With Network Solutions, the wrinkle comes in how the wp.config.php configuration defines the “MySQL hostname”.

With 99% of hosts this line of code is left as defaulted: define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

With Network Solutions the “localhost” value must change: define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘Server IP’); where ‘Server IP’ must be changed to the value assigned to your installation by Network Solutions.

You can find your ‘Server IP’ value by logging into your NetSol account and looking in the MySQL admin area. It should look something like ‘mysqlv21′.

Some might ask “Why not just use the simple install script that the host provides?” The answer has to do with security. To protect your client’s WP site against getting hacked, you should be creating and securing your database and other elements of the install manually, with strong passwords and atypical table prefixes for example.

Hope this helps some of my web design friends. And for my business friends, I apologize for the tech speak.

By way of eating our own cheese sticks, we just did a logo makeover. (I know, I know, ’bout time). Anyway, thought we’d share our experiences:

• Out of pocket investment: $470.30
• In-house project management cost: 1.5 man days
• Agency: crowdSPRING.com (a crowd sourcing marketplace of 50,000 plus creatives)
• Winning creative: peg770

Here are a couple of the almost 100 concepts we recieved:

Ninetyseven entries were posted to our project altogether. Frankly, two thirds of those were dismissed out of hand as either too literal or amateurish. The other third were of some interest, with about 15% nicely creative. We were very impressed with the professionalism of that 15% and the fast turnaround in response to our feedback — and most importantly with the ultimate outcome based on investment in time and money.

The 1.5 days of project management time was spent doing the following:

• Brainstorming requirements for logo use
  • on web banner
  • as web favicon (those tiny icons on browser tabs and favorites lists)
  • in print on business cards, stationery, ads
  • on clothing and other promo items
• Developing a creative brief
  • crowdSPRING makes this easy with an online brief builder and their 10 things to consider post.
• Providing feedback on 97 design entries.
  • This is time consuming but crucial. Creatives need timely, helpful, specific feedback, and it’s in the buyers best interest to give it.
• Polling our network for feedback on the top entries.
• Verifying files
  • Checking files delivered by creative and testing integration of logo on websites prior to final project approval.

What did we end up with for our $470 and the time spent? Original high quality artwork that we own, that was developed quickly and delivered in three versions:
 
Hope this post gives you some helpful insights into the process when considering your own logo. Let us know what you think.

Need affordable help with your branding, web presence or online reputation management – or just want to bounce some ideas off a good listener? Contact us anytime.

As an Internet marketing company, my clients often want to start projects last week and finish up yesterday.  Sound familiar? Unfortunately, paying the down payment by check easily added a week to many project start dates. Now clients can just send money to me at Paypal and they don’t even need a Paypal account to do it! Of course, if they have one, it saves me the transaction fee, which is cool too.

Thought about making it easier for your customers to pay you?  Learn more here.

As experienced entrepreneurs know, survival depends on an understanding of the real value of things. This economy has taught us not to spend ten cents on things that don’t matter.

The business phone is one of those things that does matter — a lot — which is why I’ve spent between $70 and $100 per month to have the land line with voice mail. If you multiply that times 6 freelancers all doing the same thing, that’s $420 per month – or $5040 per year. That’s over $5,000 per year we have to pass on to our clients! The troubling thing is that what we’re paying phone companies today is based on a technology infrastructure that existed way back in the 1980s, before Internet and satellite based communications.

But what’s the alternative? Skype? Vonage? A cell phone? All those require compromises of some sort and cost more. Here in Irvine, where home owner associations have fought cell towers successfully to this day, cell phone service is categorically dismal, for example. Vonage charges per month what Magic Jack charges per year. And for business people like me, who make zero overseas calls, the added costs of Vonage and Skype seem to have no added value. Skype is nice, but it doesn’t allow you to use your current phone equipment — you know, like the one with the pricey headset that enables you to move around the building while talking.

Enter the $39.95 Magic Jack available from Office Depot, Radio Shack and similar retailers. (Includes unlimited calls across North America for one full year. Subsequent years cost $19.95 each). If you’re like me, you cross your arms and dismiss ads like Magic Jack’s TV spots as not ready for business use. And that’s what I did for six months, while my early adopter friend Larry replaced his home phone service with a Magic Jack.  Note that he kept his phone system – the master and wireless phones and such – he just dropped his phone company service. Instead of plugging his phone’s jack into the wall, he plugged it into a short wire with a USB connector on the other end (i.e. the Magic Jack). The Magic Jack plugs into the USB port on any PC or Mac computer.

