Last month I did an office presentation for a local Long and Foster Office in Wayne Pennsylvania. I was not there to talk about home staging- I was asked to do a one hour seminar on blogging! Why blogging? The office manager had seen my blogs on home staging and the local real estate market in the Active Rain newsletter and realized that I must have been doing something right to get my posts noticed. His Realtors could use some advice on how to blog to grow their business and called me in to "talk blogging".
If someone had told me 2 years ago that I would spend almost nothing on marketing and rely on 4 blogs to promote my business I would have thought they were crazy.
You see as a small business owner I have tried a lot of strategies to advertise my business. As a home staging expert and small business coach I get calls daily from stagers asking for advice on how to advertise their business. My response:
- Newspaper ads- They are expensive and do not get results. I once spent $300 per week on ads and ran them for 6 weeks- I did not get one single call! Not even from friends that saw them.
- Glossy Brochures- They are gorgeous but expensive to create and even more exhausting and time consuming to distribute to offices. If you can get past the gate keepers at the front desk you can put them in the agents mail boxes. If you cannot you risk the chance of them getting tossed. I have seen receptionists throw mine away and have gone back into the office to remove them from the trash- if you have $50.00 to toss in the trash can let me know!
- Trade-shows- They are fun and exciting but expensive! I once spent $5,000 (you read that right) on a booth, materials, staging props, and hotel fees. The result? 21 phone calls from people wanting to become a home stager. Maybe I am in the wrong business.
- Grocery Carts- Sure the glamour shots are fun to look at when you shop but no one actually writes the name and number down! They are expensive too- $2000 for 6 months for one store!
So what can you do to market yourself in your local area for FREE?
Become a local home staging expert by blogging about your accomplishments as a home staging professional. If you are just starting out stage a room in your own home or better yet a friend's home, even better a friend that is a Realtor's home and write about that. Make sure to get a testimonial from that Realtor friend!
If you are an established business owner make sure to blog about the homes you stage and include photos and the name of the town and state that the home was in. Add the town to the title of the blog, the text of the blog and the blog tags. This way google will notice this info when it crawls the site. I love using Active Rain and Stage it Forward to catch up on the latest in the home staging industry but I also rely on it as a tool to market my business. When clients call me, 9 times out of 10 they have found my blog before my website using the keywords that I use in my blogs.
If you already have a blog on Active Rain consider becoming a blogging expert on a local website. I have blogged nationally about home staging for sites such as HomeGoods Stores and locally I now blog about design for Main Line Today Magazine.I do not talk specifically about staging but I use that blog as a way to promote myself as a local staging expert.
As small business owners we wear many hats- office managers, warehouse managers, human resource managers, and sales and marketing departments. Blogging is a fun and FREE way that you can promote your home staging business. I look forward to reading yours! kh
This is a great post. Thanks for the information.
Are there any online courses offered on blogging! I have read a lot of blogs and they are so varied I would like to be waked through the process!
What a great concept, blogging for marketing. Who would have thought... I have just recently gotten on the blogging bandwagon. It seems easy enough, really become a means of sharing a wealth of knowledge. I just hope there aren't too many out there sharing their lack of knowledge. Thanks for the post.
I'm new to blogging and so far like doing it and I have made some good connections because of it... I hope to improve my blogs and then to branch away from AR to other blogs as well. for now i'm just an AR blogger... Getting my feet wet! Thanks for sharing Diane
Great idea. I blog on AR and also my website: www.imtgonline.com. Thanks for the idea about blogging for local or national magazines.
Thanks for sharing, and you are right your name pops up on google all the time. I have been to your site a few times, it is very appealing and informative.
Hello Kate - Great post! I agree that blogging locally is the way to go! Though I receive many calls from advertising sales people who want me to spend $500 or more on throw away mags, I don't feel that it is necessary. With the Active Rain power...and Localism....it generates more calls for my business and additional calls when publications need my help on decor subjects. Wow...that $5000 booth rental is a killer...no thanks! Regards-Kathleen G
Great post. Whenever I've spoken about blogging I get the old eye-roll and grunt that it takes too much time. Yes, but it's free and it's way more effective, as you pointed out, than paying for all the typical forms of marketing. I'm thankful that I learned about the power of blogging from very early on. Plus, AR has been a great platform to learn and build relationships...what more could you ask for? =)
Continued success, Kate!
Kate, you are so right and I am quickly learning that spending big $$ on marketing ads are not always effective. It was very hard for me to jump in the RAIN but I am so happy that I finally did and hope to reach out to the San Antonio Real Estate community.
Kate, I totally agree. I have spent $600 on an ad that got me two calls from people wanting to be a stager, several calls from people wanting to sell me something and one actual job for a redesign. It was not worth it. The last three calls I got were from people who found me online because of Active Rain.
Hi Kate!
You are so smart! I am definitely going to see how I can implement this in my market! Thanks for sharing!
I have a number of friends who don't have a website anymore. They have an extensive blog, and they run everything through there. I'm not sure that we could do that via AR. I have yet to see us be able to add pages, exterior links, etc.
The persuasive argument for me is the enormous power of the points we all get on AR and how that places us in Google. It's quite remarkable.
Hope you're having fun at Disney. See you next week. J
This is right ON Kate! This is my main form of outside marketing. And the fact that it's free (well except for the time investment of course) makes it beautiful. It's the single most effective resource I have now other than word of mouth advertising and referrals. Gotta love it!
Kate - great post! Blogging is definitely a way to get exposure to a large audience. I will be doing way more of it this year.