Have You Seen Kertesz?

Photographers have long been considered the visionaries of our industry in terms of internet marketing. They were the first ones on the web and the first to see the value in the heavy use of images in marketing to our brides. The place where so many of them have dropped the ball is in the area of search. They know they need a visually beautiful site to show off their artistry but they often haven’t included the tools for brides to find them.

In the old days (OK, maybe a year ago) the way to go was to drive traffic to your site with magazine and bridal show marketing. It worked for a time. The problem today is that brides are bypassing magazines and heading straight to the internet. Bridal shows still provide that interactive component you need but there are so many now that you never know which one to invest in.

Here is what it boils down to: what photographers want verse what they need.

Photographers want a beautiful site that flows and creates an “experience” for the visitors. They want tons of large sharp images on a clean background. They want limitless portfolio capabilities and they want it all to come up on the first page of Google.

Nice goals. Here’s the problem. The search engines read words, not images; and they don’t read most Flash AT ALL. Until now the only way to get the site you wanted visually and the site you need for search was to build two complete sites, one Flash and one HTML. That gets expensive.

Not anymore. How about the best of both worlds? Take a bit of Flash, massive images, blog capabilities, nearly limitless galleries and wrap it all up in one sweet little package that is entirely fed to the search engines with every post through the magic of RSS. Now, set it up so you completely manage and update it yourself about as easily as you send email. (Yes, even the Flash component) That my friend is Kertesz!

Kertesz is the newest product to come out of the creative minds of The Agency @ Think. We have built a Website and blog package specifically to meet the unique need of the photographic community. You want large beautiful images? How does up to 900 pixels wide sound? You want interactivity? Your blog is a part of the site along with inline comments. You want a bit of Flash? Check out the header on this baby. You want the search engines to find you? The entire site is RSS feed. You want to tell your web designer to kiss off and do all your updates yourself? The sites are built on a WordPress platform; one of the easiest content management systems out there.

What more do you want to know? Oh, where can you find this marvel of modern marketing? Right here at The Agency of course.

Kertesz is up in beta for you to look at and play with to your hearts content. We have picked 4 photographers from around North America to be our initial testers. I will keep you posted on their experience with Kertesz.

We will be offering Kertesz in two forms. You can either purchase what we are calling the “White Site” version (virtually the same as out demo site) where we install the basic site on your server and you decorate and add you content (with our support) to your hearts delight. Or the “Couture Site” where we will do the custom decorationfor you and then teach you how to use it. Either way it’s an amazing website at an insanely affordable price.

Check it out and keep following the Agency blog for updates.

Kertesz - The Premium WordPress Website and Blog for Professional Photographers

I don’t know the last time I was this excited about a new product,

Christine

Where Do You Want to Be?

I ran across a great post on Copywriter’s Underground that I have to share; Learn the Success Secret of the World’s Greatest Chessplayer: Making Fantasy Pay

This one sentence gives you a glimpse at why you should read it.

Who do you want to work for? What kind of work situation would you like?
Construct that situation in your head. And then figure out what it takes to make it happen.

When a client comes to me one of the first things I ask them is where do they want to be. Most have only a vague idea or really no idea at all. That makes them very hard to help. There is an interesting little exercise in Tom Chandler’s post that shows you why you need to know the answer to that question. In essence, once you have the answer to “Where do you want to be,” all the other answers you need fall right into place.

I can build you a stellar website, set up your blog and teach you how to write it. I can put together your email marketing and teach you how to use social networks; but if you don’t know where you want to be I guarantee you will never get there.

If you want your business to be successful you have to have a map. Without it, the best marketing in the world only has the effect of a putting a kick ass engine on a boat but forgetting to put a rudder on it.

Take the time to do Tom’s exercise. That is the single best piece of advice you will ever get.

Oh, just for the record, I did an exercise just like that about 5 years ago. It took me almost a year to really lay it out. I can’t begin to tell you the difference it makes when all your focus switches to where you want to be!

Personal Coaching

I have to tell you about one of my coaching clients.

I got a call from a very talented graphics designer in Canada asking for help back in May. Holly was doing what she could as far as social media was concerned but it wasn’t doing anything to grow her business. She was spending more than she wanted on advertising but it seemed to be missing the mark; those were wasted dollars. All she needed was a little guidance.

