8 SIMPLE FIXES IF YOU ARE NOT GETTING AIRBNB LISTIN

it's a truth of business Airbnb or otherwise if you don't have customers you don't have a business but withAirbnb it gets worse because you have expenses if you don't have customers you will quickly lose money and eventually have to close up shop here's what to do if you're not getting bookings 8 strategies to revitalize yourlisting make your offer more appealing and to get back in search results ultimately winning you more bookings and possibly at a higher price point taking you from the red into the black with your Airbnb. These eightstrategies will get you more bookings and I’m going to order them in level of difficulty / a level of commitment or permanence some of these are going to be super simple to implement they're just going to be a couple of small changes some of them's will require some deep thought some might even require a little bit of investment and this will really depend on why you're not getting bookings which ones that you'll implement but by the end of this video you should understand why you're not getting bookings because you're going tosquarely look at a couple of these and go oh my god of course that's exactly why I’m not getting bookings and then you can hit the ground and run with these solutions number one let's talk about your booking rules it could very well be that you just have some things that make it hard to book your space a lot of hosts will implement a two day three day four day minimums stay maybe just on the weekends and this can work in your favor until you forget to take that off for last-minute bookings I in many videos tell you don't use a minimand I'd stay and instead like jack up your rates so you stay in search all the time and I do recommend that but if you don't want to do that you don't have to what I’m going to recommend that you do though if you have a minim night stay shut that thing off about three weeks out so you've done everything that you can to fill up your calendar with two day three day or four day stays by creating that minim but now if you don't have any bookings that is probably one of the main reasons why you're not getting bookings I was doing marketresearch I believe in Las Vegas and there were homes that were like big big houses and some were completely full and some were not getting any bookings and one of the ones that I thought would otherwise be a leader in the city because of all the amenities and everything that are offered it had a four day minim and it had basically 10% of the activity of a listing that did not have a four day minim in its same category so this one does affect your bookings now you can leave it on for the future to try to get the best bookings first we all believe in that and then last minute shut that minim nights stay off using what's called a rule set you can use a rule set and make your minim night stay one day and apply it to all dates in your calendar all right and number two this one can be also easy it's just a change on your Airbnb settings this is about your fee structure you may have a two hundred hour cleaning fee or a $125 cleaning fee for your two bedroom house or seventydollar cleaning fee for your one bedroom or studio now on you if you don't have a minim night's state but this also prevents someone from booking for a night or two because when they see your listing price and then they see this gigantic cleaning fee it could deter people from booking I’ve been a B testing no cleaning fee orcleaning fee or a $40.00 cleaning fee or $32 cleaning fee and I’ll tell you that first studio or one bedroom $36 is about as high as you can comfortably go to not influence your last-minute bookings right you can have a higher cleaning fee for further out and longer stays won't mind as much but 36 is good and I’ll tell you that 20 is actually bad the problem with the $20 cleaning fee is it gives you no advantages of a cleaning fee and it still gives you the same hurdles of a cleaning fee if at all so I'd set it somewhere in the 30s low 30s if you have a studio or one bedroom and my rule is basically $35 per bedroom is how I set my cleaning fees now if youthink cleaning fees is an obstacle what you can do is you can actually try not using a cleaning fee at all shut that off and use a different pricing strategy that involves not having a cleaning fee that one will allow you to decide if it's better for your type of listing just to say it's 75 dollars or 110 dollars a night and when someonegoes to book there's no like inertia or secondary decisions that they have to make they can just decide they like your home see the 110 click oair B&B fee is okay that's cool too click click click and done you can do that and it may just work for you let's move on let's get somewhere else in Cartagena to get into number 3 all right day two car to Hannah because breakfast yesterday took forever and now we're shooting the rest of this so outfit change but number three for what you can do to get more bookings you're going to focus on your title and your thumbnail photo otherwise known as your hero photo this is something that you don't have to take new photos to accomplish so don't worry about it your title should be SEO heavy which means you can show up in Google search if you do all right but it also has to be attractive it has to flow in a way that people will want to read your title and want to click on your title so your title and your thumbnail pretty much the first line of marketing for your listing before someone decides they're going to click on it so these are the two thingsthat you can change to get more clicks so I’m going to show you examples of titles that we've written for our listing you'll notice that we talked a lot about having keen beds when we have them we talked about being near something of importance we try our best to make sure that they flow naturally that they don't look like a bunch of SEO jargon or SEO garble so that way people can like read it and if luck flows off the tongue and people click we like to include what's free but we like to not state the obvious seem obvious would be that it's a 2-bedroom 2-bath right that's something that I tend to not want to eat up my listings title real estate on but the fact that there's free coffee free parking they may not have known that they may not have been searchingfor it but that could be a value add that in the title they're like oh wow I would actually like some free parking or some free you know