RunAway GetAway Alliance Member Information
RSS feed address: http://www.enfeedia.com/runawaygetaway/members.xml

I've been putting together some videos that are now posted on YouTube, and I encourage you to take a little time to view them. Altogether, about 13 minutes of viewing time.

The first one will be used to introduce potential new members to the Alliance. The second similarly introduces VRN. The third shows how to post items on Vacation Items In The News, in case you aren't sure. And the fourth digs a little into the details of the structure of the link blocks that you post on your websites.

RunAway GetAway Vacation Rentals Alliance -- About Membership

Vacation Rentals In The News

How to Post an Announcement on Vacation Rentals In The News

The Cross Linking System of the RunAway GetAway Vacation Rentals Alliance

Over the past five months, RAGA has delivered approximately 700 referrals to members by email from RAGA Destination pages (not to mention click overs to member websites). Effective today, email addresses of those referrals are being automatically registered for "ping" email for Vacation Rentals In The News -- actually, the RSS feed that drives the content on Vacation Rentals In The News (VRN) website.

Here's what that means to you:

Whenever a posting is made on VRN, an email is sent to all those registered for pings that notifies them about the new posting. When they click the link in that email, the VRN feed will be opened, and they will see your posting; in fact, will see all postings with the most recent posting at the top. In effect, by doing a posting, you are at the same time doing a mass mailing to all those who previously showed interest in RAGA. With referrals currently occurring at the rate of about 10 per day, your audience for your specials continues to grow. These ping emails serve to keep your vacation rentals business in the minds of that audience, so important for repeat business! (The ping email also offers the recipient a way to unregister, i.e., opt out, of the system.)

How I need your help to make this effective:

I've put the system in place at no cost to any of you, but unless postings are made to VRN, nothing happens. I've offered to assist you in posting items for yourself, and even will do those posting for you, at no cost -- but I need your help: I need the information from you for your posting. If each of you provide such information once a month, then your audience -- potential customers -- will receive ping email on a daily basis, on average! It will take you only a few minutes every month to gather information for your posting and email it to me. Yes, I'm begging you to participate to make this system work for all members of the Alliance.

Having trouble with what "specials" are?

Besides the obvious offerings of discounts, unexpected availability of featured homes, and other "deals", anything happening in your area of interest to vacationers -- concerts, golf tournaments, opening of ski season, music festivals, fairs, rodeos, charity balls, celebrity appearances, hot air balloon festivals, holiday celebration events, film festivals, opera season, snow sculpture contests -- you get the idea -- qualify as "in the news" items suitable for posting on VRN. It's enough just to send me a title for the item and the address of a website that provides the information; you don't have to write up the item if you don't want to.


If each of you give this just five minutes once a month, together we're bound to increase our business activity, for free.

Finally, please send me an email -- ken@runawaygetaway.com -- to let me know you've seen this, to confirm this Member feed is effective at reaching you.

I just posted an item on the Enfeedia "Articles" feed about YouTube plans regarding news feeds related to their videos. It's worth a read to keep up to date on the value of videos and feeds for your business. I'll be keeping an eye on this development at YouTube to look for opportunities to integrate their new features into Enfeedia-based podcasting.

If you've been wanting to post items on the RAGA news feed or article feed, or on Vacation Rentals In The News, but can't find the time to do so, here's an offer that ought to help. Until further notice, I will post your items for you, for FREE.

Just send me an email with want you want for your item Title, Link, and Description, and I will post your item accordingly. If you want some text within the Description to be an active link, tell me what that text is and what its link is to be. If what you want posted appears on some webpage -- your site or others -- just give me the address for that webpage and I will do the rest.

So that I don't miss your email in my in-basket, please title your email "Please post for me". And please remind me of your location to prevent mistakes.

Here are the feeds for which this offer pertains:

The RunAway GetAway news feed: Content is typically about something special happening at various destinations that will be of interest to vacationers. This feed appears on the RAGA home page and every destination page.

The RunAway GetAway Articles feed: Content is typically lengthier items providing greater depth into some topic pertaining to the vacation destination.

