Advertising your business is very important. To keep the flow of clients coming you need to have a plan for how you will get your business out there. There are many ways to advertise, but not all of them will be the right type for your company. Advertising in the right places and the right way will help turn people into future clients. Here are some ideas of where to advertise your Interior Design business.

An Effective Website

First and foremost, have a website of your own. Advertising is so technology-driven now. Radio ads, billboards, and ads in the newspaper are not as good as they once were. Be sure to have a user-friendly, professional website.

Your website will showcase all of your previous projects, help people contact you, show pricing, and show potential clients how well you work with others. All of the photos on your website need to be professionally done. You are going to shoot yourself in the foot if you do not take time to get really good photos done. Non-professional photos will make you look incompetent and clumsy.

Update the design of your website every so often. If your website is three or four years old consider doing a redesign or update. You do not want to lose clients because your website was too old or too hard to navigate.

Social Media

Utilise social media. There are so many platforms that would be really good for advertising your business. For instance, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram are extremely visually-based. Photos are constantly being uploaded and shared on these platforms. You can also create and post infographics to get your point across better than a plain post.

On Facebook, you can use ads to target who sees information about your company. You can really narrow it down to those who have previously searched for interior designers in your area or those who might be searching for living room ideas. The ad campaigns are endless. Make sure that with any campaign you do it will get you enough activity that the platform algorithms think your ads are relevant.

Pinterest can be used effectively depending on how you organise boards. One company categorised their work by room and different design styles. You can cross-market across Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook to get followers or those looking at your work for the first time to share your images with their networks and hopefully lead them to your website. All this cross-marketing will potentially lead to new clients.

On all your social media platforms and your website, if you allow people to contact you, be responsive. Respond quickly and professionally. These things will influence what types of reviews people leave you and if they become future clients.

Houzz

One social media platform needs to have a mention of its own, Houzz. This platform is probably the most important social network you can be a part of.

On Houzz, you can display your gallery, interact with other people researching interior design idea, network and speak with other professionals, and generate potential clients. Most established and reputable interior designers are on Houzz.

Have an interactive profile on Houzz. Participate in discussion boards, polls, and forums. These things will give you opportunities to share your expertise and get brand exposure. This also leads to another opportunity for cross-marketing as people may share your images on other platforms. People will also be able to ask you questions directly.

Submit your projects to be featured on Houzz. You can try to have articles and projects featured on Houzz which will give you great brand exposure.

Make your profile one that will get noticed. Complete your profile will all the different projects you’ve done and their locations. Even if you are getting a lot of traffic from people who are outside your area there is potential that it will lead back to someone in your area.

Connect with and leave reviews for partner business (furniture stores, niche designers, contractors) that you have worked with. By doing this you will help each other get more traffic and business.

Ask people to leave you reviews. The more positive reviews you have the higher you will rank in searches.

YouTube Channel

Sure, YouTube may seem like an odd idea, but it is still worth it. On YouTube, you can create a channel and gain followers. You can make an introductory video explaining your approach to interior design. You can also make How To’s for different subjects. You can connect these videos to your other social media platforms and your website.

Doing this and making sure to use keywords across all of your social media platforms will help with your SEO (search engine optimisation). You have to be conscientious about what words you are using and how you are optimising where your website and other social media accounts come up on a search list.

Search Engines

On search engines, you can run pay-per-click ads. These campaigns will help you come up at the top of the search list when people type in Interior Designers on their web browser. As you focus on the most commonly used keywords and run the ad specifically for your target area it will help create traffic to your social media accounts and websites. Run campaigns for specific design types or certain rooms, have the ad take them to a spot on your website with the exact content they are searching for.

Online Directories

List your company on online directories like Angie’s List, Thumbtack, and Home Advisor. This will once again help your company get brand exposure and be more visible on a different platform. People can leave you reviews and help improve your company’s placement on the search list.

Advertising and making a plan for exposing your brand will always be a bit challenging. You need to know where and how to advertise to make it effective for your business. The above ideas are a great start to putting your business out there and turning visitors, clickers, or searchers into future clients.

Photographers experienced with Photoshop know that using the best tools for a task is only part of the equation when editing their images. Another very important consideration for achieving optimum results is making adjustments in the correct order.

With all that in mind, the tutorial below explains how to harness the power of Photoshop’s Tone Curve to improve the look of an image, and why this should be the last step in an edit. So in essence, this lesson does double duty in barely 16 minutes.

Tutorials from German landscape photographer Christian Mohrle are among the most popular we post, partly because of the great images he uses to demonstrate his tips and tricks. Today he provides step-by-step instructions “to make use of Photoshop’s Tone Curve to add final post processing adjustments to landscape photos.”

