7 Hot Affiliate Vendors

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to make money just because people purchased products from links you placed in your blog posts and emails? That’s how affiliate marketing works. It’s great passive income and a lot of interior designers are looking for more ways to make money. Affiliate programs are a great way to make money in your sleep. Quite literally, your clients and followers can purchase items you are promoting 24/7.

The companies below have great affiliate programs that your fellow interior designers use and love! I did my own research and am not receiving any compensation from these companies to have them listed here. After visiting with several interior designers these were the Top 7 hot affiliate vendors they shared with me. They are listed in no particular order.

 1. Boutique Rugs- Boutique Rugs is one of the more popular ones I’ve come across. They offer amazing rugs, have great customer service and pay an affiliate commission of 7%. You can get more information at https://boutiquerugs.com/affiliate-program/

2. Amazon – Doesn’t everyone use Amazon, anyway? Why not use it for your business. A few of the interior designers I reached out to loved Amazon. As you can imagine you can find a wide variety of items and with affiliate commissions of up to 10% it’s worth a shot. For more information - https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/

3. Bellacor – Lighting, furniture, décor and more. Bellacor pays up to 8% affiliate commissions when a client purchases from your link. Click for more info - https://www.bellacor.com/affiliate.htm

4. Curtain Works – This company has all the window treatments your clients will ever need. They pay 10% commission and offer a wide variety of ready-made curtains at competitive prices. Here you go - https://www.bellacor.com/affiliate.htm

5. Jonathan Adler – If your target market loves mid-century modern this affiliate program may be the one for you! Think luxury, smart design and colorful optimism with a 6% commission. Check it out here - https://www.jonathanadler.com/affiliate-program.html

6. Lulu & Georgia – This home décor company seems to be a favorite of several of the interior designers I spoke with. They offer a wide variety of super stylish décor and offer a 10% commission. Learn more about their affiliate program - https://www.luluandgeorgia.com/affiliates/

7.  Serena & Lily – This company always makes me think of a breezy California style. Their products are definitely casual coastal. They have a 9% affiliate commission and more information here - https://www.viglink.com/merchants/35595/serena-and-lily-affiliate-program

Let us know if you need help setting up your affiliate vendors. That is one of the many services we offer our interior design clients at Elite Design Assistants!

Make More Money By Outsourcing

Running a business is a challenging career choice and those of us that do it, know that we continuous try to come up with ways to make more money and save more time. I am in the business to make YOU more money and to save YOU more time.

How do I do this? One of the ways is by offering a service to you that you can resell to your clients for a profit. For example, let’s say you want to offer 3d renders but you don’t have time. We can work with you to create a package that you can sell to your client where your Elite design assistant does the renderings for you. The image above is just one example of a 3d render created by one of our virtual design assistants.

This works with floor plans, mood boards, shopping lists, etc.

A second example is to outsource some of your billable hours to your design assistant. This way you can charge your clients for the work your assistant is doing. You are charging your rates and paying assistant fees. See the margin there?

Also look at where your clients are coming from. If you want to grow your business hire an assistant to market in that area, for example – if most of your business is coming from Pinterest, hire an assistant to manage your Pinterest account to grow your business. If you are getting business from your email list but don’t have time to create the email content, hire an assistant to create your email content, schedule and manage your subscriber list.

There are so many ways to generate more income and more time, you just need to be smart about it. Take a look at your business and see where you can increase revenues by hiring an assistant.

Should You Be Offering E-Design?

As you look at your interior design business, are you offering e-design? E-design is growing in popularity but if you are unfamiliar with the term e-design is the interior design of a space done entirely online. There are no in-home visits, face-to-face meetings with clients or implementation of the design. You work completely virtually from your home or studio to complete an e-design project.

There are a growing number of interior designers offering e-design as a service now. It opens them up to working with clientele in any location in the world. Perhaps you have clients with second homes, out of state friends or family who are looking for an interior designer or an ever-growing social media presence that is attracting potential clients from all over.

There are some big-name firms that I follow that are now offering an e-design package from Erin Gates to Kathryn Ireland. Check out your favorite interior designers that you follow for inspiration and see if they are offering an e-design service.

Before you offer an e-design package there are a few things to consider.

