Rangefinder Radio Interview

Recently I was interviewed by Scott Sheppard over at Rangefinder Radio.  Must say that Scott did a great job of moving the discussion along and keeping the topics flying!  He is a true professional and terrific resource for our industry.  I have been working in the wedding industry for 10 years now and have some definite opinions expressed in the interview.

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THE OBAMA TIME CAPSULE

The first ever on demand photo book created for the main stream media. It is on sale at Amazon for only $34.95 and is a hard bound, 200 page photo book that  includes hundreds of images from over 140 professional photographers following Obama’s historic road to the White House along with his first 100 days.

OK so it is a cool photo book but the reason that it is important for photographers to see is that unlike a normal photo book which is printed and sold in book stores this is only available from Amazon because each book is printed on demand. The professional photos and layout etc already exist and then the person ordering the book uploads some of their own photos as well as their name etc and they become a co-author, the invitation to the inauguration includes their name, the thank you blackberry email is to them, etc. It is the first time ever that I think a photographer has mixed a professional book with the end users images.

This is the future of book publishing. Tons of wedding photographers  and others are already creating their own books at Blurb etc but this  shows that with some front end interface photogs  can not only do that  but help end users create their own compelling pieces of history as well.

If you want more info or to be in touch with the people running this let me know!

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PDN : Photographers Virtual Trade Show

I will be on the virtual tradeshow floor!  This should be interesting and pretty cool…  It will allow artists who are unable to travel to trade shows the ability to interact with different vendors from the industry.

Live show date: May 21, 2009
Live show hours: 10 A.M. EDT – 6:00 P.M. EDT

You can check out more and sign up HERE.

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40 Twitter resources for Wedding Photographers

Twitter resources for Wedding Photographers:

These are in no particular order…

1.http://twitpic.com/ : TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter.
2.http://www.twitxr.com/ : Share pictures and status updates from your mobile.
3.http://www.mobypicture.com/ :   Shoot n Share, it’s that simple!
4.http://snaptweet.com/ : Easily Share Flickr Pictures on Twitter.
5.http://www.tweetube.com/ : Upload or email pictures quickly via Tweetube and automatically share your great photo moments with your Twitter followers.
6. http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ : You can create Twitter groups on TweetDeck, so you can keep your industry and personal contacts somewhat separate.
7. http://twittangle.com/ : twitTangle will allow you to rate and tag your friends, then filter your timeline based on those that are most important to you.
8. http://www.tweetreplies.com/ : Use Tweetreplies to have your @replies sent directly to your email in real time.
9. http://splitweet.com/ :  Get multi account management using Splitweet, so you can separate your studio and personal accounts.
10. http://useqwitter.com/ : Find out when followers stop following you.
11. http://hootsuite.com/ :  With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success.
12. http://www.tweetlater.com/ : Use Twitblocker to temporarily hide your friends that are updating a bit too often.
13. http://www.twaitter.com/ : This Twitter web client will allow you to schedule, and create recurring Tweets.
14. http://twitter.grader.com/ : How do you stack up on Twitter.
15. http://tweetstats.com/ : Graphin’ your stats.
16. http://twitslikeme.efinke.com/ : Find others like you.
17. http://nearbytweets.com/ : Find other twitters near you.
18. http://wefollow.com/ : User powered Twitter directory.
19. http://www.twellow.com/ : Twitter Yellow Pages.
20. http://www.twitterhawk.com/ : Introducing you to people like you, near you.
21. http://followcost.com : How annoying will it be to follow  @jsandifer on Twitter?
22. http://datenmafia.org/phototwitter/ : Use PhotoTwitter to take snapshots with your iSight and post to Twitter.
23. http://www.twitscoop.com/ : Search Twitter to see what is hot right now.
24. http://twiggit.org/ : twiggit is an automated service that lets your friends on twitter know what articles you digg.
25. http://www.quoteurl.com/ : QuoteURL helps you group different Twitter updates from different people into a single page that has a permanent URL. So you can put it on your blog or send interesting conversations to friends.
26. http://tweetscan.com/ : Search Twitter quickly and easily.
27. http://www.tweetizen.com/ : You can start your own group, or find groups with specific interests on Twitter.
28. http://twtpoll.com/ : Create a poll.
29. http://www.strawpollnow.com/ : Create your own straw poll.
30. http://grouptweet.com/ : Group message broadcasting for Twitter.
31. http://21tweets.com/ : They help you to achieve your new goals and turn them into a habit!
32. http://twitterfeed.com/ : Feed your blog to twitter.
33. http://www.fuelfrog.com/ : Track Your Gas Mileage with FuelFrog.
34. http://www.tweeteorology.com/ : The twitterverse on the weather.
35. http://tweetburner.com/ : Tracking the links you share.
36. http://ping.fm/ : Simple service that makes updating your social networks a snap.
37. http://jott.com/ : Makes it easy for you to tweet without ever having to type, transcribing your voice message to Twitter.
38. http://mymilemarker.com/ : Track your miles.
39. http://twtvite.com/ : A simple event manager twitter app.
40. http://www.tweetwhatyouspend.com/ : Cash tracking made simple through Twitter.

