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Easy Ways To Make Infographics For Your Social Sites

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If you’ve been to Pinterest, you know one of the most popular, most shared items on there are infographics. They are fun to look at, filled with useful or amazing content, and therefore are also fun to share.

Infographics can range from the simple to the complex, filled with basic information or elaborate graphics. The key is getting your message across quickly and with style. Check out one of the recent infographics that went viral on Pinterest.

While you can use Photoshop to do just about anything, there are many online tools that also give you an easy way to get your ideas out there. [Read more...]

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5 Ways To Tell If Twitter Is Working For Your Photography Business

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Social media sites come and go. And if you are like most photographers, you probably have your social favorites. Do you favor YouTube or Facebook? Pinterest or Twitter?

While Twitter is now one of the “old timers”, it can still be an effective tool to get the word out about your business. Here is how you can tell.

Crowdbooster

Crowdbooster is a social media analytics tool that offers suggestions and resources to help you improve your online presence. It provides you with a plan of action to show you how you can reach out to the influencers in your sphere, create content that resonates with your audience, and when to send content to be most effective. It can help you track long term engagement and how best to interact with your audience. And if you have multiple accounts, that’s okay. Crowdbooster can bring all of your Twitter accounts together with your Facebook Pages accounts, and give you one stop views of how your marketing is working.

TweetCharts

TweetCharts allow you to generate a customized report for anything you can search for on Twitter. Use words, phrases, usernames, URLs, or hashtags to check out everything related to your niche. This is a great tool to use as you are tracking your campaigns and marketing programs. Track to see how many times your Tweet is mentioned, or how many times it was retweeted. You can also track if your followers and retweeters are more male or more female – perfect for understanding who your audience is and who you should be promoting your business too.

[Read more...]

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How To Get More People To Your Facebook Page

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The only way to get more people to your Facebook Page is to tell more people it exists.

It may be easy to send people to it by providing a link in your email, or including a Facebook Badge on your blog, but what do you do if you are out networking face to face?

Why not try a Facebook Business Card?

I’ve always loved Moo – you can find a variety of posts on here talking about how to use Moo products in your marketing materials.

Now they are helping you market your Facebook page as well.

Earlier this year, they launched Facebook Timeline cards – which was great for getting people to your individual profile. Now they are offering the same for Facebook Pages. And the best part is you can try it out … for free.

Each business can now login to Moo and get one pack of 50 cards for free. And even when your first 50 are gone, additional packs run $15 a pack. Very reasonable for a great marketing tool.

Making your Moo Facebook Cards is easy. When you sign in, make sure you click the “yes” when they ask for your data. This allows them to connect up with your Facebook account to pull the data automatically in.

Once your card is set up with your Timeline photo, personalize it. Make sure all your data is correct and its easy for people to connect up with you. You can add a favorite quote or phrase to the back of the card as well.

Tip: I love quotes and used one on the back of my first free pack. But you don’t have to stick with quotes. Think about what you do on Facebook. Do you provide tips? Do you share photos? Are you running a contest? Use that info on the back of your cards. It’s a great way to drive traffic if you’re offering an ongoing promotion.

Then purchase your cards. They are now shipping all over the world, so know matter where you live, you will probably be able to add this to your list of marketing tools.

Once you have your cards in place, use them in addition to your business cards. Yes, its okay to hand out two cards if they are both sending you to different places. When you are talking with someone, what would you like them to see? If you really want to feed them info from your Facebook account, hand over that card. If you want them to see your site for more information, hoping to convert them to a client, hand over your business card. And if you can tell they aren’t quite ready to convert to a client, or they are a great referral source, hand over both. The key is to let them follow you in the manner most convenient to them.

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How To Get Clients With Viddy

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I know what you’re thinking. Viddy? What’s Viddy? There is something else out there I need to know about?

Yes.

Viddy is a social video editing and sharing app that just surpassed the 26 million user mark.

Where Instagram and other photo apps allow you to play with still images, Viddy gives you the tools to turn any 15 second video footage into something truly unique and shareable. You can add filters and music, and give it a true “movie trailer” look and feel.

And then you share it – that’s what today’s technology is all about.

Start by downloading Viddy to your iPhone and sign up using Facebook or Twitter – you can use an email instead if you choose.

When you’ve signed in, it will pull a list of your friends already on Viddy (providing you’ve used your Facebook/Twitter account), which will give you a few people to follow and see what they are doing. Following works in a similar manner to other social sites – just hit the follow button and they are added to your profile.

