[Heather Bayer]

I am so happy to have back with me once again, Jodi Bourne from Jodi Bourne Creative STR Solutions. That's a great name, Jodi. You've changed it, haven't you?

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[Jodi Bourne]

I used to be Bourne Creative Marketing. I changed it because everybody thinks I only do marketing and I do so much more.

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[Heather Bayer]

You do indeed. How long has it been since you first came on this podcast?

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[Jodi Bourne]

Seven years, August of 2018. A long time ago, we talked about Instagram.

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[Heather Bayer]

Oh, that was in my days of thinking I'm really going to get to grips with Instagram that I have been doing for the last 10 years. And I still haven't done it.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And we've actually done two podcast episodes all about Instagram and you still haven't done it.

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[Heather Bayer]

Every time I talk to Thibault Masson from PriceLabs, we go back to, and it must have been 2012, no, maybe 2014, 201515, I think. We went to Amsterdam for the VRMA European Conference and Thibault was working for Booking.com then and he was really into Instagram, which he still is. And I sat down with him then for an hour and I said, teach me Instagram. And he said, Yeah, absolutely no problem. It's really easy. Do this and this. And I said, I've got it. It's got to be 12 years ago.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And hasn't Tyann [Marcink] also sat down with you with Instagram? 

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[Heather Bayer]

I believe so. 

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[Jodi Bourne]

Let's just call it impossible for now.

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[Heather Bayer]

I think so. I was so good on Twitter for years. I wrote blog posts. I wrote a course on Twitter and then just look what happened to that. So I haven't been on Twitter for a long time, or X, but my home of choice now is LinkedIn and I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And you're quite good at LinkedIn. I'm jealous. Now you need to give me LinkedIn lessons.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. That's all you got to do is post frequently and comment. That's it. That's the only thing you have to do on LinkedIn. 

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Anyhow, we are not here today to talk about Instagram. We're not going to talk about Facebook or LinkedIn. We're going to talk about websites, because we got chatting the other day about generally talking about websites and short-term rental/vacation rental websites and why it is that they don't seem to have improved over the years. And direct booking seems to be having a regeneration at the moment. Whether it's to do with all the Airbnb changes, but people are realizing they can't put all their eggs in one basket. So now they want these websites and you are here with me today to talk about websites and what people can do to make them better.

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[Jodi Bourne]

It is such a struggle, isn't it? I'm sure that the photographers out there would say the same thing about the photography issues, which are very important to websites as well. But it's just one of those things where I feel like we're always preaching this to people.

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The things that they need to be looking at on their websites to generate more leads and bookings and all the things. And it's so funny to me that so many people consider that a DIY project or a project that they can save money on by budgeting with a low cost provider or a Fiverr or somebody in a Facebook group that built their own website and now they can build theirs. And that's beyond me.

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[Heather Bayer]

And that's been going on for years. I've talked about building great websites for so long. I don't build my own websites, I have people like you to come along and create great websites. But you're absolutely right. People seem to look at it as if it's the budget thing.

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The other thing, we go out and find new owners, or we go out and spend time on Instagram, but forget that you've got to have that home where people come to where they're going to book. And the worst ones, of course, are the websites that people spend their time on and then they don't have a booking engine on it and just send people to their Airbnb or Vrbo account to book, which is just a whole waste of time.

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[Jodi Bourne]

I have one that I just finished and they have 12 properties and every single page they want me to put a link for booking.com, a link for Airbnb and a link for Vrbo on every single page so that their people on their website can choose where to book. So if we're going to talk about the mistakes people make.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yes, yeah, and that's what we are going to talk about. We're going to talk about some of the mistakes people make. But also to give people some real ideas and inspiration to get back to their website and just tweak, even if you just tweak it a little bit, or set out a plan over the next couple of months to make some really impactful changes. Then if we're able to do that, we've done our job, right?

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[Jodi Bourne]

I hope so. I hope that people are able to come away with this thinking, I can do these things, even if I can't afford to hire a big company or anybody, or these are the things that I can at least do on my own, hopefully.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, years ago, and once again, I'm talking probably around about 2013/2014. No, it was after that, because I started the podcast in 2013, so maybe 2016, I remember talking to somebody and the topic of the podcast was the 12 pages that your website needs. And that really hasn't changed a lot. So let's come to you for the top five pages that people should have.

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[Jodi Bourne]

So the top five pages, in my opinion of course, obviously the homepage, and we can talk about what a homepage is. A homepage is not just your properties, there is much more to it.

