The WordPress Photography Podcast
The WordPress Photography Podcast
Episode 24 - Start Slow To Build The Skill w/ Nathan Ellering of CoSchedule







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Nathan ElleringSince joining CoSchedule Nathan immersed himself in growing the startup as a solo marketer with blog posts and social media. Since then, he has helped grow a team that tackles big content marketing challenges. Together, they have improved a strategy that has positioned CoSchedule as a leader in their niche with more than 15,000 users, 100,000 email subscribers, and nearly 1 million monthly page views.

Nathan has published two of Convince and Convert’s top 10 blog posts of 2015, then the #1 content marketing blog in the world according to Content Marketing Institute. He has written for Fast Company, Social Media Examiner, and lots of other awesome marketing blogs. In addition, he is also working toward continuing to improve the standards of performance for their own content at CoSchedule with the goal to become the #1 most actionable content marketing blog on the Internet.

Content marketing is Nathan’s life.

WordPress/Photography Related News:

  • Designing has begun for the next default WordPress theme, 2017.
  • In January, Chrome browsers will begin warning site visitors if a site is not SSL with a warning that says NOT SECURE next to the URL.

Referenced Links:

Where to find Nathan:

Transcription:

Transcription was done by Rev.com

Scott: Welcome to episode 24. My name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz and I'm joined by my co host, Rachel Conley from Photoscribe. Hey, Rachel.

Rachel: Hey, Scott. How are you?

Scott: Good. I got your last name in there because it came up last episode so I was like, "I'm going to get your last name in there too."

Rachel: It was a little name shaming, but now I'm good.

Scott: I'm excited for today's episode and this month is turning into a crazy month, next month's going to be crazy. We're trying to get a couple of episodes in. We got a new episode that's in the queue right now to be published I believe, and then we have today's episode and then the next episode after this is going to be the first snap episode, which I'm excited about, and that's already recorded and ready to go. That's exciting. Then we also have episode 30 coming up sooner than later, which is the next Q&A episode.

Rachel: To clarify our episodes on the 5's are going to be the snap ones, which are short little relevant topics that Scott's going to go over and help dive a little bit deeper into and then our podcasts on the 10's are Q&A, which we need your help as listeners to tell us what you want to learn.

Scott: Exactly. If you want to ask a question it's imagely.com/podcast/queue and you can get in your question for episode 30, but today we've got an awesome quest that i'm really excited for, Nathan Ellering. Since joining CoSchedule Nathan has immersed himself in growing the start up as a solo marketer with blog post and social media. Since then he has helped grow a team that tackles big content marketing challenges. Together they have improved a strategy that has positioned CoSchedule as the leader in their niche with more than 15,000 users, 100,000 e-mail subscribers, and nearly 1 million monthly page views, and Nathan has published 2 of Convincing Converts top 10 blog posts of 2015 and then for that number 1 content marketing vlog in the world according to Content Marketing Institute, and he has written for Fast Company, Social Media Examiner and a lot of other awesome marketing blocks. In addition he is working towards continuing to improve standards of performance for their own content at CoSchedule with the goal to become the number 1 most actionable Content Marketing blog on the internet. As you can tell content marketing is Nathan's life.

I just told Nathan this before we started recording that I think my brother and I were one of the first two customers of CoSchedule and as you know if you've been listening to the podcast since the beginning CoSchedule's come up many times.

Rachel: A lot, yes.

Scott: We are very excited to have Nathan here. Nathan is not a photographer but his mom was.

Nathan : That's true.

Scott: Which we just found out as well. Nathan, welcome. We are so excited to talk to you today on this episode.

Nathan : Thanks, and thanks for the introduction, that was fun.

Scott: Totally. Before we dive into what's going on with you and with CoSchedule we're going to touch on two things of the WordPress photography related news as usual. The first is that WordPress community is working on the next default WordPress theme, this is just a bit of fun news. It's going to be called 2017, just like the previous are based on the previous years and it's looking nice. I actually think it's going to look a lot nicer than the default 2016 theme. I'm excited to see how that progresses.

Rachel: It's funny, Mel Choice, who is the lead designer is one of the co organizers of the word camp Boston and I love her. I'm really excited that she's the lead designer on this.

Scott: I think she's done some other default themes in the past, but I don't think she did 2016, I think she did maybe 2015 or something like that.

