Nardi Marketing Takeout

Facebook Places

Nancy Nardi — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:38:02 +0000

More and more we’re hearing about location-based apps being a big part of social media marketing in the near future. In case you’re not familiar, Mobile apps like Foursquare let users check into businesses, letting friends know where you are. Users that “check in” to different locations can also collect prize “badges”, or discounts.

Last week Facebook announced Facebook Places, a new location -based feature. Facebook Places lets users check in to offline locations similar to Foursquare.

How exactly does it work? Let’s say you have a session with a senior. When they arrive at the studio, they can “check in” and when they do, an update is sent to all their Facebook friends announcing that they are at your studio for their session. If the client is a friend of yours on Facebook, you can check them in as well.

While location based services are still pretty new, they will soon be a big part of Facebook marketing and social media marketing. I’ll have another article coming soon on marketing with location based apps. In the meantime, information on claiming your business Place is here. If you’d like to learn more about location based apps, there is a good overview on Mashable. Have you started using any location based apps in your business and if so how are you using it?

Changes for Facebook Pages

Nancy Nardi — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:31:03 +0000

Facebook has or will be eliminating the “boxes” tab. If you have any items in the boxes tab, they will, or have been removed.

Second, the application tabs will be resized to 520 pixels wide. For any tab with custom FBML, you will need make sure any graphics are sized to no more than 520 pixels wide.

Photographers: What your website visitors really think

Nancy Nardi — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:51:08 +0000

When we want feedback on our sites, most of us will ask other photographers or our clients what they like about our site.. The problem with that is it doesn’t give us an accurate view on improvements we need to make. To really improve our site, we’d need to ask the visitors that left our site and find out why.

An article titled An open letter to photographers came across my Twitter feed yesterday and there were almost 200 comments with thoughts from brides about photographers websites. Even though it’s about wedding photography, most of it applies to all photography sites in general.

Here a quick recap:

Kill the music. Not one person said they liked the music.
Flash sucks: it’s slow to load, hard to navigate and some aren’t able to view
Pricing: most wanted at least a ballpark price to know if they can afford you.
Location: Many don’t have the town or state where their located
Don’t open site in another browser window
Contact: Make your contact info easy to find
Speed: Many won’t stick around to wait for you images to load, so size them right

Read all the comments from An open letter to photographers

I switched to a wordpress site and it’s been great. As soon as I dropped the flash, the bounce rate went from 44% to 18% in less than a month. If you aren’t familiar with that term, it means that visitors only visited one page and left. That means almost HALF of my visitors were leaving the site. The article had good insight on how photographers can improve their website. I would love to hear what high school seniors think of photographers web sites.

Photographers, what’s your biggest marketing challenge?

Photographers, what’s your biggest marketing challenge?

Nancy Nardi — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:45:53 +0000

What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to web and social media marketing? Take a quick survey

Make your website more viral with a Facebook Like button

Nancy Nardi — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:54:28 +0000

I have started using a Facebook Like button on both my blog posts and website.

When someone “Likes” a page on your site, it is then added to their profile and seen by friends in their newsfeed.

I have tried a couple of plugins, the one I like best is the Kouguu plugin. The reason is that you can track like stats in your WordPress administration panel so you can easily see which pages are being shared and who is sharing them.

You need a WordPress blog or site to use this plugin. See why I recommend using wordpress as a website.

Higher Google Ranking with Youtube

Nancy Nardi — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:50:47 +0000

YouTube can really improve your search engine ranking if you make the most of titles, keywords and descriptions. I add my Animoto videos to Youtube, then embed them on my website.

How to optimize your videos for better search engine ranking:

Insert keywords into file names
Host your videos on YouTube and then embed those videos in your site. Any video views on your site get added to the view count in YouTube
Use keywords in the video titles, descriptions and tags

YouTube videos are easy to embed in blogs and websites.

These few things can give a nice boost to your website seo.

Vimeo is another service for videos, they have both a free and a paid version.

You can read more on using video and social media in an interview I did with Animoto.

Services to for clients to book with you online

Nancy Nardi — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 12:00:49 +0000

We’ve been using online scheduling for the past five years now and it has worked well for us. We are currently using Acuity Scheduling. It is easy to set-up and has payment processing options, so clients pay when they book.

The schedule is embedded in a page on our blog. We also have a link to this page on Facebook, and on our website. And since our site is formatted for mobile use, clients can book a session from their iphone or blackberry as well.

I have tried a few other online scheduling services, Acuity I like the best.

What I like about Acuity is:

It’s easy to use for clients and convenient – book clients when your closed
the authorize.net Payment Gateway. I’m not wild about Paypal.
My sessions are at 10, 1 and 3:30 and I wanted to be able to set the schedule for specific times.
You can do a unique form for each session, which is nice since different sessions have different requirements. The forms are all custom and you can add as many fields as you want.I add information fields like what most important to them, how they hears, and a checkbox agreeing to the terms.
Works on iphone for both clients and me
It’s reasonably priced, $10 for one schedule and $19 for multiple schedules.

They have a free trial. I know some use Brownbook to. It’s a good service too, the only thing I could not do was set specific times or accept credit cards instead of Paypal.

I used Appointments Plus in the past, and it was a nice service, but a little pricier at $50+ a month.

Booking calendar looks promising, however there is still some things it lacks. It’s a plugin for WordPress, so you’ll need WP to use it. They have both free and paid versions. If collection payments isn’t important, then this might work for you.

I have also tried Appointy and Web Appointments, Schedulicity, but they lacked the features that I was looking for which was collecting payments and not scheduling someone unless payment was made. Millers lab also has free online scheduling software if you are a client. Most services come with a 30 day free trial.

