How to go from zero to $3634 in your first month on Airbnb

I couldn't believe my eyes, I just made $3634 in my first month on Airbnb and it wasn't very hard at all.

All the hard work paid off very quickly during my first month, I put in place a strategy that allowed me to fill up as many nights as possible. This worked out well for 2 reasons:

1. It allowed me to to obtain volume of booked nights.
2. I was able to obtain reviews quickly.
   

Is volume important?

When deciding on your strategy to find your first guests, you really need to sit down and do the maths. There are a few important things to consider:

1. How many nights are booked in my area.
2. Is lower price and higher volume needed or is higher price and lower volume fine? If you have higher price and high volume - you have one hell of a property to list!
3. Do I need to set my price lower in order to get the ball rolling?

All of these need to be decided on before you list. Research your area, your competition and supply/demand. This will be a easy giveaway on the approach you need to take.

Don't forget to put yourself in the shoes of your guests. You are a new listing, you have no or minimal reviews and you are just learning how to be a host - your property will not be run at this stage at the standards of a seasoned host.

I went through the due diligence stage with my property and what I found is that I wanted to ensure that I was able to acquire as many booking as possible and fill up as many nights as I could, in order to do that I used set my pricing each night based on my research and the booking came in as a result of this.

What are reviews on Airbnb all about?

Reviews are the lifeline of your property - this is a big tip!

Why do I say this? Pretty simple. You need reviews in order to convince your potential guests to book with you over your competition. Airbnb has a pretty unrelenting review system, it reminds everyone to perform a review after each booking for both guests and hosts. This is not a perfect system, but it allows feedback and to rate properties that are listed on the site.

Your reviews are important to sell your property for bookings, people like to provide feedback on anything - I really mean this. Your property could be absolutely amazing, but if they have one issue, they may consider letting others know about it and give you a rating less than 5 stars.

You may think that getting a 4 star rating is ok, it's still very high and also in the top percentage of listings. The only problem with this is that Airbnb have a badge for their top hosts on Airbnb.

This badge is called a Superhost and is quite difficult to obtain. It requires you to have:

1. 80% of all bookings have a 5 star review.
2. 100% of communication completed.
3. A minimum of 10 reviews on your listing
4. Have no cancellations.
   

Not only do you have to maintain this, it goes through a review process every 3 months internally by Airbnb and they will consider if you qualify or not.

My aim is to qualify for the biggest reason being that it puts me in the top percentage of hosts providing more convincing reasons for my guests to stay with me and even pay a premium to stay at my property.

Airbnb even make it easy for potential guests to find your property by prioritising your listing when your area is viewed and for guests to filter to show only Superhost properties when they are searching for somewhere to stay.

As you can see, this is my big Goal for Jan 2017!