Episode 107 | Netflix + Organizing = New Clients for all of us!

It is always a great time in organizing when there are things in pop culture and the public consciousness of what we do is high! 

The second season of the Home Edit show premiered on Netflix on April 1st, so today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about how you can take advantage of these things, how you can make sure that your business is ready for people to remind themselves that they need someone to come in to their home. 

Here is the checklist for what we recommend you do to make sure you're ready for an increase in attention for organizing!

1. Make sure all of your contact information is easy to find and correct on all of your digital properties. 

2. Go through your own contact process to make sure all of your links work and that a potential client can easily get to you!

3. Make it EXTREMELY easy to contact you--give potential clients as many ways as possible to get in touch with you--not just a contact form on your website. Make sure you hyperlink phone and emails on your site too for mobile users!

4. Do a webite health check, including: do you have easy to find call to action buttons? Are you featured on your site-because clients connect with a person! Make sure your service location-your geography--is easy to find on your site. 

5. Consider a Google ad. 

6. Make sure your free workhorse, Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is active and updated. 

7. Social media

8. Blog

9. Use your personal network

10. Offer to do presentations to local groups.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

You're listening to the pro organizer studio podcast with Melissa Klug and Jen Obermeier. Thank you so much for joining in our mission is to broaden the horizons of savvy business women in the organizing industry by instilling confidence and inspiring authenticity. You'll gain new insight into strategies designed specifically for professional organizers.

So now let's get started.

Hey, pro organizers, it’s your podcast. Co-host Melissa Klug and listen. It is always a great time and organizing when we have things in the public consciousness.

And there are a couple of things that are out there right now. First off, the second season of the home edit show premiered on Netflix on April 1st and the Home Sort has a new line of products out and just all of these things. That are out in the universe right now about organizing. It just feels like a really great time to have an organizing business.

So today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about how you can take advantage of these things, especially Netflix levels of attention and how you can make sure that your business is really ready for people to remind themselves that, oh my gosh, my house really, really needs someone to come in here and get this into shape.

Even before the second season of the show came out, the home edit has been in the news recently, if you haven't heard, they were recently purchased by Reese Witherspoon's company. Hello, sunshine, which means we will be seeing a lot more of them all over the place. They have new products coming out at the container store.

They have things being advertised and marketed all. Place, and we can capitalize on those things in our business without having to pay a single cent for all of the attention, which is pretty awesome. But before we start going through the list of things you can do for your own business, I want to start with something that I think is really important and.

It's that you do not personally have to subscribe to the theories of any of these shows or books or social media trends that come out to be able to take advantage of the publicity or the benefit in the rise of public conscious. You do not have to change your philosophies or how you work in your business to match the flavor of the month for organizing.

And as we all know, and this is kind of with everything, especially with the rise of social media, whether it's Marie Kondo, Clutterbuck, home, edit HomeStore, we have seen all sorts of organizing trends, come and go and come back again. There are tons of different philosophies to organizing, as we all know, and what's popular might not speak to you personally.

Okay. For example, I personally happened to be master-level certified in the KonMari method. That's a method that spoke to me when I was getting organized in my own life. It's the philosophy that works for me. There are some organizers that I absolutely adore in my real life. Some of them in our inspired organizer group who totally disagree with Marie Kondo's methods.

 And are we still friends? Absolutely. Do I personally use the KonMari method with every single client? Nope, I absolutely do not. Because the most important thing is meeting the client where they are. I am going to be completely transparent with you because that's what we do on this podcast.

And I will tell you my personal organizing style and what I like to do and what I think works effectively with clients. It's about as far away from the home edit as you can possibly get. So, as an example, I do not think organizing things in rainbow order makes sense in almost any spot in a house.

