Successful Home Exchanging - Setting Up Your Listing

Part Thee of a Series.

The way in which you set up your online listing for the world to see is often pivotal to your home exchange success. You need to clearly describe your home and the amenities it has to offer, then you need to introduce your family, your children, teens and give their ages. Explain any interests or hobbies you pursue—this will allow readers an opportunity to temp you with similar topics in their location.

Next, give some careful thought to a description of the area where your home is located. Your part of town. What shops are nearby? Are there churches, recreational facilities, a railway station, bus stop on a main route, doctor, dentist, pub, restaurant, garage?

Then step back and describe the vacation possibilities offered by a much larger surrounding area. What notable features are available for day trips? This is important because it allows readers to envisage your home exchange in a much bigger picture. They may very well be seeking a swap with one of the places you list as being comparatively close by.

Don’t imagine you are saving a few seconds of typing time by resorting to shortened word versions. These abbreviations are frequently not even understood by people from other countries, and just as important, the lack of care this implies gives a bad first impression about you as a likely home exchange partner. Readers will simply move on to an easier to read listing.

Answer all the multiple choice questions accurately and completely. All too often we find these have been skimped over and this is a shame, because on the ExchangeHomes.com web site, points from these are often pulled out as highlights in the listing’s full page display.

Finally, get clicking with your camera and take a whole variety of photographs illustrating your home and its location. If you’re asking for pet care it’s also an excellent idea to include a picture of the pets involved. Take more pictures than you will need then pick out just the best to add to your listing.

With ExchangeHomes.com you can add an unlimited number of photographs and explain each one with a caption.

I suggest you view your listing as a resume. It’s constantly stated that a resume’s first five seconds are critical. At that point the reader is either sufficiently impressed to continue, or tosses it aside. Just like a resume, your home exchange listing is competing with thousands of others. It has to qualify itself for further reading and consideration.

About Your Listing

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 9:46 am and is filed under About Your Listing, Home Exchange Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to the comments RSS Feed.