Writing a good article is an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise and showcase your business in a local newspaper or online.  An article in a local paper of course will bring you some immediate attention in your home market and that is a powerful way to build your business.

The benefits of online article marketing may not be as clear nor as immediate, but it too can be a powerful way to market your business.  Each article posted online can contain backlinks to your web site. These backlinks are one of the factors Google and others use to decide where your web page appears when someone searches for a home stager in your community.  The more back links you have, the more likely you are to get top billing. And you want top billing.

A lot of articles will also make it more likely that the local media in your community will find you and seek you out, when an editor decides to do an article or newscast on home staging.  If a newspaper article is good for business, a minute or so of exposure on local TV is golden.

Article writing comes naturally for some and less so for others. But whatever your situation, it’s worth doing. But once done, there is no reason why you should submit it to only one venue.

The article is yours, and if you post it to Active Rain that’s great. But if you have gone to the trouble of writing the article why not get double and/or triple duty out of it?

Actually you can do a lot better than triple duty. Let me explain.

There are tons of people writing newsletter, blogs and ezines on the internet. Some write all their content themselves, but this gets to be time consuming and a royal pain for most. So, rather than writing everything themselves, they will go to one of hundreds of different article directories that exist and find suitable articles they can use for their publications.

These directories are always looking for fresh content to offer to these bloggers and editors. So they are willing to take your article and post it on their site so newsletter editors can find it.  To make it worth your while, they stipulate that anyone who uses your material must include your resource page.

Your resource page is a brief statement at the bottom of you article that you write that says who you are, and allows you to include usually two links to your web site and or other site you want people to go to.

When I write articles I might include a link to one of my blogs and maybe another to an eBook I am selling.

The article directories make money on the advertising on their site, the people using your article get fresh content to use in their publications.  It’s a classic win-win-win situation.

The Granddaddy of all article directories is www.ezinearticles.com. If there were just one place you wanted to post you article it would be there.  It is free to sign up as an author.  And almost everyone I know who is serious about internet marketing uses them. But as I said earlier, there are hundreds of similar article directories.

Now understand that each of these has their own set of rules, and it can be a bit frustrating at first to understand their different editorial requirements. But If you are capable of writing an article a week or even just an article a month, but are able to commit to doing so on a regular basis, it will be well worth your while to learn your way around these sites.

One of the biggest shortcuts out there are some of the article directory submitters. These are services that will take your article and submit it to multiple directories at once.  Some of these are pretty pricey for occasional users.  I use a service developed by Brad Callen called Article Submitter.

It too is designed for the professional.  It’s top level service the platinum allows you to submit your article to over 250 directories with the click of a single button. That’s a big time saver compared to going to each site and copying and pasting your article, title, resource box, and other items like keywords directory by directory.

But I don’t use the platinum version myself.  Frankly I started out with his Free version and later upgraded to the Gold. These take a little more effort, but once you have the basics down you can upload the same article to a lot of different directories. I usually submit to about 25 different directories for each article I write.

That gives me a lot more chances that my articles will be picked up by different newsletters and bloggers. Now this may be especially valuable to home stagers.  That’s because a lot of Realtors use newsletters to keep in touch with their farms or prospect list. (Home stagers should as well – that’s why you need something like market maker to build your own lists)

Since home staging topics will be relevant to many of these newsletters, I would guess that you would have a good chance of getting relevant article picked up. And while most will be from markets outside your market area, each will include a link back to your web site and do you some good.  And sooner or later, you will find a local Realtor or two using them in your own market, with any luck at all.

Article marketing is a powerful, if slow working tool to build a significant marketing advantage in your local area.  Article marketing is one of the topics that will be part of the monthly marketing calls we will be doing as part of the Market Maker Program.

PS: if you are interested in the free version of the Article Submitter,  look for the four tabs at the top of the page and click on article submitter.  That will take you to the free version.  If you can afford it, and plan on becoming a regular article writer, the Gold or Platimum versions are more powerful.

