Good to see your post and another lodging forum member! Hope the poor response to your post hasn't run you off!

I too am in the hospitality field as an absentee owner of a property in Taos, NM. Market is and has been at about 50% occupancy for 5+ years. Market has sold same number of rooms since early 1990's +/- 6% 1 standard deviation. We do have our challenges. In other words, I too am focused and interested in any and all sales ideas.

To your list you might add or look at the following:
1. Solicit any area construction projects that may have out of town workers.
2. Work any nearby trucking companies who might have transient drivers needing an overnighter.
3. Build a data base of the corporate offices within a certain distance of your property and market to them.
4. Begin an ezine for your property that Guests can opt in for further information on your motel and local activities or specials.

We use ReservProperty for our GDS connection. I assume you are connected via Ramada. If other readers need GDS, email or post and I'll forward the contact data and answer any questions I can.

Thru our state lodging association, we use WorldRes for our property web site direct bookings. They charge 7% retail but thru the association deal our cost is only 4% for our site business. They also forward a little other outside biz.

We do biz with Lodging.com directly to save the GDS base and % costs. They're AKA resobase.

We also use a couple local res agents but results are dismal. We used to be a brand name member but they did NOT generate business for us - only 3% of total GDS/ADS res. were from their 800 or web site. They claim to be the "best value" and did not react well to our questioning the veracity of their claims.

Hope you and I can find a few other lodging folks and others who will join us in marketing and increasing our sales. I look forward to continuing this conversation!