1.       Your e-design client market will be different from your current interior design client market. The clients you will working with on e-design may still have a healthy budget, but it will typically be less than that of a tradition client. An e-design client is also very much a DIY type of client since they have the confidence to implement your design. Also, e-design clients typically want things done more quickly since everything is online.

2.       You must be comfortable working with your clients online. Some interior designers have to see their client’s home, physically be in the space, touch the materials they are recommending and have face-to-face meetings with their client to really get the creative juices flowing. This is their process – so suddenly jumping to an all online model may not work for this type of designer.

3.       There is still great value in this service. Unfortunately, there are some companies out there who are significantly undervaluing e-design, but the strong, creative, e-designers of the world are emerging and proving their worth and value. There is obviously money in it or some of the most influential interior designers of our time would not be marketing it as a service.

The pros of offering an e-design package

1.       Working remotely! This offers you a whole newfound freedom to be able to do everything from your laptop.

2.       Business growth! It’s an opportunity to substantially grow your business by increasing your target market beyond your physical location.

3.       Passive income opportunities. Now that you are offering e-design as a service you may also want to consider affiliate marketing. You can make commissions off products your e-design clients purchase but you can also add those affiliate links to Pinterest pins, emails you send to your email list and your blog posts.

e-design is a wonderful new option for clients and interior designers. Although it is extremely popular it will never replace a full-service in-house design. Not everyone is in love with a virtual experience and that is okay. It takes all kinds to make this world go round, so if you are interested in e-design at all for your business – it might be worth exploring!

Let us know if you are interested in learning how working with a virtual design assistant can help you offer this new service. We are well-versed in e-design as well!

Do You Have An Email List?

You can have every social media platform covered including a great blog, but you will get the most bang for your buck if you have an email list. Email lists are amazing and can bring you more income than you thought possible.

Why are email lists so important? Email lists are comprised of people that want to hear from you. They are interested in what you have to say and are interested in updates having to do with your business. Social media is a very valuable tool but unless you are paying for targeted ads it’s not as specific to your target market as your email list is. The email list provides you with a go-to list of people to contact when you decide to run a special, offer a new service or have great news and updates to share.

Starting an email list is fairly simple for someone who knows what they are doing.  I’ll be honest, my virtual design assistant set mine up for me. The easiest way to start one is to create an opt-in on your website. You can attach this opt-in to all your other social media as well. The opt-in is a pop up that will appear when someone visits your website and it will ask for an email address. A lot of designers offer a freebie in exchange for the email address. You can offer a style quiz or a how-to guide for the most commonly asked questions you receive such as how to hang curtains, how to hang a gallery wall, how to choose the appropriate sized rug, etc.

Once you have your freebie and your opt-in ready you will need to link it to an email capture service like MailChimp or ConvertKit. These services allow you to keep an email subscriber list and allow you to set up email campaigns. You can create an automatic email campaign or go in and schedule new ones to go out as needed.

This is a very high-level overview of how to start an email subscription list so if you need help getting one set up please let us know!

We can help you set one up, write your email content for you, schedule the emails, etc.

Do you need help with your email list? Please feel free to email me at danae@elitedesignassistants.com.

How Can We Make Your Life Easier?

I honestly want to know how we can make your life easier! I know you are busy, overwhelmed and possibly exhausted and we want to help. We want to help you grow the business of your dreams while giving you back your life! Interior designers are passionate about what they do and speaking from experience the work can get quite addicting, but we must prevent burnout and we must enjoy life.

I’m sure you have some hobbies right? Maybe you like to garden, or travel or watch Games of Thrones… is that considered a hobby? Because I feel like it should be for some people.

Think about what aspects of your business that you like the least. What would you love to outsource? What do you find time consuming and boring? And what do you love to do the most?

We help interior designers schedule their appointments because they love meeting with clients but they hate managing their calendar.

We help our clients manage their social media because it can be one challenging beast to stay consistent and continue to post every day or weekly.

We do renders! Yes, that’s right – maybe you love working with clients and finding the right pieces but you don’t always have the extra time to create the renders or floor plans or mood boards or shopping lists or spec sheets for contractors or proposals … we do it all!

Anything that can be done virtually, we can do it for you – from writing your blog to designing your website. We are trained interior designers who found a passion for helping other interior designers grow and manage their businesses. it’s a win-win-win. Win for the designer, win for the client and win for the design assistant!

