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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
Listen to this Audio Post on Why People Aren’t calling you to stage their homes.
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Last week, internet marketing expert Frank Kern launched a new product that sold for $2,000 each. In less than 24 hours he sold 2,000 units. That’s $4,000,000 in one day. Not too shabby.
Who would have thought you could sell such an expensive product to so many people so fast in today’s economy? How did he do it? Well, that is actually the information Frank was selling. How to sell goods and services on the internet.
Part of Frank’s success stems from his willingness to share a good deal of valuable information with his prospects before he launches his product, and I am going to share one of the key tidbits he offered with you today.
Frank would say there are just three reasons people aren’t buying your home staging services today.
They Don’t Want It
No Money
Don’t Trust or Believe you
They Don’t Want It.
Some never will want your services. And while others just need to be educated a little, it’s a mistake according to Frank to be spending too much time on people who don’t want your services. Instead look for ways to market to people who do.
No Money
Frank makes a more important point here. While no money may mean no money, it usually means that they don’t want it badly enough. If people are telling you they don’t have the money, you haven’t yet found a way to increase their desire. You may need to focus more of your marketing efforts on what’s in it for them.
For your home owner, it may be a higher sales price, or a quicker sales, but it also may be just getting help doing everything that needs to be done to get ready for the big move.
Make sure you are clear on the real motivations of those you have already worked with, and then share these with those you hope to work with.
Don’t Trust/Believe You.
Your prospect needs to not only believe that your services will benefit them, they need to trust that you are someone they can work with. Someone they like.
While credentials may help, social proof is far more effective. A list of past homes staged, testimonials from happy customers are powerful tools to help bridge the trust gap. These should be part of your standard presentation.
But in addition, you should find ways to reach out to your prospects and share. Provide them with good useful information, and keep in touch over time.
Little gifts in the form of useful information on how to prepare for a move, provided via luncheon talks to a local church group or social group not only give you visibility and credibility, it offers value.
Little gestures along this line, activate a sense of reciprocity, in which the recipient begins to feel a bit of an obligation to return the favor. This can lead to you at least getting a chance to bid a project.
I recommend that home stagers web sites offer a free gift that viewers can download, and then follow up with over time with a series of additional tips. This helps build that reciprocity response, and more importantly helps build a sense of friendship. And we tend to trust our friends.
Have you ever passed by a blank billboard on a backwater highway with a 1-800 number on it? Or perhaps one saying, “Your message here?” I have, but it’s been a while since the last time. Mostly I suspect, because I seldom venture off the main freeways in my normal travels these days.
In past years, I did a bit more traveling to smaller towns in out-state Minnesota and Wisconsin and I would see a fair number of them. Mostly on roads that used to be the main thoroughfare in the pre-freeway era. I suspect a good many of them still exist.
In those traveling days I used to consult with towns and counties on how to attract businesses to their communities. Today, I consult with businesses on how to attract customers. Same business, different focus.
A billboard is a marketing device some businesses use to attract customers. It’s like a display ad in a newspaper or magazine. It provides a graphic image and perhaps some keywords to people who happen to be passing by. On the highway, in their cars. In the newspaper or magazine as one’s eyes pass from one article or story to the next, one page to the next.
They have a hard job to do. They need to make an impression on your conscious or sub conscious mind quickly. It must be the sub conscious the advertiser is aiming for because there are very few such images that ever really capture my conscious mind’s attention.
Now as a kid, I remember the old Burma Shave signs because they were different and funny. I remember a number of teaser campaigns over the years that had me guessing as to what was coming next, but I can’t remember what any of them were about at the moment. I admit that I do notice some of the new billboard campaigns from time to time when they change along one of my regular routes. But I don’t remember ever buying something because I saw a billboard, do you?