Rachel: She's on the automatic design team and she's just a very involved, very wonderful person. I met her through the word camps and again, I can't say enough good things. It's really great to see her be the lead designer on this one.

Scott: The other bit of news, this is actually related to two things regarding SSL or HTPS, whatever you want to call it. In January, Chrome browser, that's January 2017, Chrome browsers will begin warning site visitors if a site is not SSL, and it's not just a little gentle warning, it's going to be a nice big letter warning that says not secure right next to the url. That little lock that's there right now, that tiny little lock, which you can see when you're on an SSL, on non SSL sites that lock will turn into something that just says in big, nice letters not secure. Make sure if you are interested in this to have [inaudible 00:05:18] everywhere, make your site just SSL. It has a couple benefits, one that won't show in Google Chrome. Two, SSL now is a ranking factor for SCO, for search engine optimization, and three, PayPal is actually going to ... I think June 2017, we just learned about this at Imagely, PayPal is going to start requiring SSL even for PayPal standard payments. Start hopping on it.

Rachel: Even if you don't necessary sell your photo's through your website SSL is important to have. It's definitely like Scott said becoming a factor in the SCO, but it can be hard to set up and again, this is where having a good relationship with your website host can be helpful. If you don't already have it and you want to start the process my first step would be to contact your website host and say, "How did I do this?"

Scott: A lot of hosts offer SSL. A lot of them are starting to offer it free and some of them make it extremely easy, some of them make them a little bit more difficult, but either way you should be considering it for your website. Nathan, what's going on in your world in CoSchedule's world?

Nathan : We've got some exciting new projects. We've always got the blog going on but some new things that we're working on right now, as far as content marketing side goes, we're launching a podcast ourselves so it's fun to be here with you guys today, and we're also launching a new video series that we're calling Over Heard at CoSchedule and it's just going to be about the things that we talk about around the office and will be a nice way for us to get some social video out there. It's fun to talk to you guys as photographers because we know that visual content performs really well on social media so we're trying to tap into that idea of motion standing out in busy news feeds.

Scott: Are you going to be doing live streaming and stuff like that?

Nathan : No, not so much. That's something that we've talked a little bit about but what we're doing is slightly more produced. It's like we think about something that we've, a problem that we've solved around the office, whether it's on the marketing team or our customer success team or even our product team, and then we just take that story and record it in video format. It's a little bit more produced. There's a little bit of drawing action in it but it's still very conversational kind of like what we're doing right now.

Rachel: [inaudible 00:07:56] curated content. I want to back it up a little bit and we know what CoSchedule is, we love it, we talk about it, but maybe for our listeners you can explain what it is and the benefits, especially to photographers who are running their own businesses.

Nathan : Definitely. CoSchedule is a project management tool, is what I like to say and everyone has projects that they need to manage and what CoSchedule does really well is it works well for content. If you have a blog that you're using to market your photography business, CoSchedule is a really great way to get organized, and everyone knows if you get organized you start to save time. What you can do is CoSchedule is that it takes the form of an editorial calender so that you can plan your blog posts weeks, months in advance. It solves that blinking cursor problem. If you go to your blog and you're like, "I need to write something today for my photography business," but it's really hard to do because you don't have ideas out there or you're looking at something that's blank slate, CoSchedule can help solve that sort of problem.

Rachel: I love that it's the only social sharing tool that lives in WordPress that works with a calender. I know that, that really, for the people that I speak with, is the biggest factor because you can open up a blog post directly from the calendar and know that it's already going to be scheduled on the day that you want it to be scheduled.

Nathan : Definitely. The WordPress integration that we have was a backbone for a long time. The way that CoSchedule started was a WordPress only tool. We had the WordPress plug in and it was built as an editorial calender to help you manage those blogs. That integration itself for WordPress is probably one of our strongest.

Scott: The fact that you can just literally take a post, even if you have the social schedule attached to that post for when a post is published, it then goes out to here and here and here on a certain date and time and that kind of stuff, but if you just drag the post to a different day all the social stuff goes with it to the corresponding dates and times. It's a beautiful interface, beautifully designed, well thought out and it is a little bit of a learning curve for people who come other platforms. As I've been finding out from people who are moving from Edgar, they're seeing it as a big learning curve, but it's going to grow on you quick because it's a calender.