The Vacation Rentals In The News feed: Content is about special offerings or special happenings at vacation destinations. This is not limited to special discounts or pricing but should be more broadly thought of as 'breaking news' that may influence the site visitor to commit to a vacation. Typically, items on this feed are time sensitive and expire at some point in time. If so, be sure to include that in your Description. For best results, rather than just say to visit your website to find specials, provide information to me about one of the current specials so that it becomes a teaser to visit your site to learn about all specials.

Podcasting

Podcasting is a method for distributing media using RSS feeds deriving benefits of RSS such as automatic notification to subscribers when items are posted. If you plan on publishing just one video on YouTube, your news feed provides an excellent way to get that video in front of others. If you publish a number of videos, each video being an episode in your series, RSS is the perfect mechanism for distribution of those videos. You can annotate what viewers will see by entering that information in the item title and/or description.

Once you've posted your video on YouTube, it's a simple matter to include it in your feed. When posting an item, just paste the URL (address) for your video into the space provided on same form where you enter your other item information. YouTube provides the URL; referring to this image, you click the "Share" button to open the window showing the URL (both the Share button and URL are highlighted in yellow). That's all there is to it. You're in the podcasting business.

Embedding the Video on Your Site

Once you are podcasting, you can embed your podcast on your site by simply inserting a small code snippet into your webpage (this is done just once). Put the snippet where you want your podcast to show. It's php code, so your server must support php, but virtually all servers do. Typically, you'll want to present only the most recent video -- more than one can be confusing -- but the decision is yours, and it's controlled by that code snippet.

The video does not begin to play until one clicks the "play" icon. Or they can click the video to view it in full size at YouTube. If your video is sufficiently entertaining or interesting or educational such that the viewer wants to see more, they can simply click the Enfeedia "E" icon to open the complete feed in a new window. Better yet, they can set up "pings" such that whenever you add a video to your podcast, they will be automatically notified by email! They simple click a link in that email to view your podcast.

When you get an inquiry email from your RAGA Destination page (and some of you are really getting good inquiries!), it's quite obvious that RAGA is bring you potential bookings. But there are other ways that RAGA helps that are not so visible.

If a visitor to your Destination page clicks over to your website, you will only know that if you use some method that shows where clicks to your site come from. Google Analytics seems to be the favorite. I recommend you use Analytics if you are not already doing so. Besides seeing referrals from your Destination page, you will get lots of information that can help with your marketing efforts. Similarly for referrals from Vacation Rentals In The News. (By the way, be sure to check your posting on that site to keep it current! Post specials or coming events to attract visitors to your site.)

But there is another way that RAGA helps bring you referrals that is invisible. It's the original basis for forming the Alliance: Improved placement on search engine results pages (SERP). To some extent, that position is improved by the inbound links from other members. It's hard to say how many extra referrals you get from Google if your listing is improved by a page or two. And hard to say if your position might be dropping without those links as others work hard at keeping their position high -- just as you do.

Here's another way you can improve or protect your SERP position. Display an RSS feed to present fresh content from time to time. It's well known that even without directly helping page ranking, freshness of content will improve SERP placement. It's easy, and free like everything else with the Alliance, when you use Enfeedia to publish a feed. There's even an option for you to build your own dedicated feed automatically from your postings on Vacation Rentals In The News -- two birds with one stone. And by inserting an Enfeedia-supplied code snippet on your site, you can display some or all of your feed, just as is done on your Destination page. Don't know how to do all this? Contact me, I'll help you!

By the way, these services are free, so your ROI on even one referral is rather spectacular! :-)

If you'd like a link on the RAGA home page directly to your website, here's how: Simply provide me a newsy tidbit about your location that would be of some interest to vacationers. I will post it on the RAGA news feed and include in it a link to your website, using text something like "For your lodging needs, visit Run Away To Santa Fe". See the feed as it currently appears for examples.

Your item will remain on the home page until such time as five more items are subsequently posted, pushing your item off the home page (but remaining on the feed). Currently, I show the most recent five postings.

If you would like a more durable link to your website, submit an article about your location of interest to vacationers and I will add that to the "articles" news feed which is displayed at the bottom of the RAGA home page.

In the past six weeks, over 100 referrals have been sent from RAGA destination pages to individual members. Not a lot, but a good start given the Destination page email form was only introduced a few months ago. (This in in addition to vacationers who choose to click over to your website to learn more about you instead of using the email form.)

