I write a lot about photography marketing, ansd there is no better form of marketing than organic search engine results. You have a main phrase that you’re trying to rank for, the single most important one. I call that a whale phrase. It’s a top tier search phrase in your niche that has huge search volume and can drive considerable traffic to your site. Something like Anytown Wedding Photographer. The Google keyword tool in coordination with Majestic’s backlink checker is a great way to figure out your main phrase. Use the keyword tool to find phrase ideas by order of search popularity. Find out if you should optimize for city A, product B, or just to generate new ideas.

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As a photographer and marketing coach for creative service professionals I’m always looking for new tools and strategies that can be used to help get the word out about their businesses.

In the age of Internet marketing and social media networking it’s critically important now more than ever for creative service professional to take advantage of every opportunity to get your work in front of and connect with our target audience.

With websites, blogs and social media tools like Facebook and Twitter just to name a few, they are more avenues than ever for pro- photographers to reach potential prospects. So the question becomes “if it’s easier to connect with our prospects online – how do I capture the leads I receive on my blog -or- website?”

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Ok I’m going to go on a bit of a rant here today, just wanted to warn you ahead of time.

While I’m looking forward to my 5 hour flight from San Luis Obispo to Las Vegas this Sunday to attend this years WPPI Convention just as much as the next guy (Airline rant for another post), I have to say the amount of unsolicited email from the show vendors this year has reached an all time high.

Starting back in November before I had even signed up for this years show, I started receiving the first rumblings of tradeshow vendors beginning to send out their email blasts and in the past few weeks this has turned into an all out email assault with some vendors totally abusing their privileges .

As the keeper of an email list consisting of nearly 10k email addresses I take this this issue very seriously. I in no way weill EVER sell or give my mailing list away because I respect my members privacy. I do allow my contributors to make announcements in the various email blasts that i do each month, but I remain the single point of contact for all email.

This all wouldn’t be half annoying if all Vendor communications were channeled through the folks at WPPI allowing the recipients the ability to opt out of receiving future mailings one time and one time only. This however is not the case as it appears WPPI has given vendors carte blanche access to use the list to send out mailings as they see fit, leaving recipients having to opt out of each and every one individually. This is in my book is totally unacceptable and totally un called for. I’m pretty sure non of us signed up for the tradeshow to receive dozens of unsolicited emails each morning.

I thought it was me just being grumpy before my morning coffee today, so I bounced it off a few thousand followers my twitter network and was surprised how fast the feedback came pouring in, and I might add all in agreement.

Come on WPPI lets get in the game and start practicing a little bit of email list etiquette, get control of your mailing list before it gets control of you and begins to turn people off to your world class tradeshow. These are tough times and people really don’t need help making excuses why not to attend next years show. If attending WPPI comes at the risk of being abused by daily spam by show vendors you can count me OUT next year.

For what it’s worth . . .

I hope to see my readers at the show next week, if you are going to be there drop me a note to Cris@PhotographersHandbook.com i’d love to meet you.

Feel free to leave your ideas or opinions on this post in the comments

How often have you walked into a meeting or met with a prospective client just to realize that you left your business cards at the office or studio? I’ll admit it, I do all the time.

One of the oldest marketing tools in the book, business cards have traditionally been the easiest and fastest way to share your contact information with a prospective client. However, what good is a business card if you forget to carry them?

We live in a digital age of websites, social networking, instant messaging and email so why not take your business cards digital as well.

Through a slick online service called MyDropCard.com you’ll never have another one one of those embarrassing moments ever again. Who knows you might actually even look cooler when you pull out your cell phone and instantly deliver your contact information right to their email inbox, in turn saving them the time and trouble have having to re-key your info back into their computer based address book.

Let me show you how to go from Zero to Hero in a few easy steps.

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If you’ve heard me talk or read my articles you know one thing that I firmly believe in is Social Media. This new method of marketing your business can help you reach new customers and stay on the pulse of existing ones.

If you’re a photographer who wants to compete in this fast changing and competitive online marketplace now is the time to start getting your feet wet with Social Networks like Facebook, mySpace, Twitter, Flickr etc.

If you don’t understand how social media works I urge you to find a friend, colleague or consultant who can teach you how to leverage the power that Social Media Networking can offer.

There is no better way to obtain real-time feedback about you or your brand than there is through what is called Reputation Monitoring.

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I’m happy to to be able to provide an audio playback of my interview with Rodney Washington of Photo Marketing Mentor. This interview originally aired January 8, 2009.

[audio:show109.mp3]
To download the audio file visit BlogTalkRadio.

There is no question that in the ever-competitive photography industry you need every advantage to set yourself apart from your competition. It’s no longer enough to just place an ad in the local Yellow Pages and wait for the phone to ring. You need to start thinking outside the box when it comes to your advertising efforts and you need to start now.

Unless you have been living under a rock or have been so busy the last couple years, in which case you probably don’t need to read this article, you’ve heard of social media networks such as MySpace and Facebook. These websites are generally used to connect with friends and family, but lurking just beneath their exterior is a wealth of marketing gold. For little to no money you can tap into the over 100 million registered members that comprise the facebook network alone. Try doing that with your local yellow pages.

At this point you are probably still wondering how this is all applicable to you as a photographer, so let me show you how by placing a small facebook advertisement you can directly tap you into your target audience.

For example, if you are a High School senior photographer you can use the Facebook advertising system to locate all 17 – 18 year old kids in your local town that have accounts on facebook. Each day as eager young high school kids in your home town log into their facebook accounts, your ad will be served up in all its glory for them to view.