When I watched the first season of home edit, was I laughing when Neil Patrick. Came in and said, basically, huh? You organize this by rainbow. It would make more sense to organize them by what they are. I died laughing. I think it makes sense to rainbow order for the home edits Instagram and their Instagram is truly beautiful, but I could go through every one of their Instagram photos and talk to a client about why I think that photo might be completely unrealistic and how the maintenance might be more than they bargained for.

But in talking about meeting clients where they are, I had a client yesterday and I was doing her closet for her. And she said, I love, love, love things in rainbow order. And I talked to her a little bit about how she got dressed and all sorts of the other things that I always do with clients.

And even though I believe that it's not the most sensible way to organize a closet. That's what she was absolutely in love with. So guess what I did, I gave her a rainbow closet. She was thrilled. She emailed this morning to tell me how much she loves it. And most importantly, her husband, who was 0% on board with any organizing now sees her closet

is envious of it and wants his own closet done. So by the way, that's a win for me. I am happy to meet a client where they are and guess what some clients love the home edit. Look, I'll meet them there, but I'm also not changing my entire organizing philosophy to meet what the home edit does.

I am not going to show up at a client. A thousand dollars worth of acrylic bins and say, okay, we're ready to organize today. That is not what generally works for me. In that same way, if Marie Kondo came up with a new show tomorrow, you don't have to become a KonMari certified organizer. 

Another example for me personally, I do not have a lot of clients that do super, super heavy product buys, but. I completely appreciate for the clients that do have product needs. I am super grateful that I can walk into the container store and the home edit ladies have given me an absolutely amazing aisle of wonderful all different sized acrylic bins.

Heck yes, I'm here for that. there is A phrase that I love to use, which is that a rising tide raises all boats anytime. There is an organizing show that gets a lot of popularity and a lot of attention that makes people know that organizing is out there.

Professional organizers are a thing, and you can have those people in your house. The thing about the home edit is they do one celebrity, but they also do a regular family. Marie Kondo works with regular families. Clutterbuck works with regular families. Any of these shows that are out there are showing professional organizing in a real.

It does not mean that you have to sort a thousand of your client's kids. Half used crayons into rainbow order and use as many acrylic pens as humanly possible. You can organize the way it works for you and for your practice or more importantly for your clients.

I am totally thrilled that we have those people who are super famous, making, organizing completely popular and well-known in the public. So what does this mean for us? 

What happens when people turn off Netflix and they open up their closet and go, oh my gosh, this is a mess.

And I really, really, really need to fix it. We haven't talking about this this week in our private inspired organizer community and people have come up with awesome answers. So we wanted to bring those to you. Plus a few more. We are going to put all this in the show notes so that you can do a checklist for your organizing business on being able to capitalize on what we hope is a ton of attention for organizing.

 So let's start with the first major category. We always want to go back to the basics. This is one thing that I always start with, because it is so foundational for your business. The thing that you have in your business that works for you 24 7, 365, whether you're on vacation or asleep or with a client or at the park with your kids or catching up on the real Housewives, whatever you're doing.

It is the thing that is working for you all the time your digital properties. 

Here's a quick example. I woke up last week and I had an email that came in around 1230 in the morning from a potential client and the subject line was, I think it was, were desperate.

And the email said, my wife and I need. So much, can we please book a consultation? It's really important. And I was just imagining that this email at 1230 in the morning was probably the result of a late night site, about the house, and then them going to the internet and searching for professional organizer to come help them.

 I go to bed early. Because I am getting old and I'm totally okay with that. I had been asleep for hours by the time that email came in, but I am so grateful that my website was working for me while I was in dreamland. Your digital properties work for you all the time. So doing a health check on.

Super critical. What I'm talking about with, when I say digital properties is your website, your Google business profile, which used to be known as Google my business, your social media, find my organizer, any other lead generation tools, any place that you are out on the internet for people to be able to find you 

one of our inspired organizers superstars, Cabrini carpenter, who is minimized, then organize in Lubbock, Texas pointed out something really important. That's going to be our first tip and that is make sure you have gone to all of your digital properties and checked out the basics. We're talking your phone number, your email, your website.