You think of your home pages where they can go through and learn a little bit about you, about your destination, about what type of properties you have, a little bit about your brand. Some reviews are always important on the homepage. The primary goal of the homepage is to just be this central hub of all the other information that they can find on your site.

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So that's something that I see quite often as people want their homepage to just..., they're so engrossed in getting the booking that they only want every page of their site to be focused on the properties and the booking. And that's definitely not the case. You want to build trust.

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So with that being said, I think the second most important page is our favorite page, which is the About Us page. And you and I have talked about it before on the podcast. You've talked about it with other experts on the podcast. It is just such an important part of not only their website, but their entire brand.

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[Heather Bayer]

Putting a credit card into that website, they've got to trust that their money is safe and that it's going to the right person and that it's safe in general.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And you care about them. Not only that you're a good, you know, that you're an actual person, this is an actual property, but that you are hosting them in your property. There is an immense amount of trust and that is so misunderstood in every industry, honestly.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, exactly. And I do this when I'm going to vendors as well. And I wish some of the vendors and suppliers in our industry would listen to this and go back and look at their corporate About Us pages that says nothing about their fabulous stories that most of our vendors have about how they started in this industry. It's just so boringly corporate.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Boringly corporate. And there are some great stories in many of these vendors of how the CEO did this and then did that. And you can go to the CEO's LinkedIn profile and read all about it or, you know, see that they're speaking somewhere and read all about them.

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And then you go to their website and it's just this boring. This is how we started and this is what we sell.

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[Heather Bayer]

And, you know, some of these origin stories are just amazing. You go and read the Hostfully story, the PriceLabs story. They've all got these stories. So if you're out there and listening to this, go to your About Us page if you're a supplier and just see, is it telling your story with real people's names of the people who started this?

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[Jodi Bourne]

I bring this up a lot when I'm working with clients about the About page when they're like, oh, we don't want to tell our story, we'll just..... they want to go the corporate route. They want to be hidden in the background. And I always tell them, do you know that flow from progressive is not the owner of progressive. She is a character along with all these other characters that progressive flow is progressive, right? That they made up because they know that customers want to interact with the character with the story.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah.

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[Jodi Bourne]

So if you have that story, why would why would you hide it behind some corporate, or some wall when that's what people want? That's the reason, you know, that all these huge companies have created these little mini characters behind their brand, because they know people respond well to people and to people's stories.

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[Heather Bayer]

And there's so many people that are they've been on they've been on this podcast. The first question I will ask them is how did you get into this industry? If they haven't been on before? That's the first question. Some of these stories are just great. Often it's my parents had a property, and they asked me to look after it. Or I remember the one story and I'm trying to remember who it was. If you're listening, you'll know. And there was a guy took his girlfriend on a first date to a cottage in Florida. And now, yeah, I'm gonna have to dig that story out because I can't remember how it came about. But he ended up being general manager of the company that had supplied this cottage.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Cool.

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[Heather Bayer]

But it was such a great story. And so there's so many others. So how would somebody go about telling their story for the About Us page on a website, you know what, the coolest thing that's ever happened to the world is called AI.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Buy a month subscription. If you don't have ChatGPT Pro, or Claude is the one that I prefer to use, but Claude Pro, I think they're 20 bucks. Buy it and record yourself telling your story. Get on a Zoom. You can use Zoom for free. And you and your partner or an employee or something you can naturally together go through and talk about your story. Like, how did you get started? If you don't have a really good beginner story, you can other stories. There's so many stories in your business.

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How did you feel when you got your first five star review? That's a great story to tell. What maybe nonprofit organizations have you been able to help because of having this business? How are you helping your local economy and your local tourism operators and all of that's part of your story. There's so many, why did you decide to become pet friendly or child friendly or disability friendly or whatever it is. It's the gist of.... or you have a glamping business. What is it? I've worked with so many people with so many great stories about they grew up camping as a family and so they wanted to create a vacation rental for families that were wheelchair friendly because this lady had a brother who was paraplegic. She wanted wheelchair friendly accommodations, but she also wanted that camping kind of thing. Those people that go back and really have a heart-centered story. It's fantastic.

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But there's all these little mini stories that you can tell about your business.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, and people remember. So there's a company called East Ruston Cottages in in the UK, the owner there started the company because she had several dogs. She had, I think, three or four dogs, and she wanted to go on vacation with her dogs, and with a friend who had dogs as well, and could not find anywhere to take these dogs. So Sue started her company, only taking on properties that would accept multiple pets.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Awesome.