The one time  five minute setup is a matter of plugging the USB connector into a computer and walking through the registration screens. Setup enables you to register the phone line and pick a local phone number. I went for the easy to remember: 949.954.4443. (Being able to transfer an existing number would have been even better, but that’s not currently available).

Within five minutes of plugging the USB connector into my laptop, I was able to make and receive phone calls from my old desk phone — with a clarity that is as good or better than my previous land line. And once the setup is completed on one computer, the Magic Jack can be plugged into virtually any computer anywhere without another set up. That means you can switch the Magic Jack from one computer to another throughout your office — or when you’re in hotels, conference centers, or virtually anywhere where an Internet connection exists.

What happens when your computer is off or on those (hopefully) rare instances when your internet connection is down? Incoming calls go immediately into voice mail and an MP3 audio file is automatically emailed to you for playback, say on your iPhone. Or you can just call your office number from any phone and roll into voice mail to retrieve your messages. And because the Magic Jack number comes unlisted – you avoid telemarketers.

By way of full disclosure, I should mention that I have absolutely no affiliation with Magic Jack nor do I stand to profit in any way other than through the good will that naturally accrues from offering information that can save my readers money and make them more competitive. If you own a Magic Jack and have experiences to share — or just have a question — I hope you’ll share it here.

…Magic Jack for small businesses. It’s cool. It’s clear. It’s cheap and really really functional.

PS:
In checking some facts for this post with the magicjack.com site, I see that Magic Jack now offers free Conference Calling. And not only to Magic Jack users, but to anyone. I just registered for mine by calling 305-848-8888, pressing 2, and defining a 3 digit pin number. Magic Jack appends the 3 digit pin to your 7 digit phone number to create your unique conference room number. That’s it. Settup’s done. Now all I have to do is tell my participants the phone number to call for the conference, and my unique conference room number, and we’re good to go. (How do you spell d–i-s-r-u-p-t-i-v-e?)

This site is based on a css template by Dieter Schneider of Norway and here are the top 5 things I like about the architecture:

1. The Photography takes center stage
2. Details are hidden below the fold and on inside pages
3. Navigation is simple and intuitive
4. Audiences are separated into 3 categories (Photo | Studio | Print)
5. Pages are light and optimize well for search — No heavy, expensive Flash

I said “5 Things I Like”, but here’s a sixth worth mentioning: The Galleries are incredibly easy to browse.

Most of the small businesses I work with are not professional photography studios, but many of the strengths of architecture in Dieter’s design still apply.

Comments?

Chad Takenaka, owner of Design Models of California

After reading today’s LA Times article by Cyndia Zwahlen, I felt compelled to do something to help Chad’s business prosper. So, with a cup of coffee at my elbow, I sent the following email to Chad Takenaka, outlining 5 Steps he could take to improve his internet marketing:

Chad,

Enjoyed the Times article and hope it brings you lots of business. I’m particularly attracted to your concept of blending “the latest technology with old school values.”

As the owner of HandPickedTomates, I wanted to share a few quick (albeit unsolicited) thoughts about your website.

It looks professional, clean, simple, well organized, and (forgive me) really dull. Here are some suggestions to improve it to drive more business to you:

* 1. Improve the architecture
* Improve the impact of the landing page (you have 3-5 seconds to connect, don’t expect visitors to drill down to do it)
* Separate your audiences on the landing page
* Message to each audience individually (I’m guessing Mattel and Disney speak differently and have slightly different needs than Northrop and Boeing?)
* Enable zooming on all photos. (Imagine trying to communicate the beauty of Hawaii using only thumbnail images)
* Tag all images, links, and urls for better search engine optimization (SEO)
* Replace the email us link with a simple form, .e.g Contact Form
* 2. Name drop
* Your client list gives you instant cred. Yours more-so than most, so don’t hide it.
* 3. Make Social Networking work for you (Flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter….)
* Your work is hip and interesting. Take the time to capture it and float it out onto the social networks.
* Use professional grade Photography and Video to tell the story
* Upload photos and video to YouTube, Flickr, etc. Make sure every post is well tagged for SEO.
* 4. Leverage Email Broadcasts
* Add an email subscription form to the site
* Send periodic email broadcasts to clients and other subscribers to keep your name in front of them
* 5. Post a Calendar of Events
* Consider offering regularly scheduled tours of your facility and post the date and time (see my Wednesday Free Consult for example)

This just scratches the surface. I hope you find some value in it. Please contact me if you ever decide to offer the facility tour.

Best,
Stephen

What do you other small business owners think about these steps. What others should be on Chad’s list?

First, some background: Tom’s been shooting seriously for about 10 years. In my estimation, he’s qualified to teach most college courses on digital photography theory, lighting, composition, work flow – you name it. His understanding of computer software is exceptional too. He has over 20 years in software development and his technical understanding runs deep.  To round things out, he’s got a longer planning horizon than most people I know and has organization skills that, frankly, put most of us to shame.