Be sure that the correct email address is being used for the email form on your Destination page so you don't miss referrals. To test it, go to your Destination page and fill out the form with a "test" email, then verify you receive it.

Several RAGA members asked me about the linking system. For example, which members sites link to their own site. And why does the link block link to RAGA destination pages rather than member sites (the answer to this question is that links in link block link to both member sites and Destination pages). Here's clarification of all that, together with a link to a page that provides a summary of all RAGA member linking.

First, keep in mind that members are organized into three groups: A, B and C. Second, note that the link block includes two sets of links: the first set (titled "Sampling of Member Sites") links to member sites, the second set (titled "Sampling of Travel Info") links to RAGA destination pages.

Links are designed to avoid direct reciprocal links, as Google does not place too much value on reciprocal link exchanges. Instead, each member is "one removed" from each other. So, each member site in group A, for example, links to all member sites in Group B. None of the member sites in Group B link back to member sites in Group A; instead, member sites in Group B link to member sites in Group C. And finally, member sites in Group C link back to member sites in Group A. With this arrangement, each member receives an inbound link from one third of the member sites.

There's a similar setup for links to Destination pages, except the rotation is different, again to avoid reciprocal links. Member sites in Group A link to Destination pages for members in Group C. And so on.

Click here to view a table that shows all this linking for each member. The left column shows what groups contain which members. The next column shows, for links to member sites, what group each member site links to . The right column shows, for links to Destination pages, what group each member site links to.

WIth this table, you can navigate to each member site that links to your site. First find out what group you are in by finding your location in the left column; the top cluster of members are in Group A, the middle cluster in Group B, and the bottom in Group C. Then find your group identifier in the middle column. All members with that identifier in their row link to your site. For example, Monterey Bay is in Group B. In the middle column, Group B is shown to the right of all members in Group A; those are the member sites linking to the Monterey Bay site.

(By the way, that revision code in your link block indicates what group you are in. For example, the code [Cr8a] indicates Group C. r8 indicates major revision 8, and the trailing letter further indicates a minor revision.)

To: All members of the RunAway GetAway Alliance
Subj: update your Link Block

The last update of the link block was almost a year ago. Some membership changes are reflected in the new code. Also, some other changes were made: The RSS logo was deleted (so loading your website is not dependent on accessing that image from RunAway GetAway) and the "subscribe" link was deleted. As you are all members of the Vacation Rentals In The News with the news enhancements I announced in my email on November 1, there is now a link to that site, located under the Alliance link block.

Please replace your existing code with the new code as soon as possible. As a reminder, if you did your last update correctly, you can locate your old link block by the comment lines at the top and the bottom of the link block code.

♦ Please replace all the existing link block code on your site, including those comment lines, with the new code, including the new comment lines.
♦ Please do not make any changes to the code; if you believe something has to be changed, contact me first. Font size is selected to roughly match the size of the majority of the font elsewhere on your page.
♦ Please include that crytpic revision code new the end of the code -- some of you have been deleting it -- it looks something like this: [Ar8a]. I need that to track revisions.

A few of you do not currently have the link block posted, as we discussed on the phone. Please post the new one near the bottom of the home page. The link block inherits the text and link color, background color and font style of your page, so place the code in a spot on your home page where you get the desired colors and font style for readibility.

Here's how to get your link block code: Go to www.runawaygetaway.com/EasyWay-Code.html and click on your location -- be careful to select the right location. The next page presents the terms of service, unchanged. Click the button at the bottom of the page to see your link block code. Everything on that page needs to be copied and pasted onto your home page.

As always, if any questions, email me or call me at 530-249-4401.

Ken


PS -- Many of you are already receiving referrals directly from your destination page. Email with the title beginning "Inquiry (via RAGA ..." indicates the email was sent from your RAGA destination page.

PPS -- Be sure to check out your posting on Vacation Rentals In The News and make sure your posting is current. Many of the postings are obsolete and need to be updated. Keep in mind that a "special" does not need to be a pricing or discount deal, it can be a special event happening in your area that is of interest to the vacationer, or unexpected availability of a special home, etc. I emailed every member their unique password. You will find instructions below for how to post on VRN, under "How to post your item on the Vacation Rentals In The News feed". It's easy and fast; one member reported: It was easy...and it took a whole 5 minutes because I hadn't done it before. Now that I know the steps, it should take me 2 minutes. (from Annette A.)

