The Master Bedroom is the inner sanctum of the home and an incredibly important room to stage properly. Here are two different videos on staging the master bedroom. Feel free to comment on what you liked or didn’t like about one video or the other. How are they different, how are they the same, or what other topic you care to mention. To comment, go to the very bottom of this post to find the comment link, it may say “No comments” if there haven’t been any yet. Be the first by clicking on it.

Home staging – the master bedroom

Staging has, of late, taken on increasing importance in real estate marketing. Several weeks ago Prudential Rubloff agent Francesca Rose and I shot video of a unit at ParkView Condominiums prior to its being staged. The transformation, as you can see…

Home Staging Tips: Master Bedroom Staging

www.homestagingchannel.com – BEST STAGING TIP Master Bedroom must appeal to both sexes. Keep bedding and décor in a neutral tone. You want to create a space that is warm and inviting. Allow homeowners to envision themselves relaxing in this space aft…

Technorati Tags: Master bedroom, staging master bedroom, homestaging, homestaging tips,

Technorati Tags: homestaging, Homestaging Tips, Master bedroom, staging master bedroom

Selling a vacant property is difficult. While the idea that a home would be wide open and totally decluttered would seem like the ideal way to show a property, the reality is that it’s not.

People it seems have less ability to envision and empty room than they do a partially filled on.  The props of existing furniture help them see the possibilities more than a truly empty home.

That is why home stagers are so successful with vacant homes. But a full staging can be expensive due to the need to rent and move furniture in and out.

A compromise solution is to do a virtual job of staging a home.  As you will see in the video below, it can be done with pictures alone for a lot cheaper.  This is a powerful way to stage a home. Particularly since the pictures a buyer sees on the internet are critical for them deciding which homes they will even look at.

A Virtual Staging Solutions Testimonial By Tom Ramos

Virtual Staging Solutions Today’s technology has allowed us to take the photos you send us and warm up the home by putting almost any type of furniture in the photo so that it appears as if the furniture is actually in the home!

This is where a virtual staging plays out to the best advantage. A vacant home can look staged on MLS and Online sites for pennies on the dollar of a formal staging. This will draw more lookers, who will see the home vacant, but already with an image in their minds of how it could look.  When they actually see the home in its vacant state, they will be more able to imagine their own furniture in it having access to pictures you provide from the virtual staging.

To learn more click on the banner below now.

Technorati Tags: virtual staging properties, virtual pictures of homes, home staging props, staging a vacant home, staging vacant homes, homestaging, vacant homes, selling vacant homes, marketing vacant homes, virtual staging, virtual home staging, virtual photo staging, do it yourself staging, DIY Staging, home staging, home stagers, Realtor Virtual Staging, Staging Tips for Realtors

Technorati Tags: DIY Staging, do it yourself staging, home stagers, Home Staging, home staging props, homestaging, marketing vacant homes, Realtor Virtual Staging, selling vacant homes, staging a vacant home, Staging Tips for Realtors, staging vacant homes, vacant homes, virtual home staging, virtual photo staging, virtual pictures of homes, virtual staging, virtual staging properties

It’s time to put your home on the market. You’ve hired a real estate agent. You’ve signed all the papers. You’ve been given the typical remarks about keeping your home neat and ready for potential buyers. And now you wait. Or do you?

Instead of waiting the typical 4+ months and then taking a reduced price on your home, why not invest in a home staging professional! Doing so will drastically decrease the amount of time your home spends on the market – up to 20 times faster – as well as increase the amount you get for your home – six percent over listing is typical!

What is Home Staging?

Home staging is simply the art of preparing your home for sale. Basically, there are five steps to home staging:

- Cleaning

- Getting rid of clutter

- Depersonalizing

- Decorating and accessorizing

- Maintaining

In days gone by, home staging consisted of advice by your real estate agent to “clean up” and “de-clutter.” If you had a savvy agent, you may have even been told to add fresh flowers or fresh linens in the bathroom. However, being a real estate professional is not the same thing as being a design professional.

