Saugatuck is a small waterfront town in Western Michigan. The town fills up from Memorial Day to Labor Day with tourists, mostly from Chicago. They have some wonderful waterfront restaurants and bars, a beautiful, tree-lined downtown that extends for about five blocks and encompasses many side streets. There are marinas and art galleries, clothing shops and ice cream shops, wineries and parks. They have a great thin crust pizza joint called Marros (for some reason many people call it Marios?) that turns into a fairly active nightclub on the weekends. Their website has a ton of pictures!

Oval Beach

There are several excellent golf courses, some great walleye and bass fishing, not too mention at least 15 charters that will take you fishing for King Salmon on Lake Michigan. The oval beach offers acres of Lake Michigan sand surf for all the sun bathers. There are some crazy dune rides just outside of Saugatuck that we take the time do every year – so much fun!

Saugatuck is about 12 miles south of Holland. Saugatuck doesn’t have the number of Lake Michigan cottage rentals that Holland has, but they do offer some nice rentals on the Kalamazoo River (which is ok if you don’t want to swim)…and also there is a little lake, that is super clear and great for swimming, called Goshorn Lake. There is a resort at Goshorn Lake called Goshorn Lake Condominiums, they offer some nice rentals with a decent beach, fishing and swimming pool. Mill Pond Realty has quite an extensive listing of vacation rentals as well.

Don’t forget the Saugatuck Vacation Rentals that we have listed here at VacationRentalDirect.com either!

There are a ton of Lake Michigan cottages for rent in the many small towns in Western Michigan. I am sure many of you will have your opinions from the Wisconsin side of the lake. However, outside of Door County, most people I’ve met agree that Michigan has the best beaches, the best restaurants and an immense supply of vacation rentals.

View of Big Red from the north side of the Holland Channel at the Holland State Park

Here are the towns I would recommend when renting a Lake Michigan cottage.

1) Holland, Michigan. Of course I am biased, but they just have the most incredible downtown and the beach on both sides of the channel is just amazing. To the north of the channel is the Holland State Park, which offers great parking and an easy access baordwalk which will take you right out to the Pier. There is a pavilion with a snack shop and some restrooms. Nothing is better than heading out to the Holland State park on a hot, steamy, summer night. The air is cooler, the waters of Lake Michigan are refreshing and there will be hundreds of beautiful boats to watch come through the channel. Pick up some KFC and just park your butt at the beach, watching boats, great swimming, a little fishing if you want…it’s all good!

South of the channel the beaches are much more secluded and private, but if you can score a cottage in the Macatawa community, you’ll have acres of the most incredible beaches in the country all to yourself! Whether north or south of the Holland Channel you are about five miles from downtown Holland.

The best place to search for a Lake Michigan cottage for rent in Holland is the Cottage Listings at the Holland Chamber of Commerce. Remember on the north side of the channel there will be a lot of stairs down to the beach, unless you are really close to the Holland State Park. On the south side, if you can get in the Macatawa community, you may not be right on the water, but it’s just a short walk to the beach. There are some great bike paths that go for miles and miles on both sides of the Holland Channel.

If you don’t mind not being directly on Lake Michigan, but still want a great beach, close to Holland, then check out Rosewood Pointe Retreat House & Cottages.

Make sure to check out these lakefront communities with cottages for rent at VacationRentalDirect.com:

Holland Michigan Cottages
Saugatuck Michigan Cottages
Grand Haven Michigan Cottages

Tomorrow I will post more in depth on other communities!

Owning a vacation rental site has its perks. Every day I get the illustrious opportunity to help users upload photos to their listings. No matter how easy I make it, there are always a bunch who just can’t figure it out. The same thing is true for adding a Google Map. Nonetheless I get to review tons and tons of vacation rental websites every week. I would say roughly 50% of them are complete junk, 35% do a good job and 15% are completely amazing.

Here are the 5 most stupid website mistakes that I see very single stinking day.

1. Shrinking a 1mb 1028×764 pixel image into a 100×100 square. To further the offense, they then repeat this for at least 10 images on the same page. The result is a very slow loading page and images that are grainy and distorted. The sad thing is that when I click on “view image” and see the full picture, many times they are great pictures.