And it may sound crazy and this may sound very, very simple. Check them out. The other day I had an example, someone filled out a form for pro organizer studio, and I couldn't figure out why my email kept bouncing back to her. It was because she forgot an L and G Gmail. So it happens. Sometimes we type things wrong.

 This is a tip I learned a really long time ago in another job is when you're proofreading something, read it backwards. Because then your brain can't fill it in. I know that sounds crazy, but it really works. I use it all the time. Please make sure you have a way to contact you.

Easily on every platform. It's a super basic, but double check it. This also goes for your information on your find, my organizer listing your free listing there, and then any other lead generation tools that you use Thumbtack. Anything else like that? Double-check it. 

 Tip two, still doing a digital health check because it's so important.

Whatever your process is for people contacting you online, make sure all your links work. For example, if you have contact form on your website, make sure your process is all connected. The links work that they actually go to the email you think they're supposed to go to. If you have a scheduling link for people to use, like they schedule a consult right away, or they actually schedule a session with you, make sure it's up and running and linked.

Right. Make sure it's linking to the exact right thing. Just quick personal story for you. And I'm usually pretty on top of this stuff, but a few years ago, my link between my contact form and my email was broken. This was on Squarespace. Somehow that link had broken.

 Thankfully I had a Google sheet as a backup. So when a client made an inquiry, it would go to my email, it would also be captured on this Google doc. But I didn't check that every single day I checked it very infrequently, but one day I was sitting around and I was like, Hmm, I haven't got an inquiry in a while.

Like, that's weird. What's going on? And I found out that the link was broken and I found that out because I went to the Google doc and there had been several people who had contacted me that never got to meet. So double-check all those things, especially if your website is connected with a CRM tool, if you have a process where there is a backend where things flow into other systems, so HoneyBook, dub, Sato, anything you use, check those links.

Here's another tip for you that you can do by the way, whether there's a new show coming out on Netflix or not go through your own process. Pretend you are a potential client. Go through the process yourself, make sure that everything is working.

 If you have people go through the contact form, pretend you're a client. Fill out all the forms. See what happens. Also make sure that you do it from a phone, because think about the number of people that are contacting you and finding you on a mobile device, do it from a phone to make sure everything looks good, that it's easy to follow, and that everything goes where it's supposed to be on all devices, have a friend or a family member.

Do it as a favor to you also. 

 Okay. Tip three. This one's important. I mean, they're all important, but make it extremely easy to contact you. When you work with people who are disorganized and they have made the decision to reach out to you and contact you, make it as easy as possible for them to do that.

I look at a lot of organizers websites, and I have seen so many we're the only way to get in touch with them is to fill out a contact. Yeah. I think when you do that, you're missing out because there are people who do not like to fill out those forms or they think they're not going to go anywhere or any number of other things.

One site. I always think about there were 12 required questions. Some of them dropped downs on the contact form and there was not a single other way to get in touch without organizer. There was nothing else listed on her website of a way to get in touch with her. I just wanted to send a really quick email to that organizer about something really simple.

And I couldn't do it without filling out this contact form with all these required questions. Please give people as many ways to contact you as possible potential clients like different forms of communication. For instance, I will avoid the phone 100% of the time.

I do not like phone calls. So if I'm trying to get in touch with a service provider, I would prefer to contact them via text or email, but lots of people way prefer phone calls. Give potential clients, the way to communicate with you that works for them sometimes with people if their preferred form isn't available, they might move on to someone else.

And you may think that doesn't happen, but I promise it happens all the time. That might be text, phone, call, email directly to a booking link. Just make sure that there are multiple options for people to get in touch with you. If they've decided that you are the organizer for. 

I highly highly suggest that you make your email address and phone number. Very easy to find both in the footer. It's critical for it to be in the footer, but also on the contact page of your website. I also highly, highly, highly suggest that you hyperlink those. 

