You don't need a website or an online vacation rental listing service to market your vacation rental property on the Internet.

Just use Google Base.

Like Craig's List, it's free, but Google Base offers much more of the polished pizzazz you typically associate with professional online vacation rental listing websites.

Google Base offers the kind of listing detail you need to attract travelers looking for that homey-accommodations feel offered by vacation rental homes.

First, you'll need to sign up for a free Google.com account and agree to the Google Base terms of the service.

Then, Google Base allows you to list a property by location, type, number of rooms, availability and other search words. You can also provide a detailed description of your property, its amenities and surrounding attractions.

What really makes this free marketing service sing is that you can attach up to 20 megabytes of files in a variety of formats to further enhance your listing. For images use jpg, png, gif, tif and bmp files. For text and publishing use pdf, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Word Perfect documents, html, plain text and others.

Now in its beta test stage, Google Base already contains more than 180,000 listings. Most of those listings were posted by popular online vacation rental listing websites, including VROB.com, Vacapedia.com and others. The online vacation rental listing sites use Google Base as an added service to their paying customers.

But anyone can use Google's free service for vacation rentals, as well as for marketing a host of other goods and services, including any property for sale or for rent.

Google, the Internet's No. 1 search engine, says more than 56 percent of all Internet searches using the phrase "real estate" are conducted on the Google website and its partner sites.

That makes Google Base a solid addition to your vacation rental marketing efforts.

And, once again, it's free.

Published: January 10, 2008

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A journalist for 35-years, Broderick Perkins parlayed an old-school daily newspaper career into a digital news service offering editorial content and consulting services. Perkins' San Jose, CA-based DeadlineNews Group includes the flagship news site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate, personal finance and consumer journalism, and a backshop, the Deadline Newsroom.