I’m absolutely in love with them, they are adorable! She is so great to work with, and came up with something I loved right away.
She has a special on these – they are $40 until May, when the price goes up to $75. Her blog says that they are only available to past logo clients, but she will do them for new clients as well. You can check mine out on my blog.

She’s also generously offering a 10% discount on her design work for Two Photog readers. Her prices are already very reasonable, so this is really a great deal. Use code 2P10 at checkout to redeem. If you get some custom blog buttons, make sure you come back and show them to us!

I’ve been using Moo for some cool uses of my own for the past year. Because my business name is not my actual name, I need to find ways for people to associate my own name with Fresh Sugar Photography. One of the ways I do it is with a Moo sticker on the bag of each print. I signed my name using my Wacom and made it into a cute little sticker. This way I am letting my clients know that they have purchased one-of-a-kind artwork, and I am also keeping my own name in their minds, as well as my business name.

I use the Moo MiniCards as a way to incorporate new faces into my portfolio. I made “you’ve been spotted” cards to give out anytime I see a child or family that I would love to photograph. They are cute and fun, and a less-creepy way of saying “Are you a model?”.

I also ordered sets of cards for myself and Danna before WPPI. At $19.99 for 100 cute little cards, it was the perfect solution for small run needs. The cards are seriously yummy, so thick and sturdy – you won’t believe them until you see them. Plus, you can have 100 different images on 100 different cards. So cool!

So if all of this hasn’t convinced you to give Moo a try, then how about a discount on your first order? Moo is generously giving our readers 15% off their first Moo order. Use code 2RB2CK at checkout, and anxiously await your order! You’ll love their packaging too, totally cute!

How about to make more money? Our fabulous friend Joyce Smith can help you do just that! She is generously giving away a copy of her amazing {How to Sell} guide to one lucky Two Photogs reader!
If you do online sales, I am telling you that this is guide is a must have. Joyce is an inspiration because in a photography world where you can be harassed for not in-person proofing, she stands tall and proud saying that online sales CAN work. She has the high sales to prove it too!

The Wordsmith site is rockin’ because she has so many guides that are actually USEFUL. Her {What to Write} guide is my personal favorite, and I consider myself to be a pretty good writer. It’s got every email that you would ever think to send to a client. Just make sure you change the wording a bit to reflect “you” because I actually had a client wonder if I was affiliated with another photographer here in Calgary because we sent the exact same email. Um, whoops! LOL!

All you need to do to win this awesome prize is leave a comment below with your New Year’s Resolution. Mine? I have vowed to quit Cafe World on Facebook for good. No more time wasters! (or at least not that one, lol) I have to wonder why I am cooking meals for virtual people when I don’t even cook for my real people?

** Complimentary Daily Internet
** Complimentary Daily Gym Access
** Complimentary Nightly Admission to Studio 54 or Tabu
** Complimentary local and toll free phone calls

I think I remember the internet being at least $12 a day, so this is a great deal if you need to stay connected. Offer ends December 31st, 2009 so book now and don’t forget to let us know you’re going!

Two years ago I send clients Coach photo key fobs and tree ornaments, last year I got over a HUNDRED copies of the movie Elf on DVD and included a copy with each holiday card I sent. So you can see why this year was very difficult.

I had been looking at corporate gift catalogs, tossing around the ideas of branded etch-a-sketches (they are pretty cool), yo-yo’s, etc when I got a catalog in the mail from Plan Canada. Their marketing strategy – Gifts of Hope, was very effective on me – essentially it was a shopping catalog of different “gifts” I could buy for underdeveloped countries. Things like a goat ($75), birth certificate ($25), mosquito netting ($30) and they even have special gifts from their “Because I am a Girl” campaign like sewing machines ($90) and girls-only latrines ($100).

I decided then and there that THIS was what I wanted to give my clients this year, and where I wanted that budgeted money to go. So I chose mango trees ($12) and home-birthing kits ($25) and bought one for every client I had this year, and some of my favorites from years past. All in all I sent over 60 gifts, and it was such an amazing feeling. I feel 100% confident that this was the perfect choice of gift for my clients, and more importantly, the children they are helping. Each gift was donated in my client’s name, and Plan Canada sent me little note cards with all the information and client names printed on them, which I then just slid into my own Fresh Sugar Photography card and sent off!