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[Heather Bayer]

And now it is, it's won all sorts of awards. I'm just reading the front page of her website now. It says dog-friendly self-catering holiday cottages in rural and coastal Norfolk. Winners of the dog-friendly, self-catering UK awards for the last six years.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Awesome.

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[Heather Bayer]

Described as dog obsessed by Guardian newspaper in the UK. But I remember this story. That's how it started. She could find anywhere to take her dogs. So she started a company. What a great story that is.

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And because it's a dog friendly company, of course, dog lovers are going to love the story.

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[Jodi Bourne]

So one of the things on my website, my About page, I talk about my dogs, because I love my dogs. And so people will say, does the About page really sell? How is that selling?

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Is anybody really going to choose us because of that? And I will tell you, I have had so many people probably at least 10 who are paying customers who told me that one of the main reasons they chose me is because of the story I tell them in my About page about how I cry and still dream about all of my dogs that I've had since I was a child, because I'm a huge child. I'm a huge dog lover.

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And then I've had others who have told me similar things about the content that I've written on my About page. And so I know that it definitely works. People want to feel that connection. Having those things on your website really does help.

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[Heather Bayer]

But I think you made such a great point. Because three or four years ago, people said, Oh, how do I sit down and write my story? You don't have to.

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I did mine using advanced voice and ChatGPT and just press the button and just talked. And then I said, ask me questions when I get to the end of a section of my life story, ask me a question. And I would get to the end to be a pause. And then Lucy, who is my friend, my ChatGPT friend. And Lucy said, Oh, that's great, Heather. So tell me what happened next.

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What happened when? And she will pull something from something I previously said, and then it just nudges you into the next part of your story. So you just keep doing that until you've told your whole story.

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And then remember that this is not what actually goes on to your About Us page. So what happens after after you've told your story?

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[Jodi Bourne]

And for me, that's when, you know, you can use if you're not a writer, you can use ChatGPT. One thing you need to be aware of, or think about. And when you use an AI tool, you need to ask the question, how does this story relate to my customer?

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And how can I, what words can I use so that my customer sees me and themselves in my story? And ChatGPT, I call mine Charlie Beth, Charlie Beth will help you write that story in a way where your potential customer is reading it and thinking, this is the person I want to work with. This is the host who I trust now with my, whether it's $700 or $7,000 for the stay, then, you know, that they have to trust you.

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And so reading that story can definitely help with that. But putting it in a way where it's not just all about you. It's about you sprinkled in with your customer and why they should trust you.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. And then when you're publishing that, and it doesn't need to be an essay it just created, filter it down to a nice summary, and then a photograph or two, a couple of photographs is always really nice too.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And that's important. Another important point about that is to keep your paragraphs small. People when they're reading the web, especially on mobile, the eyes are an issue. So keep your paragraphs short, three sentences or less.

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And it's okay if you're a grammar stickler and you know, that paragraph isn't supposed to be cut up that way. You still have to do it when you're writing for the web. But yes, and there's if you're not a designer and you're just using Wix or a basic WordPress template. There's lots of templates that you can find that say About page, they have a ton of them that you can find something to make your about page look pretty and professional.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, we could talk about we don't we have done episodes solely on the About Us page. But this is just, we're talking about this as part of the overall website renovation today.

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Okay, we've got a good homepage. We've got a homepage that covers quite a lot. Now we've got the About Us page tells a story has a good picture. I'll put a link to Moving Mountains on the Show Notes, because Robin and Heather Craigen have an amazing story to tell and that's on that page. And it's very relatable to the type of people that come to their properties.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Happy in the Keys, Martie Job, same thing there, they have luxury properties in the Keys. And their About page tells the story of how they found the Keys and why they created  these beautiful homes, they built all but one of theirs, I believe, are custom built homes and explain their dog-friendly, which is hard to find in a luxury property. So it explains why they're dog-friendly. And it's, it's a great story as well. And those, again, those stories are important. And lots of pictures.

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And then one thing we need to note, not a picture of your property, is a smiling picture with your face in it.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, and it can be a picture of you and your family. Right now if you're attracting families, then people like to see that you are actually a person like them. And then you have a family and if you accept dogs, then you would have a picture of your dog as well.

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There's a great company called Beside the Sea in the UK. And they have a lovely story. And the story includes their dog. There's a picture of the couple and their child and their dog. And it's just such a warm thing to do. So that's it.

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Do you remember about those page? What's next?

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[Jodi Bourne]

Talking more about trust is adding those trusts, other trust signals, not only on your About page, but throughout your entire website. One trust signal is called social proof. That would be reviews and testimonials.

