Google owns a monopoly on the search market and I personally think that monopolies suck.  Since 80% of all search traffic travels through Google, it is somewhat like them controlling toll plazas on all of the major highways.  Imagine driving down I-95 and having to pay tolls every three miles.  Don’t forget that Google is not a search engine as much as they are a money-making corporation.  They want money first and foremost.  They may try to present themselves as being fair and impartial, but that is simply public relations and propaganda.

To bring down a giant monopoly corporation like Google takes another giant; one that could create a better search experience.

What is search?

Imagine search as the biggest referral network on the planet.  Before the Internet, when you wanted something you accessed Yellow Pages or you asked friends and family who they used.  That was the precursor to the search engine.  Yellow Pages had a bunch of ads, paid for by businesses, and they collected them and provided them for “free” to people by handing out their books.  The end user didn’t have to pay for the information, but the advertisers did.

Your other choice back then was to ask friends or family for referrals.  Who shot your wedding?  Who remodeled your bathroom?  Where did you eat that was so amazing?  These questions would open up the opportunity for them to give you advice on where to get the products and services you wanted.

Google came along and took that model and tied algorithms to it.  They essentially created a computerized way to aggregate information and present it for free to their end users.  It didn’t take them long to figure out that people wanted to rank well in their search engine and thus AdWords came along and Google can seem to find big enough rakes for all the money that is now coming in to them.

Why Search Sucks

Google searches suck though.  Why?  Because since Google is basically referring searchers to businesses without any sort of vetting or screening, they are referring some pretty terrible businesses and websites to people.  They are answering the questions like “who shot your wedding” with completely terrible, non-professional photographers.  They answer “who was your plumber,” with uninsured, untested companies who are causing thousands of dollars worth of damage to peoples’ homes and businesses.

You see, computer algorithms can NEVER and will never replace human reviews and experience.  No scientist can write a mathematical algorithm that will accurately convey a client’s experience.

Search Doesn’t Have to Suck

Alas, however, I may be wrong about computers not being able to measure, track, review, vet and suggest companies however.  What if a company had information on which companies were good, bad and ugly?  What if a company had a way to measure how often a photographer’s wedding photos were shared and who shared them and where that photographer was located?  Wouldn’t it make for better referrals if results were given based on users experiences, company’s reputations, and social shares, likes and markers?  Dun-dun-dun!!!  Facebook.

Facebook has this information and ability and you know what, they may be building a search engine as I write.  God I hope so.  Facebook is the only company that I know that has the clout and know how

1. Add new content – This is key! If a site is getting a lot of links and no activity is going on with the site, then this is a potential red flag for Google. Keep adding and changing content on your sites.
2. Start mixing up your keywords – You might have sent too many links to the same keyword. We suggest adding more long tail keywords and also swapping out your primaries and secondary’s might be a good idea.  It’s important to mix up your keywords, it is much more  natural.
3. Use our L4L system – Make an attempt to especially get some links from the Keyword Authority area. This is a good way to get some validation from Google for your site.

We know how unnerving this can be for a site owner.  However, it is generally not a good idea to have us pull your links down.  Taking down links often does more harm than good.  As you may recall, for several years Google has performed an SEO linking test that we call the “Crazy Ivan”.  Basically they knock your rankings for a few weeks when you first start a new SEO campaign.  Their logic is that if the linking stops, then the links must not be natural and the webmaster
got scared and stopped their link building.  If the links keep coming, then they are probably natural, and they move the site right back up the rankings.  These new emails seem to be an evolution of that scare tactic.  It’s important to remember that Google can’t penalize your site for inbound links.  If they did, it would open a huge loophole where your competitors could just point bad links at your site to cut you out of the rankings.  It would basically do more harm than good.

Based on what we are seeing on our end from monitoring the health of our network and all of our client sites  — we feel that a “wait and see” approach might be the best strategy for dealing with these emails.  Just make sure you are doing everything in the checklist above.

If you need anything else at all, just let me know by leaving a comment below.

What’s the strategy?

PPC advertising is a way to drive quick sales to your site.  The strategy I would employ with Amazon would be to find products that are like the ones that I currently sell.  Thus, if you sell backpacks, then find the backpacks that are listed on Amazon.  Or simply advertising in the backpack category.  That way, people clicking the ads will only hit your site because they were already looking for backpacks.

So now you will get targeted ads from Amazon, one of the largest websites on the web.  That is cheap, target traffic people!!

Hey, why did my rankings drop?

Often, as we work our way through a ranking campaign, results for a client will drop by several places.  As much as we try to explain that this is normal and expected, often it will worry some clients.  They may have been ranked in the top ten for a certain keyword and then the next week, the report show that they dropped to number fourteen.  Again, this is normal and expected and let me explain why it happens.