Which ever you use, once you have taken the time to write an article it make sense to distribute it as widely as you can.  The more directories you post on the more editors that will see your work and the more likely it will get published. It multiplies the benefits of your efforts.  Check out Article Submitter.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, article submitter, eZine Articles, Market Maker

Squidoo: A Great Supplemental Marketing Tactic Podcast

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Getting your web site to be top ranked on Google and the other search engines is a complicated task. Particularly, if you are one of many within a given market area.

A little known tool to most home stagers is a web portal called Squidoo. It’s similar in many ways to sites like Facebook, and Myspace in that it allows people to create a web presence easily, but unlike the aforementioned it unabashedly permits commercialization.  That means you can put up sites that advertise your business.

The easiest way to do so is to reuse much of the content you have on you web page now, and/or items you have just taken down, or not yet put up on your main web site.

Squidoo calls its pages, lens.  There are a group of modules that you can create and edit in minutes once you get the hang of their system.

The most critical point when setting up your first lens is what you call it.  Pay attention now.  Call your lens, “Home Staging in ______” Fill the blank with your top geographical reference point in your market.

If you do, you will often find that your Squidoo lens will get higher ranking than your own web page, even if you have optimized your meta tags geographically as I do for my Market Maker Clients.

That’s because Squidoo itself has a high PR or page rank in the eyes of Google.

Now what you want to do is include links in your Squidoo Lens to your web site’s home page and to additional pages within your web sites.  This helps raise your web sites ranking in Google’s eyes as well.

It sees Squidoo as an “authority” site and gives more credence to links coming from it.

When I say you want links from your Squidoo lens to additional pages in your web site, I am suggesting that  if you have a separate page on your web site for Realtors (and I think you should), then somewhere in your Squidoo lens you have a section about Realtors in your home town, and link not to the front page of your web site, but rather to the page about Realtors on your web site.  Do this with other pages as well.

Google likes these links to internal pages.

There is a lot more to internet marketing than having a web site. And that is one of the reasons the Market Maker Program includes a monthly seminar on internet marketing.  While Squidoo is easy to use, like everything, there is a learning curve.

And once you master the basic mechanics you also need to learn the strategies to make it work for your particular needs.  There are a number of eBooks about Squidoo out there.  I publish one called Squidoo Basics. It is a general introduction to Squidoo and not specifically directed to home staging, but worth the $17 to get a handle on the Basics.

There are other formats beyond Squidoo, like Hub Pages, but Squidoo is probably the best place to start building a broader internet presence.  To get started all you need do is open an account at www.Squidoo.com

In due course, you will not only get your web site on the top of the Google Rankings in your home town, you will also have a Squidoo page there as well. When prospects see you listed not once, but twice, in the top of the local listings, they will begin to understand that you are the person to go to locally for home staging services.

And that’s where I intend my Market Maker members to be.  On top of their local markets.

Technorati Tags: Market Maker, squidoo, Top Ranking

I published part 1 of this the other day, so I will follow up with part 2 today. Normally I would show case another home stager’s articles. Debra Gould doesn’t need a lot of extra promoting because she does it so well herself. But then again, this is one of the ways she does it. And that’s just one of the lessons I am trying to share with you.

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Home Staging Marketing Tactics That Will Put You Out of Business – Part 2

Many design-oriented individuals decide to become home stagers without any kind of business training or marketing knowledge. While they mean well, they often stumble into some terrible marketing tactics that will likely put them out of business faster than you can say, “What were they thinking?”

In part one of this article series, I discussed why using sex appeal and inappropriate humor are awful ideas for home stagers trying to build their businesses and be taken seriously.Today I’ll share another marketing tactic that will probably put your home staging business under:

Offering a guaranteed sale

It’s surprising how many ways home stagers can find to bankrupt their businesses. I recently heard that some home stagers are now guaranteeing the sales of their clients’ homes.

In a tough economy and slow real estate market, one can guess why a home seller would want a guarantee when they’re investing in home staging services, and one can see why a home stager would be tempted to provide it, knowing how effective staging is in getting a quicker sale and wanting to do anything to attract new business. But, if a stager is in business for the long run, they really have to explore the business rationale behind providing a sales guarantee.

