Upgrade Your Flash Site to a Blogsite and Save $99

We got in a conversation here at the Agency as a result of a comment on Marc’s blog about the power of the WordPress platform for business. A photographer had commented that he was thinking of switching his site to a hybrid blogsite like Kertesz so of course we went to look at his current site. It was beautiful but it was so tightly locked down by virtue of it being a pure Flash site that there was no hope for good search engine results. What’s more, it was completely locked out by any mobile browser.

You know, two years ago these pure flash sites were all the rage, but the times have changed. Don’t get me wrong, flash still makes the prettiest galleries by far, but galleries are only one piece of your website puzzle. You need search, you need a blog for customer engagement, you need content that the search engines can read and you need a site that you can manage yourself with ease and simplicity.

Well, we want to help.

So we have an early Thanksgiving present for all you fine folks in the land of pure flash and separate blogs: how about a $99 discount for anyone wanting to upgrade to the Hybrid world with Kertesz? Now you can upgrade to a complete installed Kertesz Blogsite from ANY paid Flash or Blog template. Save $99 off the Kertesz Basic White BlogSite regular price of $297.For just $198 we provide you a complete fully installed and configured blogsite designed for wedding professionals; with full support and tutorials.  Just enter the code UPGRADE on checkout

This is for a limited time only. The upgrade offer ends at midnight on Sunday 11/23/08. If you have been thinking about upgrading your site, now is the time to join the family. remember Just use the coupon code UPGRADE when you buy your Kertesz White Site.

If you order now you we will have your new site installed and ready for you to start tweaking over the down time at Thanksgiving. Then you can join the family as they build out their sites and send us comments like this one from Jen of She Takes the Cake

“Chris this is fun! Didn’t think I’d say that!!!”

You can view her work in progress here.

Here is what another new member, Peter Quinn, has done on his site.

Take a Look At What People Have Designed with Kertèsz

I have been telling you from the start that Kertèsz, The Premium Website and Blog for WordPress is all about how easy it is to customize. Well now it is time to show you. Three of our little progeny have gone live recently and I want to let you see what people have been doing with this new format.

I just love showing off what people have done with our baby to make it their own.

First up, My Wedding Film. Elizabeth Darby decided to forgo the front page for a full on blog look. She enlarged the header and kept the flash banner active which makes it still look like a home page. Of course all the back pages are still there and show up nicely on the navigation bar. Way to go Elizabeth, I love it.

Next is M. Couturier, Photographer. Mark chose a Custom Couture site and we did the graphics and the installations. On this site we reduced the size of the header and enlarged the Flash banner so is matched the natural ratio of his images. Mark’s site just went live today and he still has a lot of work to do getting his galleries labeled and his blog populated. Check back next week to see how it has grown.

Just as a frame of reference, here is M. Couturier’s old site.

Here is another one in progress for you to watch. Sorenson Studios. Lisa Sorenson purchased a white site and is treating it as a project. She tells us that each week she takes on another piece of the site and is having a blast making it hers.

Are You Going After The Wrong Market?

Last month on Think in the Facts & Stats column I dove into some of the numbers on The Wedding Report. Well I’m at it again.

I was looking at the numbers on distribution by total wedding budget. Here is an interesting fact: 82% of the weddings in the United States are under the national average of $28,704. Said another way, there are 1,434,962 more weddings with a budget at or below $28,704 than there are at the higher end of the spectrum. Even more telling is the top category. Wedding with budgets of $57,408 account for only 3.5% of the total estimated weddings in America in 2008.

Yet I find more and more that wedding vendors want to turn their nose up at this massive target. Nearly ever wedding professonal that I talk to asks the same question: How to I get the quarter of a million dollar weddings? My question to you is how hard do you want to fight to get a slice of 3.5% of the market?

My next question is, with the current economic news what do you think those numbers will look like for 2009? I don’t see a very pretty picture. Yes, weddings will always happen and in that sense they are recession proof. What isn’t guaranteed is the level at which they will be funded. Much as we are witnessing some serious corrections in the housing market and other parts of the economy, I think that the same type of correction is coming to our industry.

So, back to the question in the title; are you targeting the wrong market? As you work to find ways to ride out the current storm, you may consider trimming your sails and heading toward that very rich market south of the average. Weddings for the masses; or to steal a word from the Germans, VolksWeddings.

PS. If you aren’t already a subscriber to Think Like A Bride, use this link for a month’s guest subscription so you can see what all the buzz is about …and read the article I talked about above.

Christine

The Great Sticky Note Experiment

How about something just a little fun for the weekend.

Does Your Website Defeat Its Purpose?

Today’s brides come from a very different mindset than those of even a few years ago. If you look through their posts on various forums you will see just how comfortable they are buying online. They do it everyday in their regular life and they expect to be able to do it in their wedding planning. Very few wedding professionals give them that opportunity.

