Who is the best interior designer in London?

Posted: 22 January, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: contemporary interiors, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment »
London

London (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

I was wondering just “Who is the best interior designer in London?”. I recently wrote about who was the best interior designer in the world and got some rather unexpected results.

You could, and of course probably did, do that same Google search to find London’s “best interior designer”, just like you’ve probably also googled your own name at some point.

And yet here you are.

Maybe you are one of those top interior designers wondering why your name didn’t appear on Google’s first page like Blanchard, Helen Green, Tollgard and Robin Moore Ede did?

Is it really important? For example I’m writing this in 2013 and Victoria and David Beckham have just, apparently, commissioned Kelly Hoppen to do their London pad. Do you think they did that Google search? Probably not, in fact certainly not, as I am sure they were influenced by many other factors. So even if you target ‘rich people’ then you might argue that your target market will never make that search.

Maybe.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

I bet some of them do though. I bet some of those responsible for recent influxes of property investment in recent years do as they are based out of London. Perhaps they did have one or two recommendations but perhaps they also wanted a few new faces to present fresh ideas. & you weren’t on that list!

So how do you get on that list? Well this blog page probably did get on or near the top of that list. So you might wonder why? Well if you look at the first paragraph you will see that I use ‘who is the best interior designer in London’ near the start of my article (google likes that) Oooh and look I’ve just included it again in the previous sentence. Google likes that too. But I will stop putting it in as if you do it too many times Google does NOT like that. & now take a look at the title, the name of the page and the excerpt…do you see a pattern emerging? :-)

So the lesson is that you actually have to put the words into your website that people might type (keywords). That’s an art in itself. Covered elsewhere on this blog. Of course now you know the trick you will all do it and I will get bumped further and further down the listing…giving me a reason / excuse for not being on the first page when you finally get around to reading this!

Then of course you actually have to have a good website and I ‘m sure you’ll agree that those companies that come up do have amazing looking websites. We deal with some of them and they certainly ARE at least amongst the very best designers in Europe, let alone London. And yet if you have the time to check their technical google ranking or ‘pagerank’ (I’ve done it for you!) you will find that most are 3 or 4; which is not so great. Certainly no higher than this blog. So you DON’T have to have a really high pageranking to get on that first page. You  have to have the right content (as well as an OK pagerank).

Now here’s how you can cheat. Search instead for a generic “interior designer in London“. Different results. And you will see that maybe your adwords advert for those keywords appears on the right hand side (you don’t use adwords? why not?). You will maybe also see that you need to have a google business/places listing to get put there as well a perhaps a listing in Yell.

So you can cheat by paying for a position on the ads on the right hand side. It might cost you a bit though. And if you get a lot of ad clicks then google will promote you to the ads at the top of the search (because your ad generates more revenue for them). And you will see that those ads at the top don’t always look like ads and they kind of blend into the normal search results. And people kind of think that they are the first results of the search…and click them. Good clicks if you can get them maybe?

Maybe a listing in Yell is a good idea and getting a Google Places/Business listing IS DEFINITELY a good idea.

So who is the Best Interior Designer in London? Well Google’s first page for that search shows designfinder.co.uk and there listing says that www.forsterinc.co.uk are the best designers…so it must be true.

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How to create a BAD (digital) first Impression? For Interior Designer

Posted: 22 January, 2013 | Author: | Filed under: home decor, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , , | 2 Comments »
Editions|Artists’ Book Fair

Editions|Artists’ Book Fair (Photo credit: j-No)

9 Ways for interior designers to create a bad impression – digitally of course!

When you first present to your newest prospect I’m pretty sure that you will be wearing your best ‘business’ clothes. When you first speak to a new client I’m sure you will make a real effort to do your best. When you send out a brochure or some other paper based literature I’m sure you will have it looking good. Hopefully too you take first emails seriously. And yes I’m sure your website looks great as well.

So all is hunky dory right? you can stop reading now and move on :-)

Well firstly, before I get into the meat of the subject matter that drew you here, I suggest that one exercise you can do on a Friday afternoon is to write down EVERY single TYPE of point of contact that you make with clients. I’ve gone through a few of them in the opening to this post. No rocket science there. However what I suggest you do is really think if they all present a coherent view, when taken together, of you and your business. Do they look similar enough and do they say similar things and present similar images?

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

Just like that fine evening wear you have to impress on really special occasions and turn heads as you walk in the room all these points of contact between your business and your potential client are the same thing FOR YOUR BUSINESS (business? you know that thing that pays for the evening wear).