I am against home stagers making any guarantee of a real estate sale from their staging because of the numerous factors involved that the stager has no control over. No matter how well a home is staged, there are several factors that will help determine whether a home sells or not.

For example:

* Is the house being listed in the right season? (Christmas and Spring Break are known for being poor times for real estate sales)
* Is the house priced correctly for its location, size and market conditions?
* Does the house have the features buyers are looking for in that area? If it’s a one bedroom home in a family neighborhood, it’s going to be a tough sell no matter how well it’s staged.
* Will the agent do an effective job of marketing the property?
* Will the home seller maintain the home in showing-ready condition 100% of the time?
* Is the home seller going to make it easy to show by not requiring lengthy notice, preventing showings during certain times, etc.?
* Will the home seller keep the house sparking clean and odor free during all showings?
* How are the agent and home seller going to handle offers they receive? Negotiations break down all the time for different reasons.
* Will the home seller accept any offer? More goes into an offer than the price.
* Will the home pass inspections?
* What if the buyer doesn’t get financing and the deal doesn’t close?
* What if there’s a natural disaster, political or economic event that interferes with the real estate market when the house is listed?

A home stager can guarantee that a house will show better when it’s staged, but they can’t guarantee a sale unless they’re prepared to buy the property themselves! It’s a much better business practice to gather statistics from past clients about the average amount of time properties remain on the market after you stage them and how that compares to similar properties in that price range at the time.

Collect testimonials and be prepared to share your track record and show off your knowledge of the local real estate market, but don’t guarantee a home sale.

In the third and final installment in this article series, I’ll discuss why giving away free advice can sink your home staging business.

Students of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program learn how to operate a profitable home staging business. Creator and expert home stager, Debra Gould, has been an entrepreneur for 20 years. She has taught more than 1000 people from across the world how to start and professionally market their home staging businesses

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debra_Gould

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, eZine Articles

The Staging Diva is one of the best known personalities in home staging circles. It should not come as a surprise that one of the tactics she uses to attain and maintain that position is article marketing.

You may not be as articulate and experienced a writer but that’s not necessary either, We will continue to post home staging articles here from top notch writers and more everyday ones to demonstrate to you that article writing is another tool you can put in your arsenal.

If you would like to get an excellent how to resource on article marketing I highly recommend Doug Champigny’s Beginners Key to Understanding Article Marketing

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Home Staging Marketing Tactics That Will Put You Out of Business – Part 1

Unfortunately, many individuals with a talent for decorating attempt to become home stagers without any kind of business training or marketing knowledge. With the best of intentions they stumble into some awful marketing tactics that will put them out of business faster than you can say, “What were they thinking?”

When you’ve made a career of being a home stager, like any business you might run, marketing must be a focus of your efforts to generate a steady stream of paying clients. Unfortunately, some home stagers aren’t portraying an image of professionalism, which not only hurts their own success, but casts a bad light on the home staging industry as a whole.

Before I entered the home staging industry, I owned a marketing consulting firm where I used my MBA and experience working for advertising agencies to help promote Fortune 500 companies. It pains me to see tacky marketing gimmicks being used by any company. But it’s worse when it’s a staging business because I sincerely want to see people succeed in this field and raise the standards in the industry. That’s why, when I train others to become home stagers, there’s a great deal of focus placed on smart marketing techniques.”

The following are some of the worst marketing tactics I’ve seen carried out by home stagers:

Using sexy as a selling point.

It’s true that sex sells, but it’s a terrible idea to use your sex appeal to sell home staging services for many reasons.

* It’s not safe. You’re going to a stranger’s home, most likely by yourself. If you don’t want to put yourself in a bad situation, don’t claim to be a sexy home stager.
* It’s irrelevant. As long as you can present a polished image and prove your ability to transform a property to appeal to buyers, it doesn’t matter what you look like.
* It’s inappropriate. Usually, the marketing I’ve seen by home stagers who are trying to attract customers based on their level of sexiness is just ridiculous and it’s impossible to take these stagers seriously.