Let me know your favorites so I can add them!

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SEO for Wedding Pros

The wedding industry is so relient on people finding us in searches with 95% of brides using the internet for planning.  There is a ton of information out there and finding the right strategy is a challenge.  Everyday I speak to photographers around the country who have heard, learned or read something about SEO that is not inline with the knowledge that I have acquired over the years.  SEO is a marathon…not a sprint and anyone who says they will can guarantee you top placement on google, I would be worried about.  The algorithms that google uses are not published and change on a regular basis.  That said, there are good practices that you can use on your site and in your incoming links that will over time move you up in organic search engines.

Formulate a strategy for your SEO and start to educate yourself on how to achieve the results you are looking for.  Here are some of the resources that I have learned from over the years: John Harrington’s blog,  http://www.seobook.com/, http://www.searchenginepeople.com/, http://www.flyteblog.com/flyte/, http://www.dailyblogtips.com/, as well as hearing a number of speakers talk on the subject at WPPI, PPE and elsewhere.  Another terrific resource would be liveBooks webinars : Learn How to Optimize Your liveBooks Site for Search Marketing

Like to know more…shoot me a call at liveBooks 415-200-0575 and we can chat!

Wedding SEO

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How does Google see your brand and is that helping your SEO?

One of the many blogs I follow is SEO Book and recently they posted about how Google is promoting brands in organic searches.  This is really just the progression of search and further promotes those that have built strong brands in an industry.  I thought I would pass it on…

Google’s New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding

Feb

25

Originally when we published this we were going to make it subscriber only content, but the change is so important that I thought we should share some of it with the entire SEO industry. This post starts off with a brief history of recent algorithm updates, and shows the enormous weight Google is placing on branded search results.

The Google Florida Update

I got started in the search field in 2003, and one of the things that helped get my name on the map was when I wrote about the November 14th Google Florida update in a cheeky article titled Google Sells Christmas [1]. To this day many are not certain exactly what Google changed back then, but the algorithm update seemed to hit a lot of low level SEO techniques. Many pages that exhibited the following characteristics simply disappeared from the search results

• repetitive inbound anchor text with little diversity
• heavy repetition of the keyword phrase in the page title and on the page
• words is a phrase exhibiting close proximity with few occurrences of the keywords spread apart
• a lack of related/supporting vocabulary in the page copy

The Google Florida update was the first update that made SEO complicated enough to where most people could not figure out how to do it. Before that update all you needed to do was buy and/or trade links with your target keyword in the link anchor text, and after enough repetition you stood a good chance of ranking.

Google Austin, Other Filters/Penalties/Updates/etc.

In the years since Google has worked on creating other filters and penalties. At one point they tried to stop artificial anchor text manipulation so much that they accidentally filtered out some brands for their official names [2].

The algorithms have got so complex on some fronts that Google engineers do not even know about some of the filters/penalties/bugs (the difference between the 3 labels often being an issue of semantics). In December 2007, a lot of pages that ranked #1 suddenly ended up ranking no better than position #6 [3] for their core target keyword (and many related keywords). When questioned about this, Matt Cutts denied the problem until after he said they had already fixed it. [4]

Continue reading the blog post HERE.

seo for wedding pros wedding photography seo

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Sick!

@Damon, thanks for making me aware of this today on FB!

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