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’ve been testing online cloud backup solutions for the past few months and they either fall into two camps.
1. Difficult to use or 2. Expensive.

I was becoming increasingly frustrated with all that was out there until I stumbled upon iDrive.com. iDrive.com simply does online backup right. Their system is a breeze to use and is available for both Mac and Windows.

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So you’ve just spent a half-day writing your latest and greatest blog post, you hit submit and then wait for your throngs of blog fans to come racing to your site to read it… and … nobody shows up.

There is an often-overlooked step in the blogging process that will help drive traffic to your blog. You need to notify the various blogging search engines that you have new content waiting to be indexed. There are probably at least a hundred different blogging search engines but really only a handful of them you should concern yourself with. Even if you pick the top 20-30 manually updating each of them can quickly become a pain.

I come bearing a solution.

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Our friends over at Photoshelter.com one of the coolest resources for template based photography websites with complete eCommerce backend solutions recently published this video based upon their findings from a  questionnaire that went out to over 550 photo buyers.

If you are in the process of building your site for the first time or thinking about taking on the daunting task of a rebuild, this is a must watch before you write one line of code.

Visit Photoshelter.com to check out some of their affordable and robust website packages for your next site.

Video after the Jump:

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More and more these days i see photographers stepping out and over the line when it comes to making a splash when choosing a background for their website. Like everything in life sometimes simple is just better and you can’t go wrong with simple white, black or neutral gray backgrounds.

Subtle textures in white, gray and black are ok but try to stay away from crazy textures and wild colors as they will only draw your visitors eye away from your images.

Spend time looking through some of your favorite photographers websites. I know all my favorite shooters use simple design with minimal color and let their images steal the show.

I know I know if you’ve ever heard me speak on the topic of web design and development you know that I’m rather vocal in my opinions against the use of Flash for websites.

Typically, Flash based sites if not built with a huge amount of forethought can be clumsy, cumbersome, difficult to manage and virtually impossible to SEO (Search Engine Optimize). Over the years I’ve spent countless hours talking clients down from the ledge and keeping them from committing CyberSuicide.

Have I painted a bleak enough picture for you yet? If Not Click to Read On…

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If your like me, and you should be, you’re diligent about checking your website statistics to see the flow and trends of visitors coming to your site, all this data will help you fine tune your web efforts.

All sorts of insightful information can be obtained when viewing your website statistics including unique vs returning visitors, browser types, monitor resolutions, search terms, how visitors arrived at your site and on and on. If you haven’t spent some time looking through your server stats I encourage you to do so.

There are typically two types of server statistics you’ll use to provide you this information Server Logs and Google Analytics, there are others but these are really the only two I’d bother with.

Let me explain briefly the difference between the two. (more…)

I’ve got some more robust articles just around the corner but in the meantime I thought I’d share a nifty little online tool that will help you spruce up your website and blog images, by creating great looking reflections underneath the image.

Yeh you can do this in Photoshop fairly easy, but not as easy as you can with RelfectionMaker from the folks over at PopMinds.com. Besides RelectionMaker they also have a few other online apps for creating backgrounds and page tabs definitely work checking out.

Creating an image reflection is as easy as heading over to www.reflectionmaker.com and uploading the image you wish to add a reflection to. You can set the reflection size and the background color as well. Once you’re all set just click Generate and bingo your new image is ready to download.

It doesn’t get any easier than that.