1. Make people mine for data on your website.  This is so easy to avoid, but evidently a lot of photographers think their client base is still playing Dungeons and Dragons. They bury their most important information under a sea of testimonials, accolades and miscellaneous pages. People eventually just get tired of searching and eventually go elsewhere.
2. Don’t give people a phone number to contact you. It’s the let’s-make-people-contact-me-my-way scheme. Seriously, don’t you feel great when you contact a company and can actually talk to a live body? Your website and your business is no different. And the same goes for business cards that send people to your website instead of your phone. If they’re serious they want to talk to you, not write an email. I understand if you’re working out of your home and don’t want to give people an address, but give them a phone number! There’s no such thing as giving your audience too much contact information.
3. Put up images that look just like Uncle Harry’s! Here’s one that’s so easy to fix, but there are some photographers who think Uncle Harry is the competition.  Up go images in the galleries that are as good as Uncle Harry’s!  WRONG – they need to be better than Uncle Harry’s and really demonstrate why you’re a professional photographer! Look at your website as if you were the client. Based on the quality of your images, would you hire you?
4. Not returning phone calls and emails makes you look really busy and in high demand!  Who started this one? Seriously, there are people on this planet who think that building your business is all about looking busier than you really are and one ingredient is to play hard-to-get!  That might have worked to get a date in high school, but success in business today is about a fast response.  It’s about great customer service and it all starts with your client’s perception you really care about their business. A quick response shows you care and they’re important.
5. Confuse your audience! This one is all about showing every image you’ve ever captured. Hey, who knows, that potential bride might just have an auto parts business on the side and be really interested in your table-top product work, especially the series you did on spark plugs, tools and 10W40! Keep your specialties separate and don’t give people too much to look at that isn’t relevant. For example, wedding and family portraiture go well together, but throw in your images of the Grand Canyon and you’ll lose them every time.

I cannot tell a lie, sarcasm is definitely one of my strong suits and tomorrow I’ve got five more ways you can help your competitors! And, let’s not forget the bright side of this – giving up business means you’ll have more time to just sit back and relax. After all, you had enough business already anyway, right?

Business is tough enough in a great economy let alone the challenges everyone faces today. Putting all the sarcasm aside, it just takes time, patience and lots of work. There are no shortcuts! Work is labor-intensive – that’s why it’s called work! But knowing there’s a quote for everything, I went searching…

“If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock.”  

Happy Wednesday! See you tomorrow for five more mistakes you want to avoid!

I just spent five days out of the office in Sarasota. The blog was all caught up with two posts in the pipeline when we left on Thursday. The minus side of being in a routine is simply how hard it is to break, when you really want to. Five days on vacation and the latest I could sleep was 6:25 a.m. I still couldn’t do anything without first checking email on my phone. and often I’d find myself at my laptop, even though there was no wifi! 

So, I’m curious about your routines! I’m also curious how many of you have built into your routine the importance of checking your website EVERY day! I spoke at the IPI convention a couple of years ago and loved it when an attendee told me that there were five people in his business and each morning everyone has a different page assigned to them to make sure it’s loading the way it should.

From that point on I set things up so one of the first things I do, right after checking email, is to check the site, in this case Summer School.Then it’s on to email followed by the blog, then Facebook and Twitter. It’s just part of the routine. And while I have yet to find something major not working the way it should,  I have been able to do a lot of fine-tuning.

So, here’s the biggest question of the day – do you check your website every morning?

• Check your site on Explorer, Firefox and anything else out there that your client base might be using.
• If you have a storefront, check to make sure the appropriate links to Paypal, Authorize.net, etc. are working properly.
• Check a couple of pages at random to see if they load fast enough.
• Check any links you have to other sites: Twice I’ve found links not working and it turned out it was a mistake I’d made and never caught it initially.
• Last on the list – pick something to proof-read. Trust me – you’ll ALWAYS find a mistake!

