We occasionally see images coming off the digital printing presses with cropping problems. If you grew up using film, you remember that everything was printed out to the edge.

However, images printed on digital presses (photo books, holiday cards, etc) are different. Friction rollers have to grab a bit of the edge of each piece of paper to pull it through the machine. To keep the rollers from gumming up, the edges don’t get printed. This means that every piece of paper that goes through the printer has a bit of white border on all four edges. To create a full-bleed print, we trim off these edges.

To account for trimming, here are three tips you should know:

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You’ve just created a great marketing email newsletter (or postcard), and you want to drive clients to your website to see more examples of your work. It makes sense: your website is your 24/7 salesman, showing off your studio’s products and services in the best possible light.

So at the bottom of the email newsletter, you write something like “See samples at myphotostudio.com” Not bad, but there is a better solution.

Ask any website marketing expert and they will tell you: When it comes to converting readers into paying customers with email marketing, it isn’t the subject line, the photographs, the graphics or the “from” address that has the biggest impact on converting views into sales.

The secret to email conversions is to send customers to a focused landing page.

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If you don’t take credit cards, or if you’d like to take credit cards at an event, you should check out a new service called Squareup.

Squareup is an application that runs on any iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android phone that is connected to the internet. It lets you scan a credit card with the free Squareup credit card reader, then submit the payment online. You get a response if the credit card was accepted, the customer will get a receipt via email, and in a few days, the payment will be deposited into your bank account.

I can think of a dozen ways you could use Squareup. For example, you could take print orders from guests during a wedding reception, an event, or while shooting families in the church for portrait directories.

Here’s what you need to get started:

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If you’re an ImageQuix user, watch your email. ImageQuix will reactivate your old events online for the remainder of the year and send an email to participants inviting them to revisit their images.

This would be the perfect opportunity to offer orders for holiday folded greeting cards. You can contact your customers via phone, send them to this page, let them select a card style, then take their order over the phone.

In addition, professional photography makes a great Christmas gift.

A couple of times a year a customer will call and say “my computer died. I installed ROES/LabPrints on my new PC, but how do I get my work back?”

There are actually three answers to this question: how to backup ROES, how to backup LabPrints, and how to backup your images.

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One of the stories I’ve been following lately is professional photographers who sell portrait sessions via online coupon sites like Groupon. While this service could be a great opportunity if designed and marketed correctly, it could also hurt your business.

If you are not familiar with online coupon sites, they way they work is this:

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If you’re using Facebook, you’ve seen the “Like” button with the thumb-up icon on the right side of your pages. While the “like” feature used to be for wall comments only, it has become the hottest new marketing trend of the summer.

Facebook can now show your business ads to users who are both in your target market AND are already friends of your business. Or, you can put the FB “Like” icon right on your studio website. When someone clicks it, a new comment appears on their News Feed with a link back to your website or FB page.

Think of it as word-of-mouth combined with social networking. Given the size and growth of Facebook, this one new feature alone could boost your entire marketing effort.

Learn how to implement the “like” button for Facebook. If you’re not using Facebook, this may be a good reason to get started.

Facebook lets you buy ads that show on the right side of a user’s main page in Facebook. They don’t cost much, and are easy to target to specific audiences. For example, you could create an ad that targets only 20-30 year old women in your zip code.

If you’ve considering buying ads on Facebook, you may be interested in a recent study by the Nielsen Group. They looked at ads by 70 different companies and discovered that ads that include social advocacy are 2-4 times more likely to be clicked on, recalled or to lead toward a purchase.

What does this mean to you?

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If you use LabPrints Album Builder, you can now select JD Photo as the album manufacturer, then select either a Diamond, Romanco or Timeless album when creating a new album order. This lets you:

• Select from a list of album sizes JD stocks / prints (saves mistakes).
• Makes your pano page layouts truly WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) and puts them in proper page order
• Makes it easier to use the album builder and slide show as part of an in-studio sales presentation

To use this new feature, follow these simple steps:

1. Create your new album in LabPrints
2. Select JD Photo as album company and your favorite album design and size.
3. Complete your album order and send it to JD.

Diamond Album users – Instead of writing down your album details in the notes field, after you receive your order confirmation email from the lab, go to our new online album details page at http://www.jdlab.com/albums/ . Here, you can quickly check a few boxes to send us your album details like cover design, gilding, etc. (not only is this faster, but you won’t miss any of the available album cover options).

Romanco / Timeless Album users – For now, continue to add any extra album details in the notes field.

The challenge of social media (blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc.) is that at first glance it seems like a free and relatively easy way to connect to potential customers, but as Jim Smith at yChange.com explains:

If as a small business you are trying to use social media to get the word out to your customers and prospects about how great your product/service is then you are frankly wasting your time walking down a blind alley. If however, you are using social media to listen to your customer and learn what his/her problem or pain is and what value your business can bring to the table then you are on the right path.

Social media today is for listening. It is not a mike or a megaphone to be used to drown the customer out.

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