Individual unique passwords for posting news on the Vacation Rentals In The News (VRN) website have been emailed to all members of the RunAway GetAway Alliance. If you did not see that email, please let me know ASAP so I can update your email address, if that's the problem, and communicate your password to you.

I recommend you review the posting for you on VRN to determine if it needs to be updated, and to do so as soon as practical -- especially for those cases where I posted a "coming soon" (or equivalent) place-saver item for you or where I copied a special from your website. Instructions for logging in and posting your item are provided with the password email as well as on this feed -- see previously posted item.

Some members have already begun posting without calling for help :-) a testimony to the process not being difficult. As always, if you need help, you can contact me by phone or email.

Keep in mind when you post your item as "new", it will go to the top of the list.

Much progress, and a few things you should do:

1) All RunAway GetAway destination pages are now updated per my Nov 1 email. Each destination page includes an email form for site visitors to contact you directly from your destination page. If you provided me an email address to be used for this, I used it; otherwise I used the same email address I use to routinely correspond with you. Please verify your email form is working correctly by going to your destination page and sending yourself an inquiry, then look for that incoming email in your in-basket. Members report they are already seeing inquiries, so don't waste this feature!

While viewing your new destination page, notice that your Vacation Rentals In The News (VRN) announcement is included in your listing. Also, go the RAGA home page and click the gold star by your listing in the member list near the top of the page; you will view your item on VRN. Both of these are automatically updated when you update your item at Vacation Rentals In The News.


2) All members now have an item posted on VRN. If you provided me a news item to post, I used it. If not, I looked for a 'special' on your site to post. And failing that, I posted a "coming soon" or equivalent message. By the way, some member announcements are now obsolete and need to be updated!

I will send you your password in an email; please update your item as needed. For instructions on how to do that, read the item that's two below what you are reading now, titled "How to post your item on the Vacation Rentals In The News feed".


3) If you encounter what appears to be errors, please tell me about them: ken@runawaygetaway.com


4) Next, I will be preparing the updated link blocks for your websites and ask that you perform the usual replacement of the old link block with the new one.

Check it out, on the home page of the RunAway GetAway Alliance ... about half way down, you can't miss it. It'll get you packing your bags. :-)

To log in, click the "shootOnSite" link that appears near the bottom of the VRN home page under the news feed (or near the top of the VRN NewsPage that opens when you click the red-and-green "E" icon).

On the page that opens, enter and submit your password that I assign to you. (Ignore the "reporter" PIN entry). On the next page, select either "Edit Item..." (to simply modify your existing item) or select "Re-Post Item..." (to enter a new item).

Once you have made your selection, you will be asked to select your item (well, you have only one in the VRN application, so selection is pretty easy), then a form will be presented to you to edit your existing data or to enter new data.

On the form, the first three fields (Title, Link, and Description) are required. The fields below those are optional. Check out the additional features, like including an image with your posting and adding text links within your description. Keep in mind that the VRN home page shows only a lead-in to your overall description (as a teaser), so it's to your benefit to make that lead-in catchy and include any text links in that lead-in for search engines to index. Once you have filled out the form, click the button at the bottom of the page to submit your information. In about 10 seconds, you will see your posting, as will the rest of the world.

Is it difficult? Here's what one member said: It was easy...and it took a whole 5 minutes because I hadn't done it before. Now that I know the steps, it should take me 2 minutes. (from Annette A.)

Since the email to the membership on November 1, the following progress has been made. I have focused on those destination pages for RAGA members replying with answers to the three questions , with a few exceptions: Breckenridge, Cambria, Hilton Head, Kauai, Kohala Coast, Moab, Monterey Bay, Pagosa Springs, San Diego, Sedona, and Telluride.

Check out your Destination pages to check what I've done, and to test the email contact form. Send an inquiry using the form and verify you receive the email, as this is how visitors to your Destination page may choose to contact you.

Also, note that the posting on your Vacation Rentals In The News spot appears on your Destination page also.

I will continue with this process for remaining members -- it's time consuming, but I will get it done. Updating of link blocks will probably now take place in January. If you have not replied to my questions in that Nov 1 email, please do so asap.

Click to access members-only item.