But like many artistic and technically oriented people, he’s quick to share, “…the whole marketing thing has me a bit overwhelmed.”

The good news for Tom is he’s got all the hard parts already nailed: 1. He knows his craft 2. His work is impactful and connects emotionally 3. He shoots around “themes”, not just one off shots. 4. He’s accumulated a critical mass of digital assets (over 20,000 images). In other words, he’s ready to publish.

The Challenge:  How to successfully market professional photography images and services online.

The Solution: Start with a broad, well thought out strategy. Then execute consistently.

The bulk of this post will talk about building a web presence and summarizing the top online marketing opportunities photographers have. But first let’s start from the perspective of an overarching Marketing Strategy. As you read the following, keep in mind the goal is to execute consistent branding in all offline and online activities. Whether someone is talking to you face to face, reading your printed material, or looking at your online gallery, they should be getting consistent messaging.

The following primer on marketing your images and services online makes a couple of assumptions:

A. Limited Budget: You have a somewhat modest budget – and may want to avoid writing big checks to Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to buy lots of sponsored ads on search result screens (otherwise known as Pay Per Click ads) or have your work displayed in banner ads across thousands of high traffic websites.

B. You’re Not A Household Name: While very good – maybe even extraordinary – you’re not as famous as you want to be.

Do You Know Where to Aim?

The first step in strategy development is to identify your target audience.

Ask yourself is my (or will my) work show up in Print Media? Annual Reports? On Merchandise? Restaurant Walls? Galleries? Stock Photography Sites? Somewhere else? There are different buyers in each example, and they each require their own unique messaging. Bottom line: determine your audience before you aim your marketing rifle.

Brand yourself.

Russ Roca of Long Beach, Califiornia, for example, is the “Eco Friendly Bicycling Photographer“.  I have trouble remembering Russ’ name, but I can always remember ”bicycling photographer” and “Long Beach”, so looking him up with Google is a snap. Here’s another example: When I type “painter of light” into Google, Thomas Kinkade comes up first in search results. These artists really nailed the branding thing!

You’re a professional. No doubt you know how to stand out and get noticed… At least offline.

The objective now is to integrate your offline and online marketing strategies.

Excellent Work Demands Excellent Presentation

Developing an excellent web presence requires thought, understanding, and a technology framework that doesn’t get in the way. Your website  is your portfolio. As such, nothing, nothing, is more important to your marketing success than creating a good experience for your visitor.

Why, then, are so many photography sites awful?

The reasons vary and each bad site represents its own unique blend of reasons. Most are just not organized well (in web design parlance, that’s “Bad Information Architecture”). And then there’s the garish background colors, the slow loading Flash intro, the hard to find and harder to understand navigation, the intrusion of branding from the 3rd party website provider, and the list goes on.

A Word About Scope

A strategy for marketing photography online must consider the following:

• Development of a quality website
• Building and maintaining a social networking presence
• Setting up profiles on search engine and photography specific sites
• Publishing articles (text, audio, video) relating to photography
• Developing affiliate relationships
• Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing
• Managing your brand reputation across the web

Getting Started

Okay, you’ve identified your audiences, you have a comprehensive marketing strategy, and a critical mass of work to sell or license. Here are some tips for my friend Tom and other professional photographers who are looking for a primer on marketing their work online:

20 Tips for Marketing Professional Photography Online
How much scope you’re prepared to bite off depends on your situation. Ambition might demand you do it all and more, or reality might suggest something more modest. Your choice. Here to jump start your efforts are 20 Tips for (Successfully) Marketing Professional Photography Online:

1. Know thy Audience (and they’re not you)

Design your site with your audience clearly in mind. If you’re a commercial photographer – or do head shots for a living – your presentation will likely be different from those of say wedding or fine art photographers. For example, a fine art site will often have little or no text, while one focused on corporate portraits and annual reports may contain substantial text and have a bottom line, net/net manner about it. Check out some top sites in your category and get a palpable feel for this.

The takeaway here is to identify your key audience(s), target all of your messaging at them, and communicate in a voice that’s consistent, interesting and compatible.

2. Bar Napkins and Information Architecture

Frame out your site architecture first.  Bar napkins or recycled bags and a pen work fine for this. Your web designer and marketing strategist can always translate those hieroglyphs into nifty mock-ups.

Being visual creatures, photographers tend to want to jump straight to the imagery. In web development, that’s usually a mistake.