I’ve also learned that Operation Smile has a similar type gift catalog, check it out: Operation Smile Gift Catalog

The response from clients has been overwhelming, and so moving. People are truly so thankful that I’ve done this, and I know that it is so much more appreciated than a new keychain. Next year when you are thinking about gifts for your photography clients, think about ethical gift-giving. It will make such a difference to both your clients and people you’ve never met.

The card image above is what I sent to clients, usually I am a stickler for having a generic “holiday” card, but couldn’t get this phrase out of my head. The template by Beyond Red and Green and is slightly modified. I actually have some of 2009′s holiday card left, so if you’d like to receive a card from me, please send me your address: brandy@twophotogs.com.

Photographer Cafe provides inspiration to photographers through its blog, which includes spotlights on fabulous photographers, great business advice, time-saving tips, and personal musings to stir creativity. The Photographer Cafe Shop is filled with products that are beautifully crafted and extremely versatile. Each product is designed to help photographers look great, delight their clients, and save valuable time.

If you’re planning to take it the next level for 2010, be sure to check out the BASIC Collections or our gorgeous DREAMY Collection. Each Collection includes products that will help organize your business and take care of the details with one cohesive look to pull it all together. Stop by the Cafe and make 2010 your best year yet!

Now that you’ve seen all that gorgeousness, aren’t you dying to win that gift certificate? It’s going to be an easy one, I know everyone is pretty busy right now with the holidays, so all you need to do is post a comment here by Tuesday at midnight. Just tell us what NON-photography related item you would love to receive under the tree this year and you could win! We will choose a winner randomly on Wednesday.

If you follow my Fresh Sugar blog you will know that I already have had the app for a couple of weeks now. I am what I like to call an “early-adopter” but my husband likes to call a “one-woman solution to the recession”.

I have to say that the idea is so genius that I am kicking myself that I didn’t think of it first. That honor goes to our friend Joy Vertz of Shoot The Moon Photography. She developed the app with two other partners and the site just went live TODAY! Like minutes ago.

The website to get your own app deliciousness is www.prophotoapps.com and you can get most of the info there, but I will give a quick run down here for you impatient folk.

MyDailyPic – A new image pops up every day for each client. I email the client the day that their photo is on there and let them know to download it and check it out. They can then save said image on their phone for their wallpaper. My clients are going bananas over this feature, checking their app everyday!

List your studio specials – When my app launched I had a gift certificate prize for the first 10 app downloaders. I sent them all a $100 gift card (ok, I haven’t yet but I am going to this week, lol) and wowsa, guess what? With the exception of one person – they were all NEW clients! Whee!

One touch access for iPhone app users to call, email you, text you, or go right to your website – One caveat, if you have a flash site – your website won’t actually show up on the iPhone, except for your splash page. But guess what? My favorite website company, BigFolio has developed smallFolio, an iPhone integrated website for your biz!

Automatically integrated with Facebook & Twitter – For those like me who are addicted to all things social networking.

Provide complete info about your studio to iPhone app users – I got to write all sorts of lovely things about myself and have the world at large believe it to be true!

Custom branded – you call the app whatever you want and use your logo – It’s your very own custom iPhone app! – It’s awesome. My little cherry looks so happy next to my Bejewelled app.

As a studio owner – you don’t even need an iPhone. We have a state of art web portal for you to maintain all of your studio information and images – we make this extremely simple and fast for you. – But the bigger question is WHY THE HECK DON’T YOU HAVE AN IPHONE? Don’t say you are a Blackberry person or I will make you go sit with my husband. Danna’s too for that matter.

So there you have it! The scoop, the dealio, the 411. I’ve got a TON of emails from photogs clamouring for their own app since I launched mine, so now you can all stop emailing me and start emailing Joy. Or just go to the site and buy it. Ta da!