I recently came across a “home staging” website featuring a strange animated character telling the world that she was her state’s sexiest stager. The whole thing was strange. After the animated head introduced herself as her state’s sexiest stager she said that if you want your home to sell fast and for top dollar you should stay tuned for weekly tips on sexy staging.

Then the animated head tells a joke: What is the difference between broccoli and boogers? Kids won’t eat broccoli. Which led her to sharing the day’s sexy staging tip which was (and months later still is), “Remember to clean the boogers off the walls before you put your house on the market.”

This is enough to make any reasonable adult cringe, and would lead even a teenager to ask, ‘Is this a real home staging business?”

Nobody is going to trust that person to prepare their largest asset to sell. There are ways to use video effectively to enhance your marketing message, but a “sexy” animated robot, especially one joking about “boogers”, is not one of them.

In part two of this series of articles, learn why offering a guaranteed sale based on home staging services is a terrible marketing idea.

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould, president of Six Elements and creator of The Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program with 900+ Graduates worldwide. Debra is the author of two home staging guides and offers a Directory of Home Stagers to help homeowners and real estate agents locate home stagers who will decorate homes to sell quickly and for top dollar

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Debra_Gould

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Learn how to use article marketing to build traffic to your web site and build your reputation in the home staging universe. Get a copy of the Beginners Key to Understanding Article Marketing by Doug Champigny.

Technorati Tags: Articel Marketing, Debra Gould, Ezines Articles

I was asked to introduce myself by one of the people I have been marketing Market Maker to this past week. I have done so in the past, but thought I would offer the quick response I gave her here again. My name is Earl Netwal.

I call myself a micro business specialist and my focus is on helping small businesses understand and more effectively use the internet.

Thousands of businesses have web sites that are doing nothing for them. Most are little more than glorified yellow page ads. I used to think that many could be transformed into significant assets if their owners knew what to to do. Then I realized I was wrong. Most very small businesses are too busy trying to stay alive. Even if they know what to do, they don’t have the time or energy to do it. But frankly most of them haven’t a clue as to what to do. So there is a double hurdle.

To try to overcome that I wrote a short report I call, “Why Most Small Business Web Sites Stink.” It’s available free from my microbusiness web site blog. It may be that my title should be changed, because what the report is actually about is a comparison of the functions of a web site to that of a trade show. By comparing and contrasting different familiar aspects of a typical trade show I try to communicate what a web site could and should be.

Last year I took a special interest in home stagers as a test subject area. I have a decade plus background as a Real Estate Broker and wanted to find some aspect of the business where a lot of “micro” businesses still prevailed. I did a significant survey of almost 200 different home stagers in the US and Canada to learn about the issues facing them as small business people.

This past week I launched a service specifically targeted to home stagers. It seeks to assist them in revamping their meta tags which are almost always awful and eventually hand hold them through a variety of other search engine optimization techniques through a series of monthly teleseminars. This is to get a greater number of visitors from their market to their web sites.

Then I set them up with an auto responder system and what I call an ethical bribe. This is designed to get their visitors to opt in and allow them to build a list of prospects from their community interested enough in home staging to come to their web site.

I then offer them a series of follow-up articles to drip on these prospects. This idea is hardly new. It’s standard practice in internet marketing 101, but so few main street businesses apply it to their web sites, and so far I haven’t found a single home stager who does.

As a result, I am confident I can help my members increase their share of the business in their markets, by out-competing their fellow home stagers and as importantly by converting more people with a passing interest in home staging into actual customers.

I am looking for people to help spread the message to the home staging community.

What I am doing could easily be applied to hundreds of other businesses outside of home staging as well.

To learn more go to Market Maker

Technorati Tags: Market Maker

Why Market Maker? Podcast

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The Market Maker program is now live and available for Home Stagers interested in getting more business from their existing web pages.

I did a survey of home stagers last year. One of the things many expressed disappointment in was how little new business they got from their web pages.