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One thing I see a lot when I'm working with people who already have a website is they have the reviews, one link at the top that said reviews, and then you go to that link. And there's every review they've ever had. And that's the only place that you can find reviews on their entire website.

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Reviews are great to sprinkle in everywhere. Sprinkle them in some websites I've done. I've just used a review, a snippet from a review in the opening hero on the page.

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This place is unbelievable. And then the quote and who it was by. Use those reviews in your footer on every single page.

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You can have some text about a property and then just a quick review. Just use the name, always use the year, those kind of things. If you have reviews back on your Airbnb page or your Vrbo page, don't be shy to share the link.

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Read more reviews here. They know your on Airbnb and taking them to Airbnb is not going to make them decide not to book with you. Now, that being said, when you take them to Airbnb, be sure and open a new tab so they can see. You haven't taken them off of your website, you've taken them to another website where they can read reviews. And really what you want to do is make sure that they see reviews sprinkled as they're reading the content and looking at the photos. I've had one client that used reviews in her photo captions.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yes, that's great. If you show a picture of your kitchen and there is something in a review says the best rental property kitchen I have ever cooked in.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes. And that was very much one of this review or the review that we used for this lady's kitchen. She was down in South Padre Island, Texas.

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And one of the reviews, several of them were about the kitchen. This lady could not believe she had every appliance under the sun. And it was like a shopping at a home appliance store.

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But so yeah, using the reviews is a really good way. So another thing that ChatGPT is great at is that voice of customer. So what I recommend to my clients is every time you get a review or if you're just starting this exercise, take all of your reviews, copy them, paste them, put them into ChatGPT to find words that your customers use often.

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Maybe that's magical, maybe that's amazing, whatever. But find those words and the stories that your customers are telling about your property. And then when you use those words back in your marketing and in your writing and on your website, then it's just a great way to meet the customer where they are.

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They're seeing these words that your customers have used about you. And you're using those words over and over again in your language.

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[Heather Bayer]

Years ago, and this was long before we began to use AI in the way we are now, we had a property that had a window seat. And it was sort of little tucked away window seat and it but it had some nice upholstery, not only just on the seat but up the walls as well. So you could actually sit in the window seat and lean back and have the cushion behind you too.

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And we didn't actually have a picture of it on the website. It was included in a larger picture in the living area where it was. But people kept mentioning this window seat and how wonderful it was. It was so quiet and they could sit and read a book and look out across the lake. And people were mentioning particularly when the weather was bad.

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And we did this manually and found that I think somebody said, people keep mentioning that window seat. We then went and took a picture just of the window seat and then captioned it with one of these reviews. And this is something that you can do now without having to do that manual work.

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Because you probably don't even know if you've got a lot of properties, what it is that people love about each one because you're not seeing a long list of those reviews for one property. Each week you're seeing a review for lots of different properties. So you don't, unless you're very clever and you've got some sort of master memory, you won't remember all those things that might be similar for property.

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Yeah.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And what's cool about it too is if you have a lot of properties, you can still paste all the reviews into just one thread and keep that thread going because ChatGPT is able to condense those for you organize them in any way that you want. Maybe you want them organized by property this week. Maybe next week you want to get SEO, everything that mentions the blue chair or every review that mentions the outdoor area.

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This is a side note. But another great way to use that data is to ask ChatGPT once they have the reviews to tell you what your guest avatar is. And it can give you a lot of really great data about a guest avatar just based on the reviews that it's read. Obviously you need more information than that, but it can really help you with that as well.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, let's explore that a little bit further about the avatar. And it's one thing, it's something else that we've explored many times over these years. So just talk a little bit about how host property managers can use AI to better understand their guest avatar and then tailor their website to them.

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[Jodi Bourne]

I think, and that's the key for me, is tailoring your website to your avatar. And so many people will say, I have all these different avatars, and that's true, and I understand that. But you can speak specifically to one or two avatars, and I fully feel that your website should do that.

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If you have 100 properties, how do you do that? You have landing pages specific to one or two avatars, and that can be done. But when you are using AI to do your research on your avatar, I have this great workbook. It's called the Perfect Avatar Workbook. There's a ton of questions in it. You can actually, and you can find these on my blog posts everywhere.

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I have a blog post on guest avatar. I know y'all probably have something on your site about guest avatar. There's so many different places where you can find some questions that you can ask about your guest avatar.

