We spend a lot of thought and time on advertising, promoting, website design, SEO, CRM, email marketing, … to be on top of mind of our potential client at ‘the moment of relevance‘, as Google calls it. So now you’re on the phone with him – what do you talk about? Obviously there’s the information you need about the production of the shoot, how many images, how they’ll be used, … but all photographers should be doning this. So what sets you apart? What makes you the guy or girl that this potential client is going to hire?
Nov 132010
Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about my involvement in the photographic community in Miami. I am an active member in ASMP, and I attend events that are held in South Florida, but I asked myself: “What do I give back to the photographic community?” This introspective was caused by reading Chase Jarvis’ blog, who challenges photographers to share their knowledge of what goes on inside the ‘black box’ of photography with the world. In a recent panel discussion at Photo Plus Expo, Chase had a group of his photographer and blogger friends together in a pannel.
One of the members of the pannel in the end of this video is Vincent Laforet, who’s blog I’ve been reading for the past few days, where Vincent is interviewed by Marc Silber. Long story short Marc had this idea a few days ago about something he calls “Advance your Photography”.
Since I am looking for a way get involved in the local photography community in South Florida and Marc was looking for pros that were willing to launch the AYP (Advance your Photography) Club pilot with him, this seemed like a great match.
We will be launching the Miami Chapter of the AYP club soon and we’ve put up a facebook community page to encourage people to keep in touch with us on this opportunity. If you know someone, who is a photographer (amateur or pro) that want’s to learn from Marc’s library of interviews with the best photographers in the world, as well as have a commercial photographer critique their photography, with the intent of advancing their craft – please share this with them. I’m looking forward to our first meeting …
Nov 022010
Although Google is without a doubt the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to search, BING – Microsoft’s search engine – just announced a partnership with facebook.
Watch a short video of how this works (unfortunately Microsoft’s embed link does not work.)
What does this mean? Why should you care? Well it means that if you are looking for a product or service, BING will let you know who of your friends ‘like’ this service on facebook, which gives you instant feedback about which company is trusted by your facebook friends.
We’ll see how this affects purchasing decisions on the one hand, but also if we’ll be more selective on who will be our facebook friends.
Nov 022010
LinkedIn has been around for a long time as a great place to keep track of your contacts as we all move through life. We go from college to work and move from company to company, many times our email addresses are ‘my_name@the-old-company.com‘ , so unless you’re a close personal friend, i.E. someone I know another email address of, I am not able to stay in touch.
My view on accepting facebook friends and twitter followers is very much looser than my LinkedIn network. LinkedIn are the people I have worked with, want to work with, should be working with – but they are people that are real contacts that are valuable for my business.
LinkedIn has now taken it a step further: they have introduced the ‘company’ page, a place where you can talk about your products and services, your employees and where people can follow news about your company. Pretty cool. Oh – if you’re on linked in, you can follow Photography by Depuhl on LinkedIn.
4. Knowing who you’re dealing with – managing your customer relationships: SalesForce
Special offer: watch for specials – I pay $9.- a month for this package. (http://www.salesforce.com) Service costs $25.- a month (30 day free trial)
I have been using SalesForce since October 2008. The Group edition allows you to store unlimited contacts, track customer interactions, captures leads from your website, tracks sales opportunities and is smart phone accesible. SalesForce is the heart of my business online. They are incredibly serious about safeguarding your data in state of the art fashion, something immensely important to me. Their phone support is incredible to.
SalesForce is my day to day calendar and to-do list (synced to iCal on my computer and iPhone – this takes a little hack that you can read more about in my blog post: The ultimate in automation), it captures leads from my website’s contact form (and emails the person interested in my photography a thank you email and lets me know that I have a new lead), maintains a list of accounts, i.E. companies that I do business with, keeps an up to date address book with my clients contact information (again synced to my mac and my phone every hour), helps me track my opportunities from lead through sale to fulfillment, allows me to view this information in reports that help me plan my business, and much much more.
How do you manage your contacts? Your sales? Your data? SalesForce is definitely one of the big players and they run specials from time to time that you just can not beat.
For more information on these sites see “5 essential sites for professional photographers (on a budget)“
In the intrest of full disclosure the links to the services that are recommend here are my affiliate links. None of these companies have approached me to advertise these services/products for them – I use them myself and believe in their products. If you use the links provided, you will also be able to save some money on your purchase or subscription of this services/products.