And here. A lot of times people are going to be searching for you on mobile devices. If they're searching for you on their phone and they say, oh, here's a phone number where I can call her and they click it and nothing happens. It doesn't go to, do you want to call this person? They're going to have to write down your phone number or they're going to try to copy and paste it, which some websites won't do.

They're going to have to jump through a lot of extra hoops to call you or email you. Sometimes people are just not going to do that. So please make it easy for them hyperlink it I'm a Squarespace website person on Squarespace. All you have to do is highlight the phone number or the email and you click the link button and it will give you an option of this is a phone number, or this is an email address, super easy, but definitely make that happen because people are searching for you on mobile, and they want an easy way to get in touch with you.

Okay. Tip four, do a website health check. On your website, if someone lands there, this is gonna sound insane, but it's, it's just data. Unfortunately you have often between 10 and 30 seconds to get someone's attention enough that they stay on your website and look around.

And then when they look around, they start to decide, oh, this is someone I would like to get in touch with. You have a very, very short time to make that impression. So make sure the impression you leave is really good. I am not exaggerating when I say I can talk about websites for hours.

If there were a job that I can have, where all I did. Look at websites and give people suggestions. I would totally take that job, but for the purposes of today's podcast, this health check on your website could just include a few key things. And again, we're doing all these things just to make sure that we are easy to contact for all the attention that we hope the home edit show is going to do.

All right. First up on your homepage, make sure there is a call to action. So a client lands on their site they've looked around, they're interested. What do they do now? Make sure there is a call to action button that is right toward the top of your homepage and on other prominent spots on your homepage and throughout your web.

 What that does is it tells them what to do if they're ready. For some people, their call to action is click here to schedule your complimentary consultation. For some people, it just says, contact me for details. You might have a call to action that says, learn more about my services. There are a lot of options, but putting calls to action on your website.

Is super critical so that when someone decides on your site, yep. I'm ready. They know exactly what to do. You've made it easy to start your process. 

Second thing on a website, health check. One of the things I see a lot on websites is we sometimes forget the most important thing. Uh, Client is hiring you for their work.

They want to hire someone that they trust and that looks kind and welcoming to bring into their home. We often forget to put ourselves on our websites so that client is going to connect with you and hire you so on your homepage, make sure you have a picture of yourself to start that connection.

If you have a team, a team picture is awesome. Say, Hey, here is the organized team that is going to come and help you with. It makes people know, oh my gosh, I'm hiring a real person to help me with my house. Give a little bit about your story, about organizing how you became an organizer.

And then you can have a call to action button on that homepage that says, learn more that if they want to, they can learn more about you and what you do. But make that personal connection, 

the third health check, make sure that your service location is prominent on your homepage, in your footer and other places on your website.

There are many times that I see that someone does not have their service location anywhere on their website. And it makes it almost impossible for a potential client to find you. It definitely makes it impossible for Google to connect clients to you example. I live in the Minneapolis St. Paul area. So on my website, I just say serving Minneapolis St. Paul and the surrounding Metro area, in some places call it the twin cities because that's another. Yeah, a search term. People use where I live. So I wanted to make sure my SEO hits on all of those things. Make sure people know where you work so that they know whether they're in your service area or outside.

All right. That was a lot on a website, health check and a short period of time. Like I said, I am not exaggerating when I say I could talk about website stuff forever, but we're going to move on because we have other tips that we want to give you to 

tip five. This is. Fabulous time to think about doing a Google ad. Let's say someone's watching Netflix and they go, man, I want someone to rainbow order my books. Who am I going to get to find to do that? They're probably going to go to the internet and they are going to Google professional organizer near zip code 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, whatever.