Since then, I have held a tele-seminar, and written dozens of articles on how to turn that around. Yet relatively few home stagers have applied the secrets well known and taught in professional internet marketing circles.

I recognize the problem in myself. I often know what to do, but doing it is often another story.

Properly setting up your web page to get customers isn’t about nicer and fancier before and after pictures. It’s about attracting people potentially interested in home staging from YOUR market place, and getting them to identify themselves, so you can directly market your services to them.

The steps required include: changing some techie things about your web site; adding an opt-in box, which used to mean you needed to redo the front page of your web site; writing a special report; and then a long series of email marketing pieces.

Now none of these are too difficult, if you know how to do them, and seemingly impossible if you don’t.

And so, most people didn’t.

That’s why I developed Market Maker. Market maker will do all this for you. Develop new Meta Tags for your web site that will help more people from your town find your web site. Create an opt in form that doesn’t require you to redo your existing web site. It provides a great “ethical bribe” that will encourage people that visit your site to let you know they were there. Let you know they are interested in home staging and most importantly giving you permission to tell them more about you and your services.

Market Maker will dramatically boost your business.

Market Maker improves your marketing in two ways.

First it helps your home staging company stand out among your competitors. You will be the one that catches and keeps your prospects attention. This will get you a larger percentage of the existing business in your community.

Secondly, not everyone who thinks about using a home stager ends up doing so. With Market Maker, a larger percentage of them will, and when they do decide to use a home stager, it’s highly likely they will pick you.

To get more information go to Market Maker

Technorati Tags: Home Staging, home staging marketing, Market Maker, marketing

Home Staging Marketing: Market Maker is Alive!

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Market Maker is alive an open for the first 30 Home Stagers that want to transform their web sites into marketing machines.

Market Maker will set you up with a proper set of Meta Tags, including Page Title Tags, and effective Site Description and geographically based long tailed keywords.  These tweaks will help more people in your local market find your web site.

Then, Market Maker will offer your visitors an Excerpt from Allegra Dioguardi’s new eBook, Styled by Design, a Guide to Home Staging Design Principles.  This will get your visitors to raise their hands and identify themselves, and get them to give you permssion to follow-up with them.

That will allow you to build a relationship with them, over time.  And people make their buying decisons based on relationships.  That means you will get a greater percentage of them to be your customers, than if you just relied on a single visit to your web site.

As you will see when you visit, Market Maker offers much more as well.

Professional internet marketers have been using this basic strategy for years to make millions. It is readily adapted to the Home Staging industry.  But in the past, it required making major changes to your web site, which is time consuming and an expense.  It required writing a special report to serve as an ethical bribe to get people to sign up.  This was a barrier to some. It required learning how to set up and run an auto responder, and this too became a barrier.  And finally, it required creating a whole series of follow-up articles which compounded the writing burden for many.

Market Maker sweeps all those objections out of the way. Market Maker handles virtually everything for you and super charges your entire internet marketing effort. Once set up it can run for years, greeting new prospects as they appear, establishing a positive relationship with them and converting them from web browsers into home staging clients. And it does it all 365 days a year, while you are sleeping or on vacation.

Market Maker will give you a competitive advantage in you maket, but only if you are the first in your telephone area code to join. Membership is limited to just one Homestage per area code.  Don’t be the one frozen out.

Go to Market Maker now to get all the details. You won’t find a lot of hype. Instead you will discover an complete and thorough discussion of Market Maket and how it works.  When you are through reading you will be in a position to make a rational decison as to whether Market Maker is right for you or not.

I’m betting you will see its benefits and how it will give you more time to do what you like, home stagings, rather than worrying about your marketing.

Technorati Tags: Market Maker

Home Staging Marketing: Winning Over the Null Set

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If you remember the null set from your school days, or as likely from your kid’s math homework, you might recall it being used to describe those who did neither a or b but nothing at all.

You put a lot of effort into marketing your home staging services and sometimes get undercut by your competitor, and that hurts.

