Guardian Life insurance recently produced a report on small businesses (2-99 employees) and their results showed that the most important personal trait of a successful small business owner was the ability to collaborate.

Business owners who build strong relationships with their employees, vendors and others are more likely to click with customers.

If you think about it, this makes sense. From the moment you sold your first photograph, you discovered that the relationship between you and the customer - and your lab - was as important as the image itself.

As I read this report I realized something else: this is true for both your business and ours.

That’s why at JD we are proud of our customer service department. Heidi, Dana and Julie have a combined total of decades of experience working with professional photographers. We know many of you by first name. We’ve talked on the phone (no robots answer our phones), been to your studios, met you over the counter, in training classes and at trade shows. Building relationships with you and other professional photographers has been just as important as providing high-quality products in the growth of our lab.

When you talk, we listen. Float wraps, accordion mini books, and high-end trader cards are just a few of the many new products we constantly introduce because you told us you wanted them.

Bottom line: if you ever need anything from JD, give us a call at 888-858-8084. Our success depends on yours.

I read an interesting article on thinkvitamin.com where a business was able to double their online customer response rate by changing the words in their website’s call to action.

You have a call to action on your website today, even though you may not realize it. It probably says something like “call now for your free consultation” or “call us today”. It is the thing you want your visitor to do after reading about your studio.

The problem with a phone number call to action is that it is really a ploy to get a potential client in the studio and sell them a package before they know what the price will be. Folks who shop online are smart enough to know this. They don’t want a high pressure sales pitch (remember free vacations in Florida if you watch a condo presentation?), so they go to the next website.

So instead of their original call to action Free Trial they tried See plans and pricing. Their response rate doubled.

If you wanted to duplicate this test, put the words “See plans and pricing” on every page on your website with a link to a new page or a one-page downloadable PDF file with your package prices. Then put your phone number on that page. If you have a second line, use that number to keep track of calls, or you can name your packages something special like prix réduit, service complet, and extraordinaire (budget, full-service, and deluxe in French). Always offer 3, most folks choose the middle one.

Try it for a month, and see if putting your prices online generates more calls.

I honestly cannot remember how I got along before Google. Back in the day a phone book, a telephone and a map were all the tools I needed to make a purchase or find an address. Now that I have Google, I can’t imagine going back to the old way of doing business.

The problem with Google is that it has too much information. Type “photographer” in Google and you’ll see everything from Ansel Adams to Zoom Lenses. Not very helpful if your customer is looking for your studio online.

Here are the steps I use when I’m selecting keywords to help visitors find my website.

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Kirk Russell, 3Lenses.com

The photographic industry is in the midst of a serious growth crisis. Even before the housing crisis, recession, and market crash, studios were booking fewer appointments, and clients seemed to be more price-sensitive.

Old-school solutions such as advertising more promotions or new flavor-of-the-month fads such as displaying images on boutique, graphic-enhanced web site and brochures, or using pretty delivery boxes won’t attract people who find most of today’s portrait studios outdated, unresponsive, and over-priced.

There is a parallel between today’s photo industry and the current housing market and auto industry. Luckily, we can learn from them and consequently avoid a similar fate.

Here’s the comparisons:

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A decade ago, getting your name and phone number in front of customers was simple. You put one ad in the yellow pages and one in the local newspaper.

Those days are over.

Today, over 80% of your customers will look for you online before they call. In order to make sure they can find you, below is a checklist of places your business needs to be registered so customers can find you online.

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Chase Jarvis is a professional photographer focusing on commercial print and video assignments. Recently, he took the time to create a video that describes step-by-step his process for storing and archiving images. It’s worth the 10 minutes to watch.

Three important points Chase makes are:

• Keep a clean copy of your original images. The moment you’re finished shooting, create a backup. These are your original RAW or JPG images. Never change them.

• Make redundant backups. The time to make your first backup is while you’re copying images off the cards. Depending on a single hard drive at any point in your workflow is a recipe for disaster. Hard drives will fail (trust me, it eventually happens to everyone).

• Keep your backups separate. A backup drive next to a PC is only slightly better than no backup at all. You should have 2 duplicate backup drives, with one stored away from your studio.

While most of us cannot afford to duplicate Chase’s collection of top-of-the-line servers and hard drives, any backup and storage solution should cover all the major points he makes. A quick glance over at Amazon shows top-rated 2 terabyte external drives going for $129, so you cannot afford NOT to make backups.

Update

Here’s a collection of videos from several world-famous photographers showing their workflows.

Recently I read two articles about companies and their brands. One is building their brand, while the other seems to be throwing a great brand away.

Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) workers are using Dawn brand dish soap to clean oil off animals on the gulf coast. Dawn responded by creating a huge branding tie-in that resulted in increased sales as well as cash donations of over $400,000 to the cleanup effort.

The National Pork Producers have announced plans to drop the universally known tag-line “the other white meat” that has become synonymous with pork over the last twenty-three years. The VP of marketing was quoted as saying it was great at first, but now “it doesn’t help sales.”

Both these examples made me think of the importance of our brand to our customers. While an “offer” or an advertisement can create sales, a good brand can build your business.

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With business picking up again (albeit slowly), you may be thinking about hiring a new employee. Having hired many folks over the years, I’ve learned that some skills cannot be taught. I’m not the only one who thinks this way:

• An article in the papers recently stated that Walmart was actively seeking out military officers returning from Iraq to join their management training program. Their logic was simple - if someone has already proven themselves to be a leader, WallMart can teach them retail.
• I have a friend who is a florist, and she carries business cards with her all the time. Whenever she gets exceptional service - for example, a waitress in a restaurant - she gives them a card and offers them a job. Her logic is also simple - you can teach retail, but you cannot teach customer service.

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I was walking through the lab this morning and something caught my eye: a 16×20″ metal print of a high-contrast senior portrait. Tom Kaza from Hicks Studio in Flint created the image, and the finished print was awesome. Which made me think of two things:

1. Until this is in ROES (working on it right now) no one is going to know we offer it.
2. Even after it is in ROES, most folks still won’t know we offer it.

I’m just like you - and your customers. I can look at an advertisement for a product a dozen times, but it won’t catch my attention until I’m ready to order. Every day, someone calls the lab and says, “I didn’t know JD made that.”

So here’s my challenge to you.

The next time you’re sitting in the studio thinking,

• “I wonder if JD can make a…”
• “This image would look great as a…”
• “I wonder if there is software to make a…”

give us a call. 888-858-8084. I don’t care how wild it is. At JD, we love a challenge.

Robbin Stieff at LunaMetrics wrote an interesting article that lists the 8 Worst SEO Mistakes companies make when they redesign their website.

For photographers and studios, “The Flash Problem” is the worst. Here’s why:

1. Photographers are visually stimulated, so it makes sense they would be drawn to great looking websites based on photography. People who design websites for photographers know this, so they frequently replace keyword-rich sites that Google likes with gorgeous flash-based sites that Google will ignore.
2. Google depends on plain vanilla text inside your website to tell it what your website is about. A Flash website has almost no text on the homepage - it is designed to load and play the Flash “movie”. Learn why adding a description tag or some keywords doesn’t solve the problem.
3. Some flash-based sites only have a single URL — the homepage. When you click on a different page on the site, you are taken to a different part of the Flash movie. These pages are hidden from search engines, users can’t bookmark them, link to them, or share them on Facebook.

How to solve the problem

Create a text-based website, then include a window with Flash inside. This gives you the stunning photography you need, but still allows text on the homepage. That’s what we did on the JDPI homepage.