Rental Advertising - Free v Paid

I am thinking of renting out my house on the Costa Blanca for short term rentals. (We love going there, so don't want to get into long term. )  There is no shortage of websites who are willing to take your money for a paid advertisement. These seem to have a standard format that generates an advert very quickly. I also notice there are a number of basic web sites that also offer free advertising space. Generally they are not all that attractive, and I am not sure if they do the job. Generally you don't seem to find them on the search engines, but maybe stumble across them with an obscure search or link. My question is what people's experiences are with this type of site.

I also came across a few developing sites such as www.thebestvillas.com which is clearly in it's infancy, and are offering free signup which I suppose is in their development period. The main benefit I can see is that these sights are generally well produced to a high standard, and expect to grow in the search engine listings. As this is free signup, I think there could be an opportunity which develops.

I wondered if anyone had experiences with any of these types of advertising. I don't want to waste my efforts in putting data in which get's lost. However, I do like the thought of getting something free from a professional site on the move. 

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Jeff, it can take a VERY long time to get a website ranking well these days, and especially in such a competitive industry such as holiday rentals. 

I always advise people to search on Google for terms such as:

"villas for rent costa blanca"
"villas for rent in torrevieja"
"holiday rental villas in ..."

etc.

The sites that come up well should be the ones to target as they will get very good quality enquiries coming through as these search terms are very specific.

We have a free rental section on the site and it's proving very difficult to get our holiday rentals to rank well, it's so competitive, although we will get there...we always do

Our long term rentals rank really well and we get loads of long term rental enquiries every day.  Search for "long term rentals ....." and we should come up.

So in answer to your question....I think it depends on how much marketing they do...but you can't beat free search engine ranking for generating enquiries, so those sites that rank well are definitely the ones to look into further.

I could go on...but I won't!

justin

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