Marketing is essential in our competitive world, particularly in adverse times. Most people realize it’s all the more important to invest in marketing when times are tough. But do they realize that sometimes the biggest competitor isn’t the gal down the street with that “other” designation, but rather the null set.

In this case, the null set includes the people who come to your web site because they are considering home staging, but then decide to do without.

That’s one of the reasons the little gift or bribe I wrote about yesterday is so effective. If you offer visitors something of value on your web site and then follow up with them; you have a far better chance of getting them to use staging and most importantly your services to stage their home.

If you don’t, it’s like betting your business on one cut of the deck, high card wins.  They either are sold on your services when they see your web site or not.

In contrast, with a little gift, and follow-up you have a chance to continue that conversation for days, until they either say yes or no. You get multiple chances to share with them the value of staging and win their business. You won’t win over the entire null set, but you have a better chance at getting more of them to use your services.

This process is at the heart of the Market Maker system.  Market Maker will be launching very soon. You want to be part of it.

http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html
Now I confess I have been stressing the need to sign up before your competitor does in most of my posts.   And while it’s true that market maker will give you a distinct advantage over your competitor, a good part of that advantage will be in turning members of the null set into customers.  People who otherwise might not have staged at all.

Effective marketing isn’t just about beating your competitor to the job, it’s about getting more people to use your services.  Market Maker does both.

That said, it’s still true that only one home stager will be allowed to join the program from any one telephone area code.  So it’s important that you at least take a good look at Market Maker as soon as possible. And then decide to join or not.  Don’t let your friendly competitor take your option to join away from you by beating you to the punch.

Home stagers who sign up on the advance notice list will get a half hour head start to join and advance notice of the actual start time.  Word to the wise, I would sign up for that head start today.
Market Maker
http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Earl Netwal
Micro Business Specialist
www.HomeStagingBusinessTips.com/blog

To get on the advance notice list register your company at
http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Technorati Tags: Home staging marketing tips, marketing

We all like things that are free and pretty and/or delicious.

And if it’s something that is also related to what our web visitors
are looking for and the product or service we wish to offer, it’s
very much all the better.

In recent articles we’ve been looking at what it takes to get
people to find your web site. There are a whole host of tricks
tweaks and tactics collectively called Search Engine Optimization
that can help build traffic to your web site.

But once they are there, what are you going to do to get them to
pay attention to you?

You are going to give them a sucker, a popsicle, an ice cream cone
just like you did your kids. Only in the adult world we are going
to give them something of value, related to our mutual interests.

Presumably they came to your web site because they were at least
somewhat interested in Home staging.

You want to be able to give them something they can use related to
home staging. Something for free. Something they can take with
them, right here and now. With no fuss or muss. With no obligation.

If you do and no one else does, you will be ahead of the game. What
you want to give them is a free report of some sort that they can
download. A Gift.

To get it they will need to give you their email address so you can
send it to them. That way you will know who they are, and how to
get a hold of them again.

That will allow you to send them another gift in a few days. And
another.

And if you keep it up, they will end up calling you when they are
finally ready to make up their mind and hire a home stager.

If you have a pretty thing to dangle on your web site, and no one
else does, you are going to get their attention and eventually
their business.

It might not be nice to bribe your kids to get their attention but
it works.  It works with prospective customers as well.

Market Maker is coming and coming soon.  Market Maker takes the
ideas of Search Engine Optimization and what we call ethical bribes
and much more and wraps it into a unique marketing plan
specifically designed for Home Stagers. It’s a marketing plan on
auto pilot that pays for itself.  Membership in the plan is limited
and you should be sure to sign up for advance notice as not
everyone will be allowed to join.

Technorati Tags: ethical bribes, Internet marketing, Market Maker, marketing

Tasha Moody got me see colors with this useful article she has posted to the eZine Article Directory. I bet it gets a lot of use in real estate and other blogs. Each time it gets used it will send Google Bots back to her web site and even if no one takes her up on her offer for color swatches, or lives in the Atlanta area, she will benefit by way of a higher search engine placement in the Atlanta Market. Plus should someone in her market see it, they will recognize that she is knowledgeable, maybe even an expert, and that will help raise her status in their eyes.