Oh, and I suppose you want to go check mine out now, right? Fine then, off you go:Fresh Sugar

The site is Beyond Red and Green and you will think you’ve died and gone to heaven. They only sell to professional photographers, so you know that you are offering your clients unique designs that they can’t get on their own. Another thing that we absolutely love that they do there is allow you to buy one template at a time, instead of the whole set. We can’t tell you how many times we have bought a whole set only to use one or two cards and have the rest go to waste. No more! Yippee! They are actually having a pretty kick-ass sale over there right now on holiday cards – you can mix and match 10 designs from 2008 and 2009 for just $55. What makes it even sweeter is that they are also giving away the entire 2009 collection or a baby announcement set to two lucky Two Photogs readers! Just leave a comment with which set you’d pick if you won and we’ll see if we just can’t make it happen! Winners will be announced on Friday.

Zach over at Photographers SEO Blog and Book agreed to answer some questions for us and all of you. Make sure you read all the way through so you don’t miss the generous gift Zach is offering.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. If they had just called it Google-boost or something I think there would be less confusion. It’s the process of updating (optimizing) your website or blog so that you have a better chance of appearing higher in search engine results. If you update the phrase of your homepage title to include a couple of the keywords you are trying to rank for, that is SEO. If you add your blog link to a couple of blog directories, that is SEO. Pretty easy, huh?

How important is SEO?

I guess that depends how many visitors you want to your website and ultimately how many new clients you want for your business. Some photographers are happy with posting a website or blog and maintaining a business via word of mouth referrals. That is all that will happen if you don’t actively put SEO effort into your site. Your site won’t rank for anything.
If you do some minor SEO work like choose the right keywords and add links back to your site, you can quickly rank for most local search terms.
Google will typically generate 50% or more of your site traffic, and the links you build (called referral traffic) can generate another 25%. That means SEO can multiply your website traffic by 3-4x. For me that is 3-4x more NEW client requests per month and they in turn refer more clients. Search traffic is the starting point for so much business that I can raise my rates 25% or even 50% and still keep the same volume of new client requests. For me SEO is the easiest, cheapest, and most important marketing a photography business can ever do.

Is doing my own SEO hard? I don’t know anything about it

SEO is not hard. An oversimplified Google takes the search text and looks for sites that use the similar or related text. Then it returns the websites that are the most popular (have the most links pointing to them). In concept this is easy to understand and just using quality keywords and getting good links to your site can take you a good distance. There are other considerations that also help like URLs, image names, etc. But a focus on text and linking is a great start and can be done relatively quickly for any type of website.
Since almost 50% of the clicks go to the top 1-2 results, there is a big difference in ranking #1 and #10. The payoff comes in learning the extra little details to boost your position from ten to one and that usually takes a lot of trial and error or online research. Hence why I wrote my book.

What is sandboxing? What causes google to sandbox a site?

If Google is the parent of my website then it would put my new website on timeout (in the sandbox) by not allowing me to rank high for pretty much anything. You might get put in the sandbox for adding a bunch of links on spam sites, purchasing lots of links in a short time frame, or throwing mashed potatoes in your brother’s face. Stay away from link offers that are too good to be true and your site will be fine.

How important are meta tags or keywords to SEO?

How do I choose the best meta tags/keywords for me?
Ask a normal person if they are optimized for search and they will say “Yeah, I’ve updated my meta tags.” Unfortunately, the easy way to optimization was so often exploited that almost all search engines stopped using meta tags in their rankings.
But there are 2 types of meta tags. Meta keywords and meta descriptions. Meta keywords are worth less than… hmm… something not worth anything. They do not help your rank, expose your words to competitors, and too many of them can be seen as spam so I do not use or recommend them on any website. Meta descriptions, however, appear on the search results page. Although they don’t help your page’s rank position, some good marketing text might entice a user to click your link, and therefore it can be important.
I wrote a post on my blog Meta Tag Gems for Photographers that talks about writing the best meta data.

Do blogs help SEO?

Blogs are the Viagra of SEO for websites. Did I answer the question? I think more people are signing up for blogs than Viagra now too. If you are a photographer, then you need a blog ASAP. Blogs are highly valued by Google, quickly appear in results, pre-optimized with links, and the list goes on. It will give you a completely new website that can rank in Google (that means 2 listings and double the traffic). Plus it will help you rank for a lot of niche terms that you would not talk about on your regular website. For example if you write a blog post about a specific wedding venue that you photographed, then your blog post might rank for searches about that venue and brides will be calling you to book their event. Whoa! By the way, WordPress is the best blog system for SEO and Thesis is the best WordPress template for SEO purposes.

