In anticipation of the fall and holiday season, the IT team at JDPI has completed a major upgrade of hardware, software and data lines last week. Initial reports confirm that – depending on your computer and Internet connection speed – you could see up to a 100% speed increase in image upload times.

As always, we here at JDPI strive to improve the service we provide to you.

When it comes to running, growing and marketing your photography business, the best resources available today are not in books – they are online. Below are six blogs and websites I use. I suggest you bookmark each of these, and when you’re stuck on a business problem, try one.

Marketing – Betsy Finn is a great photographer who is doing everything right when it comes to teaching photographers how to market their business online (we like her so much, we’re sponsoring her). You can read her blog, visit her website, or join her on Facebook.

Marketing - No BS Photo Success is fairly well-known, but if you haven’t checked out their blog, I suggest you try it. Lots of articles specifically written for the professional photographer – by professional photographers. The style is light and breezy, and will get you motivated to fire up your studio.

SEO - That is search engine optimization for the uninitiated, and SEOmoz is the best place to learn how to make your website rise to the first page on Google. In addition to the free SEO tools, the blog has many great articles like this one that specifically shows you how to create a single page that Google will love.

SEO – The SEOWorkers.com site has a search engine optimization analysis tool that I use all the time. This (free) secret weapon tells me in seconds if a web site meets the criteria for being “search engine friendly.”

Business – SCORE has been around a long time, and their website is packed with information for small business. SCORE relies on thousands of retired CEOs who volunteer their time to help other small businesses get started.

Business – The Michigan Small Business and Technology Center is a great resource for small business information and programs in the State of Michigan. In addition, they offer dozens of classes around the state on topics from Government Contracting to Business Plans to QuickBooks.

And of course, this blog can help your business as well. If you have a question on a specific topic, click one of the links on the “cloud” of search terms on the right and you can see all the posts on that subject (the larger the text, the more posts). I hope you’ll check back often.

If you have any blogs or websites you like, send me a link and I’ll share them in an upcoming post.

The bride-to-be walked into the community center where she planned to have her reception. While speaking with the manager, he showed her several photographs of the hall beautifully decorated. At the end of their conversation, the manager said, “If you don’t have a photographer yet, let me recommend one.” Then he mentioned your name.

When you shoot a wedding, you work along side a church, a reception hall, a florist, a caterer, a baker, a wedding gown shop, and a wedding planner. Each of these folks has a small business just like yours, and each needs great photography of their work.

If their best marketing photography comes from you, who do you think they will recommend as a photographer?

For example, if you take a  cake shot, print an extra 8×10 ($2.55 JD Deluxe for the second print) and send it to the cake decorator with a short cover letter telling them you thought they would like a professional print of their work. Tell them how beautiful the cake was. Do the same for the hall, the church, the caterer and the florist. Most of them leave their business cards at the event, so it is easy to get their addresses.

After a couple prints, they’ll learn that recommending you gets them a free print. They may even pay you to take photos for their advertising.

Word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. Wouldn’t it be great to have lots of people who talk to brides every day mentioning your name?

Photography by Sam Sarkis

Sony has unveiled a new product called the Party-shot™. Basically, it is a motorized digital camera base for Sony cameras that tracks people in a room, looks for faces and if it finds one, snaps a photo.

After I read Sony’s press release at DPReview.com I started thinking: could you make money with four or five of these in your camera bag? Some ideas:

• Put several Party-shots around the room at a wedding reception / class reunion / prom then upload all the images to the web immediately after the event.
• Have an assistant pull the memory cards from the cameras every 20 minutes and add them to a projected slide show happening during the event (people love to look at themselves).
• School photographers who contract to shoot every high-school event could have an assistant set these up at pep-rallies or small events to free the photographer up for other shoots.
• Can you think of any other ideas?

While this will never replace a professional photographer, could it take enough candid shots that a few great ones might pop out that you would have otherwise missed?

All I know is, if the Party-shots is popular this Christmas, every camera manufacturer will have one next year. I want one to experiment with. How about you?

Our photographers who are great marketers start designing their ads, flyers, and postcards for the 2009 holiday season in August. To encourage the rest of you to get started, below are 5 tips to make sure your ads have maximum impact:

1. It’s about the customer. Go through your ad, and everywhere you use the words “I” or “we” change it to “you” or “your”. For example:

I specialize in senior photography. We guarantee satisfaction.
or
Your photos will reflect you. Your satisfaction is guaranteed.

2. Make it short and simple. Take a hint from the print industry: the average newspaper is written for 6-8th graders. You should do the same. For example:

Our expert staff will take the time to insure that each and every photograph you purchase is skillfully color-corrected, printed and mounted to your exacting specifications.
or
You’re going to love your photos.

3. Cut the hype. The more you hype your specials, the more you sound cheap and insecure about your work. This applies to both ad copy, as well as fonts, uppercase and punctuation. For example:

BIG SALE!!! Limited time only.ACT NOW!!!
or
Exclusive offer just for you

4. Let others say it. Testimonials from others are the most effective form of advertising. Make a habit to collect testimonials all year, then use them in your promotional pieces. For example:

Your prints will be perfect, on time, and at a great price.
or
“JD Photo made my prints perfect, on time, and at a great price.” Joe Client

5. Call to action. At the end of every ad, your customer should know exactly what you want them to do. You have to tell them specifically. For example:

Please contact us at your convenience to set an appointment.
or
Call us now at 888.858.8084 to reserve your free, private consultation.

These tips aren’t just for new ads; if you’ve already created an ad, check it against this list to measure how well it stacks up. If you’re missing one or more of these 5 items, you should edit your ad before you use it again.

Customers ask why we have minimum page requirements for photo books in ROES. We require an even number of pages, the minimum number is 6 pages (12 sides) in soft cover books, and the minimum number is 10 pages (20 sides) in hard cover books. Here’s why:

• Book pages have two sides. If you don’t submit an image for both sides, we cannot be sure whether you ran out of images, or if you forgot to finish the order before you sent your order in. Either way, you’ll get a call from customer service that may hold up your order.
• Bound books with less pages than the minimum aren’t aesthetically pleasing. They just look wrong. Instead of building a book you might not be proud to show, we’d rather give you a minimum page number.

Note that if you run out of pages to finish a book, you have three options:

1. Re-design your pages so that you meet both the minimum number and end up with an even number of pages.
2. Submit blank light-colored or white pages at the end of the book. For example, on a student photo book you could put a text node at the top of the final page that said “Memories” or “Autographs”.
3. In your order notes, explain that you know the book is short pages, and tell us to make up to the minimum with blank white sheets. Since we don’t have to print them, we won’t charge you for them.

I just found this cool little camera simulator gadget online, and thought you might like to play with it.

Basically, you set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO with sliders, and it shows you in real-time what the final print would look like.

Interestingly enough, although setting the ISO is a a hold-over from film cameras, it still has an impact on your digital shots. Here’s a pretty good explanation from Wikipedia:

For digital photo cameras, an exposure index (EI) rating—commonly called ISO setting—is specified by the manufacturer such that the sRGB image files produced by the camera will have a lightness similar to what would be obtained with film of the same EI rating at the same exposure. The usual design is that the camera’s parameters for interpreting the sensor data values into sRGB values are fixed, and a number of different EI choices are accommodated by varying the sensor’s signal gain in the analog realm, prior to conversion to digital…this variation allows different tradeoffs between the range of highlights that can be captured and the amount of noise introduced into the shadow areas of the photo.

It’s nice to know that everything you learned shooting film still applies to digital.