Avoiding Wedding Consult No-Shows

September 12th, 2011

You’ve worked your butt off at bridal shows to land your wedding consultations, so when a bride doesn’t show up to her consult, it can be pretty frustrating. Not only did you not get to meet with a bride, but you also didn’t book that perfectly good time slot for any other sessions. There’s no way to avoid the no-show scenario completely, but here are a few ways you can at least reduce the likelihood that it will happen.

First in wins It took us a few lost brides to figure this one out, but now it seems pretty obvious. Photographers want to book a bride on the spot. They’ll offer a book-us-now one time offer so a bride that doesn’t book immed[...]

Posted in Marketing For Photographers | 11 Comments »

SEO For Photographers Workshop – PPA

September 5th, 2011

Search Engine Optimization – getting your photography website to the top of Google. If it’s still a mystery to you why some websites rock the search engines and yours is still stuck on page 26 (seriously, you looked that long??), you need to come spend a day with me de-mystifying the whole SEO process.

What it’s about The SEO For Photographers Workshop is going to be about breaking down the whole SEO process from start to finish (ok, that’s a lie, you’re never finished). This is not some theoretical marketing stuff. This is how you can get your website in front of hundreds of people using the same steps that brought our business tons of new customer[...]

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Posted in Marketing For Photographers | 5 Comments »

How To Buy Photography Gear On A Budget

August 16th, 2011

If you’re working on moving your photography business to the next level, you’ve probably realized that at some point you’ll need to upgrade your equipment to something a little more professional (especially if you missed the DSLR memo and are still using a point-and-shoot). If you’ve looked around at the cost to upgrade though, you may feel like you need to take out a second mortgage on the house to get better equipment. Untrue!! Don’t do it! I’ve got some great tips to make sure buying equipment won’t mean your business isn’t making you any money.

Create an equipment purchase plan Your plan doesn’t have to be elaborate. [...]

Posted in Tips And Tutorials For Photographers | 14 Comments »

Fast Track Photographer Review

July 23rd, 2011

Dane Sanders’ Fast Track Photographer book claims it will help you “unlock the photographer you were meant to be!” That’s quite a claim, but I think Dane actually does a pretty good job breaking down life as a photographer so it’s easy to compare which path fits you best. Any book that has an endorsement from Seth Godin has got to be good, right?

Grumpies I’m just going to say, “The Grumpies” cracked me up. It’s the name Dane gives to the group of stuck up photographers who feel the industry has been infiltrated by amateurs, and there’s no hope for the industry unless they are brought to their knees begging the “t[...]

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Posted in Photography Product Reviews | 8 Comments »

SmugMug Custom Website Review

June 28th, 2011

After recently writing a review on using SmugMug with ProShow Web, I found out about SmugMug’s custom website service. I was pretty interested in trying this out since it seemed like it would be a great fit for photographers who wanted a simple way to use the images they already had in SmugMug galleries as an online portfolio they could show to clients.

Using SmugMug galleries From my perspective, being able to dynamically add and remove images from the galleries is probably one of the most compelling reasons to use SmugMug custom websites. Keeping images on a photography website fresh is always such a chore, but with the ability to add and remove images using your SmugMug [...]

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Posted in Photography Product Reviews | 6 Comments »

My Wedding Workbook Interview

June 22nd, 2011

I recently got an email from Jeff Kear of My Wedding Workbook. He had a product he felt might be useful to photographers, so I asked him if he’d like to do an interview for the blog. He agreed, and here it is:

TJ: Could you give us a general idea of what My Wedding Workbook Professional Edition does? Jeff: It’s essentially online software for wedding planners that gives them the tools they need to run their business, plan their events and collaborate with clients more efficiently. Wedding planners tend to be very creative people, so sometimes all the details of running a business can bog them down and get in the way of what they really enjoy. So we built My Wedding Wo[...]

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Posted in Photography Product Reviews | 4 Comments »

Cheetah Stand Review

June 13th, 2011

Larissa and I love shooting fashiony strobed images. We also move around from place to place quite a bit while we’re shooting. A few months back we were getting pretty frustrated with our light stands. It seemed like they couldn’t keep up with our fast-paced shooting style. We were always having to open the legs, tighten, loosen close, repeat… What a pain.

Automatic light stand We heard about a product called the Cheetah Stand where the legs would automatically collapse or expand as you picked it up or put it down. I was pretty skeptical that this would be the solution to our problem, but turns out the product does exactly what it says. There’s a cent[...]

Posted in Photography Product Reviews | 2 Comments »

Rod Evans APPI Seminar Review

May 31st, 2011

Let me first start by apologizing for not posting in so long. It’s been my goal to post at least once or twice each week, and until last week I had been keeping up with that goal. Unfortunately, as much as I love blogging, I love keeping our customers happy even more, so no blog post last week (as a quick tip – any blogging you do is less important than keeping customers referring others to your business).

On to Rod Evans and APPI. Amazing and amazing. Seriously, Rod rocked the show in the small town of Germantown IL. As far as I can remember, this was my first time seeing Rod speak in person, but I think I might have caught him on PhotoVision before. Not sure. H[...]

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Posted in Photography Product Reviews | No Comments »

Professional Photographer Camera Settings

May 13th, 2011

One of the search terms I see showing up in Google Analytics for my blog is “professional photographer camera settings”. While I think I’m pretty good at search engine optimization, I didn’t realize I was good enough to show up for terms that I didn’t have content for. Actually, that just makes me look stupid for showing up in search results where I don’t have relevant material. So to reduce the amount of stupid that I look, I thought it would be nice to write about camera settings for professionals. So here we go – how to set up your camera in the perfect way to make yourself look like a professional and start raking in the cash (because prof[...]

Posted in Tips And Tutorials For Photographers | 6 Comments »

SEO For Photographers – Link Exchanges

May 11th, 2011

Link Exchanges – trading links with another website in order to rank higher in the search engines. Sounds great, but does it really work? I’ll let you know that in the past, I tried using link exchanges as a link-building technique, but since then, I’ve stopped using this method for SEO.

Adding value Hopefully your business is built around adding value to the lives of your customers. Your marketing should follow that same rule. The best marketing material will educate, entertain, or inform. If you’re exchanging links with some photographer half way across the world, are you really doing any of those? I came to the conclusion that for our business, getti[...]

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Posted in Marketing For Photographers | 28 Comments »

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