I looked over her current marketing strategy and started having one hour weekly coaching calls at the end of May. You might say I became her cheerleader and kick in the pants.

That was then. Since she started with me she has been contacted by planners as far away as Hawaii. She has been contacted and built relationships with Get Married, Alexis at Martha Stewart, Ritzy Bee, Southern Weddings Magazine, Brides Café, BFF Bridal and Grace Ormond Wedding Style. They all want samples of her work and remember, they contacted her because she learned how to build her network and get noticed. To top it all off, she has now become a featured expert on Wedding Planning Audiocast.

It all boils down to positive networking. Either you know how to do it or you don’t. If you don’t, let me help you.

Personal Engagement Marketing

When I first started in this business the single best way to market yourself was through personal engagement with your customers. That meant one thing: Bridal Shows.

Websites barely existed and at best they were an after thought. The more things change, the more some things stay the same.

The single best way is once again through personal engagement, the difference is that now it is ALL about the internet.

You get that you have to be out on the internet, right? Now think about it, your brides are engaging online with people all over the world, all the time; at work, at home, on their iPhone on their commute. Shouldn’t you be one of the people they are engaging with? “Now just how do you expect me to do that Christine?”

First off, your website needs to be interactive and change frequently. By Frequently I mean at least every third day. The best way to do that is to have a blog based website. One that can be syndicated for feed readers and that you can update yourself easily. The more often you post the more often the search engines take notice of you. Every picture you add and every word you type sends them a signal that you are alive. As you build a following of brides it also sends them a signal that you have something new to add to the conversation. That keeps you in the front of their mind. It gives you an opportunity to engage and connect with them. Just like at the bridal shows; except that instead of talking to one bride at a time you are speaking to many at once. What’s more, your words hang there in cyberspace until she is ready to hear them.

Once again, it is about personal engagement. Isn’t that where we started?

This as an excerpt from this month’s Marketing column on Think Like A Bride. You have to be a subscriber to read the full article; but if you aren’t already a subscriber let me give you a free month. This article really is that important. All you have to do is register.

Does Your Agency Understand You?

One of the first encounters I have with a new client is to review their current marketing strategy and tools; like their website. I am simply appalled buy some of what I am seeing. Do the people that created these have any clue as to what we do in this industry? More importantly do they have any idea who your target market is?

I have seen the most convoluted attempts at marketing bridal. Bridal is a unique industry. You can’t hit it like you would a lawyer or accountant. It is not a segment that wants mass amounts of text and research.

Our market wants images and ideas, they want to feel your personality. They don’t want you to tell them you are nice and will make their day perfect. Blech! They don’t want a painfully complete listing of every single rental item you have; well, unless you are a rental firm. They want to see your style. They want to feel that they can trust you. They don’t want to know that you are a retired school teacher!!! They want to know that you are the hippest florist in town.

Why don’t these marketing teams get it. Is it possibly that they are forcing their own agenda? Or is it the they do things one way and they just reshape it to fit all their clients. You know what I am talking about…wherever you are there is that one vendor that every wedding looks alike. Sure, sure the colors may change but there is always a lounge with monogrammed silk pillows. The joke being, “Oh what color are the pillows this week?” You wouldn’t hire them to do your event, why do the same thing with your marketing?

Truth in Ad Sales is brilliantly funny and spot on. It was created by John Dodds and originally showcased by my hero Seth Godin. Watch it if you want a laugh and think British humor is funny. (h/t B. L. Ochman)

I Love These New Sites

Yesterday I sat down to hand off a new site to the client. WOW! In less than 20 minutes she had it down.

The girl was posting and populating her galleries like a pro. Now before you think that was a result of my having a very tech savvy client think again. Like so many of us in the wedding industry she is a master at her craft but not necessarily at computers. To give you an example I had to set up her new email addresses in Outlook for her.

Take a look and let me know what you think. You can leave a comment on here or on her site.

Oh, one more thing. With in 72 hours of putting the bare bones of the site up before we had added one image or word of copy, Google had already indexed the site. How cool is that!

