Get Ink DIY Blog

It’s been pretty much one year since I started Get Ink DIY (say WHAT???) and one of my favorite things has been learning something new almost every day. I’ve learned things about running an online business, which was all new and exciting, but I’ve also had lots of eye-opening moments about the interior design profession and how designers run their businesses.

Since PR and marketing are functions that are intended to support your business goals, it is absolutely critical for me to have a good grasp of all aspects of the interior design business. Except I will leave the actual design work to you. (Believe me it's better that way! I just painted the entire interior of my house white, that should tell you enough, lol.)

Because I love to learn new things, I’ve found our weekly Designer Discussions on Clubhouse incredibly interesting. I’ve taken some great nuggets of hands-on tips and honest advice away from each topic and speaker.

This past Friday was no...

On Friday the guest speaker on our weekly Designer Discussions on Clubhouse was Kyla Herbes, digital content creator and home decor blogger at the hugely popular House of Hipsters blog. She is also an incredibly savvy Pinterest expert with lots of insights from her time working at Pinterest (yes, she actually worked for them creating pins for brands) and her uber-successful blogging career.

Here is the gist of what she shared in the Clubhouse talk.

Pinterest is a visual search engine, not just a place where you pin your favorite things.   Remember that you are a brand, so you need to act like a brand and focus on pinning what your audience likes, not only what you like.

Here are some tips for when you get started:

• Create a business account, or change your personal into a business account.
• Claim your website and other linked accounts so they talk to each other.
• Have a properly named brand board and supporting boards.
• To boost SEO, add keywords to everything, especially tag...

Over the last years, I’ve had many conversations with interior designers. I love to learn about everyone’s business, find out what makes them unique and what the challenges are. One of the things that naturally comes up is PR. A question a lot of interior designers seem to have is what PR really is and when it is time to start doing it. Lucky me, this is one of my favorite topics!

If you ask me, I can honestly tell you that any stage of an interior design business offers plenty of opportunity for PR.  I’ll go into more detail on this topic next week.

What I want to tell you today is that, in reality, you are always doing PR whether you know it or not. PR stands for Public Relations, which literally means it encompasses all the communications you have with your audiences - your clients, your vendors, your partners, your staff, your neighbors, your community, your peers, and so on..

Public Relations consists of many specialty areas including:

• Reputation...

How do you feel about marketing? Is it something you love or just a necessary evil?

Either way, it is a must. I was reminded of that in a recent chat I had with Jason Lockhart, the CEO of Kitchen & Bath Marketing Solutions,  for my Design PR Insider membership. He said: “If you want to grow your business, you have to do marketing.”

The two crucial things every interior designer needs to do to grow her or his business, according to Jason,  are:

• Social media
• E-mail marketing

I am sure neither one of them come as a surprise to you, and hopefully you are doing both of them! 

Jason said something else in the interview about PR that I had never thought of in that particular way. A media placement gives you a USP, a unique selling proposition, which is just jargon for something that differentiates you from all the other interior designers. And that’s what you want! 

It’s the job of marketing to leverage your uniqueness, and PR placements...