Time for my yearly Seth Godin quote.

I love reading the marketing-without-marketing mastermind. He’s always a source of great inspiration and thought provoking advice. I’ve been ruminating on this post from his site earlier this week called Are We Not Plankton? (Deevo fans will get a kick out of that).

Something that really stood out for me is the following:

What’s important to keep in mind is, as a small business owner running your own photography business, you are the “modern marketer” Godin is talking about.  You are the one that is changing the lives by attracting the clients. It all starts in the attraction of those clients. And as I discussed Facebook Likes a couple weeks back, each single Like, each individual potential client, each new actual client should be treated as gold. Because each Like, each potential client, and each actual client, all have their unique role in driving your business.

Marketers call the process of potential customers converting to actual customers a Funnel. That funnel should be your gold, and operated with your company brand values. If your communication was the last communication a person ever read, would you want that experience to be a canned response you saved in Gmail, or something profoundly worthy?

As photographers, we have the ability to change people’s lives. Let’s do it from the first contact.

Do you have a big header of photos on your site? If so, you may want to rethink that. You could potentially be annoying a large part of your audience.

Usability is the study of how people use things (like websites). And one of the things they track is a thing called Friction. This is when a user wants to accomplish one thing, but the website’s design prevents it or makes it more challenging.

When a potential client comes to your website, what do you think they are looking for? What do you think is most important for them?
I’m willing to bet, it’s not the same 5 images rotating through your header.
No, what would be important to them is to easily find the information they need to make a decision to hire you or not.

But if you have a big header, many people will be required to scroll down to find the menu. (Remember, not everyone has a 27″ iMac like you). And this happens on every single page. And it’s not just to get to the menu, but the user has to scroll to get to the Content as well!

This increases the Friction on your website.  But it’s not just your website. This is the first time a potential client comes into contact with your business. This is your first impression. The experience of the website sets the tone for the service they will receive.

So my question to you is, are you committed to assisting your clients in getting what they need? Then, you may consider removing barriers to that. I’d start with getting rid of that big header.

Photo Credit: Lap Fung Chan from Flickr.

Worth

If you look back over 2013, could you tell me how much business your website generated? Is your business even set up to be able to find out?

Just to get a sense of what I’m talking about, let’s take a completely arbitrary number like $100,000 in sales for the year 2013. You may have a few client acquisition methods, and they may look something like this:

• Website
• Word of mouth
• Networking
• Randomly meeting engaged couples or potential clients (new moms, etc).

So let’s take a look at your website. In this day and age, I’m willing to bet your site is the majority source of clients. For this example let’s say 75% meaning that our example website generated $75,000 worth of sales for you. (If you’re playing along at home, please make sure you use your own numbers).

Value

With that in mind, do you really place enough value on your website?
The majority of photographers that start online get their domain for $10, pay $80/yr for cheap shared hosting, and then slap a ProPhoto template on their site for $200, and set it up pretty much how everyone else sets theirs up (save for design differences).

So you’re up online for under $300 bucks, and probably 30-40 or so hours of your own time, or so which is great.
That might be great for people just starting out, but what about when you’re website starts generating $75,000? Does your website experience reflect that with your visitors?

Put more succinctly: Is that a match for the company that you’re looking to run?

If your website is generating the majority of your income, shouldn’t it look and feel that way?
Look, you don’t have to hire Flaunt Your Site to build you a $5,000 website (but if you want to, you should totally contact us. 🙂 ), or spend lots of money to accomplish your goals.
All you have to do is think about the user experience from your client’s point of view; From the moment they get on the site, to how they find the information they need, to how to contact you, etc.

If you start thinking about that, and start to put things in place that better that experience for your potential clients, you’ll start to increase the value you of your website. And you’ll increase the worth with all the new clients you’re starting to get.

If you use Twitter to share your blog posts and photos, you’ll no doubt have noticed that you need to use short urls in order to fit your content in the 140 characters and still get your link in. There are shortening services like Bitly, and Goo.gl that will automatically make short urls for you that you can use for your tweets. But I’d like to share a couple ways to customize your own short urls for Twitter.