2. Image width less then 250 pixels. Hello people….you own a vacation rental, people want to see large images of your unit. Not little thumbnails.

3. Sound. I cannot believe how many people think it’s cute to put up some annoying beach music on their website. 10 years ago this was novel, now it’s extremely annoying. Usually these are the same people that shrink their 1mb images down to 100×100 or smaller.

4. Dark and unclear images. Seriously, why would anybody promote their vacation rental and use dark, dingy, unclear pictures to promote it? You would not believe the number of vacation rental owners that take just horrible pictures and proceed to put them up on their website.

5. and finally my worst pet peeve, are large annoying, myspace like, background images that either repeat themselves across the entire page or are nearly the same color as the text of your website.

It is not at all uncommon to see websites containing all five elements on the same page. To illustrate my point, I am coding a new application that will automatically post the junkiest websites that I come across to this blog. I love my customers and all, but someone has to call them out. Sometimes an intervention is needed.

I am always checking out other vacation rental sites that are for sale. I expect over the next couple of years there will be many that come up for sale. On the surface it would seem somewhat easy to make money owning a vacation rental listing site. However, the reality is that to generate enough inquiries to satisfy a vacation rental owner, requires a lot of targeted traffic each month. So while a vacation rental site may con a few ignorant property owners into signing up in a given year, the reality is that if no inquiries or business is generated, that customer won’t renew the next year.

I’m glad that I am a vacation rental owner, it really helps when I am determining what features are important to develop on VacationRentalDirect.com. Hopefully someday this site will become profitable, but at the moment, it’s not a high priority for me. My priority is serving my customers and developing the traffic levels required to make their business successful.

This vacation rental listing site recently came for sale on SitePoint.com. I wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. Especially since it used Joomla with a plugin. But I’ll list it here, as the bidding is currently up to $20,000+.

VrpDirect.com

I also found a vacation rental listing site for sale on bizbuysell.com the other day, but that must have sold, because the business broker I was talking with about it, just dropped off the face of the earth and I don’t see it listed any longer.

Baby steps. Bit by bit I am gaining a foothold in this whole social media realm. I am sorry, but I am 35 years old, but understanding all of the nuances of social media and how to use it for your benefit is still tough. I have got just a few more tweaks to my blog and it will be ready. My developer fixed most of the formatting issues, now he is going to put the final RSS feed buttons / bookmarking buttons into the sidebar and then I am all set!

I continue to stumble and review sites and people I find interesting. I have already met some interesting people. There is another guy who owns a vacation rental site in California, he’s given me a few great tips. Today he told me about the tagging feature of StumbleUpon.

I knew about tags as a means of providing additional information about the post. But I didn’t know that SU actually had individual pages dedicated to each tag, those pages in many instances have decent pagerank, so getting your post or site listed higher up on those pages can generate a nice backlink. That makes sense.

He gave me this example (and I quote):

http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/holiday/

See how that particular tag has a certain amount of reviews. For you to get on that page you generally need to have more reviews then the other people to get on. A great benefit is if you look at the pagerank of that page, I now just got another pr4 link. Most keywords you only need to get 3-4 reviews of a certain keyword to show, but some keywords are a lil more competitive like:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/travel/

The top post has 468 review, the bottom has 12 reviews using the tagged keyword. So you’ll most likely need at least 12. It’s not an exact rule, but follows it most of the time. sometimes it only takes one review if the stumbler has a lot of ranking power.

(end of quote)

So that’s pretty cool. Of course, the backlink is nice, but what I found even more interesting is that it’s an easy way to find other stumblers and sites that are of high quality and match my interests. I contacted this guy on SU because a) he lives in the great state of North Carolina; b) he is a writer and also knows SEO and Social Media; c) I am looking for a writer to help me with this blog and to help me write about some of the more important regional areas on this site; and 4) he seems like an expert Stumbler, maybe he can give me some tips on how to be successful.

So, I think I am starting to grasp the essence of social media. If you are social, others will be social in return. If you contribute high quality stumbles and reviews, that help others, and if you write and produce good quality content, they in return will help you. I have no idea if I will ever hear from Matt, but regardless, his blog and his stumbles are taking me to new places that are enriching my Internet experience!

It’s cool. I’m liking it and looking forward to meeting more new people, hopefully soon I an help others get the hang of social media!!