Let me walk you step by step through the process of creating a facebook advertisement of your own and get you well on your way to generating new leads for your business.

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My name is Cris Mitchell and I’m a Twitter-holic.

This is no joke, over the past few weeks I’ve found myself immersed in the inner workings of this quirky little microblogging platform. Those of you unfamiliar with microblogging please read my previous post on the subject.

If you are like me and have spent any amount of time using Twitter, you’ll quickly realize that things could be a lot easier. With that said I’m going to list my Top Ten Tools for day-to-day Twittering.

1. TwitThis – www.twitthis.com – TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
2. WP to Twitter - www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/ - The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter.
3. TweetDeck – www.tweetdeck.com – TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
4. SocialToo – www.socialtoo.com – SocialToo is working to complement your social experience by providing you with all the tools you need to get the most you can from those you follow on the web. We’re automating the processes needed to make this experience as easy as possible, and providing you with tools to reach your audience to its fullest potential.
5. TwitScoop – www.twitscoop.com - Great search tool for finding other photographers or people in your niche market.
6. TweetBeep – www.tweetbeep.com – Enables anyone to receive alerts by email whenever a specific word or phrase is tweeted on Twitter, similar to Google Alerts.
7. TwitterBar- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664 - TwitterBar allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small unobtrusive grey icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.
8. Twitterrific and Twittelator Pro- http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific – http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/ – Both are iPhone applications that allow you to send and track tweets from your cell phone, useful for posting messages when I’m away from my computer (I told you I’m hopeless)
9. TwitPic - www.twitpic.com – TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter, TwitPic is also included in both Twitterific and Twittelator Pro.
   
10. TweeTree - www.tweetree.com – Tweetree is a usual site for view @reply threads on Twitter. It does so by grouping conversations together so you can follow the conversation in a logical order.

There you have it, those are my 10, can’t live without tools for twittering. I know there a bunch more out there so if you don’t see something in the list that you think I should know about, make sure to post them in the comments section, I want to know.

I’ve been spending a good amount of time over on Twitter.com and have connected with tons of really talented photographers. Today I was asked by fellow Twitterer Mike Panic (www.mikepanic.com) how he could best market and present his iStockPhoto stock photography.

I do not know Mike other than a brief exchange that we had on Twitter today, so the first thing I did was jump over to his website to see what he was all about. Right of the bat I noticed is that he had no mention of his stock photography anywhere on his site, at least that I could easily find. So from there I moved on over to iStockPhoto.com and did a quick advanced search for Member Name Mike Panic and still no luck, 0 results. I’m sure Mike probably signed up under a Nickname that I am not aware of. Typically the third thing I’d do is ask Mike to send me an email, so I can see what is in his email signature if anything at all, but for the sake of time I opted to let that go.

Sorry Mike I’m not picking on you, rest assured you are not alone when it comes to overlooking the most obvious ways to not only Market your stock photos online but your entire business in general.

Below I offer these 3 very easy solutions to help you increase your online stock photo exposure.

1. Create and host an alternate gallery on your personal website with large images that link directly to the image on your stock site of choice. At the very lest have a link that takes the person directly to your stock photo gallery.
2. When signing up for an account on a stock photo site such as iStockPhoto.com don’t use a nickname such as “PhotoAce” use your real name, this will allow for people to easily find your work.
3. Get in the habit of creating an email signature and listing all the sites and places people can find you and your work. It might seem a little vain at first, but get over it. Figure out how many emails you send out each day, that’s free advertising.

I hope this advice helps Mike and all photographers out there trying to increase exposure in this ever-increasing competitive marketplace.

If you have solutions that have worked for you we’d love to hear it. Leave us a comment.

If you are a Twitter user make sure to follow me at www.twitter.com/crismitchell I reciprocate the follow for anyone follows me.

There is a young twenty-something female photographer from Orange County that has taken the phography industry by storm over the past year, she was brought to my attention by David Jay just over a year ago when I asked him if he knew of a young photographer that would be willing to write for ProPhotoResource.com.

I remember the conversation like it was yesterday, he responded “Jasmine Star, you’ve got to check her out she’s going to be huge in this industry.” I thought to myself, well i’ve never heard of her but with a name like Jasmine Star how can you go wrong. Over the past year i’ve seen the growth of PPR explode in no short part without the help of Jasmine who is as far as i’m concerned one of the best online marketers i’ve come across in this business, hands down. Jasmine has built an online following like no other and ProPhotoResource.com has reaped the benefits of those followers.

If you are familiar with Jasmine’s blog you’ll understand exactly what i’m talking about. I typically don’t frequent photographers blogs because quite frankly, just because someone can take a good picture doesn’t necessarily mean they can write an informative or even entertaining blog post for that matter. The Jasmine Star Blog is a totally different animal, not only is it a place where she showcases her brilliant photography, but it’s where she does what she does best, showcases her personality.

I’ve never met Jasmine in person, our relationship has been strictly one of email bantering back and forth, but through her blog I feel like we’ve been friends for a lifetime, I feel like I know her family, her husband and even her dog Polo. Jasmine’s personality exudes from her blogs posts, and as a reader I find myself immersed in her words, her photos and her life, this is what a photographers blog should be all about.

This month Jasmine wrote a great article for ProPhotoResource.com entitled “Showcasing Your Personality” I thought it was fit to also publish here on the PhotographersHandbook.com for those of you who may not be a PPR Member. After the jump please enjoy Jasmines Article and if you would like to find more great photo education just like this be sure to check out ProPhotoResource.com and oh yeh don’t forget to drop by www.JasmineStarBlog.com and watch a master in action

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