I spent much of last year studying and reading about social media and how it works. This year it is time to put some of this into practice.
I have therefore started an experimental new service for lodger landlords. My existing service, Landlord Law, does cater for people renting a room to a lodger, but lodger landlords and regular landlords do not really have the same needs, and a specialist site will be better (and more affordable) for the lodger landlords.
The new site, www.logerlandlord.co.uk, (a wordpress site) was launched yesterday by a blog post on my Landlord Law Blog, and I will be running a twitter campaign for the next month, using #lodgerlandlord.
On 1 February I will start a 21 day blog series, simultaneously in the Landlord Law Blog and on Lodger Landlord – Tessa’s 21 tips for Lodger Landlords – effectively giving away the ‘crown jewels’. Hopefully this will encourage lodger landlords to comment and tell me what they need by way of legal services. The Lodger Landlord site will then provide those services.
I have spent much of the Christmas and New Year period working on this. The site design is powered by the wonderful Headway Theme (I have finally got version 1.56 and the visual editor to work, which is fabulous). My web designer has come up with two stonking designs for the 21 tips logo and the site header. Other than that the site has been created by me.
As regards the design, some time ago my web designer Gill gave me the numbers for five colours, which are the colours used in the Landlord Law site, and which I have subsequently used for this site. This Lodger Landlord web site uses the same colours in a different way, plus a new paler blue, which is the colour used for the ‘wrapper’ – the bit between the sidebar, the header and the post areas and also the non active navigation areas, which are white in my other Headway blogs. I had great fun working it all out.
The other expense (apart from Gill’s fee) is a subscription to Aweber mailing service. Lodger Landlords are being encouraged to sign up to a new mailing list. I use Constant Contact for my Landlord Law mailing list, but as I want to keep this service completely separate, I decided that Aweber (highly recommended by high profile bloggers such as Problogger) would be better. You will see a banner for them in the side bar. I have had three sign up for the new mailing list so far, which is not bad as the site was only launched yesterday afternoon.
It has been a lot of work but enjoyable work. I have done most of it on my wonderful macbook in the sitting room, with my son (playing computer games on his laptop) and husband (reading Arthur Conan Doyle). I am currently up to day 17 on the 21 tips and have done about 1/2 of the twitter posts. The twitter tips are being scheduled in my twitter client program Hootsuite.
By the way, the XX days of tips idea is not wholly original. I am following in the footsteps of Problogger and Blog for Profit who had similar campaigns. I think I am the first person to use the technique for a law related service however.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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This sounds v. interesting Tessa, and I look forward to finding out how your experiment fares. In the distant past when I was a lot younger I had lodgers, so I’ll gladly add my thoughts about what landlords in such a situation may need in terms of legal advice soI’ll keep an eye out for your tips starting Feb.
I also had lodgers for about six years, and they were a great help in paying the mortgage. Little did I know then how useful they were going to be also for my future internet service.