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424. Hosting Hotline

Welcome to the Hosting Hotline

Sarah Karakaian: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Hello, welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian. 

Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant. And together we are Thanks for Visiting.

Sarah Karakaian: And this is the hosting hotline. If you want to get your hosting questions answered here on the hosting hotline, head on over to hostinghotline.Com. Ask your hosting question.

We love them all. We’ll give you some feedback. You’ll help so many other hosts who listen to these episodes. 

Listener Question: Optimizing Listings

Sarah Karakaian: And today we have actually, this is you’ll hear Natasha. She had a question for us. 

Hosting Hotline Caller: Hi ladies, I was just wondering if you work with individual clients on optimizing, their listings, for a fee. If yes, please let me know.

Sarah Karakaian: Okay. Obviously Natasha isn’t asking like, what she is asking is she needs help optimizing her listings. Now whether that’s on her direct booking site or Airbnb or VRBO.

An optimized listing, a good one. All the basics of it definitely translate on any OTA or direct booking site, right? There are things that are standard. 

Importance of Listing Audits

Sarah Karakaian: And [00:02:00] here’s the thing Annette that I continue to get, get, surprised by because we do, Natasha, we do offer individual listing audits to our members of the hosting business mastery, our private community.

 When our members join, we do a listing audit right away because this helps us understand where they’re at in their hosting business. But Annette, because I do these listing audits, I get surprised because there are some obviously very successful co hosts or hosts who have multiple properties, have been doing it for years.

And I take a look at these listings and at first glance, they’re not alarming. But when I dig into them, I’m like, wow, they’re leaving a lot of money on the table because of these overarching issues that they’re not optimizing.

Annette Grant: And this question 

is for everyone. This is, we are heading in to the beginning of the year. This is the time, please everyone. And we haven’t, we are going to help you with this. 

New Year’s Resolution: Deep Dive into Listings

Annette Grant: You, anybody listening to this episode, it is like mandatory. You [00:03:00] have to do a deep dive and do your own listing audit. heading in to the new year. I guarantee just like Sarah said, you are going to find so many things that are outdated, could be improved and make that experience better for the potential guest looking at your property.

So remember everyone, this is how the guest finds us. This is what they have to choose from. It is our online listing. 

Sarah Karakaian: Here’s, here’s what happens. Host will do their listing and they’re when they’re excited and it’s new and then this is the last thing they go back to maybe a host. will tweak the title.

Maybe. Maybe they’ll go in and tweak the description or they’ve heard somewhere that if you like add a period and then delete it and add it back again and up quote unquote update your listing and give it a heartbeat that all of a sudden the bookings are gonna flow in. I like it. And we’ve done enough.

Obviously our own work, Annette, diving into our own listings and tracking and testing things. But then of course we work with the experts in the [00:04:00] short term rental industry who have dedicated their entire businesses to optimizing listings. We’ve done so many of those. We’ve invited them into our membership to talk to our members about what they’re doing.

Their findings and their testings and the software that they use to make sure listings are optimized. So all that to say is, like Annette said, make this your new year’s resolution. 

Bootcamp Announcement

Sarah Karakaian: If you haven’t really dived into your listing since maybe you posted it or you’re new to hosting and you know that you’re going to crush the turnover process or you’re going to crush guest communication, hospitality, but maybe the listing optimization isn’t your thing.

We are. Answering Natasha’s question because we are doing a listing audit boot camp in January 

Annette Grant: and this boot camp What we want to do is I know Natasha asked for us to do her listing audit But we want to equip you every host on how to do their own Listing audit so you can continue to do it and Every quarter and we’re going to equip you with the skills that you can use over and over again.

[00:05:00] Not only on your current listings, but your future listings too. So we want to invite you to that bootcamp and it starts on January 8th and you can go to thanksforvisiting.com/bootcamp to sign up, please do yourself a favor, make this investment in yourself in your property right at the beginning of the year can be a game changer for you.

We are going to deep dive with you. We’re going to have worksheets that you can go through. If for some reason you can’t make it live on the calls, we are going to encourage you, please. We’re going to have multiple calls. We’re going to have a pop up Facebook group be there. But if you can’t make it.

You still want to, take us up on this offer because you can watch the recordings, the replays. 

Bootcamp Details and Benefits

Sarah Karakaian: So there are gonna be three live calls and one of them is going to go a deep dive into, your photos and the shot list that you need and how we can better equip our photographers with what we need and different, Styles of photography that are working and not working and [00:06:00] also the placement of them in your listing and then another live call is going to be all about the title and description of your listing and best practices.