Professional home stagers know exactly what to do to create the right atmosphere. They not only tell you to de-clutter, but know exactly what to do in order to create a clutter free environment. They can walk through your home and know immediately if you need to remove or rearrange furniture. With just a quick visit, they can tell you what will enhance your homes curb appeal.

Why Does Home Staging Matter?

When it comes to sales, first impressions are everything. A potential homebuyer will often decide to enter a home based on the outside appearance. And once inside, they make up their mind about a home within about 10 seconds. This means that you have 10 seconds to create an atmosphere that entices the imagination and creates a longing in the buyer.

Home staging is the way to create that desire and longing. Through home staging, you can put your home’s best foot forward.

Professional or Do-It-Yourself?

Professional home staging services are not free and many people believe that they can save money by doing it themselves. However, there are many pitfalls to the “do-it-yourself” mentality.

1. You obviously like the look of your home or you wouldn’t have created it, right? Making changes can be downright difficult when you love your things and feel that your home is comfortable “as is.” A professional can help you step back and see your home in the same way that a potential buyer will see it. They help you take yourself out of the home so that the homebuyers can see themselves in it!

2. What do you know about color, lighting, and traffic flow? If you are like most people, you know very little about these things. Although the colors or the traffic pattern worked for you and your family, a professional can see issues that will keep your home from having that “instant appeal.” Remember, buyers are not buying “your” house – they are buying “their” house!

3. Can you walk through your home and instantly list 10 inexpensive ways to increase the value of your home? Home stagers can. They know how to make the changes in a timely manner so that you can get your home on the market quickly. They view your home from the buyer’s point of view and can tell you what to store, what to keep, what to move, and what will add that pizzazz that will make your home sell.

Is Home Staging Cost Effective?

One of the most important things you can do to sell your home quickly and for the highest possible price is to “stage” it. The proof is in the pudding:

- According to the National Association of Realtors, for every dollar sellers put into staging, they get $4 back

- The average increase over the listing price is 6.32%. On a $500,000 house, that is nearly $32,000 and will more than pay for your professional real estate agent! Think of home staging as a way to get your real estate agent for free!

A real estate professional has the knowledge, experience, and qualifications to sell your home. A home stager has the knowledge, experience, and qualifications to prepare your home for the sale. Although professional services are not free, the cost of the services more than exceeds the benefits received!

Selling your home can be a trying time. Why wouldn’t you want to decrease the time your home spends on the market while increasing your sales price? Relying on a home stager can make all the difference.

Teri B Clark is a professional writer and published author. Her most recent book, 301 Simple Things You Can Do To Sell Your Home NOW and For More Money Than You Thought, explains these tips in more detail and offers many, many others. To learn more about Teri’s latest book, visit http://staging-your-home.blogspot.com or sign up for a free newsletter

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

Technorati Tags: home staging, homestaging, home stagers

Technorati Tags: home stagers, Home Staging, homestaging

Below’s a video I pulled from YouTube.

If you are a home stager, and want to add some visual appeal and variety to your blog, you should take a look at posting appropriate YouTube videos.

It’s really very easy to do.

First step is to search YouTube for videos relating to Home Staging. You will find a fair number, although not as many as there should be. (Hint – You really should be creating some of your own!)

Second, you will note a button under the actual video on YouTube called, < Embed >

All you need to do is click on that button, and copy the code that will appear.

Then on your blog or website, you would go to the HTML or Source Code part of your page and paste that code in, and your done.

Now you may want to add introductory comments and/or closing comments after the video to explain why you choose it.

In my case, I am using a very professionally done video, featuring Celebrity Interior Designer Cathy Hobbs, who is featured on the nationally syndicated program “Black Enterprise Business Report”. The quality of the video is quite high.

Don’t let the quality frighten you away from doing your own videos. With an inexpensive Flip Camera which you can get from your local Best Buy or probably even cheaper on Amazon you can be creating high quality videos in no time.

And let me tell you, videos on your website will help lift your ranking in the search engines. Google loves video, and it’s becoming the name of the game. So get out there and use the ones that you can from YouTube and start creating some of your own.

Your before and after pictures will mean a lot more once you’ve taken the time to learn how to do video.