The Value of Blogging and Organic Search

I hear it all the time, “I don’t have time to write a blog. Is it really that important?”

It is only that important if you want brides to find you in today’s world of social media interaction.

“According to Chris Baggott Co-founder and CEO, Compendium Blogware, 44% off all web visits begin with a search as opposed to a specific URL or destination. And search will continue to grow as the most significant channel in new customer awareness and acquisition.

According to the Marketing Sherpa Search Benchmark Study for 2008 almost all of that comes from the organic results not the pay-per-click.

“To say that 99 people out of 100 click on the natural search results is probably and understatement”

What does that mean to the wedding professional? Two things, pay per click is not the Holy Grail you were told it is and you had better figure out a way to get your ranking up in the organic search.

That is where blogging comes in.

Search engines look for words, not just keywords but the context and relevance of those words. Search also looks very closely at your page titles. On a standard static website you have a limited number of pages and a limited amount of copy. That is as it should be; your target market isn’t looking for a book. They don’t want to have to read through page after page to get the information they need. But your potential client and the search engines are two very different animals. To get your clients to your site they have to be able to find you in search first. Please reread that last sentence.

Here is what a blog does differently. A well maintained blog posts at least three times a week, each time you post you add new copy (think keywords) and a new page title. This is making the search engines happy. Now, if your content is interesting and valuable to your potential clients that makes them happy.

Everytime you post to your blog, it stays there in your archives. Over time this builds up a tremendous amount of words, and because each post has its own title, it builds up a long list of these too. Take the Wedding Dish for example, I haven’t counted but some down and dirty math tells me that there are roughly 70,000 words and over 200 titles there. (231 posts at an average of 300 words=69,300 words.) That is a heck of a lot more chances for the search engines to find a word or phrase that corresponds to a term that a bride has typed in.

Bottom line: Brides find you through your website, they find that through search. Blogs are the single best way to raise your search ranking today. Now tomorrow might be different, but one thing I can guarantee you is that the team at Think and the Agency will be tracking it to keep you in the know.

How Is Your Website Traffic?

I hear many different thoughts on increasing your websites traffic. I hear everything from keywords, to Pay-per-click to print marketing to get your site noticed. You name any hoop there is and you can find someone out there that is going to tell you it is the holy grail to increase traffic and they can help you jump through it.

I say bah! Let me tell you about two of my sites. The first one, Wedding Dish, has gone from 500 visitors a month last year to over 5000 a month now. That big of an increase in just one short year and I haven’t even looked at a hoop, let alone jumped through one. I have not spent one thin dime on marketing and I really haven’t paid all the much attention to keywords.

All I have done is been consistent and relevant. I made sure that the right tools were in place so the search engines could find me and my feed and then I just started adding content, bit by bit. I devote about an hour three times a week to the Dish and already it has gotten me speaking engagements, copywriting work, web design work and an invitation to lunch at Conde Nast. What’s more, I can help you do the same thing. That, my friend, is what we are here for.

The second example is the Agency’s site. Yep, the one you are on right now. From the time this bad boy launched it only took 72 hours to be indexed by Google, and the traffic keeps growing every day. In less that a week it had been picked up by Stumble Upon.and already it is being talked about on Facebook and Twitter. People, this site only launched a month ago, back in the first week of June, 2008! Isn’t that the way you want your site to start off?

If you have to market your website instead of it marketing you; you need to rethink your site. Just because it’s pretty and your Aunt Susie likes it doesn’t mean it is an effective marketing tool.

The stats above are for the Wedding Dish

Flash Sites vs HTML Sites

The deeper I get into helping clients update their website the more often this question comes up: Flash or HTML.The answer lies in how you respond to this one simple question: Is your website your marketing or are you going to have to market your website?

What? You read it right. I thought we had gotten past the time when people were fascinated with the cool factor of having a Flash Site and had woken up to the reality of it all. Flash is pretty but if you want to get traffic you are going to have to advertise your site instead of your site advertising you.

This quote from SEO evangelist Tim Nash’s blog sums it up pretty clearly,

“Adobe Flash (formally Macromedia) is a great tool for developing highly artistic multimedia applications; it has the accessibility and searchability of a brick. If you are serious about getting organic rankings the only advice is stay away from Flash, I mean it stop reading this post it will not help!”

