From the category archives:

Identity and Branding

How Tea Parties, Abortion, and Healthcare Can Affect Your Image

Are you thinking about how hot political issues might be costing you business due to your social media personas? Here are a few of my thoughts and warnings: Do you mix these topics into the streams that your clients see? Why or why not?

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Use Social Media to become the One to Call

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When someone needs to hire a photographer, how do they find one? Regardless of whether it’s for a wedding, corporate material, senior pictures, sporting event, or editorial need, they probably follow this path: A photographer they have previously hired. A referral from a trusted source. Someone they personally know who is a photographer. Someone they [...]

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Online and Offline: It’s All Real

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When personal computers still cost multiple thousands of dollars and the internet was somewhere that only technical geeks would be found, the term IRL came to mean “in real life” as opposed to an online interaction. Here’s a reality check for those using the internet in 2009: online life and offline life are one and [...]

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Build Relationships Before the Sale

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Businesses have focused on customer retention after the sale for quite a while… but what about building a relationship before the sale? I’ve found this to be a very effective technique for my photography business. Using social media (Twitter and blogging on locally-focused sites), I’ve established relationships with a variety of people in my area [...]

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Building Influence: Broadcast Messages or Personal Touches?

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Blogging, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services allow one to reach out, make connections, and spread a message. Recently I was in a discussion with a few other social media professionals and one of them brought up the question of which was more influential: broadcasting a message that’s potentially seen by a large group [...]

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What Part of Your Photo Business is Social Media?

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One of the first articles on Social Photo Talk was a look at What Should a Photographer Blog About. In that article, I mentioned that it’s important to identify the audience for your blog. Another important aspect of blogging as a photographer is to decide how your blog fits into your business. Is it just [...]

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Flickr from Yahoo! and they Want You to Know It

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While searching Flickr tonight I noticed something that caught my eye: That little “from Yahoo!” is new. Even though Yahoo acquired Flickr over four years ago, the Flickr logo had remained un-Yahooed until now. What does it mean? Probably nothing too significant, other than to remind users that Flickr is the largest remaining Yahoo property [...]

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I Can’t Afford to Not Be On Flickr

About a month ago, I highlighted the situation of a Flickr user Matt Stigliano, whose account was permanently deleted without warning. At that time, I decided to rethink my use of Flickr and whether or not it was a wise choice for a professional photographer to publish work on a service that engages in such [...]

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SEO Basics: Links

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Last time we talked search engine optimization (SEO), we talked about how keywords relate to SEO. Today let’s take a look at links (the HTML anchor <a> tag) and how they factor into ranking on Google and other search engines. Links matter for a couple different reasons. The first is the general assumption that the [...]

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SEO Basics: Intro and Keywords

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If you start publishing content on the internet through a website or blog, one of the terms you’ll come across fairly quickly is SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s an area that should get some attention from every blogger or content creator. Search engines such as Google and Bing use automated programs [...]

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