Well I’m going to talk a little about how to create a BAD digital first impression focussing on your website. So You need to look at the first page that people most often go to. In techie terms these are ‘landing pages’; they might include your home page or any special page that Google Adwords points to on your site or any page of yours that ranks particularly highly and get a lot of ‘hits’.

So to create  a BAD first impression here’s what your landing pages need to do:

  1. No Graphics: No logo, no head-shot of a smiley-you and certainly NOT clickable.
  2. Poor Content: Be sure to include waffle and irrelevance to the reason that drew the click..
  3. Lots of words and certainly no Bullet Points as bullet points are too easy to read.
  4. No Call to Action – an even better bad impression can be created if you make it as obscure as possible for the visitor to know what to do next. Perhaps presenting a beautiful image but making it as annoying as possible by adding some music and not making it obvious how to proceed to ANYWHERE else – Designers’ websites are OFTEN like this!
  5. White Papers, Videos, Registrations, etc: OK you might have accidentally put some of these on your website to be helpful but you can soon change any good impression that that might make by giving them away without even getting the visitor’s email.
  6. Confirmation/Thank You Pages: How rude! you forgot to add one of these and to make matters worse it didn’t offer the visitor another idea of what they could do on your site.
  7. Testing changes you make might improve a visitor’s experience to your site. So you certainly don’t want to do that..
  8. Google: create a bad impression with google as well. Ideally you will name your pages PAGE01, PAGE02 and so on. Never include keywords in the name of a page as that might help Mr Google do his job.
  9. Speling mstakes. Sme ppl really hate splling mistakes and abbreviations. Include a few to enrich their day.
  10. Always fail to deliver. Like by having 10 reasons rather than the advertised 9 reasons. Laugh! We might but our client’s probably won’t.

Am I perfect? No! Do I make these mistakes? Yes of course. It does provide some food for thought though.

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Interior Designers – How Good Is Your Brand’s Colour?

Posted: 18 December, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , | 7 Comments »
Source: Marketo

Source: Marketo

Colour (color) really does matter. As an interior designer you don’t need me to tell you that. I think sometimes though we know what good colours are and what good colour combinations are and we know what feels right to us and to our clients in the spaces we inhabit.

However…

Many of us are not graphic designers and perhaps our own branding may have suffered because of colour choices we would make in our day job.

Apparently if you look more closely at the infographic on the right then you will see that their research shows that more than 90% of the world’s top 100 brands use either red, blue or grey as the primary branding colour and more than 90% of those same companies use at most 2 colours. So there’s very much a ‘keep it simple’ line coming out for brand colours. No big surprise there I suppose.

41% only use text – so that will be the brand name and/or ‘strap line’ ie there will probably be no logo as such.

Colours considered suitable for companies in ‘the home’ are green and yellow. This doesn’t necessarily apply to the colour YOU should have for your branding as an interior designer.

Indeed their research shows that ORANGE & BROWN are questionable colours for companies in the interiors space. With our Pantone 464 I suppose we fall foul of that.

Then again it is interesting to read that people associate ‘vibrant and fun’ with Orange. It is also interesting to read that the colour is the first thing that potential clients perceive about your brand.

Yet the safest choice appears to be shades of grey. If we all had grey houses and grey business and grey clothes I guess the world would necessarily be a greyer place. And I’m not sure it would be a better place for that.

Summary: Conform or stand out. It’s up to you. You can probably make most colours work as a brand but maybe a myriad of colours won’t work. Is this all stating the obvious?

 

 

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Interior Designers: Must Blog Better – But How?

Posted: 11 December, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: home decor, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment »
Content Mix: Content Marketing Institute

Content Mix: Content Marketing Institute

The content Marketing Institute created that nice little image up there that  shows what a content mix might be.

This image has been bandied about on various websites as THE correct mix. It isn’t THE correct mix but it’s a good starter to make you think. It might make you think you are entertaining your potential clients too much or it might make you think you are being a bit boring talking about kitchen worksurfaces a little too much.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

For a start it’s saying that you should blog 6 times a week or at least create content 6 times a week. For small businesses that just ain’t gonna happen in the real world.

However it certainly DOES give you ideas about what to write next.

Provide relevant information: Perhaps contribute to a thread somewhere telling people about some of the great things you learnt with a particular product on your last project.

Teach: Show you really know what you are talking about. Share some knowledge in an authoritative way on how you do your job.

Start a conversation: Perhaps on a LinkedIn group or your Facebook business page.