Nathan : Yes, and I think the difference between us and a tool like Edgar is that we are very content plus social. A lot of the other tools out there they focus on the social message first, whereas we really try to focus on ... You have a blog post and you probably want to share that blog post with your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, whatever, what we try to do is to make it really easy to schedule a social media campaign to promote a piece of content, and that's not something that the other tools do that well. That takes the form of that editorial calender and yes, definitely the drag and drop nature of it is very unique to us.

Scott: Another thing that CoSchedule does regarding content first is the headline analyzer. You have this tool on CoSchedule's website for people to try, but with CoSchedule when you create a new post or a new page you can actually ... It actually scores your headline and tells you how to improve it based on what it's seeing from it, for catchiness, for that kind of thing.

Nathan : That goes into a lot of the way that we build tool. That one's fun. We took a look because CoSchedule started as this WordPress blog editorial calender, we're much more than that now. You don't need WordPress to use us, but at the time we were like what can we do to help people get more social media shares for their content. We analyze about a million headlines from our database, found the blog posts that were getting the most social shares, took those words and built a tool to help people write headlines that would result in the social shares among our top performing content that we'd never seen. That's the headline analyzer.

Rachel: Scott and I obviously love this tool. We can wax poetic about it for hours, but I think that the testament to the product is that you guys do, do testing like that. You've seen what works and you expand upon it. Not only are you creating a product but you're also out there doing content management just like everybody else. I often refer people to your blog when they need education on content marketing. I think not only are you a tool but you're a resource as well. That's your baby, right? You handle all that content marketing?

Nathan : Yes. Thank you for directing people there. I'm really glad that, that's been a resource. I am the content marketing lead at CoSchedule and what we do is provide educational content to help people find an interest in a tool like CoSchedule. What we try to do there is, to your point like if you have a problem with let's just say marketing project management, that might be more team focused but what we try to do is publish the number 1 best post that has ever been written on that topic on our blog so that you can find one answer to that question, you don't have to hop to different articles, and that's what we try to do completely through education, and we think that if we help people do their jobs so well they'll have more of a need for a tool like CoSchedule.

Rachel: How can you translate that into recommendations for photographers? Photographers struggle with blogging, even though they have the beautiful images a lot of them get stuck with the writing, they get stuck with the scheduling, are there some quick pieces of advice that you throw off of the top of your head specific for photographers in content marketing?

Nathan : Yes. I would think first of all, having a blog as a photographer would be a huge marketing play. Having a blog in general makes a lot of since, or at least some sort of hub to be able to showcase your work. That said, if you're having trouble publishing you can't think of it like being a rock star right off the bat, and I mean from that don't hop in thinking you can publish 5 posts a week. Start with one post a month and if you can do that and stick to that plan then do 2 a month, then do 3 a month, then do 4 a month, build up slowly. I think the best way to think about something like that is by thinking about it through classical psychological principles of skill acquisition. There are 3 phases of that and you just have to start and when you start it may not be the best thing in the world but you're going to be able to ship something, and after you ship something then you can improve upon it and remove errors from that process that you just went through, and after that it takes about 100 hours to build a skill and if you can't invest the time into that ... You should be investing the time into it to build s kill, blogging is a skill.

If you think about it that way you'll be fine. Start slow, think about just some sort of consistency, 1 post a month, 2 post a month, and stick to it for a while, when you feel good about it publish some more.

Rachel: I love that. We often talk about having photographers blog once a week at the same day and the same time and then share those at different times on social media. The part of CoSchedule that I love the most is that you can have a blog post go up at the same day and the same time and then CoSchedule can have it go on Facebook, Twitter, the different social medias at what you found to be the best time for that given social media entity. Can you talk a little bit about that feature because the question we get a lot is, is it for photographer target audiences or is it just sort of a generic target audience pool and does that matter?

Nathan : What we're doing right now is talking about a feature that we call best time scheduling, and this is a really fun one for me because it was very content lead to begin with. We started looking at blog comments and someone kept asking us when is the best time to post on Facebook? When is the best time to post on Twitter. We decided to write a blog post on the topic and research the heck out of it, found educational articles out there from other blogs, from other studies, from just all over the internet and what we did, we complied 16 different studies worth of data and picked all of the different best times and shared them in a blog post, and we found that blog post to be super good, I guess. It performed really well. Our audience loved it and we figured if our audience loved that so much and it's a mechanics thing, how hard is it to remember the best time to post on Twitter.