3. Minding the store – fulfilling your clients orders: Photoshelter
Special offer: save up to $40.- on your subscription. Service costs $30.- a month (First month for $1.-)
PhotoShelter has been hosting my images since January 2008. I was looking for service where I could upload my photos, deliver them to my clients securely, serve up the photos on my website and have an e-commerce solution to sell photos directly from the site. The $30.- version includes two customizable website theme, 35GB of space to store your photos and you can use your own domain name (they do have a $10.- version that has 10 GB of space and your URL would be http://yourbusiness.photoshelter.com). Their support team feels like family when you speak with them and are tremendously helpful.
PhotoShelter is were I upload photos into archives that are displayed in galleries on my website, that are downloaded by my retoucher, that are edited by my clients on light boxes, that are the place where my clients download their final files (I can control if they can only view, download a watermarked low res jpeg or the final high res file). I can also see when which client downloaded the image through their personal password protected web page. It also has a fantastic build in e-commerce portion, that allows me to be paid via PayPal when a customer orders a print (with a lab doing the fulfillment of the printing) or a download of a digital file.
PhotoShelter has a great little desktop uploader that allows you to upload a whole folder of photos at once into your photo archive. Obviously you’ll do this after the files are retouched and finished for delivery, tagged with the metadata that needs to be in your files (copyright info, keywords, IPTC data, …). After a while this becomes one of the steps in your workflow (if you’re interested in learning more about your digital workflow a great site is dpbestflow, a guide for digital workflow that ASMP has put together; if you’re more of a book reading kind of person Peter Krough’s “The DAM book” is the definitive work on digital workflow.)
One of the features I love in PhotoShelter, is the ability to control who gets to do what with the photos that I’ve uploaded. Once you’ve created a gallery you can choose, if it is visible or hidden, searchable (great for SEO) or not, password protected or unprotected. My clients galleries are mostly hidden, password protected and by invitation only. Then I can define access privileges to this one gallery. Maybe I want the client to be able to see the images, but not to download them, the webdesigner needs web sized files and the art director needs to be able to download a high res TIFF file for the printed pieces. One gallery can do all of this. I can even limit how many images a user can download or a time period that the photos can be downloaded in. Finally PhotoShelter gives me a log of which user downloaded which file from what IP address.
I can combine multiple galleries into a gallery collection – I just shot a pro bono job for a local theatre that puts on a theatre summer camp, where each final performance of the children got it’s own gallery, but they are all combined into one gallery collection. Go ahead click on this gallery. Since you are not a user registered for this gallery, you can browse through the images and actually purchase them through the ‘add to cart‘ button. The theatre has a few people that have different levels of access: The executive director can view all the images, but can not download them. The creative person in charge of the website can download web size images, but not download high res TIFF’s and the art director that works on the print material can download the TIFF’s. All out of the same gallery, with a few mouse clicks, not bad for $30.- a month.
PhotoShelter also integrates photo slide shows nicely with my blog (which is a WordPress based blog), it does a lot more like giving me the ability to have an art director edit a fashion shoot on a light box that can get shared back to me, without sitting on the phone reading a list of files names back and forth.
Write a comment about how you deliver your images to your clients and the benefits of that service – PhotoShelter is perfect for what I need and I love that I can customize it to my needs.
Next post: “Knowing who you’re dealing with – managing your customer relationships: SalesForce”
In the intrest of full disclosure the links to the services that are recommend here are my affiliate links. None of these companies have approached me to advertise these services/products for them – I use them myself and believe in their products. If you use the links provided, you will also be able to save some money on your purchase or subscription of this services/products.
2. Constructing a place online – building your commercial websites: SiteGrinder
Special offer: save up to $50.- as an introductiory offer.
I have been using SiteGrinder since December of 2006 to build my websites since I saw another photographer’s website that was build using this tool. This is the most expensive investment in this blog post – the plug in costs $399.-, but it is very well worth it – it offers you incredible flexibility in how you design you’re website.
You design your site in Photoshop, a program that we are all very familiar with. SiteGrinder uses some very basic hints in your layers to understand what your intent is with a layer. It’s not complicated and their video tutorials are great. They’ve also just gone through a major redesign into their version 3.0 which lets you do some incredible stuff. They offer great webinars that explain everything from the basics of how to build your website to 2 hours on custom creation of forms and their functionality.