Inspire: others to do better. This could be on a forum or your could write something.

Entertain: Never hurts to make someone laugh.

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The Business Bible For Interior Designers

Posted: 7 December, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, Market Comment, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , , | 54 Comments »

Interior Design

Interior Design (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here are all (most) of our articles on “the business” of interior design. Sales and marketing resources for a modern digital world.

  1. business-tips-for-interior-designers
  2. 9-common-interior-design-mistakes-marketing
  3. 9.5-ways-for-interior-designers-to-make-more-money-profit
  4. interior-designers-get-more-customers-on-your-website
  5. Interior-designers-boosting-your-position-in-google-search-results
  6. the-proactive-interior-designer-1-0-1
  7. 6-things-that-interior-designers-do-wrong-on-their-web-sites
  8. interior-designers-5-and-a-half-ways-to-twitter-badly
  9. pitching-winning-managing-business-for-interior-designers
  10. facebook-interior-designers-10-steps-to-setup
  11. retail-interior-designers-8-ways-to-sell-more
  12. bad-things-they-say-about-interior-designers
  13. interior-designers-facebook-4-ways-to-correctly-use-it
  14. 7-facebook-mistakes-interior-designers-make
  15. designers-twitter-is-rubbish-use-twitter
  16. interior-design-marketing-2010-predictions
  17. designers-what-to-blog-about
  18. spying-on-competitors-staying-ahead
  19. interior-designer-did-your-web-site-just-popp-up-in-my-search
  20. interior-design-marketing-strategies
  21. facebook-adwords-effective-ad-writing-for-interior-designers
  22. interior-designers-facebook-key-elements-for-your-fan-page
  23. designers-interior-design-links-how-to-get-them
  24. target-markets-for-interior-designers-interior-design-marketing-strategy-2012
  25. interior-designers-an-update-on-using-facebook-linkedin-wordpress-blogs-and-twitter
  26. interior-designers-in-2012-how-do-people-find-you-on-the-web
  27. interior-designers-how-to-specify-a-luxury-cashmere-throw-for-your-client-projects
  28. an-interior-designer-gets-lots-of-web-visitors-but-few-leads-enquiries
  29. interior-designers-ipad-essential-apps
  30. interior-designers-to-houzz-or-not-to-houzz
  31. who-is-the-best-interior-designer-in-the-world
  32. interior-designers-and-their-financially-lucrative-bit-on-the-side
  33. interior-design-marketing-strategy-business-strategies-plan-for-designers-2012
  34. interior-designers-what-should-i-write-about-on-my-blog
  35. pinterest-and-customer-interest-interior-designers-pin-their-boards-to-the-wall
  36. interior-designers-why-does-no-one-visit-your-web-site
  37. marketing-strategies-interior-designers-consider-these-areas
  38. interior-designers-how-good-is-your-brands-colour/
  39. how-to-create-a-bad-digital-first-impression-for-interior-designer/
  40. sponsored-blog-post-by-interior-designers-charge-fair-rates-stop-getting-conned/

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Pinterest and Customer Interest : Interior Designers Pin their Boards to the Wall

Posted: 12 November, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: home decor, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , , | 23 Comments »
Pinterest featue in Metro - 27th February 2012

Pinterest featue in Metro – 27th February 2012 (Photo credit: Great British Chefs)

Many Interior Designers have Pinterest accounts and quite a few of us use them. Here are my thoughts on whether or not interior designers should use Pinterest and HOW they should best use Pinterest.

<Here> for example is Paula Ovalle Vicuña’s beautiful pinboard of colors. Now, this and similar boards are great sources of imagery for colours for interior designers and of course there are other pins showing styles and colour themes and so on. If you had a board like this you could show your clients on your iPAD as part of your presentations.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

BUT think carefully about how you are going to use this as a tool to win more business. How are your potential clients going to be driven to you and/or your web site. Why is your potential client going to be looking on pinterest for work by interior designers. They MIGHT be using it as a means of selecting designers but IMHO I doubt that many potential customers will be doing that – some, for sure, but not many.

Now, your competitors may be using it to get some inspiration. So you’ve done a bit of work to help your competitors. That’s all well and good as others will reciprocate and you will benefit from that potentially. But that hasn’t got you any more sales has it?

If you are going to use pinterest for collecting and presenting images then it may be great as a productivity tool.

You have the option with pinterest of creating secret/hidden boards – that may be a good way forwards for those of you conscious NOT to help out your competitors!