One thing I’ve heard over and over and over again is blog copy – blogs are everything right now and many designers either don’t have a blog or aren’t consistent with one, but blogs are a great way to share your insight with your clients and followers. We are going to be offering a new blog service very soon that will allow you to purchase blog templates with copy and images that give you the formula for quickly creating the blog post yourself! We will also be offering original blog posts for purchase as well as our custom blog writing service. There will be a large variety of posts to choose from and I’ll be adding new ones weekly! Stay tuned for more information to come! You can always visit our site at www.elitedesignassistants.com for more information!

Take it easy! Danae

Attract More Clients with Your Brand!

As an interior designer, your brand is you. You will attract clients just by being you and I know for some creating a brand around themselves and their ideal client isn’t easy.

So how do you create your brand?

In order to really start honing in on your brand ask yourself these questions.

1.       Who is my ideal client & what style do they like?

2.       What have been my favorite projects to work on and why?

3.       What type of client do I resonate with most?

4.       What kind of person am I and what do I love besides interior design?

Once you’ve answered these questions look at your answers. It’s very important that they align with each other and here’s why. I can say my ideal clients are young wealthy couples who are attracted to luxurious designs but if I resonate most with middle-aged couples who live on the coast and love a beachy design then there is an obvious disconnect there that needs to be addressed. Once you are sure that the answers to the questions above make sense implement some of that into your brand. For example, if you specialize in coastal interiors then your brand should have a coastal feel. Create a brand mood board complete with colors, images, quotes, etc. Pinterest is great for inspiration.

Once you’ve created a brand mood board start writing some copy about your brand. First write a story about you – who are you – to use on your About Us/Me page of your website.

Your About Us/Me page is your brand, your story, what makes your business so unique? Why should people do business with you? What do you have to offer?

Your About Us/Me page should be written in a conversational tone and include:

1.       The story behind how your business was started.

2.       The services and/or products you provide.

3.       How you benefit the customer.

4.       A call to action such as entering their email for a newsletter or leaving your phone number for them to call you.

Use your About page in your marketing, in your branding, on social media – update it and post bits and pieces of it throughout social media. Write a blog post or newsletter article about your About page. You really can use it as a marketing tool to create customer awareness and attract new business.

If you need help writing your About page consider hiring a copywriter or content marketer to help you. They know what they are doing and can take your thoughts and turn them into a lead generating piece of copy!

You are an interior designer so almost more important than good copy are good images. Highlight your portfolio on your social media. Create a story with your images and visually entice your ideal client to want to do business with you. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest are great platforms to showcase your work.

Need a more in-depth idea of what your brand should look like? Ask yourself the following questions.

1. What do you sell?

2. What are you really selling? For example - you may think you sell financial planning but really you are selling peace of mind.

3. What is your target market? Is this market small enough – would you be better served to narrow your focus and go after a niche market?

4. What are the characteristics of your target market?

5. What are the characteristics of your company?

6. What would your company look like if it were a person?

7. What would your company act like if it were a person?

8. What makes your company unique?

9. What need does your company fulfill? Or what problem does your company solve?

10. How do you want your target market to see your company?

Write down the answers to the questions above and start formulating your true brand. The brand that is going to attract customers and the brand that is going to move you toward success!

Remember, your brand is the mark you want to leave on the world.

Use your brand in all aspects of your marketing. Need help? You can always contact us at www.elitedesignassistants.com.

Enjoy the adventure of branding!

Danae

Generating Interior Design Client Leads

In working with interior designers I’ve found that one of their least favorite things to do in their business is marketing for clients, i.e. generating leads. They love creating beautiful spaces but don’t love having to spend time chasing potential clients. Here are some great tips for generating more leads for your business without losing your head!

1.       Start an email list. I know several designers that get clients simply from the email list they have built. Add an opt-in for people who visit your site to subscribe to your email list and offer them a freebie for subscribing – maybe a style quiz or a design guide of some sort. Use Mailchimp or other user-friendly email platform to capture and send out a weekly email of your offerings.

2.       Concentrate on one social media platform. Sometimes it’s easier to focus on generating business from one platform and doing that platform really well then it is to half-ass a bunch of platforms. Persistency and consistency are the names of the game on social media.