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Now that you have ChatGPT or Claude or whichever tool, Perplexity is another great tool for avatar research, then you just put the questions in there for your avatar. So, for example, you could say, my avatar is a 45-year-old woman, and she has children from 6 to 12. Why do you want to be that specific?

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You're not only talking to women with 6 to 12-year-old children, but you are talking to a collective group of people who have young children, if that is your avatar. ChatGPT can tell you a million things about that person. ChatGPT can show you the reviews that are from that person and what they're saying.

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ChatGPT can help you take the language that you may already have on your website or your listing description and tailor it more to that person. So, it's just instrumental in using, in really structuring and targeting your content toward the people that are most likely to respond to that content and to you and your business.

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[Heather Bayer]

I keep remembering back years ago when we did everything so manually and painstakingly writing out all my avatars and deciding on them and giving them the names and their ages and their family and where they worked and what they did in their leisure time. And now, it's minutes work instead of days.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, it is, but it's crucial work. Recently, and I've told this story often, but someone was working on their website and had hired me to help them with the writing, and they were talking about their avatar. Who's your avatar? It's couples wanting a romantic getaway. What is so important? I mean, that is not an avatar. That is a target audience. An avatar is much more specific. What age are the couples?

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What sex are the couples? Are these same-sex couples? Can they be same-sex couples? Because if they are, then you have a great, that is a great avatar. If you can create a space that's perfect for them. But just the change in age is a change in everything that you're doing.

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Change in what amenities you might be offering. It's a change in what content you're talking about. It's a change in how you speak about your amenities.

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Just going from a 35-year-old woman to a 55-year-old woman, two completely different people with complete different objectives about their romantic weekend getaway, what they want to do. And so, when you really can hone in on the details of who you're speaking to, it makes a huge difference in everything. Not just your website, but all of your marketing, and even the amenities, and even the rates.

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Just a shift from a 30-year-old couple to a 60-year-old couple or 55-year-old couple. You can increase your rates if you have increased the value of your amenities.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, absolutely. If you're aiming for an affluent, retired couple, the language that you're going to be using is going to be attracting them and they will be paying more.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, definitely.

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[Heather Bayer]

It is such a valuable and important thing to do. And it's also lots of fun. It's also lots of fun. Because once you know the person who's going to come, then tailoring that language to them. And of course, AI will do that as well.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes. And AI can tell you, here's my list of amenities. What should I add?

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They're excellent at suggesting new things that maybe might be lower costs that you could add or things that you could take away. I just found out the other day that women of a certain age don't like getting in hot tubs with their husbands anymore. Young women, they don't care.

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Older women, apparently. It's a thing that they don't really care about a hot tub. And that could also be regional.

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[Heather Bayer]

I don't know. I've got a hot... I used to use my hot tub just about every day, every night, and now I haven't used it for six months.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yeah, I think that... I don't know what it is. But anyway, yes, so AI definitely...

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If you're going to use AI for anything, then avatar research is, I would say, one of the top things to use it for.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah. Okay. I want to mention something because I just had Justin Ford on recently and he was talking about safety.

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And he was talking... You know Sibylle Kim?

‍

[Jodi Bourne]

I know of her.

‍

[Heather Bayer]

Yes. From Villa Ausblck in Vermont. Justin was telling me that Sibylle uses the word safety in her Airbnb description, in her title. And that has been proven to getting her way more bookings.

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[Jodi Bourne]

I bet.

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[Heather Bayer]

And having a page on your website that is about safety is super, super important. It's not just, oh, I've got fire extinguishers and CO monitors, which of course are important, but that's not all you have on your safety page. It's just thinking about how safe your guests want to feel.

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And once again, you can go to AI and say, this is my property, this is the listing. I want to write a page on my website about safety, so that my guests, and here's the avatar, I want them to feel safe. What should I put on my safety page?

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And it will just tell you what to put on the safety page. So it could be, if it's an urban property, you might want to talk about safety of the area. Just using the word safe is going to be helpful.

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That page can also include other things. You could have a single page that covers safety and accessibility.

‍

[Jodi Bourne]

Accessibility.

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[Heather Bayer]

And maybe sustainability as well. It's almost like a big trust page.

‍

[Jodi Bourne]

I do that on an FAQ page. So with my clients, we create an FAQ page and we have safety, accessibility, outdoor spaces, some of those things that they may overlook. People look at properties differently.

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Some people, they just want to see pictures. They want to see a couple of great reviews and bam, they're ready to book. Some people really want to deep dive. They really want to know how safe is this property. And for everybody, you need to have that information available and a website is the place to do that, on however many number of pages that you have. 

