Marketing Vacation Rentals is Tricky Especially When Using a Vocus & PRweb Subscription

April 16, 2012 - PRLog -- In marketing vacation rentals, websites, or any business, an effective marketing strategy is important. Be careful when partnering with a news distribution service or Press Release Service. Doing the occasional new release has little risk. There is much more upside versus downside to such a plan. Be cautious when signing up for a subscription service with payment up front and delivery of services to follow especially if a very good salesman is offering a deal that can't be matched.

Such a situation happened to the owner of http://www.bobzio.com, a vacation rental listing and marketing service. A very personable salesman phoned the owner with an annual subscription promotion. The owner of bobzio.com stated "bobzio is a new website that is just now finished with testing and ready to launch. Putting out a news release every day would be difficult". The Vocus sales person pulled up several press releases from another Vocus customer who put out news releases for each new franchise location opened. The salesman went on to explain that using http://www.vocus.com/content/aboutus.asp to publish press releases improves websites positioning in the search engines because the releases get circulated to over 30,000 other websites and journalist. The Vocus salesman suggested bobzio could target different areas of the world with free service promotions or identify the best value vacation rentals for specific areas. The two owners of http://www.bobzio.com had a discussion about this and decided this strategy would work as a way of informing the different vacation rental markets of the free memberships and free listings to the first 20,000 members.

This strategy was working well until Vocus stopped circulating the news releases to the 30,000 journalist and websites stating "Your press releases will be published on PRWeb's News Center but will not be sent to other websites, search engines, blogs, readers or media. By accepting the limited hold and publishing your release, you will not be able to edit it after it has been published on PRWeb's News Center. If you wish to receive distribution to media and outside websites you will need to create a new release. By releasing with a limited hold, I accept that PRWeb will not refund or credit my purchase if I accept a limited hold". This meant that the news releases would not be circulated to the 30,000 websites and journalist as promised in the initial sales solicitation. What is a practice called when a promise is made but then reneged upon based on a "policy change". That's right it is called "time to find legal representation and total up the damages"

The business lesson here is be very cautious in signing up for any subscription service like PRweb and Vocus with payment up front.  Use the free press release services such as prlog.org to test the waters.  Prlog.org has a great setup that is simple and easier to use than the pricey subscription services such as PRweb.com or Vocus.com.  The best feature is you can take the service for a test drive before investing in premium services.  The bottom line is avoid the friendly sales people with the terrific deals that are going to get any given website to the top of the search engine results such as the PRweb.com and Vocus.com before trying the test drive type of services such as prlog.org

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www.bobzio.com a vacation home rental, home swap and area services co-op.. Bobzio is member owned. Owners will be recorded when 20,000 join. Bobzio is dedicated to maximizing marketing exposure and minimizing costs using the members presence on the web.