When you do a Google ad, even if you're not doing a huge ad spend, you have a great chance of rising to the top of that search by doing an ad. This is a fabulous time to do it for a couple of reasons, not just about home edit being on Netflix it's tax time in the United States. So you've got people who are coming up on tax time, looking forward to a return it's spring, cleaning time.

A lot of people, the weather's getting nicer and they want to start thinking about spring cleaning. Google ads are the most affordable advertising and the best possible ad spend because it connects people who are searching actively for your services.

 Even if your budget is $50, that is totally fine. If you only have $50 in your budget, I promise you it's better than doing zero. You can absolutely make hay with a $50 investment. If you have a hundred or $150 for a month's worth of ads, even better, it does not take a lot of time to set up.

And it's a super, super good investment. We are going to be doing a podcast specifically about Google ads in a couple of weeks, but definitely great thing to think about for your business. 

 Tip six, your absolute best free $0 resource. Make sure your Google business profile, which used to be known as Google my business.

Make sure Google business is up to date with all of your information, a key part about Google business profile, which helps your SEO just setting up your Google business profile. Isn't the only thing that you can do with it. You can also post regularly. It's a microblog platform. You can add photos. It's a fabulous way to make sure Google knows that you are out there, that you are an active business.

And that when Julie is looking for an organizer in Denver, Colorado, we match her with Susie, who is an organizer in Denver. It's a great way to do that. Do some posts on your Google business profile. These are micro blogs, which I do not want to scare you because if you're like, oh my gosh, I hate the word blog.

I don't want to blog. I don't want to write, I swear you can post this in three minutes and here's how. Go to your Google profile. There's a link that says post you click on that and you click a button that says what's new. Go to your Instagram. You can go to any post, you take that photo and you take the caption, you cut and paste it.

And boom, you're done really simple. Or if you just have a photo and you want to put five or six sentences up there about it, you're done. Make sure you're also adding photos to your Google business profile. That's another way for just reminding Google. Hey, I'm out here.

I'm a business owner. Super super important. If you do not have money to invest in a Google ad, which is totally fine, please, please utilize Google business profile because that is absolutely free and it will accomplish many, many great things. 

Tip six social media. If you are active on social media, if you love doing social media for your business, it's a great time to be a little bit more active on social.

And maybe this is the time that you've been waiting for to try out. I will be completely honest with you. I thought I would hate doing reels but I've actually come to enjoy them quite a bit. You could also think about doing an Instagram live to answer people's organizing questions. You could do a Facebook live and depending on how you organize and what your philosophy is, if you want to be a little saucy it's home and it isn't. And it's not your philosophy.

You could even do a post on, Hey, what I do is totally different than the home edit. And here's why, because anytime there's something out , in pop culture, there are going to be plenty of people who don't like it. So you can appeal to those people to the one thing I will say about Homedics social that I do love is they will occasionally find funny tweets or memes about organizing and put them up.

I love that. I love a little humor in my social media, so if that inspires you, you can absolutely use that as an idea for your social too. 

Tip seven, you can do blog posts. Blog posts are a great way to increase SEO on your website. And if you're a writer and frankly, even if you are not a writer, you can do a quick blog post about how home edit is coming out with a new season on Netflix.

Have you watched it? What do you think? Maybe you want to give people your three best tips to organize like the home edit, or maybe you want to talk about your favorite products from the home, edit, whatever that looks like for you. You can think about doing a blog post, or you could talk about exactly what I just talked about in social media, the home edit isn't for me.

And here's why, and here's what I do the same thing you're doing for social media. You can expand it a little bit into a blog post. 

Here's a hot tip for blogging. I have a lot of people who tell me that they want to blog and they know it's good for SEO for their website, and they know that they should do it, but they aren't good writers. Pick up your phone and go into a notes app or make a new email or something that you can type on. Find the dictation button for voice to text on your phone, and then start talking about whatever you want to blog about.