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One of the things, most of my websites that I do have tabbed areas to list the amenities. And I have a tabbed area that says safety and is only safety and accessibility.

‍

It's very important value to me that I try to often either convince or work with people who have some, have either taken Justin's class or have at least some awareness of the safety. One of the things that I do is as well with the captions, the kind of safety features that they have. I will often have them go back.

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And so for example, a gate around a pool. So many people just take it for granted. There's a gate around the pool.

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But when you can show that you have a padlock or a very sturdy lock and your avatar is families with young children, just a picture with the pool gate and the lock on it can ease a mother's mind so much so that she will choose you over another property, not only because you have that safety gate, but also because you were so aware that she wanted to see it. You knew your customer so well that you put it there and you captioned it. We provide our gates or padlocks, so your young children don't have.., you don't have to worry about your young children getting in the pool area.

‍

Whatever that safety is and lights outside. I always have them take a picture with your lights on outside so people can see they're not going to trip and fall on the stairs, whatever it may be. Super important.

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[Heather Bayer]

I've talked to Lorraine Woodward a number of times about accessibility and people tend to think it's more ramps and grab bars in the bathroom. But something really simple is locks on the inside of doors, just latches which are above a child's reach. And for families once again with autistic children, and there's very many of them, just having a photo of that door with an inside lock.

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Again, going back to your mom who's going, oh my goodness, there's a lock on the swimming pool that I can see, but she's also maybe saying, oh, I want to stay in this place because I know my kid is not going to get herself or himself out in the middle of the night, because they won't be able to unlock that door. So, yeah, safety, accessibility and talking about it and having pictures of it is just such huge trust signals.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And also conversely, talking about what you don't have and coming clean with that. You're not perfect for everybody. Not everybody can be accessible in every way.

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My mom can't climb stairs now, she's older. I can't tell you how hard it is when we are looking for a property to go to the beach, to find a beach house that you don't have to climb stairs or that willingly comes out and says, or that makes the statement we have a downstairs bedroom, a coffee pot, that's hard to find. But you can't even tell by the ones that, like any description, you have no idea.

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I have to send people messages all the time. This says you have a downstairs bedroom, does she have to walk upstairs at all? Are there any steps at all?

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Just come clean with what you can provide and don't provide. People want honesty and they don't want to have to look around for all the answers. And that honesty delivers trust as well.

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Exactly that, yeah, exactly. Honesty delivers trust. You're not going to be right for everybody.

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So let the people know right off the bat, we're not right for you.

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[Heather Bayer]

What else should we...., oh, let's talk about contact forms and we were laughing yesterday about newsletters and people go to town on creating these newsletters and they want people to sign up for their newsletter. So what do they do? They put a form on their website that says, sign up for my newsletter. What happens when they do that?

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[Jodi Bourne]

So I will say they're going to get some signups, but they're not going to get high value signups and they're not going to get the signups that they would get if they just offered something and talked about it a little bit in that little snippet, even if it's - get a 15% or some sort of discount, you don't even have to put a number, get a discount code for your first booking. You and I have talked endlessly on the podcast and in a conference we spoke together on about lead magnets, come up with something of value to give your customer, to give that person when they come to your website to get, so that they will hand over their email address.

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Again, on my website, I have a blog post about lead magnet ideas. There's tons of information out there, if you look, about some ideas for what you could do to encourage your guests to sign up for lead magnet and also going back to different avatars and what they're looking for.

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[Heather Bayer]

And then we go back to AI again, because AI is brilliant for coming up with suggestions for lead magnets and then when you got your suggestion for a lead magnet, you go back to it and say, okay, that's a great suggestion. I'll choose number five, create that one for me.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, so easy.

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[Heather Bayer]

It is, and there's new platforms coming out every day that not just create the text for your lead magnet, but will create all the graphics for it too. Yeah, we may have more. If we've got interest in this, we can do another one just on lead magnets, because I know we went up on that stage in Miami, the two of us, and we just talked about lead magnets and that is something that hasn't gone away.

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People will, they don't want to give up their email address, although some will as you say, but they don't want to give it up unless they're getting something in return, and your sign up for my newsletter is not good enough anymore.

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[Jodi Bourne]

And even if you don't put, like for me, what I found is a better call to action for those people that haven't created a lead magnet, but still want that form there, is to just say sign up so we can stay in touch, because most of the time.... I read this the other day, 70% of website traffic to travel-related websites, they're just gathering information. Now, they go to a booking site like Airbnb or VRBO, they're ready to book because they found the information, they know where they're going to stay, they know all the things, but when they're coming to your website, they're still mostly doing research. So how are you keeping hold of them and having a newsletter does that, but if you don't have a freebie offer to give them at least you can say sign up here and stay in touch.