Customize your Bitly Links

Did you know that you can actually change the URLs when you use Bitly? Yeah! It’s pretty frickin cool. Check it out:

1. First create an account or login to Bitly.
2. Paste your URL into the box that says “Paste URL here”
   
3. A screen will pop up with your new shortened URL. If you hover your mouse over the new URL, you’ll see a link that pops up that says “Customize” Click that…
   
4. Now you’ll get the customize screen. Now by default Bitly uses a 6 character url after the “http://bit.ly” portion, so you’ll want to keep your custom URLs as short as possible. In my example, I added just enough characters to make it somewhat recognizable what the page is about with http://bit.ly/wp-35-changes. It more than doubles the standard length, but it’s still way shorter than the original post URL.
5. And there you have it! Your very own custom shortened URL using Bitly. You can use that as many times as you like since it will always be saved in your Bitly account.

Creating Your Own Short Domain

So you now know how to create short URLs with Bitly, but what if you wanted a short URL of your own to use? Well, you can use Domai.nr to create special short domains and use those instead of using http://bit.ly. All you have to do is go to  Domainr and fill in your business name, personal name, etc. You’ll get a list of unique names/domains combinations with alternate TLDs. The green squares indicate whether or not the domain is available.

In my case I used my own name William Bay, and I get to choose which of the domains I would like to purchase and use for a shortened URL.

The other great thing is that you can use your new shortened domain name in Bitly, so Bitly will shorten your URLs when you want to paste them in Twitter. If you follow the instructions here you can see how to setup the domain to work with Bitly automatically.

Conclusion

While these techniques won’t increase your SEO, it will definitely bring a cool factor to your links in Twitter (plus a little more branded experience). And that “cool factor” could be enough to pick up a few extra click throughs each time you post a tweet.

Let us know if you do this. I’d love to see some of the short domains that you all create from your regular domains. We love that here.

Last Thursday I was in the middle of a phone call with a client discussing their upcoming website design, and in the span of 3 minutes I received a text message, email and a voicemail all from a frantic Paul Von Rieter (pictured left), exclaiming that someone had bought his domain name out from underneath him. Now Paul, if you remember is one of the two photographers Flaunt Your Site now sponsors and manages all their website design, hosting and SEO. We were just starting to get into a new redesign for Paul when this happened, and the tires screeched to a halt.

When I called him back I found out that he had failed to respond to his expiring domain notice that he received back in February. Whether he missed it, or got busy and didn’t open it, wasn’t quite clear to him. So I asked him to call GoDaddy where he purchased his domain and to find out how to contact the people that purchased it. He went off and did that, and that led to a 10 day battle of wills, and Paul forking over $600 to get his domain back. It was stressful on both he and I, but we have the domain back, and his site is finally back up.

So let’s take a look at the “why” of this whole thing.

Why Jerkoffs buy Expiring Domains

Ok… They’re not all jerkoffs. There are plenty of people that legitimately want a domain that was not available at the time and got in line to purchase the domain when it became available.

But there are those jerkoffs that buy expiring domains with the worst of intentions. It’s called Cybersquatting. They get lists of expiring domains and seek out the domains with lots of links pointing to the site, and strong Domain Authority (similar to Page Rank). The purpose of this is two-fold.

1. They could sell the domain back to the original owner if the owner forgot about the expiration and wanted it back (there are international laws against this, but we’ll get to that in a bit). This is what happened in Paul’s case.
2. If that doesn’t pan out, the domain can be used in what I feel are shady SEO tactics of either creating a “micro-site” with that domain and linking to sites that in order to boost their rankings. Or simply redirecting the url to another site, which gives that site all the links and Domain Authority the expired domain used to have.

“You said there are laws against this?” You ask…

Well, yes. There is an international law against someone purchasing an expired domain with the intent to sell it back. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to prove intent. In this email (excuse the poor English – we believe our Cybersquatters hail from Germany – see photo for what we think he looks like), you can see their attempt at playing dumb, and allowing us to ask for the domain first.

The Expiration Process

Based on some numbers I found from 2010, GoDaddy itself has about 20,000 domains expiring each week. This accounts for more than $1 Million weekly! Some of these are people intentionally ditching their domains, but some are bound to be accidents. Don’t be one of the people that forget and make GoDaddy richer, most of you know how I feel about GoDaddy.

It might help to know the process when you forget to renew your domain. I’ll let Mike Davidson, brought us Newsvine and an all around cool internet dude, explain:

After that, the rats are all over the domains. Good domains can get swept up in minutes. So the good news is that if you miss the initial expiration date, you can get it back. Just don’t let it go too long or it’ll cost you to get it back.

