Name of your website?Watermark Vacation Rentals
Your name?
Steve Marlar
Your Location (city, etc)
Woodinville
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Allows vacation rental owners to list their vacation rentals to allow potential renters to search for a vacation rental in a specific area.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
After searching for a vacation rental, I saw a lot of bad and expensive sites.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
Oct 2007 and it was Watermark Vacation Rentals.com
How did you decide on a name for your website?
My wife came up with it and I ran with it.
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
There are other free vacation rental sites but it is different from the very large and expensive sites. Easy to search through the vacation rental inventory.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
I plan to start charging for listings and keep it for income.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
Right now not very good. The site does not generate income so all of my time and money is an investment that I hope to get back in the future.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
I would roll out more features at a quicker rate.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Not at this time but if it were making enough money, I could handled the demand.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Somebody in Nigeria spammed my vacation rental owners with a face request. We had to remove the email functionality from the site to stop this from happening.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Marketing. It is very time consuming.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
Pay per click.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
When launching you always hope that it takes off right when it is launched and that is just not the case. People do not come if you build it. You have to market it.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Launched it 2 months ago and will keep supporting it for another 2 years. Will revaluate after the 2 year anniversary.
What is your website address?
Watermark Vacation Rentals
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