Focus on the architectural things initially, knowing that the pretty face can be painted on later. This saves loads of time and hassel, since it’s easier to re-draw the bar napkin than rearrange style sheets and html coding. If your web designer insists on using prototyping software, that’s fine. Give her the napkins. Whatever.

Why is Information Architecture (IA) important?

Studies have shown you have about 5 to 7 seconds to answer two critical questions for a new site visitor:

1. Am I in the right place?
2. Am I in the best place?

Take longer than 5-7 seconds and you’re site is history.

The purpose of IA is to hook the visitor and then funnel them as quickly as possible to more focused, relevant messaging. In order to do this, your site architecture must support excellent organization of information, intuitive and consistent navigation, and a cadence of dialog that’s paced appropriately, e.g. beginning at overview level and drilling deeper and deeper into the detail, all the time with clear pathways up and down. This is analogous to a conversation you might have with someone you’ve just met at a meetup. You start with introductions and mutual sizing up, and then drill down to details in areas of mutual interest.

For a simple “dog and cat” example of effective architechture and funnelling, here’s a non-photography site that demonstrates these principles quite clearly: Mesa West Pet Hospital. The hospital’s audiences are 60% dog owners, 30% cat, and 10% other. Typically dog owners are not very intersted in cat or exotic animal care and vise versa.

You can see how the landing page addresses all 3 audiences and acts to quickly funnel them (through imagery and navigation) to the relavant inside pages for more targeted messaging. Navigating the site is consistent and intuitive. Apply those concepts to your photography site. If you do corporate portraits and commercial food, and sports for example, separate those audiences as soon as possible (and get yourself some counseling while you’re at it! Yikes!)

Couple of final points about AI for photography websites: Don’t distract your visitors. Let the focus be your art and let your art do most of the talking. Consider using your images – rather than text – to visually lead users through your portfolio. But once the visitor is connected with a particular image they naturally want to know more – and this is when the details and story behind it should be somehow revealed.

One last, emphatic point: Don’t bother trying to protect your images from being copied (i.e. right click > save). A sure sign of an amatuer is the one who is attempting to secure their online images with some funky online security coding and/or pop up warnings or by plastering their name obtrusively across every sample image. Before going down this awkward path, ask yourself what you’re trying to protect. Usually what’s at stake is a rather small, low resolution image unsuitable for quality printing at any size. Next, realize that no matter what technology you use – Flash, JavaScript, bio-neutron retina scanning or whatever – users will always be able to grab your sample stuff off the screen.

A better approach is to welcome the viral adoption of your samples, knowing that sooner or later it will lead to sales for the high resolution version. To encourage this, you should of course do everything in your power to watermark, name, tag, or otherwise brand your samples with contact info.

3. Alternate Landing Pages

Landing pages are like home pages, but vary depending on search terms a user uses to find you. You see, if a user gets to you via a search term, they’ve already communicated their primary interest. Using our example above, why have the initial page talk about cats or exotic pets if the user found your site by searching for “dog hospital”? The use of landing pages can get way more sophisticated, for example in variant testing of the effectiveness of particular page design and “calls to action”, but that’s beyond the scope here.

For an example of the landing page concept in action see how Mark Robert Halper’s site skips the home page and goes directly to the Architectural Photography area of his site on a search for “architecture photographers orange county”. If you use or plan to use Sponsored Search (paid search), connecting different Search Terms to different custom landing pages enables you to more tightly message to a visitor’s interest. If a searcher types in architectural photography – I want my immediate messaging to focus there, but I don’t want to lose the introductory elements of my home page. By having a landing page for Architectural Photography visitors, I can avoid greeting the visitor with portrait or celebrity photos, which Mr. Halper’s studio also does, while still making the proper introduction to the Studio.

Note: Alternate Landing Pages are probably a phase two implementation for most beginners. The goal of the initial project is to get the site live, not perfect, and from there to iterate it over time with more features, content and sophisticated techniques.

4. Determine your Call to Action

What outcome do you want from a user visit to your site? What outcome do you want from that user’s visiting a particular page? Ask that question for each page you create. Some popular calls to action are:

• Contact me by phone, email, text, chat or fax
• Order a print or merchandise online
• Subscribe to an email list
• Follow me on a social network (twitter, facebook, linkedin, flickr, etc.)

Calls to action may be subtle or wildly obvious, but no site can be successful without them. Painstaking care must be taken to ensure that every page influences the visitor toward its call to action.

A very simple call to action example is the phone number. If the primary call to action is to have a prospective client call you, that number should be clearly visible and emphasized on every page. No scrolling. No searching around. You may want to revisit the Pet Hospital site to see an example of how one business implemented this.