fast Wi-Fi or a pool these are cool extras I didn't know that this would happen you put that in the title so that way your thumbnail photo can communicate whatever needs to communicate and the title communicates other things to be included your thumbnail should be well composed it should have good color balance it should be nice and clear and professional seeming and it should be inviting to get people to click on your space Airbnb if you look on their home page about 20% of all photos include water a lot of their photos have this like very specific wood and blue color combination that comes from the water but it alsocomes from I guess how the homes are designed and there's a lot of natural wood in the photos but Airbnblikes to push photos that show natural wood and show water there is a high percentage of them that are outdoor shots so a lot of times it's not actually even the living room that they're showing you so water outdoor shots are mixed in well this orange and blue color mix that will show you those are all important if you cannotget shots like this from your home specifically you can go dig up some stock photos of your neighborhood like in Houston for example you can use the Toyota Center or George or brown or the Bayou or Memorial Hermann or anything that is relevant to your listings offering but this allows you to really pretty much reach in the stock photo bank and pull someone else's photos out and use it for your own now this allows you to get extra photos for free you don't have to take these professional photos but they're available for you to use in there and try changing out these thumbnails and see if you see any real traction by utilizing a different onenow I will say most every single photo on Airbnb is on the high side of exposure meaning if you look at exposure chart where zeros black 100 is white a lot of the photos although the colors are that upper half it's a very bright photo overall now you could argue to contrast this to make sure that you stick out if everybody else was doing what everybody else is doing but it's still best practices so unless you have a good reason to break best practices still keep your photo well-lit all around number four we've talked about a lot pricingstrategy I have to give this a not even though we've got tons of videos on the topic because pricing strategy does lead into your SEO which we're about to talk about here soon as well see you may get four bookings a month and then have all this space in the middle and the space in the middle that doesn't get booked islargely what's going to cost you a lot of your revenue for the month we've put in I just did a video on this so your calendar when it's completely open is the most attractive for travelers as possible as someone staying for a month or three weeks two weeks two days anybody can book your space you're the most likely to get the price you want when your calendar is completely blown wide open and nobody's booked it's when you have bookings that get like in your calendar that'll compromise how long someone could stay with you at that space that causes you how to have to implement a pricing strategy so for example if someone is checking in two weeks from now on a Wednesday then 13 days from now on a Tuesday you should be dropping that rate probably by 35% because it's just going to show up so much less in search because anybody staying that Tuesday has to check out on Wednesday there's no way around it by doing that you'll increase the amount oftimes that when someone sees your Tuesday that the book your conversion gets higher and it makes multiple day stays more attractive so someone's staying for five days includes checking out on Wednesday dropping the price on that Tuesday makes the five days more attractive and if that day was not going to get like booked anyway because it's like right next to another booking and you commonly see that you have what's calledorphaned days by proactively dropping that price you prevent orphan days and you get more bookings that are flushed together which out gives you a better shot at 100% now another thing you want to think about for pricing strategy is the fact that there's so many last-minute bookings on Airbnb small groups individuals they all travel last-minute you're going to see in your performance tab that goes like this this arc where it goes from 20% a month from now to like 7080 percent like today like when people arriving today like your areas 80% full so you want to be mindful of your performance tab because results vary per area but if you are only going toget like 35% booked how do you see you have ten listings right and so having multiple listings helps you here if you only have like ten listings and only three of them are booked and you only think that you're going tohave three booked a day of arrival and everybody else is going to be like 80% booked you should be dropping your rates last-minute to get full to catch back up to the market there's a caveat for holding out here this happened to me mid-december in Philadelphia there's a weekend December 14th 15th where we were 30 percent full ish maybe no we were 50 percent full and the rest of the market was like 80% full we were collecting about $40 more per night than everybody else was and we held our prices and that day as it came became a hundred percent full and people started booking with us last minute at our prices that we wantedso that performance tab will show you are there unusual spikes of occupancy where a lot of people like that you know that that two days stay and that way you won't drop your prices on extremely popular dates for your area but if the whole city is suffering from like 70% or worse and that's the best that everybody's going to get and you're stuck at like 2030 percent that's when you drop your rates to catch back up to the medi of the market because unless the markets going to overbook the only way to really fill up is by you know giving a better deal to people if you don't have a lot of time left that's going to be your best strategy for last-minute bookings number five is one that you may be able to do for free if you've got the furniture for it already and you're just misclassifying your home or you might have to invest in like some rollaway beds for example so occupancy count how many people you can keep at your home has all sorts of weird secondary effects to your listing so not only could you sleep more people which means a bigger group can pay