Create your profile by adding a photograph, and start videoing. [Read more...]

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8 Things To Help You Grow Your Photography Business On Pinterest

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Pinterest has hit another milestone – over 100 million visits per month with nearly 12 million  of them being unique visitors.

If you haven’t joined Pinterest yet, now is the time. Pinterest is used primarily by women, and because of the visual aspect of pin boards, they spend a lot of time on the site.

Currently you can use Pinterest by signing up through either your Facebook account or your Twitter account, giving you double the traction for half the work.  If you connect through Facebook, keep in mind that currently it connects with your personal profile, not your page. So if you want to keep it business related, sign up for a special Twitter account to connect it to.

Then let the pinning begin.

1. Pinterest will start you out with five pre-determined pin boards. You can delete these and create your own. Plan out your boards with your business in mind. So instead of “photography” be specific towards your niche market. Also break it down to give your potential customers ideas as they are searching through your boards: what to wear for a portrait, posing ideas, location ideas. Be specific and use them to direct people to what they like the most. However, don’t just fill it with stuff from your site -  be a resource as well. Its okay to post fresh ideas from other sites and resources online. Be an industry expert and share your talents and knowledge freely.

Dig Deeper: The Code For Blocking Pinterest … And 12 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use It

2. Google recognizes Pinterest profiles, so they can appear on the first pages of search results. Because of how Pinterest interacts with Google, be sure to create boards using your key terms so its recognizable and will deliver you results within the most popular key searches.

3. Currently you can rearrange your pinboards to have them showcased on your profile in any order you choose. Yet the pins within each pinboard are shown in order of when you pinned each item. If you have a closed board concept – meaning you are creating a board with a select number of pins and you know ahead of time what they will be – lay out the order first so they will appear in the order you desire. [Read more...]

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How Will Facebook Search Impact Your Online Experience

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Imagine a world where your family has just arrived at home from a variety of events and places, and they decide they want to have dinner together. Its late – cooking would mean eating late in the evening. So they decide to call up a local pizza place. Yet they don’t want “the same old” pizza they always eat. Why not try something new?

So they head online, type in Google, and pull up a list of pizza places. If you do that right now, chances are you will get the big pizza places – Dominos, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns – whatever is big in your area. And you might get a few local places, but only the one’s that have spent extensive time and energy on search engine placement.

Maybe you wanted something new. Something that your friend at work was talking about. He mentioned a place they tried last week; now if you could only remember what it was.

In the near future, you may not have to remember. It may be possible to search based on your friends knowledge and recommendations, not just who made top ranking in Google.

And it won’t be through Google. It will be through the second largest search engine in the world.

Facebook.

Yep, Facebook.

Right now if you head over to Facebook, search involves finding a friend by typing in a name, or finding a business by typing in a keyword or a business name.

Yet if rumor has it right, they may be developing a search engine that works slightly different than Google. This search engine won’t care what keywords you use, how much you’ve paid an SEO firm, or how much you are paying for PPC. Instead, it will care about things like: [Read more...]

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How To Make Your Facebook Page More Interesting

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“I’ve been on Facebook for awhile now, yet I really have no enthusiasm for it. I post sporadically because I feel like I have to. I only have a hundred fans. And I really don’t know how to keep them interested. There is zero communication on my page, yet everyone says it has great potential. What do I do?”

Have you ever felt like that? Don’t worry, many people do.

If you have no enthusiasm for it, you will fail. Its as simple as that. So at this point you have two choices.

1. Quit using Facebook altogether for you business.

2. Choose to use it to attract new business.

If something isn’t working for you, you don’t enjoy it, and you really have no desire to make it work, why put your focus there? Instead, choose another way of marketing your business and put your concentration there instead.

Facebook is just a marketing tool – its one of thousands that exist for a small business owner. Yes, it will work if you use it right. But if you don’t enjoy it, why spend the time on it.

Yet if you decide that Facebook is truly something you want to use to attract new business, then its time to treat it like a marketing tool, and gather all of your energy up to make it work.

Are you using Facebook correctly?

Before you begin building a Facebook presence, make sure you have your accounts set up correctly. When you originally set up your account, you should have set up a personal account under your personal name. Your business should have its own Page. Browse through one of the many Pages that already exist on Facebook to gain some ideas. Then set up your own. You can use it as your business name – ABC Photography – or try creating different pages for different niches. For instance, if you focus on corporate events and weddings, the two make great stand alone businesses, and would potentially be more attractable if you separated them and created a page for each. [Read more...]