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And that's better than get on our newsletter. When people hear newsletter, that screams to them marketing and they don't want to be marketed to.

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[Heather Bayer]

They don't want a ton of emails in their inbox, but they will likely, if they're on that search for information, if you've got a lead magnet, which is the 10 best places to get breakfast, or the one that really went down well for us was, things to do on a rainy day.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, that's a good one. Things to do with your dogs. That's a good one.

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The podcast, the song list, the Spotify playlist, those are fun. There's so many great ones. I'm talking most of my people now who haven't done a lead magnet yet, I'm talking them into creating a custom curated Google map. It's super easy. It's easy to provide to people. What else is great about it is when you update that, everybody who has that link gets the update. It's like something that is consistently being updated and it's fun. It can be really a fun project too because when you're creating your own little Google map, you can actually write your own little descriptions and be very personal. ChatGPT can help you with that too.

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Okay. So another thing I really want to talk about is keywords. Using keywords on your website, and this is something that you may need some help with from a professional, but you can do it yourself with ChatGPT or the old school way. You can definitely do it with just using Google and putting in some keywords and seeing what pops up in the old Google bots when you're typing things in, looking at the content that is being found. 

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But I use a Chrome browser extension called Keywords Everywhere. It's my best friend. It costs me about $30 a year to use and to do that keyword research, because showing up in AI is going... What I mean by that when now, as when you're searching for a term, AI is going to give you the response right there. And they're already showing that people are taking those AI responses and not looking any further. So SEO, the old school SEO, search engine optimization, trying to show up in Google, still a very valuable thing because that's how AI is going to pick you up by your content being set up for those keyword terms. 

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I was very excited yesterday when I was doing some Google Analytics data mining for a client and saw that both Perplexity and ChatGPT, they had traffic to their website from both of those sources. And the only way that you can do that is by doing some keyword research, really honing in on the topics that you want to talk about, that you want to master, per se, in that particular page of content, having enough content on the page, 800 words on every page of your website.

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And of those 800 words, at least I would say 0.2 to 0.5% of those should be keywords that people are searching for. Super important to do that if you want to show up in Google, or Bing, or Yahoo, or whatever all the different search engines are, because the more and more people are going to be using AI, the more important it is to have those keywords on your site. Of all the web design services, other website services other than actually the design itself, SEO and copywriting are the most important. You need to hire somebody or master your own skills through educating yourself to do that correctly. It's important.

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[Heather Bayer]

Okay, let's go on to that, hiring somebody, because we've been talking about all these things that make for a good website, and I'm sure there's people out there going, I've got a website, I have no clue what to do with it. Do I need to revamp it, redevelop it, or can I do, you know, what can I do myself? Let's just, as we wrap up here, let's just talk about that a bit, what people should be looking for if they're looking for outside help, whether there are any decent DIY options, and yeah, take that one away, Jodi.

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[Jodi Bourne]

If you are a tech person, if you have any tech skill at all, and you have a website, let's say it's a WordPress site or a Wix site, for example, I use a tool called Elementor, it's WordPress, but it's an Elementor, it's a plugin, it's very popular, so chances are, if you have a WordPress site, then your designer may have used Elementor to design your site. You can actually now even go into ChatGPT and tell it, I'm using Elementor, can you give me directions on how to add images to my website, and it will tell you. I hate that because I'm a website designer, but I want people who do have a little bit of tech skill to be able to do that on their own, and you can do it, it is doable.

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If what you want to say, if you have finessed those words, you feel confident in your copywriting abilities or whatever, then you can hire somebody from Fiverr or Upwork or even any, there's several, you can post in any of the Facebook groups asking for website help, and they will help you. If you want somebody like me, I actually call myself a website strategist because I look at the entire business holistically, I look at your avatar and your photos and your listing descriptions and your SEO and your competitors, and I put all that together to create a website that's really going to do what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to attract the right quality of guest and the right people that you want it to.

It's supposed to be fast. It's supposed to have SEO keywords on it that are going to be found by the search engines, and there's a lot of companies that do that for you, I typically, my services stop at around the 50 property mark. That's about where I get topped out at, but ICND, they do website design for bigger companies, and there's people like me who specialize in smaller companies and self-managing hosts.