You can talk about what you want to write your phone. Turns it into text. And then you just edit that text and boom, you have a blog. I do this a lot when I'm feeling creatively blocked or when, like I'm just staring at the keyboard and nothing is coming out, I mean, I could talk for hours about all sorts of subjects, so I just start talking into my phone and then all of a sudden I have something written out and it's ready to go.

Totally works like a charm. Talk it out, edit it from there. 

Tip eight, do not forget about your personal network. If you have a personal Facebook account, if you have personal social media, if you're hanging out with friends, you can absolutely use that personal network to remind you of.

What you do for a living or maybe people are going to be talking about, oh, there's a new organizing show on Netflix. What do you think about it? Or people go, oh, there's this organizing show on Netflix? I didn't know someone did that for a living. Yep. I do that for a living, 

I have gotten tons of clients from people in my personal network, knowing what I do the way I choose to do it sometimes is I will frequently post on my personal social media about fun things that I encounter in my business, or, you know, organizing tips. Sometimes their jokes sometimes they're for real, but everyone in my network knows what I do for a live.

I often talk about being an entrepreneur. So sometimes I don't even talk about organizing. I just talk about being a business owner. This has led me to be referred to many, many, many clients just from my friends. I have worked with some of my friends, but not a ton.

They refer me to their friends and that's all you need. There is a real sound that I heard recently that said, in order to have a business, you need to talk about your business. And I really loved that. And by the way, I'm not advising you to do it in a super aggressive, way or talk about it all the time, where it's the only thing you talk about.

But I do really, really recommend using that network. It's a quick and easy and often freeway into new client. 

 All right. Last tip, offer to give presentations. Reach out to local groups and see if they're interested in a presentation about home organizing. Moms groups, mops, mothers of preschoolers these groups are super popular.

I love giving presentations. I have spoken to church groups, libraries. I have done many speeches for financial services. Providers. So people that are financial planners will hire me to give speeches to their people. I've talked to junior leagues, I've talked to chambers of commerce. 

There are so many places that would absolutely love to host you for a presentation. And a lot of these, by the way, are virtual. I've done a ton of zoom presentations. Get you in front of a lot, of potential clients.

Alright. If you are listening to this and you were like, oh my gosh, Melissa, that is way too many things to update. That is too many things to do. And you have just totally overwhelmed me.

Absolutely not the intention. So I do not want anyone to feel overwhelmed. I want you to remember that anything you do is better than doing nothing. So if that list that I just gave you sounds completely overwhelming. Pick one, pick one thing and say, okay, I ain't going to concentrate on cleaning up my digital profiles.

That's all I can do. You know what? That's awesome. If you say, you know what I haven't ever thought about using my personal network, I'm going to go concentrate on some networking. I'm going to concentrate on some personal networking and some networking, networking, networking, networking, or I can just say at 10 times, Maybe there is something totally different that I didn't cover that you know, would work great in your local area or great in your neighborhood or great in a moms group that you're in or whatever, I just want to remind people, this is a fabulous time. Whenever there's something out that gets organizing some events. Capitalizing that in as many ways as possible when the information is hot, when it's popular, when people are going on talk shows and talking about it, all of that stuff.

Totally take advantage of that. I would absolutely love to hear from you guys. Other ideas that we didn't talk about here, so you can email us at hello@proorganizerstudio.com. We will also be posting about this on our social media. So please feel free to comment and say, Hey, did you think about this?

There are so many things we can do, but in general, here's what I want. I want your phone to be ringing off the hook. Or people texting you or people emailing you because they have just seen the show and they want to get organized. This is also just a friendly reminder. If you have not watched our new free workshop, the pro organizers profit plan, it is available 24 7.

Just like our website. You can go to PO roadmap.com for that, and we will see you back here next week with another episode of the pro organizer studio podcast. Thank you as always for listening. And we will see on the flip side by France.

Thank you so much for listening into the pro organizer studio podcast. If you'd like to get our roadmap for success as a pro organizer, head straight to www.poroadmap.com.