Google is Ever-Changing

Google is a computer system, a very large and complex computer system, but simply a computer none the less.  It is programmed to continuously crawl, read, analyze and report data from websites back to central processing computers.  In any given day, Google will process these things:

• Millions of new websites added to the web.
• Billions of lines of code, text and images that are added by websites.  Think of how much new data gets added to the web by a news site like CNN or FoxNews in a single day.  It is staggering.
• Hundreds of thousands of new videos
• Millions of new links from one site to another
• Millions of posts on bookmarking sites like Digg.

You see, it is doing a LOT of work each day.  Each thing that Google does on every day is so that it can make mathematical adjustments to the index.   The all important index.  This is the area where sites are ranked based on formulas that Google has come up with to put sites in an order from best to last.

Formulas Can Change

During the day, Google is applying their algorithms to every piece of data that enters the system.  Certain algorithms aggregate data while others apply rules to data to get an output.  While no one outside of an inner sanctum of scientists actually know the formulas and algorithms at Google, what we do know is what they tell us lay people.  Certain things on a site are important and others are not.

Every once in a while Google makes adjustments to their formulas to attempt to always provide their site visitors with the most relevant possible results.  This is a formula change.  These adjustments will move every site on their index unless the site is solidly ranked.

As recently as April 2011, Google introduced their “Panda” algorithm update which shook up rankings quite a bit.  Working on our client’s rankings, we’ve seen some significant drops in rankings.  We’re currently working to get those sites re-ranked.

Flawed Reporting Systems

Because of Google’s great complexity and system, the reporting systems simply cannot keep up.  Here is how a typical reporting system works:

• Reporting system is located somewhere.  Let’s say Charlotte, NC
• Google’s servers are located all over the world.  Thus, a reporting system in Charlotte, NC will be querying Google’s servers that are closest to Charlotte.  Make sense?
• However, we are sitting here in Denver, CO and we see and interact with Google’s systems here in Colorado, not directly in Charlotte.
• The system searches the Google (Charlotte) servers and reports back to us in Denver.   The report can be completely off from what we are actually seeing on our end here.
• Because there are regional results, the reports can be off my lots of places.  Even hundreds of places in some cases.

Bouncing Eventually Stops

The thing with bouncing is that it eventually stops happening.  As more and more effort is put into ranking a website, the bounce effect will eventually stop happening.  Because that site gets solidly ranked, has sticky content and doesn’t have a high individual “bounce” rate, the site will eventually “stick” to an area of results between 1-3 places apart.

All this to say, “don’t worry” with your rankings.  Normal changes in the algorithm will often cause your site to move back and forth.  It is very common and very expected.

I remember reading “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” by Robert Kiyosaki and going over the part where he does a quick interview with a very talented author in Singapore. During the conversation, he points out that he is not the most talented author, but a Best Selling author. Kiyosaki’s skills in marketing himself are unquestionable. Is he a good author?  Sure. Is is he a great marketer? No question.

My goal in writing this short instructional thingy is to help you market yourself through others. When you finish reading this, you will have a complete overview of our system of getting our photographs onto vendors websites and blogs and on our client’s Facebook profiles, with our logo on them, and thus getting hundreds of other wedding vendors to market our photography services.

Read on, young Jedi….

The Concept

Vendors will market for you: Have you ever been to a wedding where one of the vendors asks, “could you send me some photos so that I can use them for my website?” I am not sure what your response is thus far, but I am going to encourage you that it should be a resounding “ABSOLUTELY” and “thank you.”

For that vendor just asked if they could promote you for free! It is like they asked, “Do you mind if I do some marketing for your photography services on my website for no charge?” Your brides and their friends will market for you: Another FANTASTIC place to market your logo is on Facebook. By sending your brides photos with your logo on it and a short instructional email telling them how to use them, you are potentially reaching HUNDREDS of other clients.

You know that the brides have added their bridesmaids as “friends” on their Facebook profile.   Thus, the moment they put up that photo on their Facebook page, their friends see it on their own Facebook news feed. You just got your name in front of each and everyone of your client’s Facebook friends in just seconds.  Facebook doesn’t protect those photos from “right-click, save-as” commands. So, if a friend wants to grab it, they can. But it has your logo on it!!! Great, let them grab it and put it on their Facebook too. That is great viral marketing you can take advantage of.

