the most amazing website.

Heather Bayer
Not only did he have that, but there was also restaurants of Eleuthera. Then I noticed at the side of the site, it said, Villa Rental. This guy had a single villa. We didn't choose that villa at that time. It wasn't appropriate for our family needs at that time. However, for eleven years I have talked about that site, and if anybody wants to go to Eleuthera, they should go to this site, and I think that's exactly what we're talking about here. I've brought this up as an example so many times, because this owner was giving away everything he knew about this place. I didn't go there, but I think quite a few people who wanted to go to that same island, have now gone to that site and may well have booked his place. Mind you, there's a lot more properties on it now.

David Angotti
Yeah, it's a great reminder that what we do when we do it well, and it positively impacts others, will ultimately pay our own bills down the line from here. Going back to content strategy, what's a good way to get started in it? Once you get past the questions that people have asked you, another just pretty easy hack, I'll give a couple hacks for people that are just getting started, is leverage Google. Go to Google and just type your destination name like Gatlinburg, for example, and see what Google suggest gives you the auto complete there gives you complete the search and see the questions where it says people also ask these other questions about your destination. And you can do that. And then you can actually repeat this process with a single letter of the alphabet after Gatlinburg. Like, Gatlinburg A, and then all of a sudden you're going to see Aquarium and airport and these other words that start with A and then B, and you can go through the whole alphabet like this. And now you're leveraging the machine learning of Google. You're leveraging the largest user data set in the world to guide your content strategy with no paid tools at all.

David Angotti
And if you really want to take it to the next level, you could then take a keyword like Gatlinburg or Smoky Mountains or whatever your destination is and go to a tool that you can sign up for a free membership app called Answer the Public. And you go to that tool and you drop in Gatlinburg and you hit Search, and it will actually expose all of that stuff that we were just manually doing on Google. And you could download certain sections, like all of the questions people ask or all of the prepositions, the who, why, what, when, where, all of the whole alphabet that we were talking about manually a second ago. You can download that into an Excel spreadsheet. And now you have this beautiful content strategy right there that you can use for the next year, for most people. And that's going to give you all of the keyword volumes and everything as well. And that's a free tool. So this doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be, go spend $10,000 on tools over the next year or pay an agency to do this. Oftentimes we will do better jobs as destination experts than an agency that you pay a high dollar to, because they aren't the subject matter expert.

Heather Bayer
While you were talking just then, I was just doing that. I went to Gatlinburg. I went to Gatlinburg A and got Gatlinburg attractions. I went to Gatlinburg attractions and I looked at people also ask. And one of the questions was, is it better to be in Pigeon Forge or Gatlinburg? And I clicked on that. And that is a blog post by a company called Colonial Properties, which is a vacation rental company in that area. So that's the way it works.

David Angotti
And that's somebody that's at that information seeking point in the decision purchase. And if you can grab them and bring them into the funnel then, and you've done a good job, hopefully with your inventory acquisition like that company has done, I know that company well, then you can hopefully convert somebody. They're serious about booking. If they're asking, Where should I stay? That's getting middle to lower in the funnel. This is why it makes sense from a financial perspective beyond being the the dream maker.

Heather Bayer
So we can't have any conversation these days without including AI and ChatGPT. And I'm getting really good at this now. I can recognize a ChatGPT written article just like that. But I'm sure there are many more out there that have been taken from ChatGPT and have been personalized. What's your thought on using ChatGPT or any other AI platform to develop content?

David Angotti
Yeah. So I have a whole presentation on this, how to leverage the AI tools that are available to us today and how we should do that, maybe even if we don't have experience on this today. But I can tell you definitively, do not mistake what Google has said about, Hey, it's okay to use AI, to mean we're going to go create a thousand pages of AI content, spew that onto our websites and hope for the best. There have been very large studies of 20,000 sites where the AI versus the human articles have been studied to see which ones are ranking. Are they ranking in spot one? Are they ranking in spot two? So on and so forth. And then a score on the percentage that was written by AI. So the study I'm referencing here was done by originality.ai, and you can search for that or put it in the Show Notes. Basically, until an article reaches a certain level of humanness to it, it probably is not ranking on Google today. And so that is something to just be aware of. It does not mean we can't use AI for amplification of our efforts, but it is not the whole effort.