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It is just, for one thing, I think it is one of the most valuable things, most valuable assets that you have in your business is a well-branded, well-written website. It is as important as anything else that you're doing in your property, and then also just keeping it fresh, keeping it updated, things change, listening to the podcast and keeping up with the things that change that are out there. For example, right now, a big thing is using lifestyle images in your photos on your website.

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It used to be those were only for marketing, for the social media sites and whatever, but now people really respond well to those lifestyle images, the kids jumping into the pool or the table set with people around it, and rather than just, here's a picture of our table in the kitchen, in the dining room, now they want people like and are responding to those better images. So keeping up with trends is important. I would say redoing your website about every three to four years is very important, and I know people hate to hear that, but it's true. It's just like your storefront. If you had a storefront, you would redo it often.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, exactly. Just talk about those lifestyle pictures, Kerry Gibson from Chalets Hygge. As soon as you started talking about lifestyle pictures, it just reminded me of a photo that's on her site. There's a beautiful property in her portfolio. I stayed in it, and so it has a lovely balcony that goes across the top, and it's a photo of just a woman just standing there leaning over the balcony with a cup of coffee. And it is... It's a world of difference. It just says everything about the place. I thought, I want to do that.

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And I think if you can find those lifestyle images that are going to get your avatars to go, that's me. That's what I want to do.

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[Jodi Bourne]

That is exactly right. One of my best examples of that is the lady that used the photo of the mom on the beach reading with her kids playing in the sand in the background. It was just such a great shot of just...

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It was actually a photo of one of her guests. Her guests had sent it to her to use, and we put that on her website and in all of her marketing. It immediately spoke to every mom in the world who was considering that property. Ah, they get me. This is where I want to be, and this is the photo for me.

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[Heather Bayer]

And I think that's a great place to wrap this up, Jodi, because this is what your website should do. It should say exactly that to people. You get me.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, exactly. From the very first instant that they arrive to your site, I say this all the time, they should feel as welcome as the minute they walk in the door of your property.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yeah, exactly. I don't think we should leave it there. I think we should come back in a month or two and keep going with this, because now that we're building AI into everything we do and all the time, we can come back in two or three months' time and say, okay, now you can use this tool and this platform and do something that is going to just blow your competitors out of the water.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, I just read this morning that there's some new announcement that one of the AI tools is about to make this month that's just going to be a game changer, and I can't wait to hear. You probably know because you're keeping up with things a little bit better than I am in the AI realm.

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, every platform is doing it, but I think we're just waiting for ChatGPT-5.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yeah, ChatGPT-5 is supposed to drop any day now. Have they given a release date yet?

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[Heather Bayer]

Well, talk about it being 31st of July, but that's past now, so I think it is going to be any day now. Sam Altman apparently said it scared the living daylights out of him.

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[Jodi Bourne]

So that's what I read this morning, and I could not remember if it was ChatGPT or another of the bigger ones, but yeah, I can't wait.

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[Heather Bayer]

Oh, I know. They released Agent a couple of weeks ago, which I've messed about with ChatGPT Agent. If anybody's looking for Agent, if you go to ChatGPT and where it says Tools underneath the message box, if you click on Tools, you can choose Agent, and you have to have a plus account or a pro account.

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You can't do this for free, but it will do things like create presentations for you in PowerPoint. Yes. It will create Excel spreadsheets.

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[Jodi Bourne]

The spreadsheets are incredible.

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[Heather Bayer]

Yes, yes. So they released that a couple of weeks ago, and then people were saying that is just a precursor to ChatGPT-5.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Yes, I will come back any time, and we can talk websites, AI, copywriting, keyword research, all the things, but yeah, it sounds fun.

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[Heather Bayer]

What I'd like to say to everybody that's out there listening, if you've really what you heard today, you're going to make a change in your website. We'd like to see what you're doing. So email us at vacationrentalformula.com.

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So it could be heather@vacationrentalformular.com. That will get to me. Jodi, if anybody has, this has sparked somebody to say, I need to revamp my website. I need to get in touch with Jodi. What's the best way of contacting you?

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[Jodi Bourne]

Probably just go to my website, Jodibourne.com, and there is a big button at the top that says, let's chat, I believe is what it says, or get in touch, maybe [Work with Me]. There's buttons all over my website that say that, and then it sends you to a little form with your info, and we can schedule a call. I talk to everybody and love just helping and seeing what we can do together or how I can help you, really.

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[Heather Bayer]

Perfect Jodi, thank you so much. Once again, this won't be the last, obviously.

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[Jodi Bourne]

Thank you.

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