So you have to answer this question: “Do my clients hang out on Pinterest so making them more likely to find out about my interior design skills from my Pinterest account?”.

IF you can answer that question positively then read on…

Effective Pinterest Marketing

1. Fill-in the Form! Setup You Account Properly – Gets the Basics Sorted Out

Your name (first and last), username, logo, About, Location and Website information should all be properly included. PLEASE if you can make sure that, for example, you use the same name as you do across all media – printed and electronic. It’s good for your ‘branding’. Verify your website and put your blog address in your ‘About’ section.

2. Be a digital stalker! Follow People – You build a following, which looks good to potential new followers, if you follow people. They often reciprocate. It’s a bit like Twitter in that respect. Perhaps look for people or boards with certain of your keywords on them and then follow those people.

3. In the Digital World, Content is King! Get content. Regularly seek out and add new relevant content. To be truly amazing you will, of course, add your own original content. Content may be the king but creativity rules the Empire of Design.

More?

Create a board and use it (link to it) on facebook or twitter to invite your other followers to discuss it.

When you blog you always add at least one great image right? Well make a collection of those great images on pinterest. That way you save a little time by using one piece of content twice.

Focus on the right content. Think always about your target customer. Only post what they are going to be interested in.

Put a url in your comments on pins to link back to the original content (your blog), Ibelieve I am right in saying that this URL is made clickable by pinterest.

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Interior Designers – What Should I write About On My Blog

Posted: 9 November, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: home decor, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , , | 33 Comments »
English: JC Hryb, interior designer/owner of S...

English: JC Hryb, interior designer/owner of Style de Vie and Twenty Gauge, promotional photo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What can I write about?

Anything you want to of course. Although it is clearly best for you to write things that your target audience will be most interested in, the things that will make them come back to your blog again and again and again. In old marketing speak that raises your brand awareness (and the interest in it).

It’s also best to write the words that NEW potential clients are most likely to type into google.

However, I suspect that you have come to this post as you have run out of ideas. Don’t worry it happens to us all.

Use these tools to find alternative ways or approaches to subjects you have already written about:

Start By Asking Ubersuggest and Soovle Questions 

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

So try;

  • can interior designers do…
  • does an interior desinger need to…
  • will an interior design project involve
  • would an interior designer be better if he/she…
  • how could an interior designer improve…
  • why does an interior design project always…
  • when does and interior design project usually…
  • where does an interior designer buy…
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Who is the best interior designer in the world? in Europe?

Posted: 9 November, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: contemporary interiors, Fabric Tips, home decor, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, Market Comment, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , , | 28 Comments »

English: Interior Designer, Tanya Gyani

Who is the best interior designer in the world? blimey that’s a question and a half.

I’m writing this post in wordpress and I use this thing called Zemanta which suggests images and articles to do with the subject as I compose the article. So the first designer that appears will get put in the picture on the right and that will be the person you are looking at now!

I’ll probably not know the person that is suggested (we’ll see it still hasn’t appeared yet!)

Ooops there she is: Tanya Gyani.Congratulations Tanya.

Now of course there probably really is no ‘best interior designer in the world’ that we can all agree on. But the point of my post was to go one of two ways. I was either going to come from the angle of saying that YOU should be the best interior designer in terms of how you market yourself to your target niches OR that whoever comes up and gets put in my picture is the best interior designer in the sense that they are the best at getting their image shown against a generic search for “the best interior designer in the world”.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

Maybe Tanya will now go on to global fame? Who knows? If she does I certainly hope she will start specifying some of our fabrics on her projects as she hasn’t done so yet! (as far as I know).

No; really YOU should be positioning yourself as the best interior designer at what you do. But rather than saying you are “the best at XYZ” it is probably more appealing and more humble for you to phrase it as “I am the only Interior Designer In XXX who does YYY”. Use that sort of angle A LOT in your client communications (written or verbal) and you give your potential clients A REASON TO CHOOSE YOU and a REASON FOR YOU TO JUSTIFY YOUR PRICING. Make sure it’s true of course. For uniqueness is priceless (well almost!!)

Remember of course that it should not all be about price. Your client wants a great job most of all. Cost might be a factor but so also is the risk of who the client chooses. Find a way of exuding confidence and competence to lower that perceived risk.

Good luck you and good luck Tanya (there she even gets a link to her website).

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Interior Designers – Where are my customers?

Posted: 8 November, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: | 23 Comments »
English: Interior designer J.C. Hryb of Style ...

English: Interior designer J.C. Hryb of Style de Vie and Twenty Gauge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What do you mean “you have no back-links“. You must have back-links. Everyone should have back-links. Shouldn’t they?

