Owning a second home abroad has been a steadily rising trend during the last decade. Many of us now own a holiday property abroad, which offers a privileged retreat away from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. However, the reality is that for most second-home owners their holiday is unoccupied during most parts of the year and what many people don't realise is that they are missing out on the fact that their holiday property could be turned into a potential goldmine by renting it out to other holiday makers while its vacant.

There are millions of holiday makers every year across the globe that prefers to rent a villa rather than staying in hotel accommodation. As a property owner, if you are able to rent your vacation home anywhere between 12-15 times per year, you should easily be able to cover the mortgage payments, maintenance or other running costs of for your property. That is, if you can rent out the property about once every month, your property will pay for itself and will soon turn into a profitable investment.

There are several ways of getting extra rental income from your holiday property. The traditional way to do it is to approach a letting agent, who will find and take care of the short term rentals for you. One word of warning though, management companies will cut deep into your financial returns as they can charge anywhere from 10% to 50% of the rental income, making positive net cash-flow much harder to achieve.

An increasing number or second-home owners are therefore starting to run their holiday property just like their own business. They have realised that cutting out the middle-man is essential and will take everything from the rental process to the advertising of the property themselves.

Potential holiday makers that might be interested in renting your property might come from any corner of the world really, so one essential thing you want to make sure you consider is Internet advertising. If you have a webpage for your property, you can promote that page via Google ads and get website visitors on a pay-per click basis. By spending some money on this, you will start generating visitors to your site and hopefully a few of these will actually decide to rent your holiday home.

You can also list your holiday property on a vacation rentals website and for a small flat annual listings fee, you get a 24/7 online advertisement for your property that is exposed to thousands of potential holiday makers. The benefit of going down this route is that it is probably the most cost-effective way of advertising your property that there is, as you do not incur any pay-per-click fees, agent commissions or referral fees. This would be a much more colourful and visual way of advertising your holiday rental to potential customers as you would get your own full-page advert for your property, together with photos, a text description of your property and a location map.

Alternatively, you could also start up your own free Facebook page for your holiday property and let others join that page as "fans", this is often an effective way of promoting your property by word-of-mouth through social media platforms.

There are a number of websites that specialises in vacation rentals by owner. It's actually a very smart and convenient way of advertising your holiday property for maximum effect and minimum cost, which more and more second-home owners are taking advantage of. Looking for holiday rentals abroad on the Internet is the norm today, so this is one advertising channel that you should not overlook.