Become a Natural Homes Associate and join our marketing support group.

Natural Homes' goal

Natural Homes is a not-for-profit organisation that redresses the marketing balance between sustainable and unsustainable businesses by providing environmentally ethical, but often less profitable, natural builders, crafts people and environmental organisations with free access to a mainstream audience.
 

How do I become a Natural Homes Associate?

You need to be a natural builder or crafts person using natural materials, or a training organisation in either discipline and you need to contribute content for publication (pictures of your work) to the Natural Homes archive. If you have already contributed content then you qualify but we would like to write about more of your work which helps your business get noticed. These are the step towards becoming an associate.

Step 1: You must have a website representing your products and/or services.
Step 2: Read this page to understand the full scope and value of associate membership.
Step 3: Join Talking Natural Homes and/or The Kitchen Table and/or Permahome, depending on your niche, to network and contribute.
Step 4: Write to house@naturalhomes.org giving your Facebook profile address and website. We'll get back to you.
Step 5: After an article has been published about some aspect of your work your membership will be created bringing visitors to your website.
Step 6: Once you are an associate you can join No.204, see below, where you can network and get web and social media marketing advice.

The best way for us to select something for publication that you have built or made is to browse a Flickr or Facebook album of your work. It helps if your various projects are organised in sets or albums. Your pictures should be at least 900px wide but the bigger the better. Flickr gives you 1Tb of free storage. If you are yet to take pictures of your home(s), here are some tips and tricks.

From time to time book publishers and mainstream print magazines contact Natural Homes asking for print quality pictures for articles about natural building and living. If you would like your work to feature in these magazines you will need to have print quality copies of the pictures Natural Homes publishes. Generally a 5Mb image should contain enough data for print publication.
 

What is access to a mainstream audience worth?

Being an associate is FREE and always will be, as will the reader's access to Natural Homes. Advertising to the mainstream is expensive. This is the advertising message of the conventional construction building website building.co.uk. 

"Our 210,349 monthly unique users and our daily engaged audience of 2,325 on building.co.uk, Building is the ideal place to target those in the construction industry and promote your brand. With such a broad reach into the industry, you may be surprised to learn that campaigns start from as little as £500." [NOTE: Facebook page likes: 3,833 growing at 45 per week, 12th March 2016]

In contrast the equivalent data for Natural Homes is:

"Our 600,000+ monthly unique users and our daily engaged audience of 50,000+ on Facebook you may be surprised to learn that campaigns are FREE." [NOTE: Facebook page likes: 1,800,000+ growing at 15,000+ per week, 12th March 2016]

Natural Homes position in the online construction market

Natural Homes has published every day on Facebook since February 2011 and increasingly on Google+ since December 2011 with growing numbers of shares via Twitter (about 20 per day) and Pinterest (about 50 per day) bringing valuable visitors to naturalhomes.org. Without question Natural Homes has the best connected social network on the web with a highly engaged audience. As of July 2015 there were about 4 million article (page) reads every month on naturalhomes.org with the average visitor staying for 10 minutes viewing 4.7 pages per visit. A typical article can expect to receive around 3,000 Facebook LIKEs in the first few days of publication. The most popular reaching several 10s of thousands of LIKEs.

Reaching the Natural Homes audience

The Natural Homes website is designed to engage its audience at three levels using a variety of publication techniques gradually increasing the engagement of its audience. You can reach our audience by contributing your work to each level. Each of the levels are represented graphically with slight variations. Links are made from one level to the other with text links or graphic buttons.

Level 1: Introduction

Level 2: Lifestyle

Level 3: Hands-On

An introduction article describes the building technique, size, location and builder. The lifestyle article shows the main construction steps and might include details of the people who live there. The Hands-On article details an aspect of the building like a rubble trench.
 

The hands-on articles are written by associates and edited, published and publicised by Natural Homes via the natural homes facebook page. A hands-on article will contain links from naturalhomes.org to the associates website, ideally to content that illustrates further the topic of the article. Each hands-on article details some aspect of natural building or natural living so that collectively these articles enable readers to build and live naturally.
 

Calling an article as an associate

You don't need to be an associate to contribute to the website but it does reinforce your brand and helps you increase your marketing reach. An associate call looks like this: naturalhomes.org/beths-strawbale-cottage.htm?a=sigikoko where ?a=sigikoko is added to the URL of an article. 'a' signifies 'associate'. Calling an article with an associate member's name or brand displays a graphic website link at the top of the set of article links on the right-hand column of each article (the article stack, see far right). This enables, in this case Sigi Koko, to share articles on naturalhomes.org that include her advert with her social media audience in Facebook, Twitter and Google+ etc. It also enables her to ask Natural Homes to include her associate call in the next Natural Homes publication in Facebook, G+ etc. to reinforce her brand and maybe help to sell extra workshop spaces. Here's an example of how to use an associate call from Denmark Farm on Twitter and Facebook.
 

Ten thousand impressions per month... or more

As well as calling an article to display your associate link for sharing in your social media channels, it will also appear randomly in the article stack. In one million article reads your associate link currently has about a 1 in 100 chance of being displayed. This means in a month your associate link will be seen about 10,000 times, but not necessarily followed. In some circumstances for a limited period an associate's graphic can be made to display at the top of the article stack for every article on naturalhomes.org. This level of support would deliver the graphic about 2 million times per month.
 

Filtering your associate call with a tag

If you become an associate, and are say a straw bale builder, you can filter the content you share from naturalhomes.org in your social media space by calling an article with a tag as well as your associate call e.g. naturalhomes.org/maya.htm?a=sigikoko,t=strawbale. This will only display straw bale article links in the article stack with the associate graphic at the top. Notice the comma ',' separating the associate and tag calls. The current set of tags can be found here naturalhomes.org/natural-building-articles.htm in the first drop-down list.