Make sure the call to action works. How many of us have been on sites where we’re ready to take action – perhaps spending time filling out forms, or entering our email address – only to find the submit button doesn’t work or doesn’t work properly? Test all forms, check all contact information before launching a site – and then periodically afterwards, because stuff changes.

5. Get Creative With Templates

Avoid implementing non-customized, off the shelf templates – unless you want your portfolio to look just like everyone elses (SmugMug users, you know what I’m talking about).

The tools that third party sites offer for customizing templates seldom deliver the site the photographer was hoping for.

What then to do?

Some photographers, being engineers at heart, will attempt to learn the underlying CSS, HTML, javascript, and other skills to do their own customizations. In my opinion, this is analogous to the client who decides to become a professional photographer to save the price of the headshot. Smart business people will outsource the work for less overall cost and a better outcome.

6. Don’t Flash ‘Em

I don’t really like Flash -  for a whole host of reasons. Use it as a highlighter, if at all. That’s right, limit your use of Flash.

Why?

Because it’s heavy, slow, costly to change and maintain, and usually forces the user to passively “watch your commercial” when what they really want to do is drive themselves around. Too often Flash simply gets in the way of your art.

Letting a user choose what they’re drawn to, on the other hand, and enabling them to interact freely with it, makes for a more interesting and engaged user experience. Oh, and Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone nor in about 10% of PC/Mac users environments, so all those neat movies and navigational techniques go missing in action.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some notable sites that use Flash, like the inside pages of Marian Kraus’ Commercial Photography site, but other simpler, cheaper, more ubiquitous technologies can serve the same purpose.

A good use of flash as I mentioned earlier, is for highlighting. For example, check out the interesting way Mark Robert Halper Photography uses it here. It’s eye catching how the young woman unexpectedly walks past a seemingly still image.  (however, she does it every 12 seconds, which gets annoying real quick and should be limited to 2 times, tops)

7. Simple Eloquence

However you accomplish it, orient visitors quickly and keep things calm, simple, organized and highly impactful.

One way that sites do this is to have a landing page with nothing more than 4-8 images representing their very best work. Each image is large enough to be impactful, yet as a group they still show “above the fold” (no scrolling). Another popular layout is to have a Rubik’s cube like design of 16 or more small thumbnails that control the display of a single larger image.

Be brutally selective. Leave weaker images out. Even when doing so creates design challenges for a page. Only have 15 exceptional shots but a page design with 16 placeholders? Change your page design to 12, for example, rather than put that so-so 16th image out there.

Using the bar napkin tool mentioned earlier, you (and/or your design collaborator) will no doubt design a site that presents your art with subtle eloquence. (If your art is raw and in your face – or otherwise doesn’t fit the word “eloquence”, replace it with another adjective that describes the mood and vibe that’s right for you)

8. iPhone Browsing in Church

Should your site play music? Uhm…Let me think. Here’s the short answer: No. Here’s the long answer: No no no no NO! First off, you have little if any control over the user’s audio environment – and say their volume is inadvertently turned way up so that your cool new wave techno vibe – instead of setting a rich mood – has them diving for the volume control with one hand while they click your annoying site away with the other. Secondly, there are lots of times a user doesn’t want to broadcast their activity (e.g. they’re at work, or at home with a sleeping baby in the next room, or iPhone browsing in church…whatever). And we haven’t even discussed the subjective tastes in music that there are.

But if you feel you just HAVE to do music, have mercy on your visitors and have it stop automatically after about 30 seconds. And don’t have it play again unless the user specifically asks for it. And not just for that page view, but keep it off as the user returns to the page during their visit as they often do.

Nuff said.

9. Hey, How Did You Two Meet?

How will your audience find you? Tip #9 is about building search engine optimization (seo) into everything you do. Envision what search terms someone might use and make sure you build the most relevant ones into every image description, url link, page title, and throughout the content on your site. And everywhere else you find yourself publishing on the web for that matter. (bonus tip: Google offers free and powerful tools for developing keyword lists.)

Here’s a simple example of seo as it relates to this picture of a river, snow, and evergreen trees. There are essentially two elements for every image that can be read by search engines (assuming the coder maintained them, which is not a requirement). The first is the “Alt” tag, short for Alternate Image Tag. The Alt Tag contains text that displays on a web page when an image is inadvertently missing from the server. The second is the “Title” tag, which contains text that displays when the user mouses over the image. A good SEO discipline is to code both Alt and Title tags with search engine rich terms. So while “river, snow, trees” might be descriptive, it wouldn’t show up on a Google search for “photos of the Merced River in Yosemite Valley”. SEO is part art and part science so there’s no correct or incorrect way to code an image. The photographer in this case chose to code the title tag with “Merced River, Yosemite Valley by T.F. Anthony (www.TFAnthony.com)”, as a mouse over shows.