Building your own website allows you to get the design exactly like you want it, especially if you are integrating multiple services, like a photo e-commerce engine, a CRM service, a blog. The top menu bar is created in Photoshop and coded through the SiteGrinder plugin. (You can look at the home page here.) The one underneath is a PhotoShelter design, the product I use to distribute my images (more about that in tomorrow’s post), but you can take a look at the search page to compare the two.
See how close the designs are? There are some differences, but even if you click from one to the other you will not notice that you are now on a different website, yes it’s still mine, it’s branded with my logo and colors, but the e-commerce portion is farmed out. Site Grinder lets you do this. If you would take a predesigned template, you are limited to the changes the designer allowed you to make.
Another really important item for me is the integration of my CRM solution (see post on day 4) with my contact form on the website. SiteGrinder allows me to run the scripts necessary to integrate the form and the database (you must have a web hosting service that does not limit you to the scripts you are allowed to use, 1&1 lets you run your own scripts – so there is no issue there. You will have to get your hands a little dirty in coding here, but the CRM solution I use does a great job in teaching you how to integrate the forms with their service.
Let us know what web design plattform you use and why you think it’s good – I really like the fact that I can stay in Photoshop, a program we’re all really familiar with.
Next post: “Minding the store – fulfilling your clients orders: Photoshelter“
In the intrest of full disclosure the links to the services that are recommend here are my affiliate links. None of these companies have approached me to advertise these services/products for them – I use them myself and believe in their products. If you use the links provided, you will also be able to save some money on your purchase or subscription of this services/products.
1. A stake in the ground – hosting your photography website: 1 & 1
Special offer: get up to a year of free hosting. Service costs $10.- a month
I have been using 1&1 internet hosting since June 2003. To be honest I signed up with them after I saw an ad in Wired magazine: 3 years free hosting. They’ve turned out to be an awesome company to be doing business with. The $10.- package includes 150 GB of webspace, unlimited monthly transfer volume, 2 included Domain names along with 100 subdomains and 1,200 2GB email accounts. That will last you for a while. They have terrific phone support with knowledgable people and short hold times.
My commercial photography website and this photography / technology blog are hosted through my 1and1 hosting package as are my email accounts. The design of the website is created with SiteGrinder to mimic the design of the PhotoShelter portion of my website. So when you go to my home page and see the options below – there are actually 3 different websites in one: search, lightbox, cart and client area are hosted by PhotoShelter along with all the functionality that they bring to my users experience, blog is hosted one 1&1, but is this blog that you are currently reading and the home page, about, contact and a few other pages are hosted on 1&1 and not the PhotoShelter predesign, since I wanted them to be able to do more that what PhotoShelter offered: the scroll on my home page is one example, the integration with SalesForce on my contact page is another.
The individual parts that make up my website are designed in a way that the user does not feel like he is visiting different sites (with the exception of my blog). My site is due for a redesign I want to move a few more pages away from PhotoShelter and onto 1&1 to be able to control content a little better.
Why don’t you let us know which internet hosting company you use and why you think they’re great – 1&1 is flexible, reliable and has great customer service (and pricing).
Next post: “Constructing a place online – building your commercial website(s)“
In the intrest of full disclosure the links to the services that are recommend here are my affiliate links. None of these companies have approached me to advertise these services/products for them – I use them myself and believe in their products. If you use the links provided, you will also be able to save some money on your purchase or subscription of this services/products.
[Listen to my interview on the new media photographer podcast this coming Monday, as Rosh and I talk about the basic building blocks of your photography website(s) that you should have - stay tuned to this blog on how to save some money!]
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You have to be online. No one questions that. But how do you go about building a website? Now before I go any further, I have to remind you that I am a photographer first and foremost, not a coder, not an HTML pro, not a webdesigner, … but my business (in one form or another) has been online since 2004 and the majority of my clients find me on the first page of their search results on Google.
Sure you can hire someone to do the work for you. This post will talk about a do-it-yourself approach. It will require you to be willing to hack a few things, to find work arounds to what people say is not possible and do be willing to learn, but it will also show you a few short cuts, save you some money over the custom website design or the high end services.
