Inaugural Mocha Cafe

Gail Doby and Erin Weir of Design Success University, welcomes you to the first inaugural Mocha Cafe. Each week Gail and Erin will introduce the theme for the week along with the designer and resource spotlights, activities for the week, and one of their interesting and design stories.


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interior design education, interior design university, business interior design

Remodeling? How To Hire The Best & Stay Sane!

Welcome Message

Gail and Erin introduce Design Success University

How to Get Found Online & Get Interior Design Business

You have a nice website, yet you’re not getting the calls you want or need to have a profitable and sustainable business that provides the lifestyle you deserve. Why is that?

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean consumers can find you. Have you searched for interior designers in your metro area? Do you come up on the first page of Google or Yahoo? If not, you need to do some work. 80% of the calls go to the top three listings on the first page of the search engines.

List your site with the search engines. If you do this yourself, this can take many hours, but it is free. I really recommend outsourcing this to someone who does this all of the time.

Optimize your site for the keywords that people use to search for interior designers in your area. Keywords could be “interior designer new york,” or “kitchen designer San Francisco.”

Your website should be optimized with your keywords, in what are called anchor links within the text of your site. An anchor link is text that the search engines see that indicates relevance to a search by someone looking for your services.

For instance, one search term you might use to look for me is “value based fees.” If you’re looking for information about growing a more profitable and passion-filled interior design business, the link takes you right to another site we own. (Be sure to download the complimentary eBook!)

Make sure you anchor link keywords to secondary pages within your website. This is called “deep linking.” The search engines reward you for this because you have more content that makes the search on your site more relevant.

Here are examples you might use on your site:

• Interior design city
• Interior designer city
• Kitchen design city
• Bathroom design city

If you’re really on top of the game, your website address, or URL, should include the main keywords someone might use to find you. For example: http://www.interiordesignorinteriordesigneryourcityyourcompanyname.com.

If you don’t have a website address like this, you can register a new domain that uses this naming convention and forward it to your current website address.

Be sure to list your site on Google, Bing and Yahoo! maps. This is free, and extremely important to help you get found. These days, over 70% of all people who look for any service look online and view your website before calling you. If you’re not on Page 1, you’re not very likely to be found.

Add a blog to your website, and post articles at least once a week with the main keywords for your site. Search engines “crawl” the web every day looking for new content. Fresher content gets higher rankings in the search engines. If you don’t have a blog attached to your site, then at least update your website as frequently as possible.

I recommend a blog because you can update the site yourself. There are many qualified web developers who can set up a template for your site and teach you how to use it. You can even use a hybrid blog template that looks more like a website. Just search on Google for WordPress templates and take a look at the options available.

Every website or blog can be customized with your logo, branding and graphics.

Remember to write your content to appeal to the emotions of the potential client. Don’t use a laundry list of what you do. Tell your visitors how you improve their lives.

Use alt-tags for all photographs on your site. Alt-tags are the text you see when you roll your mouse over a picture or image.

Use similar naming conventions that I mentioned above. “Master Bedroom Interior Design NYC” is a good tag if you want your images to be found in the city of New York. Images are more likely to be found than your website.

Talk to your webmaster about your H1 tag (Title Tag), Meta Description and Meta Tags. These must be relevant to the keywords that your prospects use to search for you on the web.

If you really want to get found, use a video about your business. Few designers use videos yet, so you’re very likely to get a high search ranking if you use a video with keywords and your URL in the description.

Gail Doby, ASID, is co-founder and Chief Vision Officer of Design Success University. DSU is your shortcut to a more profitable and passion-filled interior design business. Click the link to get your complimentary copy of the Interior Design Fee & Salary Survey eBook now ($79 Value). This article was originally written for Decorati.

10 Time Triage Tips - Part I

One of the common themes I hear from interior designers is their feeling of being overwhelmed and “busy” especially when business is really good which we all hope it will be in the near future. This is the perfect time to really think about your business and plan for a more successful future.