Mohrle’s demonstration image for this episode is a pretty, but somewhat dark, outdoor scene with beautiful reflections in the small foreground pond. His goal for the transformation of this sunrise shot is to accentuate its soft, dreamy colors.

The first task is making several basic adjustments in Photoshop’s Raw editor. The image is underexposed because Mohrle metered for the highlights. He starts by changing the profile to Adobe Standard which immediately brightens up the darkest portions of the scene.

Other quick adjustments include modifying White Balance to neutralize a slight yellowish cast, bumping up exposure to open up shadows, dropping highlights, and pumping up contrast and texture. Next he places a linear gradient in the right corner of the sky, to help make it stand out with adjustments to Saturation and Clarity.

Mohrle then does some simple sharpening and color grading before turning to the final Curves adjustments. With all that out of the way it’s time for the meat of the tutorial, and Mohrle demonstrates exactly how it’s done.

There’s a wealth of powerful tips and tricks on Mohrle’s instructional YouTube channel, so pay a visit often and see what’s in store.

We also suggest you check out another tutorial we posted, explaining how to use Photoshop’s simple Selection tools for clean and precise results.

Just to be clear, we’re not recommending that anyone become a one-trick pony when editing their image. In the interesting tutorial below, however, you’ll learn how to use one simple Lightroom slider to dramatically enhance landscape photos and other images shot outdoors.

Instructor Tom Sloan is a professional photographer with an eclectic mix of landscape and portrait imagery. He’s also a respected editing expert who posts simple tutorials for quickly improving the look of all sorts of photos.

In today’s episode he discusses “the one Lightroom slider I never knew about,” and how this “editing secret” now has a prominent place in his workflow. What he describes can really add pizazz to an image, and it’s so simple that it only takes him four minutes to demonstrate.

This discussion is all about Lightroom’s Calibration panel and the powerful Saturation slider that’s partly responsible for Sloan’s great images. He demonstrates his approach by finishing up the edit of three different photos—using the Saturation slider to ”give the images a little Pop in color.”

While this basic technique may not be a secret to everyone, Sloan explains the best way to get the job done. He begins this session with a basic description of how Lightroom’s Calibration panel works. If you want to take a deeper dive on this topic after watching the lesson, you can find links to more comprehensive tutorials in the description beneath the video.

Sloan moves on to his straightforward three-image processing session, where you’ll see how he employs the Saturation slider to significantly enhance the look of his trio of photos. He typically uses this technique as a final step in the editing process, which is where each of his edits begins.

Sometimes all that’s required to improve a landscape shot is pulling the Blue Saturation slider to the right for a more vivid sky. As you’ll see, however, other photos require a bit more thought, but even then this method is super simple. Sloan also explains the important differences between changes to HSL settings vs. those involving Calibration when editing RGB images.

If you appreciate Sloan’s comfortable approach, you can find more videos like this by visiting his popular YouTube channel.

And speaking of landscape photography, check out the earlier tutorial we posted that explains why some landscape pros are switching from wide-angle to telephoto lenses.

We’ve all been there: You’re out and about running errands without a camera and come upon a striking scene that deserves to be photographed, so naturally you pull out your phone. But if you always shoot in Auto mode the images you capture won’t be as awesome as possible.

In the video below from MountMedia, an instructional site with up-to-date camera reviews and shooting how-tos, you’ll see how to dramatically improve your mobile photography by using powerful iPhone features that you’ve ignored in the past. By the end of this episode you may even think of your iPhone as a “real” camera after all!

Instructor Werner Plank covers a lot of ground, so we recommend having pen and paper handy to take careful notes for future reference. He demonstrates what he calls “15 amazing tricks”—many of which you’ll find yourself using over and over again from now on. Plank refers to Apple’s iPhone 14 and 14 Pro (Max) in this demonstration, but much of what you’ll learn is appropriate for shooting with other models too. And he provides links to more helpful information in the description beneath the video.

The “magical” tricks in this episode include everything from controlling the iPhone with Siri voice commands, and convenient hidden features of the shutter button, to capabilities of the robust iPhone Photos app. There’s also an interesting tip for using Live Photo to create impressive long-exposure effects.

Plank provides powerful advice for those interested in capturing motion. You’ll see how to create a gif from a burst, an easy way to convert a Live Photo to a video, and how to take photos and videos for the shared library. There’s also a quick method for shooting a Hyperlapse with your phone.

Several tricks are geared specifically for improving the quality of iPhone photos, including those for enhancing depth of field and taking the “perfect” portrait with the help of Live Photo. This is only a smattering of what you’ll learn, so grab your iPhone and note pad, and hit the “play” button now.

There’s much more of interest on the MountMedia instructional YouTube channel, so pay a visit when you have time.

You’ll also want to check out the tutorial we posted last month, with more mobile photography tips and tricks.