It all boils down to search and accessibility. Let’s look at search first. Even though the large search engines like Google have some Flash indexing capabilities these are still very limited. The internet is and always has been a text based environment. That is just how search works and html still does it best. When the spiders crawl your site they are looking for words and relevant content; to do that they have to be able to read the words. The text on a Flash based site is read as an image, not readable words. Since the spider doesn’t see any relevant content it just crawls off to another site and doesn’t bother to index your cool pretty Flash site. No indexing, no ranking in the search engines. What more, is they often see your entire site as a single image. That means that even if you have 1000 images in your gallery of the coolest cakes ever the search engines still see it as a single image. Not good.

I don’t care how cool your site looks, if no one finds it what are you getting for your marketing dollars? So the question remains do you want to spend your marketing dollars getting clients to you business or to your site? Traffic to your site shows off your work and your business and prompts clients to contact and hopefully hire you. The more good traffic you have the better chance you have of selling more clients. If your site, cool though it may be, doesn’t show up high in the rankings of the major search engine you are going to have to drive people to your site through other marketing channels. That means increased print media buys and increased exposure at bridal shows to advertise your website just to get people to find it. Bummer. So here you have spent all this money on what your designer told you was a pretty cool website and you are off having to spend buck just to get people to view it. You may even sink so far as to use Adwords to get visitors. That doesn’t sound like a plan to me.

Accessibility is another factor to consider. I know, most everyone has a Flash player plug in, if they don’t your front page can include one. I know too that everyday more people have high speed broadband connections but there are still people or situations that use dial up. On anything less than broadband the load time for Flash is somewhere between molasses in February and a geriatric snail. You have between 10 and 30 seconds to capture your audience; they aren’t going to stick around to wait for the load bar to finish. Heck I get frustrated waiting and I have broadband.

Navigation is another failing of a lot of Flash sites. Most have their own unique navigation conventions which force your visitors to spend time figuring out how to navigate your site. On sites designed with an older version of Flash hitting the back button takes you out of the site completely.

The third and I think most potentially deadly access issue with a pure Flash site is when it comes to phone based browsers. Look around at your target market, they all have phones with web browsers and they use them. Guess what, mobile browsers won’t load Flash. Not do it badly, won’t do it at all. Browsing the internet on your mobile is the tsunami of the future. Now explain to me why you would shell out your hard earned dollars for a site that can’t be seen AT ALL by a great big chunk of people looking for you?

“But Christine, I don’t want an ugly site.” Oh for crying out loud, who said that if you pass up Flash you have to have an ugly site that just lies there like a dead fish. Most likely some web designer that does mostly Flash. It’s not true, you can still have a beautiful, visually engaging site without having a pure Flash site. You can still have beautiful, huge galleries and slideshows with full audio. Heck there is nothing wrong with even throwing in a few Flash elements, search won’t read them, but it will read the rest of your site.

Before you buy or build a new website ask yourself the simple question. Is your website your marketing or do you want to market your website. Sometimes, simpler is better, but it all depends on your answer.

You can read more here and here, or just Google Flash vs HTML.

Branding your bridal or wedding business

One of the fundamental steps towards marketing success is clearly branding your business for your target market. Sounds simple, but it is often a step that takes some time and thought. To help understand what is meant and involved in branding I wrote a short 1 page summary for my bridal and wedding clients titled “Who Are You” as a point of beginning.

Next Page »

• Recent Posts

  • Have You Seen Kertesz?
  • Where Do You Want to Be?
  • Personal Coaching
  • Personal Engagement Marketing
  • Does Your Agency Understand You?

• Categories

  • Announcement
  • Branding
  • marketing
  • personal coaching
  • Website marketing

• Archives

  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008

• Links

  • Bluehost Webhosting - Webhosting & Domain affiliate
  • The best shopping cart system. Affordable, powerful, managable. 1Shoppingcart.
  • The Smart Planner™
  • Think Like A Bride
  • WEDDEX
  • Wedding Dish by Christine Boulton
  • Wedding Professional Success!

• Meta

  • Register
  • Log in