While you’re at it, put the free Google Analytics code on your site. Google Analytics will enable sophisticated reporting on site traffic: e.g. the number of unique visitors, number of total visits, how long visitors stayed on each page, how visitors reached your site (direct url or through a search term or referring site), how many “goals” were achieved (such as email addresses submitted or contact-me forms completed) and much more.

Add social networking links to your site too. Make it easy to go viral by building in links to all of the social networks. (Flickr,Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)

10. The Immutable Reality of Online Marketing

OK, you’ve architected a great site that’s impactful, eloquent, visually arresting, well organized, easy to use, fast loading, search engine optimized and works in all the popular browsers and monitor sizes too – including behemoth 42 inchers, 11″ laptops and cell phones. (Whew!)

Now what? Well, if you believe in the wishful philosophy, “Build it and they will come”, then your work, my friend, is done. Kudos all around. Drinks on the house.

But maybe you’re shooting photography in a dimension apart from the Field of Dreams – or maybe it’s just that you’re not certifiably naive – so you already know there’s some marketing work to be done. Yes, directly ahead of you is the business imperative to generate traffic.

11. Paid Advertising

Paid advertising refers to Sponsored Search Results, Banner Ad placement, Online Videos and the like. Below is an example of sponsored ads associated with a Google search for “orange county ca architectural photographers”. (Note: the map – and listings to the right of it – are not sponsored ads. More on this shortly)

The beauty of paid ads is that they’re like water spigots that you can turn on and off at will. Need instant traffic? Just open an account with Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn or the like, and have your ads drive traffic to your site almost instantly. All it takes is to budget the maximum spend (per day, month), tell them where you want your ads to show (geographically), create your ad text and search terms, and enter your credit card.

Paying for advertising can be (should be?) a serious, hand wringing step. It begs some sober thinking beforehand about how traffic will translate to revenue – ideally more revenue than the cost of said advertising. Big ad companies, like Google, MSN, and Yahoo, provide tools that help you set visitor goals and quantify the related Cost Per Action (CPA’s are things like a customer completing an online order for one of your prints, a contact form submission, an email subscription) so you can track your Return On Investment.

If you’re just starting out and have no marketing momentum – or just want to hit the ground running – consider paid advertising. (Here’s a financial tip: redirect the money from those lame yellow page ads to some online pay per click advertising that will actually drive business your way!)

12. Your Organic Garden

This tip is about Organic Search and Optimizing for first page search results placement. Organic Search Results are those listings you see in the center of the results page, as shown below. Search engines provide these listings at no fee to the companies listed. But while search engine companies don’t charge for organic listings, the cost – in terms of consulting fees and labor – of attaining and maintaining a high search result ranking can be quite high and depending on how competitive the search term, virtually impossible for many businesses.

Why? Well, competition is the main culprit. As you can see in the example below, the number of hits for “orange county ca architectural photographers” was 85,400 (top right), and only 10 show on the first page of results. Almost no one I know looks beyond page 2, Ever. On the other hand, if you’re a top revenue producing architectural photography firm headquartered in Orange County, California with say twenty years of experience, and lots of impressive clients, a first page placement should be well within reach, particularly if you’re practicing a good many of the 20 tips listed herein.

Organic Search is like a back yard vegetable garden in one sense. While it costs less out of pocket to grow your own food, the growing season is long and the real cost in time, labor, and money is often more than the alternative.

Search engine companies work very hard to supply their search customers with relevant results. They hate it when sites try to scam them into including them in search results when they’re not what their customers are searching for. They spend incredible amounts of time adjusting their algorithms to weed out offenders and in the end they usually do.

The carnival hawkers of Organic Search Engine Optimization will no doubt guarantee you top placement, instant results (and any stuffed animal on the top shelf) for a significant chunk of your change. Just know that no one can really guarantee you that. There are no durable black magic shortcuts or painless pathways to organic search engine placement. Better to find a reputable SEO firm that will help you build durable placement over the longer term.

Practice good SEO fundamentals, and consistently code your content on the web with search engines in mind. Good search placement is the result of hard work performed consistently over time. This includes search term optimization and other marketing efforts across your internet footprint. Remember, the footprint is growing almost daily and today encompasses a brand’s website, the social networking sites, review sites, and profile sites like Google’s Local Business Center Listings, Yahoo Local, CitySearch, and more.

The map above, with the red pins, is an example of a Google “Local Business Listing”. They’re free and absolutely crucial to your marketing if your business is focused on the local marketplace. To qualify for a Local Business Listing account, you must have a physical address that is certifiable by Google. Other sites like Yahoo Local, CitySearch and many others provide local business listings as well, though features and pricing differ widely from vendor to vendor.