Aren’t they really important?

Can my blog/website survive without them?

Let’s see shall we? Read on…

Some Interior Designers will use their blog or website as a means of lead generation and then of course that leads to REVENUE. To such people, where their website/blog appears in search results WILL affect how many leads they get. If you are one of those designers whose website is a branding statement or a follow-up to a business card or a place to get directions to your office, then maybe where your blog/website appears in Google searches is not so relevant. IE IF the target person for your company knows the name of your company then they are going to type in that name and, more often than not, you’ll pop up pretty soon…unless you are called BBC Interior Design or CNN Designers or something along those lines! You get the drift?

It is a fact that the more genuine links you have to your website the higher you will appear in Google searches than would otherwise be the case. Just go back and read that again and note the word GENUINE.

So what we do on this site periodically is link to the blogs and website of interior designers…new and old. Known and not known. We share our ‘likes’ indiscriminately.  IF we do that we are doing you a favour! (So kind). Yet in the process of doing that we often add a post to our blog with your information in it. Oh and that boosts the frequency of change on our site…which Google also likes and so we benefit. (Not so kind…more of selfish perhaps?..not really we ALL gain). These kind of back-links are good. They are genuine. They might help subscribers to our blog find out new interesting stuff, perhaps even from their competitors. Google kind-of recognise this and credit us both for it. Cool.

But now let’s go a little deeper and get to the home truths. Why would I link to your web site? No really … why? What is so great about it? There are a LOT of interior designers website out there (I mean a real LOT) is yours really so different? Do you copy other’s images and comment on them? That’s OK you are adding your own original content to someone else’s original image. I’d prefer to see YOUR pictures of YOUR projects and YOUR comments, that would be better but I can live with reading your thoughts and views and opinions – they are often funny and interesting.

Do you just put on pretty pictures and sleek images and have a really nice looking site. That’s potentially great. I’ll link to it once. BUT I WILL NEVER COME BACK. EVER. There you go you got me…and then you let me go.

You’ve got to have compelling, original content that changes regularly. If you have that EVERYTHING works; I come back Google thinks you’re wonderful and so on.

It’s a bit hard to do though isn’t it. Finding the time to write perhaps 2 or 3 times a week. You can be original and maybe even funny for a few months but it gets harder after that. Sorry just stating a ‘fact’ there, no magic solutions. Be creative, perhaps? That’s your job right?

Anyway. You’ve come to the point where you are running out of stuff to say and you remember that those back-links are darned good things to have. So you go with a company who you pay a bit of cash to to create links to your site from hundreds of pseudo-fake sites that they have created. This used to kind-of work. But the people at Google are clever, they constantly try to stop you cheating. SO this works much less well than it used to.

Also again think what are these companies going to be linking back to? You have to have the content.

Let’s say you do not have a blog or perhaps one that you only wrote in for a month before giving up as no-one was reading it.   So again you go down the purchased back-links route. Why? what is it going to link to? You have to have the content. & it has to change to get real people to come back.

Actually IMHO if you are a start up company with a pagerank of 1 or zero. Then I’m pretty sure that these back-links would very quickly improve your pagerank to a 2 or 3.

So what to do?

Talk and write about your creativity. Your competitors will be interested for sure. THAT won’t benefit you at all. HOWEVER there are not many interior designers doing that, so when a potential customer sees your site some of them will notice.

People in the design industry should comment and re-publicise all our work more often (that’s kind of how Houzz works in  away if you think about it). When you share, you benefit, in the eWorld of Mr Google. You are opening up your secrets maybe, but those that share and participate in the online design community will gain the most from Mr Google. If you don’t share you may well keep your methods and clients secret but you may also never appear in Mr Google’s search results.

Thoughts welcomed. Creating false back-links could backfire and could cost you money. And we ALL know it is cheating but many of us still do it to beat the system.

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Interior Designers and their financially lucrative ‘bit on the side’

Posted: 4 November, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: home decor, interior, interior design, interior designer, interiordesign, interiors, modern homes, modern interiors, The Business Of Interior Design | Tags: , , , | 17 Comments »
Advertising advertising

Advertising advertising (Photo credit: Toban Black)

For our American readers I will leave the explanation of another meaning of ‘a bit on the side’ to your furtive imaginations. This article looks at some of the ways you can make a bit of money (on the side) from your blog – that is ways other than that of attracting your target customers to your web site.

Be Warned: This may well distract you from your core business for minimal gains!

