Time Saving Tips to Moving Your Home Staging Blog – Part 2

Starting and building a home staging blog can be a complicated topic.

My goal is to demystify it and remove as much of the technical jargon as possible.

After all, we’re home stagers not website experts and computer programmers!

Most of us would rather be out decorating homes to sell on the real estate market, than sitting at home in front of a computer screen.

However, the reality is that we do need to keep up with technology to the extent that it can help us grow our home staging business at next to no cost.

In my last post, I introduced you to the 10 Simple Time Saving Steps to Moving Your Blog and why you’d want to do that. Here is part two of that article:

1. Batch your work and spread out your home staging blog posts.

You want to post regularly to your blog to get search engines and people used to re-visiting it regularly. Moving your posts over can be tedious. From experience, I’ve found it easier to batch my work by moving over 4 to 8 posts in a single sitting.

But you don’t want them to all publish immediately! Remember you want a steady stream of new content to impress the search engines.

WordPress lets you easily schedule publication of a post at any date/time in the future.

It’s important to decide on your ideal posting schedule, for example once or twice per week, and then you can preset your posts to publish on that timetable. By the way, this is especially helpful if you want to go on holidays. Just preset all your content to publish while you’re away!

You may also feel inspired to write some new articles or use content from Staging Diva Chronicles. You can intersperse this content with the posts you are moving over from your old home staging blog.

2. Leverage your blog posts on social media.

Every time one of your home staging blog posts is published you should be promoting it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Your goal is to drive traffic to those posts and encourage shares and comments. Google and the other search engines give higher ranking to blogs that are shared and commented upon.

That’s why, if you’re a regular reader here, you can show your appreciation for my work writing these posts by commenting and sharing them! It’s a great help to me for SEO, but it also encourages me to keep writing.

I know once you have your own home staging blog, you’ll appreciate anyone who comments on yours. When there’s no obvious audience, it can be hard to keep up your motivation to keep writing free content for your home staging blog.

After all, it’s time consuming and takes a lot of discipline to stick with week in and week out!

I hope you enjoyed this series on how to move your content from an existing home staging blog that’s on a domain you don’t own, to your own URL or a sub-domain of your current website.

If you have and questions or comments, I’d appreciate you sharing them with me and the Staging Diva community at large!

Also let me know if you’d like more posts on the topic of blogs or websites. I’ve invested thousands of hours and dollars understanding these topics and, if you’re interested, I’d like to continue to share what I’ve learned!

Debra Gould, The Staging diva

Internationally recognized home staging expert Debra Gould created the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love. She has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate and is the author of several best-selling guides. With 30,000+ students in 24 countries, Debra is celebrated as one of the most influential people in the home staging industry. She appears on: HGTV, CBS Radio, CNNMoney, The Wall Street Journal, Woman's Day, House & Home, Style at Home, GlobalTV, This Old House and more.

Comments

Liz Murray says

June 13, 2012 at 10:33 am

God this is one of my biggest issues. I’m not a techie. Mechnical savvy of using technology equipment has been overwhelming for me, and I SOLD technology for 5 years. I finally bartered with someone to help me download digital pictures to my laptop so I could do more work on my website. I made some Cornish pasties for her. She helped with my pictures.
- Debra Gould says
  
  June 13, 2012 at 2:22 pm
  
  Liz, there always is a learning curve with any new thing. But if you stick with a WordPress site/blog (hosted on your own domain) as I recommended, you’ll find it doesn’t take that long to get reasonably comfortable with the everyday things you’ll need to know.
  
  Now, you mentioned having someone help you download digital pictures to your laptop for use on your own site. I hope these are photos that you’ve purchased the rights to use, or that you’ve found on a free photo sharing site that expressly gives you permission to re-use them. Otherwise you will run afoul of copyright laws. I know this wouldn’t be your intention, but some people don’t realize what they’re really allowed to do.
  
  For more on this topic see these two articles I wrote:
  
  Copying Home Staging Website Content Isn’t Flattery — It’s Plagarism
  
  Home Stagers Using Fake Portfolios
  
  Thanks for commenting Liz!
Susan Atwell says

June 13, 2012 at 3:07 pm

Another way to stay motivated to write blog posts is by using the articles to build a newsletter. With over 800 local agents, clients and potential clients on my mailing list I know that someone will read these articles – either on the web or through the newsletter.

Google Analytics also keeps me motivated to write as I can see how many people visited my site and from where the traffic came. The newsletter, Twitter and Facebook all drive more traffic to my site than I would have guessed.

I also recently started posting my newsletter to Pinterest in its own board. I figured it couldn’t hurt, as I always try to have at least 1 good photo per issue. (Reader’s love pictures too.)

On average I write 3 articles for each newsletter – which means 3 posts on my blog per month. It’s not a lot but – just like any successful exercise routine – consistency is the key.

PS – I’m in the final stages of building my WordPress site. I’ve recently chosen and installed Yoast for SEO. Looks like you may have used this for your http://www.SixElements.com site? Any home staging specific advice for setting up key words etc.? Thanks!
- Debra Gould says
  
  June 14, 2012 at 12:25 pm
  
  Susan,
  Thanks for sharing your experiences. You are definitely on the right track for building awareness of your home staging business online and continuing to grow your database, which is critical to long term growth. Well done!! Yes, Yoast is a good plugin for SEO 🙂
Sally says

June 13, 2012 at 4:58 pm

Thanks Debra for this very important information. I dont know much about blogs and I had no idea that it makes a huge difference having my blog on my url. I would definitely love to learn more about blogs and blogging. Thanks again Debra.
- Debra Gould says
  
  June 14, 2012 at 12:28 pm
  
  Sally, glad you found this helpful. It is a HUGE topic which I try and keep as nontechnical as possible. We frequently discuss blogs and blogging in our monthly Staging Diva Dialog calls which take place on the third Thursday of each month. It’s your opportunity to join me in a small group live on a conference call. I answer questions and teach more in-depth staging and marketing topics. Here’s where you can learn more about it and see the call schedule:
  
  https://stagingdiva.com/divadialogpromo.html
  
  By the way, members get not only the live call with me, but also a recording after the fact to keep and listen to as often as you like!
Jackie Nordeman says

June 15, 2012 at 10:10 pm

Debra, your blog postings are always helpful, full of great info and inspiring! I appreciate the timeliness of this particular blog posting because I’ve been struggling with this exact thing! Finding the time to keep my blog up to date has definitely been the hardest for me! Thanks for your timely encouragement!
- Debra Gould says
  
  June 19, 2012 at 12:24 pm
  
  Glad I could help Jackie! Keeping my blog up to date can be a struggle for me too, so your comments are most appreciated. It’s easiest to write when there’s feedback 🙂

“The Staging Diva Business Training Program is worth every penny!

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In addition to her courses, Debra offers SO many supplemental materials that are incredibly helpful too. The community of Staging Diva Graduates is another bonus, as we all support each other and share each other’s wins.”
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By the time I was on Course 3, I had already completed three home staging jobs which more than paid for all the training!

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— Rob Reinhart (CA)*Make It-Home

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— Lori Carbone (NJ)*Spaces That Speak Home Staging

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— Wynette Williams (NJ)*Red Robyn Interiors

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— Susan Bierig (NJ)*Re-deZine The Shore Way LLC

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— Haana Nyamekye (MD)*Zuri Sophia Interiors

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