My uncle Urban had a billboard on the highway from the Minneapolis to St. Cloud where he had a butcher shop. The sign read, “Gaida’s Meats” with a sausage on on fork that protruded above the sign. It was a clever enough visual effect, breaking out of the box. I suspect he got at least occasional comments from customers in the store about it. Particularly when it was new. But I doubt it brought in any new customers. It may have, however, brought in a few more existing customers. Not because it made his product any more valuable, but because it created status. A sense of importance because everyone who lived in St Cloud saw it whenever they returned home from a trip to the cities.
In my uncle Urban’s eyes the sign wasn’t meant for people from Minneapolis that happened to be going to St Cloud, it was for people from St Cloud who happened to have traveled to the Twin Cities. They would be coming back on this road. And that’s where he placed his sign.
Now I’m talking about billboards today, because in many ways they are like a business website. The clever ones may catch my attention as I browse through many related sites online. But only if they are on the highway I am traveling. If I am on the freeway, and the web site is on a dusty county road, I will never see it. And no matter how cute, creative or otherwise inspired it may be, it may as well not exist at all. It may as well be blank. In my book, it’s not even worth a toll free call to find out how much someone wants to put my message on it.
When it comes to online advertising, far too many people have spent all their effort coming up with a great image and feel for their sites and not given any thought to whether to put their site on a freeway where it will be seen by thousands or on a dirt road where only the crows and gophers will see it.
On the internet, the way you get in front of the traffic from Minneapolis to St Cloud is to make sure the keywords in your meta tags put you on the right highway. In addition, you need to use those same keywords in your message – in the body of your web pages.
This is particularly easy for local businesses, and a bit more difficult for those who compete on a national scale.
If my uncle still had his butcher shop, I would encourage him to use St Cloud Butcher Shop, St. Cloud Meats, Saint Cloud Butcher Shop, Stearns County Butcher Shop, Benton County Butcher Shop, and Polish Sausage as just a handful of maybe several hundred keywords in his meta tags.
In fact, I would take every conceivable term like meat, sausage, etc., and pair it with every conceivable geographical term that people in the area might use to find what they were looking for in a computer search. I call such terms geographical long tail keywords. And they are designed to mimic the actual phrases people might type into their search engine. While they might type “sausage” the first time, when they see over 20 million responses they will quickly find a geographical term to narrow their search if they are looking for a place like my uncle’s where they can get good Polish sausage.
And yet if you look at most business web pages you will see terms like plumber, attorney, dentist, groceries, resort, bait, or what have you in their meta tags. Such keywords are worthless. But so too is having Minneapolis, or Saint Cloud, or New York.
As my frequent readers know, I have been working with the Home Staging Industry for the past 9 months or so. As I dug deeper into the keywords that people actually use, I have grown a list of 124 terms for the home staging industry. Most were fairly obvious, others less so. I have been offering a service to the industry where I concatenate the various keywords I have researched together with the relevant geographical modifiers for individual home stagers. It gets a bit tedious and time consuming. But the result has been a block of keywords that puts my client’s web pages on the internet freeway, while their competitors are advertising their business on the dusty back roads of the internet where no one goes.
Where do you want your billboard to be? If it’s appropriate for your business, follow my example and create a series of geographical long tail keywords. It will make a difference in how often your potential customers find you. It also will make it far more likely that you get top ranking for a keyword phrase when you are the only person who has taken the time and effort to include in in your keywords.
Don’t forget that you also want to incorporate as many of the major terms into the body of you text as well. So if you are a Homestager in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, make sure to say so in the text of your web page as well as in the meta tags.
[note: this is a new chapter I will be adding to the resource section in my new free report, on Why Most Small Business Web Sites Stink." Thus while the examples I use are not directly tied to home staging, the content is applicable to home staging as well as most any business or non profit agency for that matter.]
Auto Responders:
The key component required to transform your current static web site into a marketing tool, is your auto responder. The service I use and recommend is Aweber, www.BuildRelationships.aweber.com . It is by far the preferred service, and is used by most of the internet marketers I know.
