How Blogging Helps Interior Design Businesses
[This post contains affiliate links. Click here to read my full disclosure.]
If you’re an interior designer or architect, you may have heard how blogging can be a huge help to growing a profitable design business, but you may be unsure about why or how.
You may also wonder, “Even if blogging’s helpful, will it be worth the time and effort?” The answer is an unequivocal YES! Blogging done effectively is one of the most powerful tools out there to grow your online presence, which in turn, will grow your business.
I used strategic blogging techniques to grow my home and garden blog from zero to 4.5k pageviews/month in six months and then to over 50k pageviews/month in one year. That’s a lot of eyeballs on one website every month.
If you also blog strategically and funnel that traffic toward your design services and products, then it’s possible to see a significant uptick in your revenue growth. So let’s dive into the nuts and bolts of blogging for business growth.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
SEO - Search engine optimization
Establish Authority
Provide Value To Your Ideal Client
Connect People To Your Brand
Generate Leads
Long Term Benefits
Passive Income Opportunities
Repurpose Content For Social Platforms
Post #9 - DIY Your Interior Design Website Series
How To Start An Interior Design Business
Why You Should Build Your Interior Design Website
Why Squarespace Beats WordPress For Interior Design Websites
Best Interior Design Websites On Squarespace
Best Squarespace Template For Interior Design
Choosing An Interior Design Domain Name
8 Interior Design Website Must-Haves
Interior Design Website Mistakes To Avoid
Why Blogging Is Important for Interior Designers
9 Tips For Writing An Interior Design Blog Post
Why You Should Blog to Promote Your Interior Design & Architecture Business
New to Squarespace? You can sign up for a free trial, and I can even get you a discount! Use code GREENHOUSE10 to save 10% off your first year.
Blogging helps you to organically rank in search results for design services or products relevant to your home design business.
If you want people to trust you with their homes and hard earned dollars, you need to offer them some serious value in exchange. A quality blog post is a great way to provide value to your ideal design clients for FREE while building trust with your audience. Doing this consistently will over time, expand the reach of your interior design business.
Search Engine Optimization - SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to techniques used to tell Google or any browser about a website’s content so it’s indexed by search engines and ranked accordingly.
Want more visitors to your design business website? Yes! We all do.
What’s one of the very best ways to do it? Blogging.
Blog posts are one of the most effective ways to be seen by a search engine.
Blogging drives traffic to your website. It doesn’t matter if you’re an interior designer, architect, or in online-underwear sales. Blogging helps any business get traffic.
By providing fresh, quality content, you’re giving Google and any search engine new content to index. If Google thinks you’re publishing new content regularly, it will index your site more often than a site that’s rarely updated.
At the same time, your new content creates more opportunities to rank for keywords important to your business. This will also drive more traffic.
Backlinks
An added SEO benefit of writing a quality post is that it can generate backlinks. Backlinks are when someone thinks so highly of your content they want to link it to their own content as a reference.
For example, when I write a post on indoor plants on my home and garden blog, I link to research produced by university horticulture departments with scientific data about how best to grow them. I do not reference another blog post that appears to have just regurgitated content from yet another blog post.
If you write quality blog posts, you will find that sometimes people will link to your post as a reference.
Backlinks serve as a vote of confidence about your content from other websites and send a positive signal to Google about the quality of your work.
Having backlinks from other quality sites improves your own SEO ranking. Backlinks are a critical factor in search engine optimization. However, generating backlinks is one of the most challenging parts of SEO. So by writing quality blog posts, you increase your opportunity for getting those important backlinks.
Establish Authority In The Interior Design, Architecture, or Home Building Industry
Regular blogging provides you as a business owner with the opportunity to establish authority in your field by showing the world what you know and what you’re capable of as a designer.
For example, if you’re an interior designer with a local clientele, you could write a blog post on latest home design trends that are especially suited for your location and are appealing to your clientele.
Using my location of Napa, CA, this could be the concept of outdoor rooms and indoor/outdoor living since it’s a mild climate and people love to entertain that way. Another idea is kitchens featuring wine storage and utilitarian yet high end cooking features since many people here are either directly involved in or attracted to Napa’s wine and hospitality industry.
