Introduction to Natural Homes
Natural Homes is a not-for-profit organisation
that provides a growing mainstream audience of
2.2+ million followers, growing at 15,000+ people per week,
with content about natural building and natural living skills,
products and services. It provides the practitioners of those skills,
products and services with free access to the audience which
includes 20,000+ daily web visitors and 75,000+ group members.
Natural Home's goal is:
To 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.
The
team have grown the Natural Homes audience to bring mainstream
media opportunities to the natural building community.
Collectively we can make a significant statement that encourages
people to build naturally and thereby put pressure on planning
authorities all over the world to adopt natural building methods
and materials.
The 7 step publication plan
To help artisans to get the best out of the Natural Homes network
we have established a 7 step publicity process for your projects.
It uses a marketing mix of website articles, Facebook pages and
Facebook groups with other social media techniques. The 7 step process applies to all of our content threads i.e. natural
building
 ,
natural living
and homesteading
.
The graphic below illustrates the 7 step process to capture
content from artisans, deliver it to our group members (70,000+),
Facebook followers (1.8 million+) and website readers (20,000+ per
day) making it easily accessible to the mass media.
At
 (see below) the
artisan e.g. a natural builder, registers workshops ideally 3 months
ahead of the event via the
workshop calendar. These workshops are publicised by Natural
Homes on its various language pages e.g.
English,
Spanish and
 Russian.
At
posts are made to the appropriate group i.e. natural building
 ,
natural living
and homesteading
.
These posts share your progress, express your skill, provide
feedback from peers, inspire members, add to the growing catalogue
of knowledge and establish content that will be linked back to at
step 4 when an article is published on naturalhomes.org about your
project. At
the artisan makes publications on his/her website and social media
accounts (e.g. Facebook, Pinterest and Google+) progressively
adding well described content to an album that represents the
project. Here is an example from Raquel Rodríguez about making
sgraffito tiles. At
when the project is complete the artisan notifies Natural Homes.
Content is gathered from the group and artisan's web and social
media pages for an article in English on naturalhomes.org which is
publicised via its Facebook page and other media outlets. The
article (see
example) will contain links to the discussions in step 2. The
English article is eventually translated to other languages and
publicised again. This step establishes multiple links from
naturalhomes.org to the artisan's website helping his/her search
engine ranking.
At
the artisan ensures print quality versions of the best of the
pictures at step 3 are saved in well described project albums in
flickr.com.
The flickr account does not need to be public. The pictures should
not be branded or carry a copyright protection watermark.
Publishers each have their own copyright protection method to
protect your rights. The description of the picture should end
with a note that explains who (person or company or domain name)
the picture should be copyrighted to.
NOTE:
We recommend you keep pictures around 5Mb or higher at least
2,000px wide. A 5Mb picture would allow a double
page spread in an A4 size magazine. Editors will often crop
down to a suitable picture within the image you provide so
additional data quality is recommended. Flickr offers 1Tb of free
storage. Here is a guide for
taking pictures of natural buildings.
At
 ,
if you are a member of an association for your craft, we recommend
you write a case study for the work. The association will use it
to represent your craft at trade shows and you can add it to the
discussions in our Facebook groups at step 2.
At
the mainstream media
discover the article about your work on naturalhomes.org and
contact us
for publication support [most recent National Geographic
Traveller, 11th May 2016]. Our interface to publishers is the
'Publisher's Library' which provides all the contact details,
project summary and links needed for the publisher to write their
article. Natural
Homes assures, on your behalf, that their publication will include
links to your website, either in print or online or both.
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