While it’s possible to have a programmer develop an auto responder service on your own web site, using a professional service makes a lot more sense in the long run. First, it’s cheap. Rates will vary depending on how much traffic you generate, but as of my writing this, most small businesses will be able to start for well under $25 a month, even less if you take advantage of their annual payment plans.
There are a couple of things you should understand. Aweber uses what’s called a double opt in system. What this means is that when a person signs up to be on your mailing list, they are actually signing up on a form you create at BuildRelationships.aweber.com. Once Aweber gets their initial message, they send out a confirmation message to the email address registered. This asks your new subscriber to confirm that they want to be on your list. Your new list member must confirm, or they will not be included.
This accomplishes two things. First, it keeps people from putting in phony email addresses, just to get your free report. And more importantly, it serves to protect you against spam complaints when people register someone else’s legitimate email address instead of their own.
Aweber is a known entity in the internet marketing world, and it’s well known they use this double opt in system. Thus the folks who monitor and prosecute SPAM complaints are far less likely to raise any issues with you, even when someone forgets they signed up for your list and complains. This avoids problems you don’t need.
In addition to the double opt in feature, they automatically insert both an automatic “opt-out” link and your legal address at the bottom of each of your messages. This means you will always be compliant with the anti Spam laws, and your subscriber knows that they can stop your emails whenever they want. Best yet, if your subscriber decides they want to stop, all they have to do is click the link and it’s done automatically. You don’t need to be involved at all.
These peace of mind features make the monthly fee more than worthwhile by themselves.
But you get a lot more than peace of mind. Aweber offers a lot of features, more than I can cover here now. But lets lay out a few, for the sake of clarity.
First, you can have multiple lists, at no extra charge. You can have a list for those people who sign up on your web site. You can have another list for people who sign up because you add, an invitation to do so on you cash register receipt or invoice forms.
This may make sense as a way to conduct separate conversations with prospective customers who are first finding you online, as opposed to the conversation you want to have with people who are existing customers.
You may also want to use this capability to focus on different product lines. Say you are a restaurant that also does catering. You might have a sub list for the catering business in addition to a primary list that promotes your weekly or monthly specials.
This ability to run multiple lists is a great asset. It allows you to have multiple conversations going on, with multiple people at the same time. All on autopilot.
There is one more basic concept to get across regarding auto responders. There are two types of basic messages. The first is the follow-up message. These are written and stored in the system and are sent automatically once a person signs up for your list. The first one goes out immediately once they have confirmed that they want to be on the list. Then you can pre-schedule any number of additional lists as you wish. Depending on your particular needs, you may want to send a second message three days after they get the first one, and then maybe another in 3-5 days, and then weekly thereafter.
Some people set up mini courses on topics of interest to their customers. A Liquor store may for example create a series of posts on wines, or the characteristics of different beers they sell. A restaurant, may do recipes or cooking tips, etc. The key thing about follow-up messages is that they should be “Evergreen.” With any luck people will be signing up to your list every day from now till the end of time. You want messages that make sense no matter the time of year. So event though it may be Spring, when you are writing you messages, eventually it will be winter when someone joins your list. All of these follow-up messages are sent sequentially based on the number of days since the person signed up on your list. So on any given day you will have message 1 going out to newly signed up people, message 3 going out to people who signed up last week, and message 14 going out to people who maybe signed up four months ago.
The second type of message is the Broadcast. This is sent to all people no matter when they signed up. This type of message is ideal for sending out messages about this week’s specials, of attractions for the coming month, or holiday greetings. If you are a dentist and want to let your patients know to schedule their appointments prior to you upcoming two week vacation cruise, you send them a broadcast message six weeks in advance and then again periodically up until you send them a message on who to contact in case of an emergency.
The best part of this, is that you can pre-schedule broadcast messages. Thus if you want, you can send a Happy New Years message for exactly at midnight next year right now.
If you have a three month advertising plan, you can schedule all your broadcasts for the coming three months at one time, and then forget about it. The messages will be sent automatically, and your customers will get you messages and respond and it won’t cost you any more than the cost of your auto responder and the time to write the messages.