you more money to stay there which they tend to want to do but by showing up in more searches because you can host morepeople groups of eight will find you where you normally didn't have that let's say your place to host five people it's a two bedroom house you've got two queen beds and a couch well if you buy some rollaway beds and make that number eight or buy an extra queen-size bed for one of the two bedrooms so that you'realready at seven now and plus one rollaway bed makes it eight you go from five to eight then that way groups of eight will find you even if they don't want to book with you because you've raised your rates a because now you host eight you raised your prices even if they don't book with you you're still showing up and searches more which gives us CEO boost that's good at the rate that you've just chosen four five at eight you're probably way more attractive so if you don't change your prices you're going to get booked a lot more because you can host more people because people will see that your place could sleep eight like your placethis looks better on paper just by being able to sleep more people now so aside from the SEO boost from sleeping more people and doing that you're also putting your listing into a category of less competition see every listing that can host sixteen people can host four people right but not every listing that can host four people can host sixteen makes sense so in this case by that being a bigger listing when groups of eight search there's going to be a lot less properties available so it's easier for bigger homes to kind of meet thebill that's required in order to get a booking because there's this less property available more people will bookyour listing for larger groups because they have less options right so if you're having a hard time competing atyour weight bracket move up in weight class oddly enough that'll work add some beds increase the amount of people you can advertise you can stay and you get multiple SEO pricing and of course supply and demand benefits six is another one that you can do for free you can simply re list your property let's say that you don't have good SEO you don't have a good title or description and your photos were junked for a bid and you didn't have a pricing strategy and you did this for a while your listing is underperforming because it's got a bad year it's got a bad track record for a while so Airbnb has already decided that your listing is unpopularand it's like I already dropped it in search now if you do everything right you can get back up and start to getninety percent occupied where you start to get this rare find or rare gem icon on your on your listing and stuff when people are searching for you but that takes a while and it's an uphill battle so if you don't feel like grinding it out to get to the point where your listing naturally gets good in search you can just cut your losses and recreate your listing that's it so to do this you go to the top where it says create listing and then you select your listing and hit duplicate listing and then the only thing you really should be careful for is when you duplicate a listing when it shows the map of where your places hit the back button and check the address with apartments especially they like to drop the apartment number and you might have to repo that in therehomes are less of an issue with this but just check just in case anyway it could they could happen to you and then people show up somewhere that like and they'll be like what's the apartment number you be like oh shoot we and you cannot change it once you create a listing you cannot go in and change the address so byreally listing you get an SEO boost you get the new listing boost all right you get that for like a month now and so what they do is basically the in good faith they allow you to try to prove that you're interesting becauseAirbnb is algorithm they told me they refer to it as an interest algorithm and so with new listings they don't know if you're interesting yet so they give you a month-long boost and it gets you to the top of search for a while and it's your job to be sticky it's your job to get bookings get reviews get people to stay fill up your calendar 100% of the way getting 100% full and having a lot of views are probably two main things that you really want to do to continue to spin up your SEO outside of good reviews so those are probably the big three so recreate your listing to get back in search fast and then in like put all these practices into play and youshould stay at the top so number seven let's say you've recreated your listing added a rollaway bed change what you planned your title to be well now you should go in and do like an SEO check and an amenities check there are going to nerd out on something but I’ll keep it short I promise it's something called a booleansearch or a binary search is zero and one you either have a pool or you don't you either have a gym or youdon't you either have parking you you don't you have coffee or you don't 0 or 1 and there's a lot of 0 1 check boxes on Airbnb so when people are searching they're going to check things that matter to them like instant book entire place they want 4 beds even though you know it's a group of four they want four individual beds like four guys traveling for work they don't want to bunk up so these check boxes are boolean search options and the moment you don't qualify you fall out of search so what you want to do is you want to load up on these amenities every single amenity you can imagine li argue that you have you want to have it and check it and complete your listing that way so that way you always show in search because remember you want to show up going to be clicked on you want to be viewed and that leads to more SEO right there's that's enoughto be said for that now there's other aspects of this your delisting title should be SEO heavy or keyword heavy to show up on google king bed suite in like near the medical center for example I had a listing in Houston for like three years and it was a two bedroom with one king bed in each room and we called a double king suite great for executive long-term stays something like that I think it was shorter because the title has a character limit and it would show up on the first page of Google when you search for a king bed Hotel in Houston it would show up on Google first page and that's why using keywords that king bed are so important in your title so