By providing fresh, quality content, you’re telling Google (or any search engine) that you have expertise in your home design niche. The more quality content you produce, the higher your authority on that subject in the “eyes” of the search engines crawling the web determining rankings. This mean your posts will eventually rank better so more of your ideal clients will see your content when they’re searching for subject matter relating to your post.
Provide Value To Your Ideal Clients
This one may seem kind of obvious, but there’s more to it. By publishing good information, you’re providing value to potential clients by helping them solve a problem or learn something of interest. While this is a great service to provide, it also helps grow your business.
Providing value for free to your potential ideal clients increases your chances of converting them into paying clients.
This is a win-win for both of you. They get quality information relevant to a design topic or problem they’re interested in, and you’re able to build a connection and possibly work with them or be referred by them in the future.
Connect People To Your Home Design Brand
In addition to high quality information, by infusing your writing with your own style and personality or the culture of your design business, you forge a feeling of connectedness to your brand.
This is key for fostering the “Know, Like, and Trust” factor that’s crucial to eventually converting site visitors into paying clients. If people have a feel for your personality and perceive you as likeable and trustworthy, that goes a long ways towards them being willing to hire you to work in their homes.
Generate Leads for Your Interior Design Business
A step beyond providing value and connecting people to your brand, blogging also helps generate leads. Visitors reading your content are doing so because you’re addressing a problem they have or a subject of interest. Either way, they have an interest in what you’re about, so they’re naturally a potential lead for what you’re selling.
By offering a well placed CTA (call to action) or two in your blog post enticing them to get on a call, join your email list, or shop your offerings, your content is generating leads for your design services and products.
How you go about doing this is a subject for a different post(s). Suffice to say, the goal here is to:
Use your blog post content to bring people to your site.
Encourage those readers to take action on your CTA.
Then nurture those leads so they become part of your sales funnel.
Long Term Benefits To Your Interior Design Business
So here’s the really great thing about blogging - once you produce a high quality post, it will hang around online in perpetuity. For months and years to come, your blog post can continue to generate traffic and leads.
Nothing’s guaranteed of course, and there are strategies and techniques for increasing or maintaining a post’s rankings that require some on-going work, but overall, blogging is amazing because it’s a “put the work in up front” growth strategy that allows you to reap long term business benefits.
Passive Income Opportunities For Your Interior Design Business
Another interesting benefit is the opportunity to generate passive income from your blog posts. As an interior designer, you can join home design related affiliate programs.
An affiliate program is when you promote a product you know and like and provide your unique affiliate link to that product through your content. If a reader clicks on the link and eventually makes a purchase (affiliate links have cookies set with durations of days or weeks) then you receive a commission for referring them at no extra charge to the customer.
Squarespace Affiliate Example
I’m an enthusiastic affiliate for Squarespace website building platform. I think it’s hands-down the best platform for small business with it’s beautiful made-for-you templates and simple drag-and-drop site-building process.
So if you were to click on the Squarespace link I provided and begin a trial within a particular timeframe, then I would receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you. You'd even save 10% off your first year by using code GREENHOUSE10 .
This is affiliate marketing, and the beauty here is that the affilite link doesn’t expire and neither does your post (unlike social media).
You can see how powerful this can be when combined with a high-trafficked blog post.
When you write a post that ranks well with a CTA plus you include a few affiliate links, you can have a situation where you’re generating traffic, leads, and potential affiliate income.
While it’s not “set it and forget it”, most of the work is done up front with only some periodic updating to maintain your ranking.
Repurpose Content For Social Platforms
One last point to touch upon is that your blog post can work even harder for you. Your content can be easily repurposed for use on additional platforms to further your online reach. Here are a just a few ideas:
Pull out key content and combine with branded visuals for Instagram
Publish the entire post on LinkedIn
Use the content for a Clubhouse discussion
Create an eye-catching Pinterest pin about your post which will link back to your blog post
Summary - Blogging For Interior Design & Architecture Businesses
The higher your content ranks, the more pageviews and exposure your design business gets.
The more positive interactions people have with your brand, the more likely they are to take action on your CTAs.
The more CTA leads you have, the more opportunity for converting those leads into clients or customers.
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