Your marketing strategy should consider all search engine marketing opportunities – paid, organic, local listing – and choose the combination that best fits your situation and budget.

Don’t forget your built-in network. Online marketing starts with communicating to family, friends, existing clients, associates and other supporters you already have. Look to them to draw the recommendations, testimonials and support you will need to build trust with your online audience.

What about the Social Networks?

The remainder of this post touches on the top social networks you will want to consider when developing your marketing plan. They are, in no particular order:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Flickr
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

13. Facebook for Business.

Separate from any personal Facebook page, the content and dialog on the Facebook (FB) Business Page is focused on your photography services and images. Building your FB Business Page is not particularly straihtfoward and the rules around things like “vanity links” are a bit murky as of this writing, but all in all it’s not rocket surgery.

Once your FB page is completed, invite any current FB Friends to become “fans” of your photography page. By publishing your FB Business Page in all of your marketing touchpoints – both offline and on - you build an audience that is reachable directly and for free. Callan Green wrote Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies. Sure the 5 examples Callan gives are all deep pocketed corporations with big marketing departments, but the overall take away is: “keep your site fresh and interesting”. It’s worth a read.

14. Twitter

Twitter is – plain and simple – about getting noticed. Few want to know what you’re having for lunch, but what about a link to that cool new photo exhibition you just came across? The way you get noticed on Twitter is to build a following, and the way you build a quality following is to build a reputation as someone whose Tweets provide consistent value to their audience. If you decide to join the Twitter fray, every 140 character post you make should be made with your target audience in mind.

If you sign up for a free Twitter account, select a screen name that helps brand you and customize your background. LATimesPhotos and MindStudio are examples of Twitter profiles customized to say “photography”.

Twitter and the 3rd party apps that surround it are changing faster than Boston weather. E.g. Twitter now supports images and video (via free 3rd party applications like Twitpic and 12 Second Video), and cool apps like Schmap.it that makes it easy to advertise and track your workshops, exhibits, meetups and the like. See more about Schmap.it in this post.

15. Flickr

Flickr should be part of your marketing strategy, period. If you think it’s too amaturish or just want to know more, check out this list of 36 Reasons Flickr is a Photographer’s Ultimate Tool (it’s from 2007 but most of it still applies)

Here are some quick basics of posting on Flickr:

1. Take great photos and upload your best (this is a given for this audience)
2. Write a proper title and add ample related tags
3. Invite your friends and connect with new ones
4. Post to appropriate groups
5. Fill out your profile
6. Favorite and comment on others’ photos

(Quick basics compliments of Squidoo)

16. YouTube

Presumably everyone on the planet knows what YouTube is. And it surely is all of that. But YouTube is also an awesome tool for getting the word out about your photography. Do exhibits or workshops? Record ‘em and post. If you have a camcorder or screen capture software and a headset with microphone, you have what you need to make and publish video displays of your work. Video editing software has come way down in price and free versions are available for Mac and PC.

Both YouTube and fellow video sharing site, Vimeo.com, enable uploading and playback of High Definition Video. For example, see this Photographer’s clip on Vimeo.

The ease with which these videos can be embedded in websites and blogs and shared via email and social networks, makes them very viral.

17. LinkedIn

For those unfamiliar with LinkedIn, LinkedIn is Facebook for your professional life. It’s free (for the basic version), and enables you to easily connect to and stay in touch with those who know and can recommend your work.

Like most social tools, how you use it depends on your own style, but three fundamental things should be in place:

1. YOUR PROFILE: Develop as complete a profile as you can. Stuck for inspiration? Search out other pro photographers with excellent profiles using the “Advanced” Search feature and emulate those.
2. CONNECTIONS: Build a respectable number of network connections. Have at least 10. Work towards a goal of 100 or more.
3. Recommendations: have a goal of 5 or more of your personal connections recommend you and your work.

If you’re new to LinkedIn and need a jump start, click the help link at the top of your LinkedIn page. Unlike most help functions, this one is actually helpful. One of my personal favs is the link “Ten Tips on Building a Strong Profile“.

18. Blogging

Blogging is a powerful tool for staying in front of your audience, but extracts a price in terms of time and energy. It’s a personal choice. If you have the skills and inclination and can commit the time it takes to keep blog content fresh, go for it. On the other hand, blogs that grow stale reflect poorly on you.

Three valuable bi-products of blogging are that it:

1. Provides valuable content that can drive traffic to you from social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn and the like
2. Can enhance your professional reputation
3. Keeps you engaged, constantly learning and current.