Your website is no different than any retail store or office. Not checking it every day is no different than Nordstrom’s forgetting to unlock the door and then wondering what happened to business! Most important of all, and just like Nordstrom’s, keep your “inventory” fresh! Your galleries have to show your very best work and your promotions need to always be current!

Living in LA you never say, “I’ve seen it all,” because sure enough an hour later you’ll see something more bizarre.  It’s great to look young, but so often in LA you see women (and men too) who have just pushed the envelope on youth too far.    Personally, I don’t want my gray hair died back to what I looked like in High School!  And I earned those bags I get under my eyes, why would I want to give them up?  The list could go on and on, but here’s my point.

Take a look at your website.   It might be perfect or, like so many other photographers, you either need a facelift or you’ve overdosed on photographic Botox!   

First, photographers often get tired of their images before they really need to be changed.  At the other extreme, many of you can focus your camera, but can’t focus on your specialty.   You’ll have all kinds of images on your website – some of them might be great, others are mediocre, even bad and were just included to fill up space. 

Think about this for just a second.  Pretend you’re a potential client and you’re looking through your galleries.  Let’s assume you’re guilty of inconsistent quality, with a few great images in the beginning, tapering off to average and poor later on.  Look at your images through the eyes of your client.  For me the first question I’d worry about, is who am I going to get if I hire this photographer?  While one image might be spectacular, a minute later I saw images that were “underwhelming”.  The gap between great images and everything else might be huge, leaving me wonder which persona will I get for my shoot.

Second,  there’s the Stuckey’s Grand Buffet Theme of just too many images and too much variety.  I’ve talked a lot about diversity, but you need to make sure your images are separated by subject matter and don’t throw too much at potential clients. 

My good buddy, Scott Bourne, and I have two different thoughts on this.  I don’t have a problem with a photographer demonstrating two different specialties, for example, wedding and children, because they’re both linked in a natural progression theme of family.  Just keep them in different galleries.  Scott believes you’re be better served to position them in two different websites and also target your marketing separately as well.   Pick either suggestion, but don’t mix them up in the same galleries.  You’ll wind up confusing your clients and in the end they might go elsewhere, just because they’re looking for a photographer who’s focused on just their needs.

Third, are your images in sync with today’s styles and trends?  So often I’ve seen images on websites I know were taken years ago.  You need to keep your website fresh!  Personally, I love it when photographers use their images in a blog style with a little copy that describes when and where the images were taken and especially demonstrates their enthusiasm.

Last but not least, limit your copy!  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then don’t bury people in paragraph after paragraph about yourself – give them images demonstrating quality and consistency.  It’s outdated terminology, but your goal is to create “sticky pages”.  Sticky pages means they literally don’t want to leave your site.  They want to share your images with their friends and they especially come back to look at more of your images at other times.

In the end we’re right back to getting a face lift!    Your website is your calling card – it’s who your future client sees before they ever pick up the phone or meet you.   Show images that are created from the heart and you’ll be able to pull at people’s heart strings!

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.  Ansel Adams

While the statement itself sounds like a complete contradiction, think about how hard it is to write something precise.   We all use too many words to just get to the point.   If it takes more than a paragraph or two to explain something then it’s probably too long.

Now, here’s a great exercise for a Sunday morning and it comes in two parts.  First, if you could come up with just six words to describe your love for photography what would they be?  Second, look at the “About Us” section of your website.  Does the description of who you are on your site match up with those six words that describe your love for photography?  And, are you able to do it in two paragraphs or less?

Happy Sunday everybody – make it a great day – enjoy your family and friends and relax!  All the challenges of the business will be there tomorrow morning!

Quality is still number one!  It’s the one common denominator on every site of every photographer or even company we consider iconic.  I know it’s not a revolutionary concept, but we’ve all gotten so caught up in social media, blogging and the buzz in our industry that too many of us seem to forget, a well-exposed, composed and presented image is still King!