The Hang-Ups

• Hang-Up One – Good Intentions with no follow through: Good intentions are sometimes just that; intentions. Sometimes, ahhummm often, we let the seemingly less important things slide and go off the radar. So that vendor who asked you to send them photos gets left in the dust, photo-less and perhaps a bit ticked that you never did what you said you would do. Or the bride whose wedding you just shot takes one of the photos from a friends digital point-and-shoot and puts it on her Facebook page because you did not send them a professionally taken photo. Not smart folks!
• Hang-Up Two – Time and effort it takes to add your logo and actually send the photos to the vendors. I fully realize that by writing this, you may say, “I am not going to spend that kind of time to add my logo to each photo that they want. I have so many other things to do with editing, spending time with family and everything else. I simply don’t have time to add that to my to do list when it is so far down the importance ladder.” Please change this mindset. I am going to give you some very time-efficient methods that you can use to make this no problem at all — actually easy.
• Problem Three – What guarantees that the vendor will credit my work when they use my photo? Lots of vendors are lazy when it comes to offering credit for your photos. (or their webmaster is lazy) Since many vendors rely on others to operate and maintain their websites, there is little guarantee that your photo credit will ever make it to their site unless you have already added your logo prior to sending it. I am going to show you the easy way to accomplish this for every vendor quickly and easily.
• Problem Four – What guarantees that my clients will use my photos on Facebook? While there is no guarantee that they will use them files on Facebook or any other website, you certainly can encourage them to do so (gently) in an email.   Below, I give you an example of an email that we use with great success when we send our brides and clients images that they can use for their Facebook profiles. It works extremely well and we are getting our name out there to thousands and thousands of potential clients.

There is much more to learn…..

The Opportunities

Vendors:
Let’s pretend for a second that you go to a wedding where there are the following vendors:

1. 1. 1. Wedding Planner/Coordinator
      2. Officiant
      3. Caterer
      4. DJ or Band
      5. Florist
      6. Cake Baker
      7. Dress shop
      8. Make-up artist
      9. Hair Stylist
      10. Venue
      11. Am I forgetting someone?

How many websites will be talking about you?

The above list represents ten vendors that potentially want photos from that event for their website. If you were to provide them photography from the wedding with your logo on it and they each used it, then that would be ten different websites that your logo would live on for FREE.  Let’s further assume that you shoot fifteen weddings annually. Assuming some vendors would be repeated, let’s pretend that you get five vendors from each wedding to post a photo that you shot with your logo on it. Five websites times fifteen vendors equals 75 different websites that you now own a presence on. Your name on 75 different websites (not including your own) in only a year’s time.

Now, let’s multiply that out one more year. It is conceivable that you could have your name on over 125 different websites, marketing your name and service in about two years!!  If you were to buy advertising space on 125 websites, it would cost you a fortune!  Facebook, blogs and websites Don’t miss the boat on this. Facebook is the single largest community on the web. It is growing at an unbelievable rate with hundreds of thousands of new profiles added DAILY!!!

If you are not taking advantage of marketing your business through Facebook, then you are missing the biggest marketing revolution in history. If you don’t know what Facebook is, here is a great starting point . My writing here is not intended to start you with Facebook basics. It is to convince you that it exists and that even if you don’t personally use it, you can utilize it to market yourself through your clients’ Facebook profiles.

My goal is to convince you to email a few of your favorite photos to your brides specifically for their Facebook profile, blogs that they own, and websites that they may have. The images you email them will contain your logo and already be sized for the web at a ratio of 800px by 600px. Your brides will post them on Facebook (by your suggestion) and all of their friends on Facebook will see those photos with your name on them. They may have hundreds of friends, maybe even thousands! So, you just sent a virtual flier to thousands of people for FREE!!!!

The Solutions

Are you convinced yet? I could go on and on about the sheer power of simply adding your logo to each and every one of your web-sized photos and taking a moment to send those to your clients and vendors. If you are convinced, wanna read how we do it?

“This is how we do it”

Following are the instructions on how we accomplish the task of adding our logo to our photography and send it to various vendors and clients who in turn market our services for us.