So How Can You Protect Yourself

It seems to be a very simple task of renewing your domain every year, but as we’ve witnessed mistakes happen. Not only has it happened to Paul, but just ask Foursquare, their whole site went down after forgetting to renew their domain. Here are a few tips on how not to let this happen to you:

1. Register for 10 years. The longest period you can register a domain for is 10 years. When it costs you ~$100, you may as well. (Please note, that this will NOT improve any SEO value to your site as some have been led to believe this by the Website Grader).
2. If you are auto-renewing, make sure that you have a valid credit card or Paypal account hooked up to your domain registry account.
3. Absolutely ensure that your domain registry companies email does not go to your SPAM folder.
4. Do NOT buy the “Private Registration” add-on that most places will sell you. While this won’t help you with an expiring domain, it will make sure that your domain is not registered under GoDaddy’s name. It’s always best to have your name be the one that’s published with the domain publicly, so there is absolutely no doubt that you are the de facto owner.

The Wrap Up

$600 is a lot of cash, but it could have been much worse. So remember, don’t be like Paul, keep your domains renewed.

*This blog post has been approved by Paul Von Rieter to ensure that people learn from his stupid mistake.

Hello Pinners,

I’d like to thank you all for the great things you’ve shared with us about the Pin It On Pinterest plugin. We love the product and we want to continue to make it a better one. We also know there is an issue for a small percentage of people who can’t use it, and we’ll be getting to the bottom of that and fixing it.

I just spoke with Jamie Swanson at The Modern Tog and we put together a wishlist of what will be in the next one. We’re super excited about it, but we’d like to hear from you as well. The next version will be a full 1.0 version, so we want it to be robust and ready for primetime.

Tell us what features you’d like to see in the next update below in the comments. They may not make it, but we will read all of them, and it will give us a really good idea of how you want to use it.

Thanks so much and keep Pinning!

Such a great deal of our business is centered on writing. Emails, blog posts, bios, website content, marketing pieces, invoices, proposals, etc. If your writing skills aren’t up to par, you could turn off potential clients with poor grammar, spelling or even lazy writing.

Take a look for yourself and see how many blog posts you’ve written lately that are half-ass’d attempts at scrawling something out as quickly and painlessly as possible. (I’m looking at you Wedding Photographers).
I must have read at least two hundred wedding blog posts that follow this general pattern:

“I just shot a wedding this past Saturday that was to DIE for. Jane was SO beautiful in her dress and Jack looked so handsome. They’re such an amazing couple, and I was so honored to be there and take part in such a big moment of their lives.
Here’s the photos. Hope you like them.”

And have you all even looked at your “About” pages? Most of them look like they were taken from the same template.
Your writing style doesn’t have to win awards for style, but if you spend some time with it, and translate the creative juices you use for photography into your writing, you can come away with something far more original, and vastly improved.
For example, look what San Luis Obispo Wedding Photographer, Ken Kienow did with his About page. What’s unique about it, is that it’s simple, but written well, and more important, it’s from his heart.

Writing is a skill, and I promise it can be improved.
Ernest Hemingway once said:

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.” 

It won’t be an overnight phenomenon, but put a little extra effort into your writing from this day forth. Create a backstory from your life experience for your next blog post so that people can not only experience your fantastic photos, but also create their own unique picture of what it was like to be there. One of my own personal favorite blog posts was from my best friend’s wedding in which I was a groomsman and I weaved one of my travel adventures into a special moment that we all shared. Can you bring something from your own history to your blog posts?

Work on it. Push yourself. And in the meantime learn some writing skills. There are great books out there to read and improve. Here are a few:

• The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
• On Writing Well by William Zinsser
• On Writing by Stephen King

I read Elements of Style 18 years ago and I believe it should sit next to everyone’s computer right alongside a Thesaurus. It’s a very quick read and it will point out many of the common misuses of English that people tend not to catch such as: “there, they’re and their,” “lose, as opposed to loose,” and the dreaded “its/it’s” problem.
The book will also cover other grammatical and sentence structure errors that make the difference between being taken as an intellectual, or …the opposite of that.

The other books can take your skill of writing to levels that you would never have imagined.

In closing, remember:

• When so much correspondence is focused on email and the internet, the way you write creates an indelible impression, on others, about you.
• Stretch your imagination. You don’t have to hit “Publish” or “Send” when you’re done writing. You can save drafts and come back to it later.
• If you take on the challenge of boning up on your writing chops you will have a tremendous advantage over those that resist and are left behind with their poor writing skills.

Grammar and writing is one of those funny things where it only stands out to people if it’s bad. And it’s a terrible thing to say, that if you develop your skills as a writer, you’ll turn off fewer people.
But that’s the truth. So learn to write well.