There are 2 ways that web sites and blogs can make additional revenue. If you are in the right market writing the right stuff you could make $1,000 a month…just like all those unsolicited emails say you can! Or you could be in the wrong market and invest the same amount of time as the person who makes $1,000 a month but yourself only get $50 a month. So be careful.

The 2 ways are shown here.

  1. Put adverts on your site (google adsense – which is the reverse of Google adwords)
  2. Host blog POSTS that are effectively adverts containing back-links to other sites by:
    • You write the blog post for the advertiser; or
    • The advertiser or their agent writes the post and you just put it on your site.

Be Warned: This may impact negatively on the image of your blog or website.

Pre-requisites

To make money in either of these examples you need to have people going to your site. So if your site is currently ‘low-traffic’ then I would stop reading now and get back to your interior designing!

Google, with their adsense, program will be interested in adverts on ANY site, including yours. But *YOU* will only make money out of adsense if you firstly have lots of visitors for your great content AND SECONDLY they click on the adverts that Google put there.

If you have a good site with lots of visitors and a good ‘pagerank’ (>3) then advertising agencies will potentially be interested in your site, especially if your subject matter broadly matches that of their clients. If you also have lots of twitter/pinterest/facebook/linkedin followers then that might be a bonus for the agency/advertiser (but probably not, although it should be).

Simple adwords can go anywhere on your site – be it a web site or a blog. Paid posts could be a new page added to your website but more easily it can be accomplished with a blog which you hopefully already have.

So what do I need to do then?

Cheque from Google AdSense

Cheque from Google AdSense (Photo credit: Wikipedia). It’s on wikipedia so it must be true, right? :-)

A. Attract Agencies

To attract advertising agencies I would firstly check a bit more closely some of the unsolicited emails you have been deleting. Some of these may well have been from advertising agencies genuinely offering to pay you to put posts (and/or back links) on your site for a fee…honest! Workout a standard response to these emails including why your site is great and how much you charge, save it and use it. We have accepted some adverts from this route and, yes, it is true and genuine and you do get paid (or you remove the post). We worked on the assumption that it was virtually zero effort and the post would soon get buried in the history of our numerous posts – you could even put a one year time frame on the advert after which you would remove it.

Secondly I would be proactive and look for sites that let you register an interest to be a host for these paid-for-blog posts. Sites such as www.socialspark.com let you do this.

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Click To Read More Interior Design Articles

If you have a good pagerank (>3) and, say, more than 5000 unique visitors per moth then you should get at least US$/£100 for a single post containing one backlink to an advertier’s client’s site. You may or may not get a few of these a month. Compare this to the next paragraph, AdSense, where you should get a higher frequency of lower value income…

B. Use Google Adsense

Many of you have your blogs on wordpress. If you let wordpress do all the hosting for your then you will not be able to incorporate ads on your site. This is because wordpress place adverts themselves and make money from your site themselves. You can’t see them doing this if you look at your site from your computer…but they do. Honest.

So you have to move or migrate your blog to somewhere that you control. The company who hosts your website will probably be able to let  you install wordpress on your part of their machine and then you can use it and put ads onto your site. This could involve quite a complicated migration and software installation for you or your techy people. Again there will be a cost associated to this. You will then have to set up your blog so that parts of it are able to automatically show Google’s ads and credit your account if they are clicked.

NEVER click the ads yourself nor get friends to do it. Google are very clever.

If you are on a site that is controlled by wordpress (like this one) then look at your wordpress control panel for clicks on your site. You will probably see quite a few clicks to sites that you don’t know about. How did these links get on your site? Well they were the ones that google put there. If you add up your clicks you will get some idea of the number of clicks you might get going forwards by doing AdSense yourself. If you work on a revenue-per-click of 20p to 50p (20 cents to 50 cents) then you can do the maths of a best case scenario and a likely case scenario for an interior designer.

Be Warned: AdSense can theoretically show your direct competitor’s adverts on your site through their AdWords program.

Problems

Sites like socialspark.com allow advertisers to automatically put posts onto your site. Whilst I’m sure the content will be ethical I’m not so sure it will always tie in with the image you hope to portray on your site.

Think how your readers will feel. Will they want to be shown ads on your site and might a post from an advertiser, in a way, trick the loyal reader into reading an advert they were not expecting.

Moving to a site capable of hosting AdSense adverts might be tricky and/or time consuming – depending on your current setup.

That’s about it really. Fairly simple to understand but potentially tricky to implement for uncertain rewards.

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