Allegra Dioguardi, Interior Designer and president of Styled and Sold Home Staging is now offering training and mentoring for aspiring and seasoned Home Stagers alike.

http://www.stagingtrainingbydesign.com

Allegra is a Parsons School of Design graduate. And her sense of design is the missing element in many home stager’s education. It’s one thing to declutter and establish some focal points, it’s another to tie everything together with a sense of style.

Allegra has had decades of experience that predates the home staging revolution. She has worked and taught many people how to stage model homes, long before the term Home Staging was coined.

She has invited me to prepare a module as part of her course on websites and search engine optimization. I am looking forward to it. It will give me another chance to distill the essence of my two eBooks, Why Most Small Business Web Sites Stink, and Main Street Climbs to the Top of the Search Engines.

I anticipate that I will revamp both my WART Analysis and Market Maker programs in advance of the course presentation. My goal will be to provide affordable support and training for Home Stagers who want to take a hands on approach to controlling their web sites.

I will use this preparation process to devise the easiest way to train home stagers to get more people to see their web sites, and then to get more of the people that do see them to actually do something.

In the meanwhile, I am very interested in hearing from you. What issues do you have with your web site that I can help you with?

What lessons have you learned that should be shared with other home stagers in the area of web site, and email marketing?

For More Information on Allegra’s Classes go to: Home Staging Training

Technorati Tags: Allegra, Allegra Dioguardi, Home Staging Training, Market Maker, WART Analysis

One of my clients for the WART Analysis mentioned that she has benefited from my past advice as well. She sent me this testimonial about how she took my advice and is top ranked not once but three times by virtue of her Squidoo lens.  It’s one thing to appear on the first page of the search engine, but when you are there three times, it really improves your credibility with prospects, don’t you think?

Here’s her comment,

—

—– Original Message —–

From: Earl Netwal

To: Kelly Heaps

Sent: Thursday, April 02, 2009 8:55 AM

Subject: Kelly, Homestagers should use Squidoo.

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 homestagers 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.

Best wishes,

Earl Netwal

http://HomestagingBusinessTips.com/MarketMaker/index.html

Technorati Tags: Internet marketing, Market Maker, squidoo, WART Analysis

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 PodcastSquidoo: A Great Supplemental Marketing Tactic

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 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

Home Staging Marketing: Why Market Maker?

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!
Home Staging Marketing: Market Maker is Alive!

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

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

Curb Appeal for Search Engines

Listen to podcast

Curb Appeal for Homestaging Web Sites

When you want to show yourself off, you may decide to put on your best dress.

When you talk to your clients, you tell them to stage their house, to present it to its best advantage.

When you put up a web site to attract potential customers, you need to do the same thing.

To attract people to your site, you need to dress up your META tags.

Geeky it may be…but it’s curb appeal for search engines.

Starting sometime next week, you will be able to get all of this done for you when you become a member of Market Maker and much, much, more.

But even if you don’t, you should be aware of what you can do to make you web site sparkle in the eyes of the Google bots. They roam the internet and determine whether or not your site has enough curb appeal to merit a look see.

Previously, We’ve talked a bit about finding keywords and how to improve your Page Title Tags. Today we are going to dress up one more section of your “Hidden code” the Hidden charm that the bots love to see. (See yesterdays article on how to find your meta tags, if you don’t know how.)

The Description Statement is one of the META tags that makes a difference in how to professionally stage your web site.

It starts like this:

“<meta name=”Description” content=”______”/>”

In the blank, you want to put a description of your business. This should be keyword rich.

In the first article in this series I told you how to look up keywords. This is where you begin to use them.

You want to come up with a sentence or two that includes as many top ranking keywords as possible and an appropriate geographical reference.

Example:

“Staged to Sell is a professionally accredited and certified Home Staging Service specializing staging houses in Minneapolis, Bloomington, Edina, Burnsville and Apple valley and other South Metro suburbs. Our home stagers are expert real estate fluffers and the best home staging company in Minnesota”

Notice: Very few human will ever see this, although some might. Stilted language is okay. We’re going for robot sex appeal, not your English teacher’s ok.

Getting people to find your web site is just the beginning of the process of communicating with them. But it is the essential first start. Like curb appeal, it will help get them to look closer, but its what’s on the inside that gets them to buy.

Next week, the Market Maker program will launch. Market maker will not only deal with this geeky tech stuff, but will also add significantly more to the conversation you have as a home stager with your prospective homeowner.

Market Maker is a complete home staging web site marketing plan that runs on auto pilot. It will give you a distinct competitive advantage. Sign up for advance notice at Go to

www.homestagingbusinesstips.com/MarketMaker/ComingSoon.html

Best wishes,

Earl Netwal

www.HomestagingBusinessTips.com/blog

PS: Market Maker is coming, but not everyone who wants to will be allowed to join. Initially only 30 Home staging companies will be allowed to join, and only one from every telephone area code. This will be a powerful tool to build your business. Be sure to sign up for advance notification.

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

Technorati Tags: Market Maker, Meta Tags, prospecting, Web sites

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

Technorati Tags: eZine Articles, Market Maker, Marketing Houses