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Blogging Is Booming For Business … If You Do It The Right Way

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Its easy to get caught up in the promise of big returns by using the latest social site – whatever that may be. Yet by jumping on the “latest and greatest” social networking site, you may be missing out on an opportunity that has been there all along.

Blogs are sometimes overlooked as the strong marketing tool they are. A recent study showed that blogs as sources of online buzz have increased over the last five years  from 36 million to 181 million. Yet why are blogs still so strong? Should you be using them? And is there a right way … and a wrong way … to use a blog for your photography business?

Blogs Are The Backbone Of Success

Sarah is a photographer. When she decided to start her photography business, she had been unemployed for several months and didn’t have a lot of funds to invest in her new business. So she did what any savvy business owner would do and did everything she could for free. She printed off business cards on her home printer. And she started designing a Facebook page to showcase her work. She spent several months adding posts and content to Facebook and gradually built up a pretty good following. She gained over 2,000 followers and had a steady line of prospects and customers – enough to keep a steady income coming in every month.

Then someone got a hold of her Facebook password and started posting spam from her account. Facebook received a number of complaints and shut her account down. [Read more...]

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Can You Make Money With Your Photography and Chime.In

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What are your favorite pieces of each of the social networks you use? If you could build another social network to use for your photography, what would it look like?

Back in October 2011, a new site debuted … Chime.In. Think of Chime.In as a way to share short thoughts like Twitter, a way to get more in depth with each thought like you would with a blog, and voting capabilities like you get on Reddit.

Instead of focusing on information, Chime.In describes itself as an “interest network.” It has a newsfeed, profile pages and a system for following others – all like you are used to with other social sites. Instead of updating your status, you “chime”, which is a cross between an update and a post.

A Chime displays a headline, the first few sentences of the Chime, graphics (photo, video), your profile photo, interest tags, and options for liking, commenting or sharing. Your Chime can be up to 4,000 characters in length, giving you a lot more freedom to write exactly what you want to say. And once your Chime is up, people use a voting system to surface the best comments to the top of Chime.

While Chime may seem like just another player in the already busy social media field, it does have one unique difference. When you design your profile, you have full control over it, including the advertising and sponsors that run on your page. You can include your own ads on the page and keep 100 percent of the revenue. Or allow UberMedia to control the ads and split the revenue 50/50.

Chime.In is built with mobile in mind. You can access it via a similar look and feel as the web edition from one of its mobile apps, including iPhone, BlackBerry or Android.

Once you have your profile built, you can stay active in several ways. Type in your interest – photography – and you’ll be able to search through Chime by interests, communities or people. Then build up your followers list and start communicating.

Chime is simply another social site. Will it be popular enough to bring in a following that will help grow your business? It depends on your business and how you approach it. Yet it may be worth setting up a Chime to cover your basis and have one just in case. Remember, the key isn’t having one or two sites you rely on all the time. Its about spreading yourself out and being where potential followers may be. It doesn’t mean you have to be active all the time – just make sure you have a presence and watch it. If it becomes a big hit in your business world, by all means keep using it.

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Is Your Pinterest Traffic Worthless?

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If you look at any business media source today, the focus has moved off of Facebook and on to Pinterest. And for good reason. It’s the largest growing social media site yet.

But don’t let the large numbers fool you. The millions of people that are flocking to it are doing it for their own agenda, not yours. The audience (mainly women) love looking at all of the great ideas posted by other people and sharing them with their own followers. The numbers are there. But there is one thing that may not be there … valuable traffic.

If people are viewing your work just because they love the image, what is that doing for you?

Nothing.

Unless you do something with it.

Are you seeing the residual of people talking about and sharing your images with their followers? Or are you getting actual traffic to your site, finding people clicking over to your pages and spending the time looking around at what you have to offer?

The only way to find out is to physically track your statistics and monitor what people are doing. You must follow the traffic, where they click to once they come into your site, and most importantly, do they convert once they get there?

Dig Deeper: How Google Analytics Can Help You Grow Your Business

The key to a successful web presence isn’t traffic … it conversion. If 100 visit your site and 100 convert, you will be successful. If you have one million people visit your site with zero conversions, you will fail. [Read more...]

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