19. RSS and RSS Readers

RSS Subscription links (see the orange button below) make it easy for others to subscribe to changing content on your site – such as news and blog posts. By clicking on your RSS link, a visitor can add your blog or agency news page to their RSS reader so new postings show up immediately for them.

RSS readers are about organizing the overwhelming amount of information that moves across the internet every minute and hour of every day. Readers will help you – as a professional photographer – save time. They’ll help you stay up to date on the latest trends in your industry and your target market.

RSS Readers (aka Feed Readers) such as Google Reader, are free and easy to set up.  build an online information portal that pulls together only the news and information sources that are relevant to you. Think of RSS Readers like personal subscriptions to the top news sources you decide to follow: photography magazines, newspapers, top photography blogs, and anything else.

20. The Differences Between Professional and Amateur Photographers

I thought I’d end with this blog post by “Dean” on photopreneur.com.

This is the end

There you have it. A primer on marketing professional photography online. It’s a lot to digest and maybe a bit wordy, but my aim was to provide a single concise overview of how to market professional photography online. I welcome your comments. If there are areas you’d like more detail on, let me know. If you found it helpful or not so helpful, please let me know that as well. Good luck, and as Garrison Keillor says, “Be well, do good work, and stay in touch”.

Stephen Kane

Principal, HandPickedTomatoes.com
Online Marketing Strategies | Web Development

Schmap is free, easy to set up, and really useful if you host informal events. Take for example, a neighborhood cafe that has lots of book club meetings, open mike nights, live music, etc.

A Schmap tweet not only gets the word out about the event, it tracks confirmations, maps your location for customers, and provides a link to your website via your twitter profile.

But the viral doesn’t stop there. Schmap automatically creates a retweet for each attendee along with any comment they made, e.g. “PaulHesseBroker @web_tomatoes I’ll be there! I’m a commercial real estate broker specializing in Southeast LA and Northern OC… http://schmap.it/GWk3zi “.

Have a question about Schmap, Twitter, or any other aspect of online marketing for your business? Post a comment here or contact me at HandPickedTomatoes.com.

Businesses will no doubt weigh the options based on cost versus value. So let’s start with cost. Even with Microsoft’s recent price drop from $15 to $10 per month per user, they’re still priced 240% higher than Google. This means they have a lot to make up for in the value department to put them on par with their competitor.

And how about value? I haven’t compared Office Web Apps with Google Apps myself, but my friend Larry Higgins, Director, Sales & Marketing at One Touch Global,  just forwarded me this review:

I began using Google Apps for my personal needs in 2006. Until two months ago, I continued to use MS Office Professional as a backup – effectively paying twice but not being ready to cut the safety cord with Microsoft. I recently dropped MS Office and now use Google Apps exclusively for both the process improvements of the cloud computing model as well as the cost savings.

What made me put both feet solidly in the Google App camp?  Over the past year I’ve noticed that there is nothing that I or my users do that we can’t do in Google Apps. When colleagues send MS Word or Excel docs, we open them in Google Apps with no problem. For example:

When the chairman of my high school reunion recently sent six committee members a spreadsheet and asked each of us to update it with any current contact info we had on classmates, I immediately imported it as a Google Spreadsheet Doc. I then sent invites from within the doc to all committee members enabling us to all update the same document without  emailing attachments back and forth or manually coordinating and updating a master copy. It also tracked who made what changes. And although most committee members had never used a Google Spreadsheet before, the learning curve was trivial.

After viewing the video above, I’m glad I stopped waiting around for Microsoft to move to the cloud. They should have been there in 2002 anyway, but I suspect they had MS Office license fees to protect. As business consumers, we have those license fees to consider too – along with the cost of maintaining and updating the underlying products. With cloud computing, the inflated costs and headaches of hosting our own applications go away. And since Google is way out front of Microsoft in the cloud, now’s the right time for business people to seriously consider Google Apps.

Why not ask for an email address?

FeedBurner makes doing that free and incredibly easy, by way of an email subscription widget.

FeedBurner was acquired by Google in 2007, and is a marketing tool that every blog or website should be using. It’s free and takes minutes to set up.

Adding the FeedBurner email subscription form to your blog is a cinch. Just cut and paste the code that FeedBurner provides into your blog admin panel (in WordPress you can add it via Appearance > Widget).

Once the email form is in place, FeedBurner handles all the complexities… The confirmation email and unscubscribe processes, the database for storing and maintaining the subscribers’ email addresses, as well as tools to export addresses to a standard CSV file  to use any way you want, e.g. with your email campaign tool of choice.

The FeedBurner site will walk you through how this is all done, but if you have a question that’s not covered, enter a comment here and I’ll try to address it.

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