The important question to ask yourself is, “Am I Busy or Am I Productive?” We’ve been talking about this in our Business Mastery Membership Monthly Mentor sessions, but I want to extract some key ideas for you to consider.

1. Laser Clarity – this is really the key to time control because you’re really not controlling time, you’re controlling yourself. If you aren’t clear about why you’re doing something and how it will get you to your goals, you’re wasting time. Once you’re clear, the path is direct and inevitable. It absolutely must be tied into your emotions, values and reason why or you’ll find yourself sabotaging your results. Your goals must be specific, measurable and written with a date for completing. The quality of your life depends on the quality of your questions. (paraphrased and author unknown) Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Why are you doing what you are doing?
• What is success to you?
• What are the measures of success to you?
• Does your business align with your values?
• Are you enjoying it?
• What specifically do you like about the business?
• What specifically do you love doing?
• What specifically don’t you like about the business?
• What specifically don’t you love doing?
• What specifically would you like to learn?
• Are you happy?
• Are you achieving what you want?

2. Fanatical Planning, Laser Focus & Lockdown (Debbie Green's great word!)

• A goal without a written plan is just a dream. I don’t remember who said that, but it is true.
• You can only do one thing at a time. The more projects you start at the same time, the longer it will take you to complete all of them. Multi-tasking is deadly to achieving your goals. Focus on the biggest and most important things first. Start with the end in mind and write down the step that needs to be done prior to achieving the major goal, and then the step before that, etc. Schedule your time.
• Identify your 2 – 4 most productive hours of the day. Are you a lark (early) or owl (late)? Always schedule your work on the drivers of your business during these hours. Be ruthlessly protective of this time and do what Debbie Green with Minutes Matter Solutions, Inc. calls “lock-down.” Turn off the phone, instant messaging, close the door, totally focus on the projects that will do the most for your business first. If you have trouble starting, just write down the smallest step you can take to get started.
• You have to know how much time things take, and if you don’t you can’t manage your time. Start logging for a few days how much time you spend on different activities. If you’re spending two hours on email and answering your phone per day, you’re being reactive vs. proactive. Control this and start becoming aware of how long things take to do. As soon as you know how long things take, find ways to do them more efficiently. Always look for the elegant solution.

3. Creative Chunks – do similar things at the same time. If you are writing blog posts, do those all at one time on a specific day and time and do a month’s worth. Every time you shift from one task to another, you lose as much as 20 minutes just getting into the rhythm of the project. That’s why it is so important to have laser focus. Use a kitchen timer to keep you on schedule. Take complete mental breaks (maximum of 90 minutes on one project before a break) and do something to rest your mind like taking a walk, etc.

4. Systematize & Streamline – parts of this business are fairly routine. Document the routines completely so you can delegate or outsource them. Your time as the owner of the business should be spent on the five drivers for your business – sales & marketing, project planning & oversight, client relationships, systemization and joint ventures. If you were to focus your time on these five drivers alone, you would achieve more in less time and make more money…what could you do with the extra time and money? Use that to power through the documentation and systemization process so you can assign the work that doesn’t require your creativitity and skill sets.

5.Improve Your Strengths & Outsource or Delegate Your Weaknesses – I just learned this a few years ago, and it was really eye-opening to me. Keep this in mind if you have kids, too. If you have particular strengths, focus on improving those if they are the key drivers of your business. Find a coach, or find the best person you can to be a mentor to you to teach you the best practices. It will save you incredible amounts of time, money and wasted effort. This is also known as modeling. Everything that is not a strength, don’t do and don’t try to improve. It is extremely freeing to give up trying to improve things that aren’t playing to your strengths.

Watch for Part II soon...

If you’d like to learn more how to get more clients, work less and enjoy your interior design business more, be sure to request Design Success University’s Interior Design Fee & Salary Survey eBook - $49 Value with our compliments. We’ll also add you to our complimentary weekly newsletter, IDEAS that is full of educational and inspirational articles plus a calendar of upcoming events.