We’ve done a lot of testing this year. One of our coaches, Wendy, is obsessed with this, and she does a lot of testing with different properties that she manages in Scottsdale. And so we’ve learned what her testing results have put out. And then here, the last. Live training and this is what I think a lot of people skip over is how to read your analytics.

So when you make these changes, how the heck do you know if they’re working or not? If you’re not tracking where you were in terms of conversion rates into that one change that you made and whether or not it’s, it’s moving the needle in terms of getting a looker to become a booker. 

Annette Grant: Sarah, I’m going to ask it.

What do you mean? Analytics. I know there are some people that have no idea what you are talking about. What analytics are you referring to? 

Sarah Karakaian: Yes, so it’s much easier to show everyone visually obviously. 

Annette Grant: That’s why they need to join us in the 

Sarah Karakaian: boot camp 

yes. And here’s [00:07:00] the thing, the bootcamp, I don’t want to be vague about this, it’s 49.

And it’s from January 8th to the 16th. This isn’t a one off thing. You’re going to be hanging out with Annette, me, and our team. We have that pop up Facebook group. If you are an HBM member, if you’re already in our private community, you can attend. These are complimentary. You can attend these as well, and we would love to have you there.

But for those of you who’ve, you know, Aren’t in our membership

Annette Grant: and if you 

have been a listener for years and years like come meet us come hang out with us We’re gonna be on zoom We’re gonna get to see everybody’s faces like we truly know that this can be a game changer for you and that’s where Sarah and I in 2025 we really want to serve you as best as possible.

And that’s why we truly believe that your listing. I mean It is the pinnacle of your entire business. This is where the magic happens and we want to link arms with you and help you and equip you for the future so you can have the best listing in 

your city. 

Sarah Karakaian: I think the best OTA insights can be found on [00:08:00] Airbnb. Surprise, surprise. If you go to when you’re on your hosting side of your Airbnb account, if you go to menu and then you go to insights, it’ll bring up your performance dashboard and then you want to go to the area of that performance dashboard that says conversions. And it’ll give you stats there that you can filter between whether it’s all your listings or a specific listing and what you want to do before you make any changes, before you change your hero image, before you change your title, before you change your copy.

You want to write down where your listing is at right then and there in terms of conversion rates and then make, and here’s, I’ll give you another tip. 

Final Tips and Farewell

Sarah Karakaian: When you make a change, make one change. Make one major change and then wait a couple days to see if that one change is moving the needle or not We actually got that tip from this is for any website in general from a previous business coach of ours when you want to test whether you’re testing an email a subject line you’re testing something on your website or You’re listing on Airbnb or VRBO or any of [00:09:00] the other OTAs You Change one thing, measure it, see what the changes are doing, if anything, and then change something else.

Because otherwise if you change multiple things you’re not sure what’s moving the needle. But that’s it. I would love for you guys to come to Bootcamp. It’s thanksforvisiting.com/bootcamp. And to answer Natasha’s question, Natasha, if you’re in our private Facebook group, 

we can talk about it in the Facebook group, and really give you some more personalized feedback there. Plus on the calls, we’ll have time for Q and a, it’ll be very much of a community helping everyone out to make sure that we are starting the new year off with really optimized listings and your listing is not a set it and forget it.

And that’s the cool thing too. So we’ll be doing these things together at the beginning of January, then you’ll be equipped for the rest of the year. What we recommend is putting a event on your calendar and having it pop up maybe every, try every four weeks, and then you can go to six weeks and depending on your listing and obviously your own seasonality, when the season changes, when your own, Travel patterns changes for your guests and your booking window so when it pops [00:10:00] up in your calendar It’s time for me to go back in and optimize my listing and test things 

Annette Grant: because 

we all know all the sudden six months can Go by and you’re like, oh my god That stuff isn’t even in the home anymore 

Sarah Karakaian: thanksforvisiting.com/bootcamp.

It’s 49 If you buy it before the year ends, it could be a write off. It’ll be a write off next year, too, if you, if you join us, um, if you’re listening to this episode a little bit later, um, beginning of January. But, definitely the value is coming in live if you can. So we would love to meet you and see you there.

But, Natasha, thanks for calling in. Thanks for asking such a great question. We hope to see you, next year. in the boot camp. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian. 

Annette Grant: I’m Annette Grant, and together we are Thanks for visiting. Talk to you next time. [00:11:00]