3.       Start a Facebook group. Start drawing your target market to your Facebook group where you can discuss your services, show examples, offer advice and get people excited about working with you by connecting and getting to know them.

4.       Create a 5-day challenge. Entice people to use your service by creating a free challenge of some sort. It could be a 5-day room challenge or more specifically a 5-day home office challenge or 5-day master bedroom challenge. Something that fits with your target market and would get them involved.

5.       Use a lead funnel. Lead funnels are a great way to generate leads but do cost money and are best set up by experts, unless you know what you are doing. They use Facebook or Google Ads to generate leads to your inbox. These are typically automated in such a way that they work even while you sleep!

 Any or all of these are excellent ways to get new clients. At the end of the day, time is money and if you are able to fit this into your schedule then do it! If you are not, you may want to consider hiring an experienced virtual design assistant to help you grow the business of your dreams!

Planning a Great Blog

Blog posts are an excellent way to drive traffic to your site and to showcase your brand, your talents and your services. Not only can blog posts shed some light on what you have to offer your clients, but they can be used as a great way to create passive income. Although we all know how necessary blogs can be for our business the unfortunate truth is the most of us don’t really enjoy writing them, planning them, finding graphics, sharing them, etc. So, what can we do to make blogging a little less painful and a lot more enjoyable? I’m going to share that with you today!

Create a Plan! Block out 30 minutes on your planning calendar once a month to brainstorm blog post ideas. What do you want to write about? What pertains to your clients, your brand and what you love to do as an interior designer? You need to know your ideal client well enough to know what they like and what they’d enjoy reading about. Start writing down topics. For example, you could write about color, specific pieces of furniture (tulip tables, sectionals, x-benches), mixed metals, powder rooms, maximizing visual space with design, etc. Gather ideas from your favorite magazines and websites.

Once you have a great list of topics, schedule a couple of hours once a week to research and write. Since you already have your list of topics, choose one, do some quick research and then write. Your blog posts don’t have to be novel size, 500 words is just fine. It’s best to write short engaging copy, then long rambling copy. Be sure to include your personality in your post, people get to know you as they read your writing and the ones that are entertained or educated continue to come back for more.

Once your copy is written, come up with a great title for your post. For example, Why Are X-Benches So Popular?, Sectionals vs. Sofas, Most Popular Paint Colors for 2019, The Most Attractive Way to Mix Metals. Okay, you get my point.

Now you have a title and copy – next is gathering some graphics. Search your own library of photos and your portfolio first, if you don’t have anything then try a free graphics site for photos to include in your blog post. You can try pixabay.com, unsplash.com, picmonkey.com, or picjumbo.com for free photos.

Once you have your title, copy and images you can reread your copy – out loud to make sure you caught all the spelling and grammatical errors and then either hit publish or schedule it to be published at a later date. Once it’s published be sure to share it on all your social media platforms.

When you plan time in your calendar to do these things and to do them consistently it gets easier and easier each week, especially when you know what you want to write about. To further my organization, I assign a topic to each post in my calendar so when I go to write I’m not even looking at my list of topics because I’ve already chosen a topic and placed it in my calendar for that day.

I plan by blog posts out 6-8 weeks in advance to ensure that I’m staying consistent with my posting.

This doesn’t sound so bad does it? If all else fails call me. My virtual design assistants write blog copy and manage social media all the time. We understand that you enjoy creating spaces and we enjoy creating content and a following for our clients.

For more information on our services, please check out the website at www.elitedesignassistants.com.

Happy Writing! Danae

Most Common Pain Points for Interior Designers

I’ve been in the interior design industry for a while and I’m in a lot of different professional groups. Interior designers are amazing at juggling multiple moving parts and taking what could seem like total chaos and putting it together to create an amazing design. They are master puzzle artists is what they are!

Trying to do it all on your own can get a bit overwhelming and that is why I find that a lot of interior designers face the same obstacles, and the number one obstacle is lack of time!

I’m sure you would agree – not only are you trying to work with clients you are trying to work in your business to keep the pipeline full. The adage of market until I get clients, work with clients, and now have to market again to get more clients cycle gets old and frustrating.

When several hundred interior designers were asked about their popular pain points. These were the top 5 that stood out!

1.       Keeping up on social media.

2.       Writing blog posts.

3.       Creating Renders.

4.       Utilizing affiliate links.

5.       Getting a steady stream of clients

Here are some tips to help you with these pain points.