Here’s Cathy…I hope you enjoy.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Using Video, Homestaging, Home Stagers, How to Use YouTube, Using YouTube, Cathy Dobbs, Flip Camera, Black Enterprise Business Report

Technorati Tags: Black Enterprise Business Report, Cathy Dobbs, flip camera, home stagers, homestaging, How to Use YouTube, Using Video, Using YouTube, youtube

Listen to this podcast, Chased by a Bear:

Homestaging Business Tip: Chased By a Bear!

Chased by a Bear!

There is a story of two people in the woods, being charged by a hungry bear. One stops to tie his shoes, the other scoffs, “you can’t outrun a bear.”  “I don’t need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.” His companion replied.

So too, with marketing in a local market.

You don’t need to be the best in the nation at marketing, you just need to be better than your local competitors.  That may be easier than you think.

With notable exceptions most home stagers spend very little time thinking about their marketing. Some may even feel it contrary to their nature. But if you are serious about your home staging business, you must give some serious thought to how you are going to attract your next customer and then the one after that.

That’s one reason you have a web page. But many of you make a mistake and think a web page is all about selling a potential customer on your staging skills. The purpose of a web page is to get prospects to call you.

I will discuss that more in a future article, but many of you have a bigger problem and don’t even know it.

Many people looking for a home stager in your town can’t find your web site.

In past articles, I’ve touched on two things you can do to remedy that problem. One is to change your page title tags to include relevant keywords.  Another is to change the Meta Tag description on your web page to also include relevant keywords.  There is one more major step to take in the meta tags area, that will greatly increase the chance that prospects looking online actually find you.

And that is the formal meta tag keywords.

There are over six million web sites that show up when someone searches for the term “Home Staging” in Google. That’s way too many, so most people when confronted with so many responses do a second search.

And in that second search they may try another keyword, like “home stager,” but more likely they will use the same keyword and add a geographical term.

When my son searches for pizza on the web, he adds his zip code. For a less common business like home staging, he might use his telephone area code, or the town name.

I’ve written about this before, but I am amazed at how few people actually take the time to make this simple change to the keywords they have in their meta tags.

If you do, and your competitors don’t, it’s like you putting on a pair of tennis shoes. Hey, they may even be a slightly better home stager than you. But if you are wearing geographically based keywords as your tennis shoes, you will get ranked above them in the computer search engines.  You will get seen, they won’t. Or if they do, they will be listed under you in the rankings.  You will get first chance to stage more houses. And they won’t know why.

Now I know some of you aren’t into competition, but this is business. If you want your phone to ring. If you want to be doing two to four more home stagings a month, you need to pay attention to your marketing.

You need to change the keywords in your web page’s meta tags. You need to include terms like “Home staging in Minneapolis”, “St. Paul Home Stager”, “House Staging in 612.”

In the first article of this series, I told you where and how to look up keywords. You need to find the top keywords people actually use, and then mix and match the appropriate geographical references for your market place.

It’s a chore, but not hard. It will make a real difference, and will allow you to outrun your competition.

Next week, the Market Maker program will be launched. All of these changes and much more will be handled by Market Maker for you. Market Maker is a unique program designed specifically for the Home Staging industry.  It will put your web based marketing on auto pilot and will pay for itself.

Membership will be limited, particularly at first. So if you want to sprint to the front of your market place, make sure you sign up for advance notice of the release date.

To do so go to http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Best Wishes,

Earl Netwal
MicroBusinessSpecialist
http://www.HomestagingBusinessTips.com/blog

Technorati Tags: homestaging, Keywords, marketing, Meta Tags

Listen to the Pod Cast

Getting People To Find Your Web Site

There are many ways to market ones home staging business. Most of them are enhanced by having a good web site where you can refer interested people to learn more about you and your business.

That way, when you give a talk to a church group or Chamber of Commerce luncheon you can give people a web page to visit.

But you can also get a lot of free traffic from people surfing the web for information on home staging, if your site is properly set up so it can be found.

Unfortunately, most home staging web sites are not easy to find, because they have not been optimized for search engine traffic. About 85% or all web traffic results from searches on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and a myriad of others.