• Step one – After editing your photos, export them all as web-sized images. After you edit your photography for a wedding, bridal, engagement, family, maternity, infant or any other session, you should export the photos in full size jpgs (which you are probably doing) AND in a web-sized format.   For this writing, we are concerned with the second export.You should export all of the images you shoot with the ratio of 800×600 at 96dpi with a quality of about 90%. This will create jpgs of about 100-150k. If you are using full-format cameras, then the size ratio will be a bit different, but the quality and dpi will remain the same.   For this, we use Lightroom from Adobe. You might be using Bridge, Photoshop or another program for your editing. What ever you use, you should be able to save your  photos in this “web-sized” format.
• Step two- Add your logo to every image. This can be accomplished in a number of ways.
  1. The perfect software- The software we use is called “Batch Photo Watermarker” and is available here: http://www.easysector.com/    It may not look like much, but for $29 you get some very fast and reliable software! There is a bit of a trick to getting it to work correctly. The best way that we found to get it to work:
     • Create an all white logo on a transparent background.
     • Add a small drop shadow to the logo.
     • Size the logo file to about 400 pixels wide and whatever corresponding height. This works for our logo. You may have a logo that is taller than wide. You might consider some different sizes. Just play with it and see what works.
     • Save the file as a PNG file. This is super important. The software reacts the best with PNG files. I tried transparent gifs, but did not get what I was looking for.
     • The big key in adding your logo is that people can read it. At first I was adding our flat logo in its designed colors. What I found was that when an image had colors that were too close to our logo colors, the logo was lost in the photo. White with a drop shadow is perfect and works on every photo so far.
  2. Use Lightroom 3.0.  It now has the watermarking feature that you want
• Step 3 – Start sharing the photos – Now that your logo is on your images, start sharing them with clients and other wedding vendors. In this step, you will learn the process that we use to share photos with our vendors and clients. First we will start with the photo sharing process that we use with our vendors. Vendor Sharing- We have chosen to use SmugMugas our permanent, off-site, fullsized jpg storage. It is about $150 annually for the professional account which gives us unlimited storage.   When we meet a vendor and get their card, we contact them after the event and send them a note like this:Dear Joanna, (we use their name from their business card)
  • It was great to see you the other day at Katie and Rob’s wedding. What a beautiful couple and a gorgeous setting. I wanted to let you know that I did not forget about my promise to provide you images from the event. It just takes a few days (or however long it takes you to edit) to finish the images from a wedding. I have finished editing them and have posted the images to an album I created specifically for ABC Catering. The link is here  www.the-smugmug-link.com.  You are free to use these images on your blog, website or Facebook by right-clicking them and saving them to your computer.  Please let me know if there is any other way that I can be of assistance.Warmest regards,Bill Nixon** One last thing for the vendor Email – I will also attach a couple of my favorite shots for this vendor to the email and send it out. Now, each time we shoot an event with Joanna of ABC, we will be sure to upload the photos to let them use on their website with our logo on them. They can download any of them or all of them. We don’t care because they have our logo on them. When they use them, if they forget to credit us, doesn’t matter because our logo is on them.
    

    Telling the client!

    “Your images are ready!” – Great ways to tell the client. We absolutely love telling the client that their images are ready. Why? Because it is a reason to contact them and we are finally done editing! When we tell a client that they can now view their images, we like to include a couple of images with our logo on them and encourage them to put them on Facebook or any wedding websites or blogs that they may own.    We will ask them to create a link to us as well, but if they don’t, it really doesn’t matter. (unless your name is John Smith. More on this later)
    Here is a sample email that we send to our clients.
    Dear Brooke,

    We just want to say again what a pleasure it was to shoot your wedding. You, your family and friends are wonderful to be around and we are so very honored that we could be a part of your wedding day.  I also wanted to let you know that your images are up and ready to view. You can  go to our website at www.smugmug-link.com to preview the images. You might also want to share this link with your friends and family.

    As you can see, we have also attached a couple of our favorite photos from the day. These just touched our heart and we did not want you to miss them as you go through the hundreds of photos that are on line now from your wedding.  We have sized these images to fit perfectly on Facebook. (if you have a profile there) It is always great to upload a photo or two to your Facebook page so that your friends and family can see them.  The other information you need about your book and disc of high resolution images is on it’s way in a separate email. I just wanted to email you this while I was thinking about it.

    Warmest Regards,

    So, as you can see, I encourage them to put images on Facebook for the reasons you read above in the intro. Even though you read them above, I am going to reiterate them here because Facebook is so very powerful.

    • When the bride loads that image you sent her on her Facebook profile, ALL OF HER FRIENDS SEE IT! Do you think that she is friends with her unmarried bridesmaids who might want a wedding photographer?
    • When a bride tags herself in the image, ALL OF HER FRIENDS SEE THE TAG.
    • Imagine this. That bride may have 300 Facebook Friends. So, 300 people can see your image. Then, if those friends make a comment on her image like “Wow you look beautiful,” then all of their friends see the comment and the image.  Literally thousands of people can see an image that you take 5 seconds to copy and paste an email and send.

    HAMMER IT HOME

    Conclusion
    Here is the deal and a self-evaluation.  Are you being crazy strict with your wedding photography, not giving it to anyone to use? If that is the case, you might find yourself always doing the same thing, year after year. If you want people beating down your inbox, begging you to shoot their wedding, then get your photos on a bunch of sites. It is better than a reference or referral. It is a serious endorsement!!

    And, if you are missing the Facebook boat, please smack yourself three times and change your ways.  Start using these methods and you will soon find that you are a very popular and in demand photographer.  I encourage you to try out the process.

    * I said earlier that unless your name was John Smith, it really did not matter if
    vendors give you link-love from their websites. That is because in our case, Kelli Nixon
    is a unique enough name that we always come up first when someone sees our logo and
    searches for it. If you are John Smith Photography, then you might want to get a
    branded name. That way, when people search for you based on what they read on your
    logo, you will be found.  Otherwise, put your web address under your logo.