There you are, touring a new listing in the perfect location, with the right number of bedrooms and the best school district. It’s the only one in your price range, and while it’s clean and new and generally de-cluttered, you just can’t get past the master bathroom seeming uninviting and the finished basement feeling a bit dark. As much as you’d like for it to be, it just isn’t “the one.” No offers today.

Unfortunately what that seller failed to realize is that a simple change in paint colors would have been the missing link to clenching an offer, all for the cost of a can of paint. Choosing the right paint colors is a critical step in preparing a home for sale and is one of the biggest players in the emotional connection (or lack thereof) that a buyer makes with a property. What are those perfect paint colors for helping sell houses? Well, that’s the million dollar question that can be very difficult to answer if you don’t know color. Read on for some basic tips that will get you on the path to choosing the right colors for staging a home:

1. Neutral is great, but all beige is boring
A common real estate misconception is that painting the walls white or beige throughout the entire home will give the buyers a “blank slate.” Problem is, it usually turns out to be a very boring, unmemorable blank slate that rarely results in increased profits or a faster sale. While beige is much safer than super bright or very bold colors, having a variety of color within the right palette is ideal. However, using a warm beige or tan such as Shaker Beige by Benjamin Moore in the common areas (hallways, stairwells, foyers, etc.) is recommended.

2. Stick with earth-toned varieties of tan, green, yellow, blue and grey
For example, when looking at greens stay in the sage, celery or rosemary ranges. Or when thinking of yellow go with the more buttery or golden tones as opposed to the brighter varieties. Look to the types of tones and shades you see in nature most often and mimic those in your color choices.

3. Either the walls or the décor should take the stage – but not both
If your living room has dark brown leather and walnut-toned furniture, you’ll need to go with a lighter tone on the walls to balance. Likewise, if you have a maple dining room set and white fabric upholstered chairs, you’ll need a warmer color on the wall and complimentary place settings/centerpiece to ensure the room doesn’t appear washed out. Consider your furniture, cabinetry, artwork, flooring and countertops when choosing the shade of paint.

4. If in doubt, go with the lighter option
If you’ve narrowed your options to two or three colors and all would make great choices, a rule of thumb is to pick the lighter option when going to sell. While deeper tones can make fabulously enticing rooms, they can be tricky. If you aren’t working with a home stager or color consultant it’s better to air on the side of safe, rather than chance overwhelming the seller.

5. Green, red and yellow are appetizing colors
Sage green, apple red and golden yellow are great colors for dining rooms and kitchens because they evoke appetite. Red is definitely the trickiest of the three to use effectively without overwhelming a room, but if combined with the right furniture and accents it makes for a very appealing color. Yellow is a cheery color that encourages conversation. Green is a combination of appetizing and soothing, making it popular with many different types of people and in several different rooms of the home.

6. Cool colors like blue and green have soothing, spa-like appeal
Use a gray-blue in a bathroom with an orchid by the sink and a stack of fluffy towels by the tub, or sage green in a bedroom with white bedding and dark wood furniture for a soothing, harmonious appeal. Some studies have shown that blue and green actually have healing properties such as lowering heart rate and blood pressure! Try “Iced Marble” or “Mosaic Tile” by Benjamin Moore.

7. Order a sample can
When you have decided on your colors and picked the shade you feel is best, always pick up a $5 sample can of paint and test it on a decent-sized area of several walls with different lighting in the room to ensure it works on the grander scale. This small investment will save you a lot of time and energy in the end, as tiny paint swatches can often be deceiving.

Good Luck!

Tasha Moody is a certified Home Staging Expert and President of Simply Staged, an Atlanta home staging company. Go to http://www.PaintColorsThatSell.com to learn about the 27 BEST staging colors that consistently help sell the listings Tasha stages. Order your own paint fan of the colors with oversized swatches and details of which room the color works best in for just $25 so you can start recommending paint colors with confidence! Choosing beautiful paint colors has never been so easy.

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