David Angotti
So like an idea, for example, that everybody here could easily do ChatGPT, you take that whole list of the people also ask questions that you can download over at answer the public. You paste that into ChatGPT with this up above it where you say, Give me topical clusters for all of the questions below and eliminate duplicate or redundant ideas. You hit go. Now all of a sudden, it's going to take all of these 100, 200, 300 questions and change them into, Okay, here's the ones about location, here's the ones about things to do, or where to eat, or a time of year, and it's going to topical cluster that. Now from there you could say, give me an outline of this or give me 1,000 words on this topic or give me bullet points that should be included in an article about this. And then you apply all that research that ChatGPT did to your human expertise along with it. Now you obviously pass the originality score. It is written by a human, but you've done it in maybe half the time, and it's also a much higher value piece of content for end users.

David Angotti
So that's how we're using it. We aren't going out and creating hundreds of articles and putting those out there on the Web. We have the history of Google. We know basically Google penalized sites that did that a long time ago when there was a whole other way to do this. And so we don't believe that that's the recipe for success moving forward.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because I have seen advice out there, which is simply take your topics and just feed them into Google and it will give you the article and all you have to do is copy paste it. I'm a storyteller. I love telling stories and I couldn't think of delivering any form of article without a personal anecdote in there. Whether people want to hear it or not, they get it. But it's useful. It'll really.... and you just said.... ask for bullet points, so you don't forget something. But I think it's also worth remembering as well that it does not know an area the same way that you do if you live in it.

David Angotti
Yeah. And if you are going to use it to write or help write articles, make sure you set up templates for your brand of voice and that type of thing, and guide it on how to speak to your end users. What's their reading level? For example. I'll give you a simple example of that. I was wanting to go over the history of the geographical land of Israel with my children to talk through like, Hey, what's happened here over the Millennium? The first time I asked ChatGPT for that, it was pretty complex. I said, Rewrite this for a 12-year-old. It did it in a way a 12-year-old could understand the next time. You can take any topic like that, complex topics and ask it to summarize it or rewrite it. Things like that can be pretty helpful as we're trying to figure out how to leverage this for research.

David Angotti
Other things that we can do very easily with a competitive research with some of the plugins that you can use on ChatGPT-4. So don't ignore the plugins. That's a common mistake people will make. These plugins are where the real gold is, and then the prompts. And so the prompts that you write will determine the output you get from the system, and I'll give you a link to a prompt template and example that your audience can have. And basically the quality of that input will determine that output.

Heather Bayer
Do you have any suggestions on a couple of plugins that are particularly useful?

David Angotti
Prompt Perfect is by far the best one. So the way that one works is you'll just start writing your prompt in plain language, and then you put "perfect" in quotes next to it, and it activates this... Basically, think of it like inception.ai is now rewriting your prompt for AI, and it's this AI system called Prompt Perfect. And you can even see what you started with and then what it rewrote if you expand the little carrot that drops down. So that would be one of the ones that I would definitely recommend for pretty much everybody that's using it.

David Angotti
You can also have things like Serpstat. There's a lot out there around pulling in the statistics of how many people search things, that type of thing. Those would be some good ones to start with, I would say. That and then it's natively in ChatGPT, actually, but you would want to also enable the beta feature of Browse with Bing, and that way you don't get that error of, Hey, the last time I crawled the Internet was 2022. And instead, it actually goes out there today and crawls the internet today. So this would be some of the more beginner ones.

Heather Bayer
So the second one you mentioned, what was that one again?

David Angotti
I think it's called Serpstat, and I can send you the link to any of these that you want. But basically it's the idea that now with a URL or with a keyword, it can pull information and data about that.

Heather Bayer
Okay, so I will get these links from David and put them in the Show Notes, because the moment I start mentioning AI, I think our stats just begin to go up and up and up. People want to hear about this, how to do it, but how to do it right.

Heather Bayer
Just one last question on content, is about distributing it. You talked about SEO and coming up in Google and perhaps Google Snippets. I don't know if they do still do Snippets, but the questions, that's where you could find yourself if you do answer a question that people are asking in bulk. But how else do you get this content out there? Because there's no point in just putting it on a website and just hoping people will come.

