by Debra Gould on February 18, 2010
Summary
Author of the Home Stager’s Guide to Twitter, home staging expert Debra Gould, discusses how social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are powerful marketing tools for small business owners.
Facebook and Twitter Powerful for Marketing Small Business
At one time, Facebook might have been nothing more than a meeting place for teenagers and college kids, but those days are gone. There are roughly the same number of people on Facebook today as used the entire Internet a decade ago.
Social media is the ideal way to grow any type of small business, including a home staging business, because it’s an effective form of marketing while costing nothing more than an investment of time.
Staging Diva® and marketing expert Debra Gould says, “If you own a business and you’re already on Facebook for the sole purpose of communicating with your friends and family members, you’re missing out on how powerful this tool is in growing a business.”
A Facebook account is essentially a large, interactive database of friends, acquaintances, former colleagues, family members, etc. You’re able to send a “friend request” to anyone on Facebook so it’s easy to build a big list quickly. Because most of the world is on Facebook you’ll be surprised at who you can find from your target market.
Your database of contacts gives you access to your friends’ photos and you can read your friends interactions with their friends on their “wall” (where most discussions happen on Facebook).
That means your friends’ friends can see what’s going on over on your wall too. And that’s incredibly powerful when you’re talking about your business.
“To promote your home staging or decorating business,” says Debra Gould, founder of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, “all you need to do is publish a new set of before and after photos of a home staging or interior redesign project and write a couple of sentences about the transformation, and all of the people on your list can see them.”
Gould adds, “If they can comment on your photos or on your wall, their friends lists can see that information as well. Suddenly, you’ve exponentially increased the number of people who are aware of your services and have seen a sample of your portfolio.”
It’s true that Facebook is a good way to waste time (especially if you’re playing on FarmVille or doing any number of silly quizzes), but if you use your time differently it can be an outstanding way to grow your business.
Twitter is easier to use than Facebook and requires much less of a time commitment.
In many ways Twitter is also an even more powerful marketing tool for a small business owner. There is no need to approve friend requests since anyone can follow anyone else (and there is no need to follow them back unless you want to). Twitter offers the ability to search for “tweets” (140 character Twitter posts) on any subject. That makes it a fast way to identify experts on a given topic. Since tweets are indexed by Google they are a powerful way to drive traffic to your own website or blog.
In the Home Stager’s Guide to Twitter Debra Gould provides a comprehensive step-by-step guide to using the free Twitter service to grow a home staging business. Written for total beginners, it also includes more advanced Twitter marketing strategies.
About the author
The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Gould created the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to help home sellers and real estate agents locate staging services in their area
by Debra Gould on February 9, 2010
National Post Homes Magazine
by Rebecca Vogt
Ready, Stage, Sell: Hiring a pro to primp your pad before it goes on the market could reap you thousands of dollars
Excerpt:
“‘Every house has a soul’ says Staging Diva Debra Gould, a petite woman in hipster black with a shock of dark hair and an engaging smile. We’re chatting on the second floor of her airy home.
As president of Six Elements Inc., and the force behind Staging Diva, a six-year-old company, which as primped hundreds of homes variously priced from $190,000 to $1.7-million — in addition to seven of her own (she’s also taught home staging from Spain to New Zealand)— Ms. Gould knows what it takes to sell a house quickly and for a hefty sum. A good stager, she says, ‘will set the scene so that the highest number of potential buyers fall in love the the space.’ At her web site, StagingDiva.com, she offers information on services and products geared toward the home seller, before-and-after photos of past clients’ homes and even training for those interested in starting their own staging business— a field that’s been garnering more and more attention in the real estate industry.”. . .
by Debra Gould on February 1, 2010
Summary
Home staging expert, Debra Gould, shares a success story from a Staging Diva Graduate who was able to rescue her career as an Interior Designer during Southern California’s housing collapse by learning home staging.
Staging Diva Program Rescues Interior Designer’s Career
When times are tight, nobody is spending money on frivolous things like interior design. But in a recessed economy with people being forced to sell their homes and wanting to keep all the equity they possibly can, they are willing to invest in a designer who is skilled in home staging.
When Interior Designer, Linda Scaglione, found herself in the midst of Southern California’s housing collapse, she became desperate to find a way out of the sinking retail side of design.
A friend suggested that with her skills she should consider getting into home staging and that’s when Linda made the decision to take the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program.
By taking her talent and experience in interior design and combining them with the business knowledge she gained by taking the Staging Diva Program, Linda was setting herself up for great success.
Linda’s home staging business is called Haute Decors. Marketing primarily to the real 
estate industry, Haute Decors is known for updating existing cabinetry using decorative painting on top of providing home staging services.
Her first project after reinventing herself as a home stager saw Linda staging a condo that ended up selling within 24 hours! On top of that, it sold for more money than many other units in the same condo development.