Social media – concentrate on one platform. It’s far less time-consuming regarding posting and engagement if you focus on one medium and get really good at that one. Or you can always use a scheduling tool like Hootsuite, Edgar or Buffer but as a reminder these tools are great for scheduling posts but not for engagement. You’ll need to do that yourself. OR you can hire a social media manager to do it all. This way the social media is off your plate for the most part and you can focus on other areas of your business.

Blog posts – Block time to write several posts at once and then schedule those posts out. Another option is to purchase pre-written posts to use for your blog or hire a copywriter to write posts for you. Depending on the areas of your business that you enjoy focusing on the most, having someone else handle your blog could free up a lot of time from researching and writing.

Creating renders – there are some very quick and easy ways to create renders – more on this coming soon- or I may sound like a broken record but there are design virtual assistants who will do your renders for you!

Utilizing affiliate links – researching, applying, organizing and using affiliate links can me a nightmare. Keep them all in one place on an excel spreadsheet and in your website favorites tab so you can grab them anytime you like. To start, just work with 1-3 vendors that offer commissions of 5-7% and focus on promoting those. If you are wanting to grow more and use a lot of affiliate links it may become very cumbersome and worth hiring a design VA!

Steady stream of clients – we all want a steady stream of client’s don’t we? There are ways to get those by utilizing social media, active campaign, mail chimp and paid ads. The key is consistency and persistency in your posting. These things take time and patience. Use Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups and local networking groups and get your name out there. Make your portfolio visible to your potential clients on all your media platforms. If people don’t know what you do, who you are and how you can help then how to you expect them to find you? A design VA could certainly help you with all of this, too.

If you aren’t able to hire help just yet you can still become successful by managing your time well, getting your work in front of others, practicing great customer service and by being yourself. You are a Rockstar with a creative gift to share the world – so share it!

 For more information on our services, please check out the website at www.elitedesignassistants.com.

How to Get Clients When You Hate Social Media

I know a lot of super smart, motivated people who would love to work from home and/or run their own businesses, but they hate social media. And as most people in business now – if you aren’t on social media, then you don’t exist.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not always been a fan of social media. At times it feels like a huge drain on my time and I have so many other things I need or want to be doing. When I started my company years ago, I knew this about myself and knew I wasn’t going to be one of those people that could spend an eternity on social media platforms posting and networking and connecting so I came up with 3 easy ways to generate leads on social media without falling down the rabbit hole.

1.       Just Pick One Platform! That’s right, when I started my business, I picked one social media platform that I used to generate clients and that’s it. Depending on my schedule, I spent anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes per day, five days a week on that platform and that was it. I researched where my ideal clients hung out and since I work with business professionals – Linked In it was! I built a six-figure business using LinkedIn alone and it has served me well. You need to be diligent in creating connections and building relationships, but it doesn’t have to be super time consuming. Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are the most popular platforms for Interior Designers.

2.       Use a Social Media Scheduling Tool. There are several social media scheduling tools out there that allow you to add all of your posts and set your schedule. So once a week, once a month, once every couple of months, how often you want to block out some time and go in and write and schedule your posts. Popular social media scheduling tools are Edgar, Buffer, Hootsuite, Tailwind and Sprout Social. Be sure to do your research and comparisons – some of these tools don’t do all platforms and their prices vary per month. Tailwind is very popular among Interior Designers who are on Pinterest and Instagram.

3.       Hire a Social Media Manager. Now that my business is growing and I need to be on more than one platform, I hired a social media manager. There are a few different ways to utilize a manager. You can spend a few hours each month creating a calendar of content and images for your social media manager to post or you can spend even less time giving them a general idea of what you want each month and let them create the content, find the images and post. Either way, hiring a social media manager is a great return on your investment. Their persistent and consistent posting on your social media platforms creates a funnel of leads that will keep your pipeline full as you continue to work on your existing clients. If you are serious about growing your business a social media manager is an excellent option to create the growth you need! And an added benefit of a social media manager is to have them also follow up on your engagement. You can schedule all the posts you want but engagement is key in generating new leads!

When used properly social media can be a very effective tool in growing the business of your dreams. So stop stalling and get your brand out there already … you’d be so happy you did!