David Angotti
Yeah, this is the hard part about building a brand. So basically you have what's called the on-site portion of SEO, and then you have the off-site portion. So that on-site includes everything from content research, ideation, and creation, you're getting it published. It's hopefully good photos. I'll just pause there to say that's another reason to not just go out there and spew automatically generated content onto your website, because you've hopefully gone and taken photos of this and that, that actually probably costs you more money or took you longer than maybe the written content would. You don't want to waste this really good photographic content that you created. You've done all that. Now you have it sitting there, and it's that classic. Like, if you build it, they won't necessarily come. And now what's even more challenging to get the people across it. Some people may come across that site even if that's all you did and you just built it. But most people are going to start coming once you promote it. There's different ways to promote it. We can promote it on social. That requires having a following, most likely though. Most things don't just go viral without somebody pushing them from behind the scenes.

David Angotti
And so if you have a good following, you can promote it there. If you have your own email list with a lot of emails, you can definitely share it there and it becomes a flywheel that can drive your marketing a little bit better. If all of a sudden here's this list of things to do in fall and it happens to be fall season and we're hitting our list with that, it just makes sense. It would make sense if there wasn't a search engine, and that's how I try to think about things. But then the other way is the search engines. How do we rank on Google? How do we get the traffic coming in from the search engines? Most of that's going to come in once we build our authority as both an author and then also as a brand. So the author has to do with basically, are we a subject matter expert? Do we display those characteristics in the overall experience on our site? And that's something that's a little bit easier. The harder part is how do we build our authority as a brand? And that's how we need to go out to journalists over time and build coverage into our brand and think of it as PR.

David Angotti
You'll hear people say link building, and I wish that word did not exist. Think of it like PR. This is not something you just go build. This is something you go and earn. You earn it through editorial relationships. You earn it through that content process of building the right content. Just recently on smokymountain.com, we created a piece about 'the spookiest spots', and we did it based on data. Then we shot that to journalists like PennLive and Thrillist and these different sites that are top 25 or top 100 news outlets in the country, and they want to cover it because it's interesting. It's interesting to their audience. They don't care if you just signed a big property. They don't care if we have a bunch of vacation rentals in Gatlinburg that we want to rent. That's me, I care about that. They care about what does their audience care about and how can I make their job easier of telling their audience? And so we can shop it to these different people like that with a good press pack and reaching out to them. It's a pretty manual process at first, but over time, you build up a Rolodex that you could quickly reach out to and say, Hey, would you be interested in covering this if we created it? And you're guaranteed success at that point.

Heather Bayer
Mike and I went to Quebec last month and we stayed at an absolutely beautiful spot in the Eastern Townships, a company called Chalets Hygge. It was a stunning trip. In talking to the owner, she's not a property manager, she just owns half a dozen of these properties. But she has developed a relationship with her local tourism organization, so much so that when I was there, the representative from the tourism organization came out to speak to us, because she wanted to just tell us how important this partnership between Chalets Hygge and the tourism department was. They are sending her influencers. When they get press requests from the major newspapers, the major publications, the major online media, the first thing they think about is Chalets Hygge, because they have this relationship built up. And, Kerri, I know you're listening. Kerri just does such a wonderful job with these partnerships and with the content on her website. So once people are there, they can see that she has the partnerships with chefs in the area and equipment rental companies and attractions. And it's just this great symbiotic relationship.

David Angotti
Yeah. It's so amazing when we think about PR the right way. Most people think about it the wrong way. The right way is, how does this pass the, what I call the bar test here. And so the bar test is when you're sitting at the bar and you hear the people next to you talking to each other and something is said and you want to know what's the rest of that story.  That's going to have exponentially more press pickup every time than something that's just the same boring pitch they've heard 100 times before. Think of it like that. If I overhear this at a bar, would I need to know the end of the story? I'll give you an example of that on our Florida brand.  We did a survey about two years ago about, if you could would you agree to be attacked by a shark if you knew you would survive and not have any long-term ill effects, but have the story? You're going to have to deal with all the pain and everything else. Would you do it? It came from we were just sitting around joking one day here at the office.

David Angotti
Well, the funny thing is we went and used an official polling company like they use for elections. We had data science behind it. Now all of a sudden, we had hundreds of responses that were put together with this very reputable polling organization, and we took that to journalists, but we didn't give them the answer. We asked them if they would want to know. All of a sudden, they would write back and say, Yes, we want to know. But we bundled that with the question of, Would you like us to send the press pack and would you like to know the answer to this? Then we would send it to them. Now we have hundreds of pieces of coverage into our story on shark attacks and our shark attack interactive map. It's like the equivalent of the Leaf Map for our Florida [Smoky Mountain?] Brand. But that's part of how we pushed that story forward. It had to have that hook, that thing that makes it fascinating to somebody that hears it right away. If you don't have that, you're trying to sled uphill and it's not going to be fun.

