Transcription
A host from my community has just sent me a video about Airbnb titles released today by the world's largest Airbnb influencer, and I'm going to respond to it. You're going to be an Airbnb title expert by the end of this video; you're going to know how to use it to get more bookings, and I'm going to correct some falsities in Sha Rage's video. I just released a video talking about the cleaning fee because both Shawn and Ro built released a video in the same week talking about it, and I cleared up doubts about whether or not you should be using an Airbnb cleaning fee. That video is performing number one on my channel, so that's how it works: you tell me you like it by watching the video and giving a thumbs up and maybe a comment, and I make more related content. So let's jump in.
A title is right below your listing. You've got the thumbnail, you've got "home in Denver," and then you've got your title. So your title isn't in bold anymore; it's really not even a title. So that title needs to be loaded with reasons to click. I want to clear up something related to this: he is correct what he's saying—the title is now below your photo—but Sean is talking about P2. Now, as a prior Airbnb employee, I had access to some Airbnb lingo, so P1, P2, and P3 was Airbnb lingo. Right now, I'm showing you P1, and in my book, you always got to have a good resource on hand. I explain what optimizations you can take on P1, P2, and P3. On P1, there are no optimizations. Okay, that makes it easy and frustrating at the same time. The FPG—I call it future potential guest—must enter your destination. Okay, and what do you know, we got some of my listings here.
So now we are on P2, and this is what he's talking about. You can see this is my listing space; it's taken up about 70% by my photo. So while you should optimize your title, of course, it's not really being paid attention to here on P2; it's more important on P3. And that's because it's not even bolded anymore. Here you can see when somebody sees your photo and they see "home in Denver," and it says "the Gisha house" or whatever, that title doesn't exactly drive value for people. Briefly, he's touching on branded listings now, so "Gisha house" may or may not be useful. Branded listings is—is not exactly in this topic. You should brand your listing if you have repeat guests, you have various listings in the same market, and it's a luxurious space, or people are likely to want to share it. In those three instances, you can brand your space, and then it would make sense to put your brand name in the title, like I have in "Belmonti Penthouse." Because sometimes guests are going to know to take that, go to Google, and search for it. Just understand that you should have the Google search spots if you're branding your listing "Belmonti Penthouse."
Now I recently optimized a listing for a host, and they were branding their space, except when I typed it in on Google, it brought me to a retirement home with the same name in his market. That's very bad; we want to avoid that. So this is what the guest should see if they type your brand name on Google. There's another topic about direct bookings, and that was popular a few years ago. It's—we've been moving away from it as hosts because we realize that, hey, that's like a whole another job that we really have to take on, and sometimes it does make sense, but for most hosts it does not. We need to actually clickbait people in a way, or at least generate curiosity. I just did a speech about this in Tennessee; I was just speaking in an event, and it hit me: the one word that we need to add to our title is an adjective, and it's a strategic adjective.
Now I'm very curious what he's about to say because if you've been following me, you know that I say you should never add an adjective into your title—"luxurious," "spacious," uh, whatever it happens to be—you know, that doesn't add value for the guest. Instead, what you want to do is add amenities—add your most important amenities for the FPG. Okay, that usually is your best amenity, but not always. Understand what is valued in your market and what your competition doesn't have; that is your strategic advantage, and it should be in the title as a bonus point. Ideally, you want to put in the title what you cannot see in the listing. In my title, I have like "daily breakfast" or "daily cleaning," "early check-in," things like that, uh, "sound system." And so when you describe something with an adjective that is counterintuitive to what people typically expect to find, that's what generates curiosity in a title. So if you said that a like a hot tub was a "volcanic hot tub" or a "Nordic hot tub," people may just not really understand; they might have an assumption, but they'll be curious to find out if they're right.
Okay, I'm somewhat bought into his explanation, but there's one big contrad he's making with himself as it relates to titles. So what is he saying? He's saying that if you have a hot tub, you should add something to that hot tub, like columns, and call it a "Greek hot tub" or a "Nordic hot tub," and then that's what you call it in the title, and that generates some interest from the guest. There's a big problem though, and that is the title is number two; photos are number one. It's the same reason why I say don't use an adjective in your title because the guest has already seen your photos, so they've already decided for themselves if it looks cozy, if it's luxurious, if it's spacious, if your hot tub is indeed a Greek, a Nordic, or a volcanic hot tub.
At one point, I had in mind "Sky shower." Let me show you what that looks like in my title. I've since removed it. I had—this is actually my brand new title; I'm testing it out. I have a quote in the title, and I'm actually going to show you my listing, and I'm going to—as this custom—show you my calendar for this month. I am almost 100% booked here. I actually got a direct booking; uh, this—this is actually booking 2020, direct booking. So I only had one day of avail—of availability in—in March, which is um, slow season as well. So that has to do with my pricing strategy mostly, which I teach on this channel for free. If you want more of that pricing content, if you're not doing so well in your slow season, comment below that you want to know about my slow season strategy; you can also search that on Google.