There are other more advanced features available once you have you system up and running. For example you can do split testing to see which of your ads get a better response, and there are ways to tie your blog posts into the process and even pod casts. But such services are beyond the scope of this report.
They offer a series of helpful tutorials which should be more than adequate to get you up and running in no time. I am also available to assist you. Contact me at enetwal@gmail.com.
A decade ago, small businesses flocked to the internet. It was going to transform the way business is done and they wanted to be part of it. And many are today quite disappointed and perhaps philosophical about how their web pages didn’t do diddly squat.
While there is no doubt the internet has changed how business is done today, for most businesses all that changed is they now have an internet Yellow Pages add in addition to there actual listing.
The only people that go to their web site are people who already know about their business, and are jsut checking for a phone number or the times we are open.
While that’s certainly not true of all businesses, it is true for a good many, how about you?
I’ve been preaching on three major topics here about why I think most business web sites stink.
* Most aren’t using their ability to list their business in multiple categories.
* Most have just a billboard, or an electronic brochure and not an interactive site
* Why most web sites are so bad, even when you paid good money for them.
In my prior posts on this blog, I have tried to use the trade show as a metaphor as to what the role of your web pages should be. I encourage you to look back at my past postings and read them.
In the last few days, I have been focusing on how most web sites I’ve reviewed lately have poor and often no keywords.
If you were able to afford it, and were in the wall paper business, you might buy a yellow pages ad under wall paper, and maybe under decorating or a number of other yellow page headings. Most businesses don’t as its very expensive to do so, even with multiple category discounts.
With your web pages, you don’t need to pay extra to be listed in multiple categories. You just need to do a systematic listing of all relevant keywords that your possible customers might use in an effort to find you.
This may take a little time and effort, but once done, it will pay tremendous rewards in additional traffic and potential new business.
You may have thought your web designer would have done this for you. But unfortunately most web designers are not marketers. They tend to be graphic artists or techno geeks. Great at creating web pages, but not necessarily at getting your web site to generate the business you had hoped it would.
Over half of the 123 Home Staging Professionals who answered my survey question on the “Climate of Competition” in their markets rated it as “Mild, we are all friends.” Only one rated it as “Hostile, we are fighting for every advantage”
That said, those with 2-4 years experience were the least likely to claim competition as Mild. My guess is after two years of business, they were more likely to have run into competition and not necessarily come out ahead in every case.
The “Top Dog” category in the survey seemed to share this attitude, although a few seem to have arrived at the point where they had developed strong relationships with Realtors which was providing them with a steady stream of new business. For them the competition was less relevant. In in many cases it may have been seen as asset as it provided an overflow valve when they were too busy.
The unasked question I refer to in the subtitle, was the “Null Set.”
The biggest competitor Home Stagers face is the number of Realtors and Home Owners who decide to not stage at all. Or who never consider the possibility.
While a few markets report large percentages of homes being staged, that is not true in most markets.
When you think about competition in that light, I think most markets could accurately list competition a
One of the more surprising aspects was the fact that over half of the survey respondents reported calling fewer than five Realtors in the past three months as part of their marketing efforts.
This floored me. In the survey report, I break out seven different categories of respondents, and it turns out in this case that those with more experience are far more active in contacting Realtors, than are the newer stagers.
The new guys should, in my opinion, be burning up the telephone lines to get their businesses in front of as many Realtors as possible. How else are they going to get those initial jobs to develop their portfolios and referral business?
One anecdotal comment captured in the many essay questions on my survey suggested that they were calling a lot more than the three Realtors they were advised to contact in their training course.
I have to believe this was a misinterpretation of a comment that maybe all they needed was three regular Realtors to build their business with regular referrals. At any rate if this is being taught, I have to wonder about the wisdom of the instructor and the school employing them.
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March 18, 2009 
3 Comments 
Home Staging, home staging marketing, Market Maker, marketing
Brett McEllhiney
Andre Arnett
Lonnie Minton
Doug Champigny
Joel Osborne