If you were to enter the words “home staging” into Google today you would get over 6 million responses. The top 10 names on the page get the vast majority of actual page views, the others 6 million don’t, and that includes your page.

That means that 85% of the people searching for a home stager are unlikely to see your page at all. That’s lost business. Business you could have a shot at…if your web pages were properly optimized to get the search engines attention.

There is an entire industry devoted to Search Engine Optimization or “SEO.”

But there are some simple steps anyone can do, if you are willing to take action and make your web site more attractive to the search engines. If you do, you will get more traffic to your page. And that’s the first step. What you do with that traffic is another issue. But first things first.

In the next week I will be posting a series of articles on SEO. This is a prelude to the release of a major new product. The exact release date and time is being held under wraps for now.

The new product is called Market Maker. Not everyone that wants to will be allowed to join when it releases. I encourage you to sign up for additional information at
http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Today, I want to let you know how easy it is to begin to find keywords that apply to your business and website. In later articles I will tell you how to use these keywords, for that’s where the magic of SEO takes place.

There are a lot of expensive paid keyword tools, but the best free tool is Google’s.
Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
In the middle of the page, you will see a blank box with directions to enter a single word or phrase. Type in the word “Home Staging.”

Make sure the box that says synonyms is checked.

Then you will need to enter the letters from the Captcha code that is there. This is to confirm you are a person and not a computer or robot.

Then click get keyword ideas.

When I did this recently I got 127 keywords related to Home Staging and another 73 related terms. Not all of these are appropriate for a home stager looking to find customers. But many are. This is because different people will use different terms to search for you. If your web site is only set up to attract some of these keywords, you won’t stand a chance of showing up in the results the search engines return at all.

There is a lot more to say about all this, and it does matter. If your web site is properly optimized to get traffic from all the relevant keywords and your competitor across town isn’t you will get more business.

If your competitor’s website is properly optimized and yours isn’t you will loose out on business you could be getting.

If you’re not turning away customers today because you are too busy, you may want to consider making the effort to understand keywords and how they apply to your web site.

More on this tomorrow. And don’t forget to sign up for information on Market Maker.

It is designed to put your web marketing on auto pilot and to pay for itself!

Go to http://homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Best wishes,

Earl Netwal
www.HomestagingBusinessTips.com

Technorati Tags: Home Staging, homestaging, Homestagingbusinesstips, Market Maker, SEO

So far, I haven’t found a single home staging web site with good keywords in the meta tags of their web site.

This is a big mistake, as these meta tags are what almost everybody other than Google uses to find web sites to display.  And while Google may have the largest chunk of web search, they certainly don’t have it all. And with the older demographic that is most likely to use the services of home stagers they may even have a lesser share of the pie. That’s cause most older folk are likely to use the search tool that comes with their computer. My wife for example has Yahoo on hers. While she may say she is going to “Google” something, she actually uses Yahoo.  Yahoo uses meta tags. So does MSN, ASK and virtually everybody but Google.

I have created a base list of some ten dozen key words people often use to search for home stagers in their market. I add or subtract a few depending on the scope of service of the individual home stager, and then incorporate geographical elements to come up with a comprehensive set of what I call, “geographical long tail keywords.”  These are the phrases people actually use to search for you.

Every business should have these in the hidden meta tags that the search engine “bots” see, but no one else does. Unfortunately most web site developers are techies, and not marketers, and they often don’t have a clue as to what they should put in there.

For an industry like Home Stagers, where I have already done the Keyword research, I charge $75 for a compiled list of keywords. I have a few simple questions that Home Stagers need to answer, and then I can generally get their completed keyword lists done in 24 hours or less, depending on what’s on my plate that day.

Until the end of January, I am offering a $40 discount as part of my Recession Fighter effort, (Yours and Mine) So if you would like more people to find your web site, drop me an email, and I will give your web page a look see. If it needs the work, and so far they all have, I will let you know and submit my list of Q’s.

But hurry, I will raise the price to $75 effective February 1st.

email me at enetwal@gmail.com with any questions.

Technorati Tags: geographical long tail keywords, homestaging, Keywords, long tail keywords, Meta Tags