So the reason why I put "Sky shower" is because it—well, it was similar to what Sean is saying; it kind of roused interest—"What is a sky shower?" And it wasn't in the—it was towards the back of my photos. This is a sky shower, so you can—you get it. It says YouTube after all. Now here's the key: your hero photo has to change when you do this. That is true; 100% agreed. Sounds like what I've been teaching for the past decade. If you're going to say that you have a Gothic boho design, you cannot put your living room or any of your black and green stuff in your hero photo because we're trying to generate curiosity for a click. That's not true; that goes back to what we're optimizing on each page; we're not generating a click on P2 from the title; we're getting a click based on the photos. The faulty reasoning that Shawn has here is that he's not a guest, or he's an infrequent guest. He's not a guest as much as I'm a guest. I'm actually filming this video in Rio de Janeiro as a guest. I'm Airbnb's number one guest in the whole world—3,000 stays in probably around 200 cities across the globe. So I have a unique experience where I'm always booking as a guest, and then I've also written some blogs on my private—my personal brand online called Danny Boob, where I've written blogs about how to get deals and book good Airbnbs, etc. And friends and family know I used to work at Airbnb, so they come at me from the guest perspective—"Can you help me book? Can you do this?" So I get a lot of extra experimentation and testing from how do guests actually use the platform. And so that's why I know that the title is not what's getting you the click. From P2, people will open up multiple listings and they'll consider multiple listings, so you're more likely to get a click now than before. Yes, that is true, and it's been true for years due to platform changes, but only on desktop. The guest will click open various listings on mobile; that is not true. And as long as you deliver on the back end, do your job well, you'll get more bookings. And there's one extra bonus for getting more bookings: it's called action. That really sounds like me.
Called action is something I use; it's a very low leverage strategy; it's not going to move the needle on how many bookings you're getting, but it is something that you can do. Namely, if you have a basic listing, you need to be filling out every section of text, and sometimes if you just literally have no section of text, well, I thought, "How can I still optimize the text for a listing that doesn't really offer much?" And a CTA is one of them. So I am going to post some of my—the CTAs that I use in my list things in the pinned comment below. What I like to do is I like to have a bullet point list somewhere in my description of like all the cool stuff in the home—what bullet points—that's my thing; that's what I've been doing for 10 years and talking about it publicly. So uh, gosh, this really does sound like me. I don't mean to be cruel here or mean, but this is the first time I'm watching this video right now, real real time with you. But anyway, let's move on. I'll have it called action to send us a message, and by asking someone to send us a message instead of book, that called action's a little bit more easy to comply with. Raise your hand if you want extra messages from guests. Everyone knows hosts that as soon as you get a message without a booking from a guest, the conversion rate plummets, and the reason why is what we referenced earlier: nowadays guests are encouraged to click open a bunch of listings, and they're partly encouraged by the lack of filters on Airbnb's system, and so we want to avoid as many messages as possible by making the listing clear; we want as many bookings as possible.
I just have a new tool that I want to introduce to you now. It is a free tool; it's called a description uh, generator. I'm going to put a link to it in the description here, and the reason why you need to use it is it'll give you bullet points; it'll give you my strategy for formulating your summary text, which is the most important text. And here's the other thing: why do we want to do that? Well, we want to do that because text becomes the most important part of your listing when a guest is reading it. A lot of hosts, we think, "Oh, guests don't read text, blah, yada, yada, yada," but guests do read text sometimes, times, and when they're reading texts, they're reading it because they're not yet sold on your listing; they have maybe two or three listings to go; they all kind of look generic. That's partly what my Superhost listing optimizations do; they make you not look generic, so the guest doesn't have to ask questions, and they don't have to even read your listing. Because by the time they got to the photos and the title and the pricing system, they're already sold on your listing. But please do like the video, share with the friends you love, and do not share this with the host that you want to go out of business because this—this stuff will work. I know he was kidding, I think, at least, but feel free to share my video with absolutely anyone. This video was pretty specific. Now let me know if you liked it because here's the thing: as my channel grows, I can focus more time on talking about these very specific things. Now my channel is 5% the size of Sha Rak's channel, so you can decide if the value I'm providing is at least 5% of the value he is providing. If it is, I would encourage you to subscribe because right now the thing that sells the most for me that I focus on is the books. Unfortunately, the books have a cost; they're between 10 and 20 bucks at any given time, but because that's what you—the—the audience have shown me that you prefer in buying a ton of my books, that's where I focus on, and that's where I get really detailed. If instead you want me to get detailed here on YouTube, show me, and show me with a subscribe or a like, however that makes sense for you—sharing it with your favorite Reddit community or your Facebook group—and I can talk about very specific things. For example, let's say I got a question recently about whether or not they think adding uh, humans to the photos makes sense. Now they may have got that because of the last video I did; um, one of the other famous Airbnb YouTubers added that to his photo. We can go into extra person fee, for example. Let's say this following scenario: you have a maximum of six guests, and the reservation brings eight guests. You have video proof; you send it to Airbnb, and you say, "Hey, I'd like to charge for the seventh and eighth guest." Airbnb says, "Great, what do you want to charge?" You say, "100 bucks." Airbnb says, "Okay, but where are you getting that number from?" And you're like, "Well—" and Airbnb says, "Yeah, you're not getting anything." Now how do we go around that? This is something that I do to all listing optimizations in the back end, in the calendar; you can charge for an extra guest. Now I recommend you price your listing for max occupancy, but even in your—if your max occup is six, in this case it was—we're still going to add an extra guest fee so that you have leverage. So typically I'll go in the C—I'll go on the calendar and I'll say, "After six guests, charge 100 bucks per guest." So now you have some leverage. Okay, if that reservation was two nights, now you have 100 times two guests times two nights; that's potential of 400 bucks. You say it was 400, but I'll be nice; I'll let the guest pay only 200, and Airbnb says, "Okay, that makes sense; that's within your—your Airbnb listing." That's a very small detailed thing, but I'd be happy to share that with you in exchange for a like, and if you would like my strategy for Airbnb titles, I actually created a free tool you can use right now; link will also be in the description. You answer a few questions, and then you get almost unlimited options of titles based exactly on how I would do it if I was optimizing your listing, based on exactly how I would do it if you were paying me to optimize your listing.