All the marketing genius in the world isn’t going to substitute the quality of your photographs.  And while lots of hype and discounting might seem to get more business in the door initially, it won’t get you a second time buyer.  People won’t come back to you if your work and service was “underwhelming”.

So, the next time you put images up on your website, think quality.  Think about if what you’re about to post is really your very best work.  Is it representative of a philosophy that suggests you never compromise the final image?  Does it really show the skill set you want to present?

I found two quotes that seem appropriate to the topic:

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. ” William A Foster

“When you’re out of quality you’re out of business.” Anonymous

Thanks.

At IPI’s (Independent Photo Imagers) conference this past summer, when I suggested people needed to check their website every morning, one of the attendees gave us a great idea.  There are six people in his company and every morning, when each person boots up, they each check a different page of the website to make sure everything on the site looks good and loads right.

You’ve made an incredible investment in your website.   What good is all that work if the site isn’t working as efficiently as it could be?

We discussed website load speed back on September 17, 2009 in the blog post Website ? and how important it is to a visitor’s overall experience. Although a bit extreme, the statistic I cited in that post was that ” . . . Google has found that as little as a millisecond in load time for their pages can be the difference of millions of incremental dollars.”

In an effort to continue to evolve best practices, Google is adding load speed to their SEO algorithm. January 2010 is the rumored start for this additional factor making the optimization of page loading more important than ever.

I like this change by Google to the algorithm. On the one hand, it will make for more page-loading efficient sites resulting in a better visitor experience and retention — on the other hand, it will lower the use of bandwidth and possibly hosting fees. As the larger companies/websites become more load efficient our expectations will shift and we’ll expect the same performance from both big and small.

A free tool that we use at PhotoOne is WebSiteOptimization. It is setup to allow you to enter your sites URL and submit for diagnosis. As outlined on the bottom of their Homepage, the website speed test will “ . . . help you find out if slow pages are hurting your business. It will test page size, composition, download speed and point out some of the things that need to be done to increase your on-line competitiveness.”

For all of us who hate waiting in lines(*), go ahead and check out WebSiteOptimization. If you haven’t had your site tuned-up in a couple of years, it might be a good New Year’s resolution.

(*) fun fact: during your lifetime you will have spent roughly 5 years in a line.

The bottom line is now is the time to look at every aspect of your business, especially your website.   Your website is your calling card – it’s the one vehicle that virtually everybody interested in hiring you is going to look at.   It’s time to update your site  and really put yourself out there. Think about it – if so many of your counterparts are  pulling back then isn’t this the perfect opportunity for you to make your work really stand out?   You’ve got a chance to be in the spotlight all by yourself!

So, before you blame the challenges in your business on the economy or the Uncle Harrys of the world, are you happy with your website?    Is it time for a face lift and a new look for your business?   The best time to launch a new brand or look, is when your competition is slowing down and their marketing efforts lacking.   Maybe it’s time to go back to square one and analyze your website, your images and the message you’re sending to your clients when they ”walk through your door”.   Are people talking about what they saw on your website, or did it look like everybody else’s?

I’ve worked with Big Folio a lot over the last year and I checked on any specials they might have to help photographers upgrade their websites - use code bfsave150 to save $150 off the setup fee of any Premium BIG Folio site. The offer only has a short window, running to the end of this month, October 31.

Your website is critical to your success.  It won’t do any good creating the greatest images of your life if people can’t find them on your site, they take too long to load or simply lack excitement in the quality of the presentation.

The reality is it’s not a perfect world and every website should be constantly checked.  It should be checked on different computers as well.  I recently had a great suggestion from an attendee at a  marketing presentation I did at the IPI Summer Convention. 

“We have six people in the company.  Every morning when they boot up, their landing page is a different page on our website.  That’s six different pages that get checked first thing, before we even start the day!”

Years ago there was  a TV campaign that simply had one line:  “It’s 11:00 PM.  Do you know where your kids are?’  Well, it’s time to modify and bring that line into business and 2009…”It’s the start of another business day – do you know if your site’s working?”