Getting the Back Office Ready for Wedding Season

Marie is busy editing the summer wedding work and blogging her work. She's the face; if you sit down with her for a consultation then you'll want to hire her to take your photos.  That means it's my job to make sure everything else works. I think it's a fairly easy formula that I follow:

1. Pay Attention to the Analytics
2. Keep Fresh and Relevant Content
3. Always Update the Plan

Looking into the analytics we can tell that the majority of people that spend any time on our website is female and between 18-34 years old. That's exactly where we wanted to be when we were writing our business plan last Fall. Our website is attracting the right attention and it is producing a fair amount of feedback. It is safe to say that we are appealing to the right audience. Now we just have to step up our game.

We ended up with some fresh content through the spring that looks great on Lininger~Rood.com. We did some absolutely magnificent events and met some great couples. Every single one got us closer to having a well balanced portfolio to start this year with. We never focused on the content. It was more about telling the stories of our customers most intimate moments, capturing them in time, and allowing them to share their moments with the world. Their story is the why.

Once we had the why, we started working together to get the how and what. And we're still at it. I mean, the reality is that Marie takes pictures. She loves it and she would do it even if there was no business. But to be in business and provide a value to the customer we had to work backwards from their story to the right pictures. The why doesn't change, but the how and what will keep changing as we evolve and as the market changes. That change is what make us continue to search for the most right answer. 

The Lininger Rood Wedding page.

It holds true that the mobile site produces more traffic than the desktop mirror, but not as much as we expected. It is fairly typical for us to maintain separate site that look and feel the same but are optimized for the platforms that they run on. ShowIt makes it pretty easy to maintain both mobile and desktop sites. We did create new pages styles on the mobile site for Wedding and Family events. The interface looks great and packs a lot of content in a small space. It take some guess work to figure out what the right content is. We guessed. But I think we guessed right enough.

Advertising is an art if you don't have a huge budget. No homegrown startup has an ideal advertising budget so it's always important to figure out how to read the analytics and respond somehow. We started with paying Facebook, Google, and the Knot with targeted adds. Eventually, the numbers showed that Facebook wasn't getting business conversions so we dropped the paid adds and promotions. Free exposure from Blogger, Instagram, and Facebook brings it home just fine. The tools will tell you what is working, not what is not working. So, it takes some experimentation. I cover all of this in my book so I won't go too deep there. What I found out putting all of this together is that art doesn't have a set way to create success. We will keep changing the way we advertise, and the way we promote, and the way present our work. 

So, that leaves us thinking about what we need to take us into the next year: new equipment and services. Equipment upgrades are always in order. We planned to spend as much money as we could keeping our inventory up-to-date and ahead of demand. Marie loves the Nikon D750 and it does a great job for the services that we provide. But it may be time to look for a second camera body. The logical choice is to get another D750 so that we don't have to learn a new set of features. That will provide a good back-up for Marie if something happens goes wrong with her camera and gives us the option to provide an in-house second photographer.

We have been acquiring lenses as the need arises. There are so many different options that we have to prioritize the lens to the service. Our next lenses will give us greater ability to get close-up shots in more detail. Light kits, reflectors, and remotes are always options for spending any additional cash influx.

New services are exciting. They are exciting to think about and exciting to try to create. This business will demand certain things but other things require the photographer to provide. Marie has started building books of her work to showcase her work. We haven't started selling photo albums but I suspect that the year will build into that as we get to some of the more exclusive venues on the calendar in the upcoming year.

Python script runs the world!

One of our couples asked for a photo booth at their reception. Naturally I jumped at the opportunity to develop something that we can use. It gets me out of the shadows. I begun to play with ideas and settled on using a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen monitor, I wrote a couple of hundred lines of Python to control the user interface, a small camera, a photo printer, and if I connect to a WiFi hot spot, then I can email and blog the photos on the spot. I have a good interface and an idea. Certainly I will need Marie to put the face on it so it looks like something great and I think we will have a winning product.


I am excited about this for a few reasons.
1. It's cool. Everybody loves a photo booth at a party. It's boas and fake mustaches for everybody.
2. We can make photos and videos to include in the wedding packages. We already do beautiful formal photos but now we can include the candid party pictures.
3. It puts branded photos in potential customer's hands.
4. We can built our contact database by having the printed photos with logos, targeted emails, and blog content tied to

5. It is a new revenue stream that customer will pay to use at our events.
6. There is a development opportunity to produce and sell on a large scale.

Can you tell that this is my new favorite part?

As long as we can stay in this magnificent city, then we will continue to grow along our planned path. Not too fast and not too slow.

Thinking About Design

I got to thinking about how to improve my book cover and realized that undone know a thing about designing a book cover. The obvious thing to do is to read a blog, right? That's what I thought. I found Humble Nations @ http://humblenations.com/ did a good job of confirming just what I had suspected: I'm clueless about design.

I was hasty publishing. Very hasty because I was up against some deadlines that had nothing to do with this book, or any book. Basically I imposed a deadline on myself for a pretty bad reason. I was excited to get it on the shelf... Now that I have a bunch of extra time I am rethinking some of those decisions.

The book is all about the layman businessman figuring things out that are outside the skill set of the business. That means you are trying to cut your cost by doing everything you can yourself. It save you cash and it is more fulfilling. But you might do it twice, or three times, before you are comfortable with the results. So, here I am with a book on the Internet about marketing your business on the Internet and my cover sucks. See that linkage? I'm not expert at this stuff, but I am learning at every turn and I will be an expert with the help of the tools that are readily available on the Internet.

Internet, Internet, Internet...

That's funny, right? I'm getting an oil change at the dealership. Ms. Marie's Jeep was behind on recalls and services so here I am sitting for two hours. So, I'm filling my idle time thinking about how to get more out of my business. All of my businesses. On the Internet. I'm on the Internet trying to figure out how to better promote my book about promoting your business on the Internet. This Internet thing is big.

Back to the point. I haven't solved anything except for thinking about the irony. The original book cover was made from a word cloud. They are neat to play with so I got caught up in the neatness and some other geeky people though so too. So I took the first half of the book and pasted it into a website to get a picture of the words all jumbled up. It looks neat to me but doesn't do anything but puts some words out there. It wasn't a very smart move and I wish that I hadn't been so hasty. Have you ever said that to yourself? This is my first time, but anyway. All I needed was a cover with a title and my name. That's exciting. I had a cover with my name on it! But it is ugly. It is ugly. No doubting that, but I didn't think it mattered. It matters. I say that a lot in the book.

Now I have to figure this thing out. But i have no idea how to do it. I will. Soon.

But now my oil change is done. 

First Week Is In The Bag

90 copies sold the first week! I'm so stoked! 

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01BWDHV5A?ref_=pe_2427780_160035660

My First Book is on Sale

Because it's not all about the money. That's right, it's not. Some of it, but not all. I'll run a special as often as I can on Amazon. So, right now I have given away 30 copies of Getting Your Name Out There and it's only been one day. I hope that we give a million away, it costs me exactly the same amount.

Please pick one up in the Amazon Kindle Store. If you read it then please leave me a review.

Getting Your Name Out There: Marketing Your Small Business

Getting your name out on the street is hard. It is really hard work. When you are a small business owner with a little skill and a dream, you are going to want to put everything into your craft. Be a craftsman, an artisan, be really good at something that only you can do. However, I will tell you now that it will not be enough. This is not intuitive stuff. I am an intuitive guy and I missed it the first time. So, let us talk about how to get your name out there in a way that works and keeps you getting noticed by customers. This book is all about search engine optimization and using the internet to fuel your business.
It's on Amazon for a really great price, pick up a copy and get started today.