In almost every specific situation I find that the problem is very basic. Their website presents their business, but never “asks for the order”. If you have ever been in sales, you have heard your sales manager to remind you to “ask for the order”. Yet very few of our websites actually do just that. As wedding professionals we create service packages and describe them very well. Offer compelling pricing. Sometimes we even have interactive functions where a site visitor can see if a particular date is available or add options and tally a new price, but we are missing the most important function. The function that actually allows them to BUY. When we get close to that part … we tell them to call us or send an email. You are building your entire online marketing to convince people to buy from you then NOT giving them a way to do it. Can you imagine Amazon’s sales if after you found the book you wanted at the price you wanted, and that it was in-stock, they told you to call them to order the book? In that situation Amazon’s sales rate would probably be about the same as most wedding professionals.

As Amazon and every other successful internet marketer knows, your website can do something very special … it can ask for the order and make a sale. Which is something that brochures, business cards, bridal guide ads, even your Goggle Adwords can’t do.

Fortunately, the cure is very simple. Just add a “shopping cart”! These services are available from third-party websites and are as easy as listing your product/service in a form on their website, adding your PayPal and then just placing a snippet of code to your webpage. My favorite shopping cart service, and the one I use, is 1ShoppingCart.com. Not only is 1ShoppingCart extremely simple they also have great sales support tools such as auto-responders, coupon and discount options and reports.

I was unconvinced of the value of a shopping cart, until Marc Fuller pointed out the incongruity of putting forth effort in internet marketing and not being able to actually being able to make an internet based sale. Now I would not want a marketing website without it having the ability to take an order. Even if the order was just for a free 20 minute initial consultation. Get the order! Make it simple and direct for today’s bride to engage your services.

Today’s bride views the internet as a natural market place, don’t try to change her … let her have it her way. And profit!

reprinted from Think Like A Bride, September 2008

What do Martha Stewart, the NFL and a Coyote in Wyoming All Have in Common?

What an odd question. The truth is that they have something important in common, something you that you also need: a great, functional website with a killer Content Management System. As different as they are, all three entities have sites built on the same platform we use to build our client’s sites. WordPress

In fact, this is a WordPress site and so is Wedding Dish.

I have been talking about the need for wedding professionals to have an easily updateable site that they can manage themselves for quite a while. This is from last December’s Think Like A Bride

If you can’t update the pictures and text on your site by yourself at the click of a button your site is out of date. If you hire a designer to do it for you stress first and foremost functionality. Demand it have a Content Management System (CMS) and that you are fully trained on how to use it. The biggest pet peeve I have with clients is when I tell them to update the photo/copy on their website and they say that their web guy has to do it and he charges $$$ to do it. Fire his rear and get a new site.

Giving wedding professionals the tools they needed was one of the major factors in launching the Agency @ Think in the first place. As we brainstormed and researched the best ways to do that, we too settled on WordPress.

With Stewart, the reasons behind her choice were having a blog with more programming options. For the NFL, they needed something that could handle their traffic, was adaptable to their current branding and would run the cutting art video that they needed. For our friend in Wyoming, Charlie the coyote, Shreve Stockton needed something that was easy for her to handle.They all found the same option we did to be a perfect fit.

If you are starting to get the picture that a WordPress site may be the way to go, let us help. There are so many options that we can build for you that no two will ever look any more alike than the 3 above do. The one thing that will be identical will be how insanely easy it will be for you to finally manage your own website. Isn’t it time you took control of your most valuable marketing tool?

PS. If you aren’t already a subscriber to Think Like A Bride, use this link for a month’s guest subscription so you can see what all the buzz is about …and read the article I quoted above.

The Truth About Lead Lists

Each bridal show you do or magazine or website you advertise on uses a lead list as the carrot to get you to book. Well let me tell you, that carrot gets more shriveled and pale everyday.

What! you say? There is a plump juicy list of several hundred brides that need your services just waiting to be yours. Well the truth is that there are very few places you can even use those leads. In the last two days I have spoken to all of the major bulk email providers trying to negotiate a way to do it with the Can Spam Laws. There are a few rather ineffective work arounds but even those are frowned on. Nothing will stop you dead in the water faster than having the major ISP’s block your email because you have been labeled a spammer. Trust me, just because you aren’t selling body part enlargement or cheap mortgages you can still run afoul of these laws.

So what is the answer? For one forget the value in those lists as far as an email campaign goes and build your own. Second, if you simple must use those lists, start off with a good old fashioned direct mail postcard inviting them to your website. Then make sure you have a lead generator of your own to harvest legitimate addresses.

I’m going to go into this more indepth in the September issue of Think Like A Bride and you don’t want to miss it.. The smart thing to do is hop over there right now and sign up for my email updates.

Christine

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;