The remarkable success of that project led to Linda being hired to stage a 2.6 million dollar beach home that had been sitting on the market for more than a year. After a kitchen renovation and Linda’s home staging the owner had several pending offers within one week!
About the training she received through Debra Gould’s home staging course, Linda says, “It gave me the courage to start my own interior design business specializing in home staging. For anyone wondering if the investment will be worth it, I say ‘Go for it’!”
About the author
The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Gould created the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to help home sellers and real estate agents locate staging services in their area.
by Debra Gould on January 27, 2010
Summary
Home staging expert Debra Gould offers five tips for handling walls in home staging, in a story on one of NAR’s (National Association of Realtors) highly visited websites.
Excerpt from “Staging Tips: 5 Tips for Tackling Walls” by Erica Christoffer, Contributing Editor, REALTOR® Magazine:
“Walls are a key element of home staging. They are the canvas showcasing the greatest attributes of a house. But where do you start when preparing a home for sale? Staging Diva Debra Gould, president of Toronto-based Six Elements Inc., offers up five rules of thumb for handling walls in home staging.
- Remove personal pictures: Those wedding portraits and baby pictures have to come down, as do diplomas and awards. Personal items such as these are distracting to potential buyers. You want them to focus on the home itself, not who the current home owners are.”
Read all five tips for tackling walls at Styled, Staged, Sold.
by Debra Gould on January 25, 2010
Summary
Home staging expert, Debra Gould, shares stories of men and women who have completely reinvented their lives to become home stagers.
Will you give yourself permission to reinvent your life?
Watching the comments pour in after posting an article about a registered nurse and mother of four finding great success and creative fulfillment as a home stager inspired The Staging Diva, Debra Gould, to share more stories of those who’ve changed careers to completely reinvent their lives.
Marketing consultant turned home stager, Debra Gould says, “It’s rare today for anyone to keep the same career for an entire lifetime. We’re all living much longer than our parents’ generation, and many people at the traditional retirement age are realizing they still have many years ahead that they’d like to be productive, not to mention doing work they would love.”
One of the comments that came in was from 62-year old Carol who shared that after working for 36 years as a hair dresser she made the decision to make a change and start her own home staging business.
Pauline commented that her career in criminal law had her so miserable, she would find herself literally getting sick on her way to work in the morning. Since changing her life and becoming a home stager, she’s eager to start work every day.
“Reading those comments made me dig deeper and take a closer look at what other Staging Diva Graduates have done in their lives before turning to home staging, and there were several cases where people made a very drastic change,” says Gould.
One of those Staging Diva Graduates is Fran Matsumoto, co-owner of Pristine Staging in Beverly Hills. Fran had worked as an airline employee and also as the office manager to Rodney Dangerfield and his wife Joan before reinventing her life as a home stager.
The mother of a large “yours, mine, ours” blended family, Jayne Steuart’s career was spent caring for eight children, waiting for her turn to do something for herself. With her youngest child now 14 years old and her own work off the back burner, Jayne is having the time of her life as a home stager and owner of Pearl Home Staging and Redesign. (Read about one of Jayne’s home staging success 
stories here.)
In her early 50s, a layoff saw Donna Dazzo out of a 25+ year career in the field of financial services. Rather than taking that time to find another job in her industry, she started her own successful home staging business, Designed to Appeal. (Read more about Donna’s success as a home stager here.)
Gary Baugher left a secure management position he’d held for 15 years at a car rental company to start his Nashville home staging company, An Eye 4 Change.
Ken Sater in California started his home staging business, Creative Home Visions, after working for 18 years in mortgage banking and 14 years in the insurance industry. (Read more about both of these men and their stories here.)
“In one of the more recent stories I’ve heard and possibly the most romantic, Sophia Mose ‘escaped’ 
her job in London where she worked as a lawyer, to the countryside of France to work as a home stager,” says Gould.
Sophia writes, “I’m not having an easy time getting clients as Home Staging is an unfamiliar concept here, but I’m not giving up. If it doesn’t work here, we’ll just move to a more populated area! All the time, people are questioning my choices and telling me that I’ll regret it, but you can’t listen to that. You have to give it a try, otherwise you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.”
About the author
The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained thousands of home stagers to start and grow their own businesses. Gould created the Staging Diva Directory of Home Stagers to help home sellers and real estate agents locate staging services in their area
by Debra Gould on January 22, 2010
On the January 9, 2010 episode of HGTV’s “The Decorating Adventures of Ambrose Price,” home staging expert 
Debra Gould aka The Staging Diva takes Ambrose under her wing, teaching him how to stage a home to sell.
The show follows Ambrose and Debra as they visit three homes that have been staged with Debra explaining what was done right and what was done wrong in each of them.
Later in the episode, Ambrose tried out his new home staging skills on a condo by himself. The show ends with Debra offering her critique of what Ambrose did with his newly acquired design skills.
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