Resources for Your Home Staging Business
If only running a home staging business meant that you only had to stage homes and shop for furniture and accessories. Unfortunately, running a business is more complicated, from accounting to marketing, and even making sure your computer is running efficiently!
We have put together a list of tools that we have used for Stager Sidekick, and know they would greatly help with the business side for your home staging company.
Affiliate disclosure: I recommend only products and services that I personally use, trust, and get value from. I am also an affiliate for some of these resources, so I may receive a referral fee when you use the links below.
Resources we recommend for home staging businesses
Accounting and Invoicing: FreshBooks
Business Email Address: G-Suite
Domain Name: Namecheap
Local Business Listing and SEO: Google My Business
Make space on Mac hard drive: CleanMyMac
Accounting and Invoicing: FreshBooks
Want to get paid? Every home stager knows the challenges of chasing down payments from some clients.
Simply set up your client in FreshBooks and enter information for how much they owe you for the staging job you just completed. Then FreshBooks will create the invoice and email it to your client. FreshBooks makes it easy for your client to pay you for that home you masterfully staged for them. Buy furniture, pay movers, or have any other expenses? Enter them into FreshBooks, and your accounting life just became easier.
During tax time, FreshBooks makes your accounting easy for income taxes. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of what FreshBooks can do for your home staging business.
If you use the link below, FreshBooks will give you a 30 day free trial for you to see if FreshBooks is right for you.
Click the link to check out FreshBooks.
If you are still unsure and want to learn more about FreshBooks, you can read our article with a video by clicking here.
Business Email Address: G-Suite
What is your email address? Hopefully it doesn’t have a gmail.com, yahoo.com, or even worse hotmail.com or comcast.net at the end of it. A serious business will have an email address that uses their business name. For example, if your home staging business is called “My Staging Company” (pretty original, I know), your email address should be [email protected]. That email address shows your clients and prospective clients that you are a serious business, while a gmail, yahoo, hotmail, comcast, or anything similar is less than professional.
G-Suite is a service from Google that gives you that professional email address.
G-Suite comes many other utilities through Google. Such as 30GB of storage with Google, your employees (if you have any) can get an email address on your domain, you can integrate it with Outlook, and it makes file sharing a breeze. All of this for only $5/month (each employee is an additional $5/month).
Click on the link to check out G-Suite from Google. Or contact us for a coupon code worth 20% off your first year.
Domain Name: Namecheap
If you don’t have a website, or you are thinking about changing your website domain name, get the domain name through Namecheap now. Don’t Google to see if it is available, just get it.
What is a domain name, also known as URL? It is the “DomainName” part of www.DomainName.com. The domain name for Stager Sidekick is www.StagerSidekick.com.
Domain names are approximately $14/year, but your first year will be $8.88 when you click this link for Namecheap.
If you have questions about domain names, you can contact Mike at [email protected], and I’ll help you out.
Here’s the link again for your $8.88 domain at Namecheap.
Local Business Listing and SEO: Google My Business
Almost everyone has heard that SEO is important. But what does it mean? In a nutshell, good SEO means that when people search for something like “home stager in <your town>” in Google, your website shows up near the top of the first page. Bad SEO (or no SEO) means that your page shows up several pages later, or worse, not at all.
SEO can really be overwhelming for a home stager to figure out on their own (websites from Stager Sidekick come with a lot of SEO features, and we provide guidance for you to improve SEO on your website).
But there is one thing that can really help out your website’s SEO that so few home stagers actually take advantage of, and that’s called Google My Business. Google My Business is extremely valuable for helping your local SEO.
Google My Business is a free service from Google, and it’s not too complicated to set up.
Click on the link to check out Google My Business.
Make space on Mac hard drive: CleanMyMac
Do you ever get the message on your MacBook that your hard drive is running out of space? Well I do. That’s why I purchased CleanMyMac, and am so thankful that I did!
Apparently your Mac creates tons of important files that you never know about. Over time, those files become junk that takes up space – a lot of space.
CleanMyMac scans your computer and gets rid of all that useless junk so that you can stop getting that disk space message from your Mac. The first time I used it, I had 4.28GB left on my 128GB hard drive, and was regularly getting a warning from my Mac. After using CleanMyMac, I had 35.12GB free. That means I gained over 30GB by having useless files that have no value removed from my computer! For $39.95, CleanMyMac is a miracle worker!
Click the link to check out CleanMyMac.