Heather Bayer
That's fascinating. I absolutely love that. Hey, we're coming up to our time, and I can't believe that.... we could talk for a long, long time. Looking ahead, David, we have to look ahead. Where do you see the future for all this content marketing for this industry? Is it something worth pursuing? Is it going to have longevity? And is there anything out there we should be aware of beyond AI?

David Angotti
It will change faster and more than it has ever before in the next few years, I'm convinced of that. I don't think that's something to be afraid of. I think we embrace it. Can I give you the recipe of exactly what Google is going to do tomorrow? No. A year from now, definitely not. But what I can tell you is, when we produce content that helps end users, that solves end users' problems, that is difficult for a machine to recreate. So for example, images, they're really struggling. We've tried all of the paid and unpaid ones out there, and people end up with seven fingers and missing a foot. And just these weird things happen where they have three arms. That's not even close yet. Or we'll ask for a picture in Panama City Beach, Florida, and it will return us a picture of the beach, but the buildings are all wrong. I mean, we aren't even close yet on images. So that's what I would say. That's a real opportunity still, because other people can't go out and just create a great library of original images easily today. So as I think about where some opportunities are that, and if it's struggling with images, how much more so with the videos?

David Angotti
So let's think about shooting really good videos of places. And primarily, though, how do we impact vacations positively? If we can figure that out, we don't have to so much worry about Google. Google is... They're trying to go there all the time. And so all of these algorithm updates, hundreds and hundreds of them every year, we hear about a few of them, but the multiple a day we know that happen, all of those are really to do one thing, to basically give the end user what they want from Google. And so what does the end user want? They want to be helped. They want their problem solved. So when we're writing a post or we're taking photos or creating a video, do it to the highest level. I'd rather see one post done really well in a way that would help somebody than a hundred done halfway. Because when that post is better than anything else that's out there today, that's the post that's going to help people first and foremost, but then the byproduct is ranking.

Heather Bayer
And then that brings us back to the beginning about being exceptional. So that was a good circle. Thank you, David. It's been an absolute pleasure talking with you. There's been a number of things you've talked about that you're going to send me some links to, which will go onto the Show Notes. And how can people get in touch with you if they would like to?

David Angotti
Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn for sure. That's probably the best place to get a hold of me. There is a contact form on my website as well, but LinkedIn is where most people will contact me.

Heather Bayer
And I'll put that link on the Show Notes too. Once again, always a pleasure. And we will get together face to face at some point, for sure.

David Angotti
Yeah, that's coming in the near future, I think. And I sure appreciate you having me. You're always so much fun to talk with, Heather. And thank you for all you've done for the industry. I really mean that. I was bragging on you to the whole team here and just saying that you're one of the people that's had the most influence for the longest for this industry and just keep up the good work you're doing...

Heather Bayer
Well, I love that. Thank you so much, David. That was fantastic. Always so great to be talking with you. We've known David for a number of years now, and it always is such a pleasure to sit down and take in all that wisdom and knowledge and inspiration and enthusiasm. I do hope you enjoyed that. I do hope you go to the Show Notes and click on the links that will take you to those things that David mentioned about prompts. It really is important to have those prompts right, get them right, and then, of course, you've got the plug-ins, which I will put in the Show Notes as well. Prompt Perfect,  that's one I use on a daily basis. Serpstat, I've got to check that spelling. He will let me know about that.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much for tuning in today. Always lovely to know that there are people on the other side of all this. I do hope you are checking out The Tipping Point, which is our Monday podcast. That is just 7-10 minutes of focused education. We pick a topic each week and then I will talk about it, or Mike came in and talked, or we'll have guests come in and just talk about one specific topic and every week there are learning points, action points.  You can leave that Tipping Point episode and go and put some of these things into practice almost straight away. Every week we have a download to accompany the episode. The other thing is it's on the podcast, you can listen to it, but if you want to see the slides that go with it, you can see them on YouTube as well. There's a link on the Show Notes to The Tipping Point episodes too.

Heather Bayer
Thank you for being with me again. Of course, I'll be with you next week as I sit here and enjoy the sunshine in Gulf Shores that I said I wasn't going to talk about. I'll see you then.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. Don't forget to check out our sponsor, PriceLabs, and their dynamic pricing and revenue management tools. Click the link in the description of this episode for more information.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.

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