Sailing beyond Active Rain, don’t miss the boat.

[Many home stagers post on the Active Rain Blog site. While this is a great forum and brings home stagers and Realtors in close proximity, it shouldn't be the sole marketing focus. Instead, if you post there learn in the article below how you can leverage your efforts.]

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Posting on ActiveRain has many benefits but if that’s all you are doing, you are missing the boat.

Active rain is a good place to share with other homestagers, to learn from them and to get exposure of your business with other active rain members. But most Realtors and home stagers are not on active rain, so don’t let yourself spend all your marketing efforts there.

Instead, multiply your results.  Post articles on your own blog and on article directories and not just on Active Rain.

This will significantly boost the number and value of back links to your web site. It will accelerate your rise in the search engine results and win the top ranking in your market.

A post on Active Rain, puts some wind in your search engine rankings because the Active Rain site is seen by Google as an authority site. It has a page ranking of 6 which is pretty good, and a link from active rain back to your site gets more credit that a link from your cousin Mary’s occasional blog.

That said, if your only back links are coming from Active Rain, there is reason to believe that each additional post is less and less meaningful from Google’s perspective.

To really fill you sails, you want to get back links from dozens and then hundreds of other web sites.  And it’s easy to do. Particularly, if you are already posting regularly on Active Rain.

There is no reason why you can’t post the same article you intend to put on Active Rain on your own blog first.  I highly recommend that you set up a either a free Blogger Account, or better yet a free WordPress blog. There are a lot of reasons for this, but most notably, having your own blog sets you up as the expert and allows you to develop your own identity.

The second additional step is to register with eZine articles, and begin publishing your articles there as well.

These steps work in combination with each other, and capture the wind of your effort like a three masted ship captures the same wind three times over.

The same article with a few tweaks can be used for all three. And the results are a swifter voyage to the top of the rankings.

Let me explain it a bit more.

Your own blog makes you an authority in the eyes of those who come to it. Be they past or prospective customers, other homestagers or realtors or the media and general public.
This increases your status as the go to person in your market on home staging.

You have an article idea.  You write it up and post it on your blog.  You then take the same post and share it on Active Rain. You get Active Rain points, and rise in their listings. Plus you enjoy all the other benefits of participating in the active rain community.

Once you have it up on your blog and active rain, your rephrase it slightly to appeal to the general public. You then post in on one of hundreds of article directories. I recommend eZineArticles as the place to start.

Once posted on eZine Articles, your post is available to be reprinted by bloggers and ezine writers around the world. The bargain is that anyone can post your article, but they cannot change its wording and must include your resource box.

The resource box is where you put a brief blurb about yourself, and a back link to your blog and to your main web site.

As your article is picked up by blog writers, you get more and more back links. It builds slowly at first, but as time goes on it grows into a gale of a windstorm sending tens, then hundreds, and then thousands of back links to your web site.  Before long, Google realizes that you are an authority, and blows you past the finish line as the regatta winner and top ranked homestager in your market.

The beauty of this system is that you go yourself to the article directory and find other home stager’s articles from other markets and print their articles as entries on your blog.  That way you can add new material to your blog on a regular basis without having to write it all yourself.

For Example, I posted this article on Active Rain, and a modified form here and as a broadcast to my Home Staging mailing list.
You should do the same thing.  You write an article a week, and post one or two others from elsewhere on your blog. It sets you up as an expert.

You take the one article you wrote and with minor revisions as necessary post it in three places.

This provides you with a great deal of leverage, and will make you captain of your own destiny.

When you become a member of Market Maker, which will be opening next week, I will be sharing other ideas and techniques that will help you maximize your return on effort as you market your home staging business. Marketing can be challenging, that’s why it’s a good idea to put as much as possible on auto pilot, and then leverage the work you do so that it has maximum benefit.

Market Maker is a limited membership program. Members will have access to some innovative marketing tools that will put them on top of their local markets and provide a genuine competitive advantage. It is highly recommended that you sign up for advance notification of the start date as only one home staging company will be allowed to join from any given market place, and initial membership will be limited to only 30 companies.

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

Setting up your web page, and getting your web site to the top of the search engines is a challenging but worthwhile task. The first step is to take stock of your current web site. How does it stack up in terms of its meta tags, on page factors and off page factors. What would need to happen to get to the top of the search engine rankings in your local market? For $99, I will review your existing site, identify its strengths and weaknesses. Suggest any easy changes you or your computer person can make quickly, and evaluate the steps you would need to take to rank in the top organic listings in your market place. This will include a half hour personal consultation with me, after I complete the analysis. To learn more send me and email together with your web site address, and I will do a free quick evaluation of your site to see whether or not my services would do you any good. Then and only then, will I ask you for a commitment, and payment. Send email to enetwal@gmail.com

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