By the way, most of our clients that use the online schedule, are either returning clients, or they have already talked to us by phone. It is rare that someone books just from doing an internet search.

Online web form tools

Nancy Nardi — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:00:34 +0000

If you are looking for a service to help you design a sign up form or some other type of form for your websites here are a couple of options.

The first is Wufoo, a form creator that can host forms for you, or you can embed them on your own site. It’s easy to use, and it’s free for up to 3 forms. I used Wufoo for a couple of years and it worked really well. There were a couple of limitations, like not being able to re-direct to a webpage after a form is filled out, you need a paid subscription for that. Only 10 fields were allowed on the free forms. You can upgrade for more options including being able to collect payments, which is nice if you do not have an ssl for your site.

Since I use Tave as my studio management software, I can also create forms for my website. The nice thing about this, is that when a prospect fills out a form it’s automatically entered in my database software. If you are using Tave, then you already know about this feature. Tave has a 30 day free trial if you’d like to sign up.

A couple of years ago I tried Zoho Creator for forms, and created my database and form. This was a pretty complex set up, but it has a lot of potential. It’s also free. Definitely not for the novice though.

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin (pictured above). You can create unlimited forms on your WordPress site or blog using a simple plugin. It has drag and drop simplicity and the form easily embeds in any post or page. Here is a sample to the one I use on my site.

It took 1 minute install and about 3 minutes to create a form.
You can export entries to your database software
Set up auto-responders
Re-direct to another web page
Set up as many forms as you like.

You do need WordPress to use Gravity Forms, it will not work with another website.

There are other services too, these are the ones I have used. If you have one to recommend add it in the comments.

Photography and Video WordPress Themes from Graph Paper Press

Nancy Nardi — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:40:46 +0000

If you’re looking for cool WordPress themes for your photo or video site then check out Graph Paper Press. In a previous post I talked about Prophoto blogs, which is another nice option if you haven’t checked it out.

Graph Paper Press themes are minimal and high end looking. They have a nice uncluttered layout with the emphasis being on the images. I really like all the portfolio layouts, especially the Widescreen theme with full screen images. The theme options panel make it easy to customize.

There are 19 themes to choose from, some of which are free to use. You can also sign up for a quarterly or yearly subscription where you’d have access to support and all of the themes, like Widescreen, Fullscreen and Mansion. These are my favorites and only available to subscribers. Subscriptions cost $49 quarterly and $99 annually which gives you access to over 19 themes and pro support.

The themes can be used as your main website, a blog, or both. I used Widescreen before, but wanted one that was more customized so I switched. Lots of great themes to choose from if you want something right out of the box. One great feature of Widescreen, is being able to have a mobile video compatibility built right in.

There’s a great showcase gallery with different site samples. Graph Paper Press. Tomorrow and Wednesday, online forms and online scheduling services.

Why I’m using WordPress for my website

Nancy Nardi — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:36:05 +0000

A few months ago I switched from a flash based website to one built with WordPress. I’m not against flash, I used Bludomain and Showit sites for a while. WordPress gives has more flexibility and there were specific things that I wanted the website to do and WordPress provides that.

Why I’m using WordPress for my site and what were the features that were important to me

Large, full screen images make a big impact on visitors, and that was a must. Until recently that could only be done with a flash site, but now there are some wordpress themes that offer some really cool portfolio and gallery effects.

Being able to have a different background image on each page was a something I wanted as well. WordPress 3.0 let’s you add custom backgrounds, and some themes have functions that let you have different background image on posts and pages.

Since switching to a WordPress based site, SEO has improved. You can check your own site using the Website Grader at Hubspot

I own the site. No monthly fees, no special software systems to learn, and the site can be changed anytime or add a new theme. It’s pretty inexpensive to purchase a theme, around $75 or less in most cases. I switched from Bludomain hosting to Bluehost, which I love. All my sites are hosted by Bluehost.

Being able to use plugins to add extra functionality to the site is a big plus. Things like adding a Facebook like button, viral sharing features, automatic back up, image protection are just a few. Here is a post on some WordPress plugins that I like.

The site is viewable on mobile devices, which will be important in the near future. There are some flash web services that offer an iphone or mobile site with your regular one, but I wanted to keep it simple.

Adding video is easy and also viewable on mobile as well. I use Youtube to embed videos on a page. Youtube is good for seo as well.

Adding landing pages is easier, so I can track different marketing strategies.

Have a blog and website all in one. No extra installations needed, simply add a blog page and start posting

I can easily add sign up forms and embed other widgets, like a Facebook Page Like box for my Facebook Page, an email sign up or embed the studio magazine using issuu. Sign up forms were a pain to add with Bludomain.

Easy navigation and having a phone number on each page is important, especially for mobile users. Mobile users should be able to “click to call” from any page on a site.

Administration and updates just seem easier with a WordPress site, plus I have the option of selecting which posts or pages to post on Twitter or Facebook Page wall.

I just recently signed up for Gravity forms, which is great plugin for WordPress. You can create as many f forms as you like right from your administration panel. This is great for things like a simple contact form, or a senior model application. Plus you can export the sign ups in a csv file and import into the database software of your choice. The forms can have multiple fields as well, custom replies and autoresponders and you can reply to any entry right from you admin panel. It’s only $39 and you own it, no monthly fees.

If your looking for some nice WordPress themes, check out Prophoto Blogs or Graph Paper Press. Graph Paper Press has really nice themes, including a full screen one. Both have good tutorials and support. Prophoto is easier to customize, however I like the portfolio layouts that come with Graph Paper Press.

What are you using for your site and what do you like about? What don’t you like about it?