your title should have a natural like flow though so in the description you can do more of this and I would keep it all - the first three lines whatever you think will trip some of these keyword search if you put in the first three lines when someone shows you the preview or when Google shows you a preview of a listing it's going to make all the key word matches in bold you've ever searched on Google you've seen they're like these are your key word matches so you need to put it at the top of the listing because it doesn't scroll down for a guest and show them the chunk that matches in paragraph 3 of your description so put it all at the top so free parking or stuff like that should be like in the first couple of lines so that way you seem more relevant when you do get a keyword match and they click on you because they see a lot of bold letters on Google cool now another part of like showing up in search aside from eloquently writing your description to include key words and still be fun to read these you should fill out the rest of it Airbnb wants to see that you've completed your listing you need to complete at least four additional text boxes outside of the description so you've got this neighborhood about this home other things - no getting around guest access just fill them all out because that again in a way is it's going to give you a listing boost another thing you can do is complete the accessibility survey take photos of things that prove that your home is accessible for disabled persons and that'll give you way more views because there's a huge supply and demand gap right now for accessibilitywe're going to talk about that in a future video I’m talking to Airbnb about it right now but there's things that are too far like I do not put my my my cancellation policy is moderate just to get on work a collection or family collection it's not worth it err DNA shows data that strict cancellation policies make more money than than not then moderate or flexible so I stand my ground on my booking policies for strict even though I’m not on work collection but everything else you know go go nuts and fill out everything else that Airbnb wants you to do aside from moderate cancellation policy and smart pricing stay away from those and you should be finethe last one now this could be free could cost you money depends on how bad it is but you can redesign andrephotographed your space now it could be as easy as just moving around your furniture it could just be that see you may have had a listing for a few years and it did good back when Airbnb was less popular but now that there's more competition there's a higher bar to meet right to be competitive now it also that your furniture is getting old and you're getting bad reviews because the place just isn't as awesome as it used to be so if you're going to recreate your listing and your listings a few years old you should refresh the space reinvest into like the stuff that's hiware and make sure that that stuff is new again you may just need to buy a little bit of decor add some color to your space so it doesn't look so barren or stark and get a little pops of color that'll show up in your photo so it's more attractive so that's one thing that you can do rearrange your furniture look for stuff that's hiware dispose of it buy new stuff if your listings older make sure that you have enough decor that the photo can be lively and busy and colorful this could be just accent pillows on your on your couch or the throw blanket stuff to go in your coffee table you know like a little bits of art on the wall that you're missing plants greenery on the like floor plants like tall plants we buy like the same ones from Ikea we've got like tons of them those things will make your photos look better and then of course when you takeyour photos make sure that you practice good best practices for taking your own photos if you're not going to have a professional come in and do it for you if your photos are not professional and there's nothing else that you can do your listings already well designed etc but it's hard to get good lighting without bringing a professional in then you have higher professional if there's no way for you to get good photos without invoking a paid professional you might just have to do it but if you want to do it on your own and you can even do it with a smartphone you can you just need good even lighting see this camera does something called bracketing which means it takes a dark photo like wear it wear it only lets a little bit of light in it takes another photo where it lets an average amount of light in and then it takes another photo where it keeps the shutter open longer so it gets way more light in I can take three identical photos at different levels of light andmix them together and make what's called them like I’m high dynamic range photo and I can make professional looking photos myself because I have the camera for it and we talked about how to dobracketing and stuff like that in our course that we're about to release but if you don't need if you cannot do that because you don't have like $1,000 $2,000 camera then that's okay you just with your iPhone what you want to do is you want to have good even lighting so you need enough light in the whole home but you need to have it even so that way when you take one photo you don't have super bright and super dark spots thatcontrast does what makes it hard for an iPhone to do its jump if you keep your lighting nice and generally high in a photo and then it's all like the evenly distributed your camera phone will do just fine you won't confuse it and I recommend if you can shoot low generally like 4 feet high and then shoot across the room so you get a little bit of floor a little bit of ceiling in your photo you can even do pano photos with your phone to get like one really big wide photo and then you can kind of crop in and get the perfect amount of crop to get theperfectly composed shot it's also better to over shoot a lot of photographers who will shoot more than they need and then they go into the editing room and choose which photos perform the best so photo best practices we have other videos for that in this channel as well combine all eight of these and get good at all eight you'll be unstoppable essentially you will have the best listings out there you'll always be booked and you always be booked at the price you like that's going to be wicked awesome so I hope you can apply these.