My website is built in flash, can I get better SEO with a flash site?

Oops. Not counting the Terminator, machines like Google can’t read Flash. That means all the great text and pages within your Flash site are probably invisible to search. Non-flash sites have a greater chance of success, but Flash sites can still rank very easily by putting text at the bottom of your homepage and building some links to your site.

Why do my site rankings fluctuate so much? One day I will be on page 1 and the next I will be on page 3 then back again? (slight exaggeration :-P )

Actually, I wouldn’t expect that much fluctuation, but ranks do vary from day to day. In one tiny example I posted something on my blog that I added to some social networks including my Twitter page. That day I help the top 7 ranks for one particular term, but later in the week most of them fell off of search. Why? Probably because the text was no longer on the top of those social sites anymore so Google didn’t see it. That is one illustration of how the people ranked below me were affected by new posts and new text that was posted on the Internet for a short time. The best way to maintain a steady rank is to have lots of links pointing to your website.
More important than your rank, is how much traffic you get from the rank. I would rather be ranked #10 for a broad term that gives me 100 new visitors per month than #1 for a very specific thing that nobody searches for and drives no traffic. So don’t get caught up in watching your rankings.
I check mine once per month using a tool called Rank Checker. It’s a Firefox plugin that allows me to save all my key phrases in a list, then click a button to see where I am ranked across the 3 major search engines for each phrase. I also follow which keywords are sending me traffic from my Google Analytics report. If I start getting traffic for “best San Diego photographer” that means I probably rank for it and maybe I will write some more content with “best” at the beginning.

Can you tell us a little about your book and what kind of info it has in it?

Photographers SEO Book gives photographers the best advantage for getting high in Google without the need for technical skill or time to do a lot of online research about SEO. It offers step-by-step instructions that I have followed successfully across pretty much every different photo website system and blog there is. It not only explains Google, but offers cut and paste keyword examples, optimized homepage text, 50+ recommended photographer link locations, Google Analytics setup steps, and lots of tidbits of advice.

Let’s say you spend $100 on your website per year to get 2 new leads per month ($4 per lead). What’s the ROI when you invest $39 one-time on SEO and double that to 4 new leads per month? I said it earlier about myself, but it applies to everyone: the photographers who invest in SEO will get more business and be able to charge higher rates than they did previously.

Thank you SO much Zach!

I now have my own copy of The Photographers SEO Book and I can personally attest to the fact that it is full of quality information and so many awesome ways to help your SEO, and the best part is it is easy to understand and follow for someone like me who is not very tech savvy! :-P

Zach has so generously donated 3 download copies of his book to twophotogs to give away to our readers..how amazing is that??!! Who out there does not want their site to be easier to find?

All you have to do is post your comments (yes, you can enter twice by leaving 2 comments in a random order) below, and maybe leave a little love for Zach to thank him for his time. 3 random winners will be chosen  on Monday next week. If you don’t win, or are super eager to get started on your SEO today head on over to Photographers SEO Book and get a copy.

Good luck!

***UPDATE***
Just wanted to say that this was the FASTEST shipping to Canada I have ever encountered. I ordered everything yesterday morning, and they arrived on my doorstep this afternoon! Love everything I got – I highly recommend Think Geek!
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I bought a ton of things from Think Geek today. Our talented South Carolina photog friend Pam Nafziger wore this AWESOME tshirt while we were all on vacation in September and it made me laugh, so I had to get one too.

While I was picking that up, I saw this t-shirt, so I got this one too! I had to get one for my mom as well, who is completely addicted to Twitter.

Then I picked up this super cute charging station. It charges all your gadgets without showing all the messy-looking cords! I love it, I am always on the search for fun things for my office.

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And lastly, this cool garden camera. I didn’t actually buy it, but I love the idea of making my own Planet Earth video of stills from my blooming flowers. Which I would totally do if I had any blooming flowers. Ever. But anyway, it’s would be pretty neat in the right (green) thumbs.

If you’ve seen anything cool online that would be good for me to share on the blog, send me an email!