If you want to send 3 tweets a day it's going to be really hard to remember all 3 times, right? We thought if it's a mechanics thing why not build that into a tool directly in Coschedule. That's exactly what we did. We took the data from that blog post and we built a tool so that people who use CoSchedule don't have to remember any of those points, and there's probably about, I don't know, 40 different best times among all the different networks. There's no way you can remember that. That's why we built that right into CoSchedule, and it's very fun for me being the concept marketing lead, we saw our audience asking the question, we published some content, we saw it was successful and then built it into a tool, which has also been extremely helpful for our customers now. That's a fun story for me to tell.

Scott: What I really like about that feature too, is not only can you say the best time but you can actually say, "I want it to be the best time between this time range." You can actually narrow it down. If you're coming out with something or something you only want it announced at a certain time, you can reach the biggest audience at that time frame, in that general time area. Your team overall just did a great job knocking that feature out of the park. I've been using it. The social templates that you can make, the social templates that CoSchedule has is basically you can save the schedule that you want for your social content and reuse that in new blog posts. I have one called best times, and it's literally the days I want my content shared on different social networks also based off of a CoSchedule article on the best days to post, and then I have it using the best times for each of those days for each of the social networks.

I can just create a new post and say, "Use my social template of best times," and then I have a re-share, again it does sort of the same thing, but I set it to start 90 days after the post is public.

Nathan: That's smart.

Scott: I have two, and then I also use the automation. It's great for photographers to be able to now not have to think about that aspect because they need to keep making photographs, keep making money for their business, not having to worry about when to post stuff on Twitter or Facebook, and that one thing, which now has branched out to multiple features in CoSchedule, but that one basic principle of best times that your team is simplifying has now made the photographer's business that much better because they don't have to think about another thing.

Nathan: I think.

Rachel: I think ... Go ahead.

Nathan : I was going to say for photographers too, I assume a lot of times it might be a small team or maybe a solo premiere, what is the value of your time. Doing those sorts of thing like mechanics, like posting all of the time or remembering to re-share things to your point, if you can just automate more you save a lot of time, and if you don't have to think about all the different posts that you need to write or that sort of thing, you can dedicate more time back into actually writing that blog, and to our point earlier, build the skill of actually publishing more often for your blog, which is ultimately probably going to be more beneficial for your business because you'll just have more stuff to share.

Rachel: We were talking about there is a learning curve, but what I like about CoSchedule in WordPress specifically is that not only is there a calender view, but there's also the box. If you're looking at a blog post, you scroll down, hopefully you have the [inaudible 00:22:20] installed because we talk about that all the time, and then below that is also the CoSchedule box. These decisions can be made while you're creating the post in that version, but it can also be made when you are looking at the higher editorial calender view. As a visual person, as most photographers are, you really have the option to, again in WordPress, really look at a different way, and I think that, that is so helpful for the right brained of us, because that's what we do, we focus on visual things all the time.

Nathan: Whatever you can automate, the tedious stuff that you don't like, that's exactly what I'd recommend doing for any blogger.

Rachel: Go ahead, Scott. I just cut you off last time. It's your turn.

Scott: I was just going to say that the automation is just the upfront push. You're still going to be manually replying to anybody who's engaging in that content, but there's no reason why you can't automate and a lot of people are scared of it because they think it's not organic, it's not unique if you're automating content, but again, just remember time is money. Your photography business, the time that you spend in your photography business, on the business itself, is far more important than the time that you spend having to manually post in different places.

Nathan: I think to your point, automation, that word is maybe scary.

Scott: Yes, that's for sure.

Rachel: Is he an office dog?

Nathan: Yes, we have office dogs actually below, which is what I was worried about.

Rachel: We love it. Don't worry; we love it.

Nathan : I told everyone else in the office to be quiet but I can't control that. Back to this point of automation, I think that word is scary but there's two types. There's one where a robot would actually write your stuff and send it out for you and you have absolutely no control. What we're talking about is that you write things and you just put it on a schedule. There's a proven thing about bucketing like tasks together that you can do more at once whether than it spread out. Why not just write 30 social messages at once and have them go out as the best times throughout the next 3 months. That's just social. There's probably a whole bunch more that photographers can do, I don't know if you guys have some tips around that.

Rachel: I think the concern around automation is that world events, the things that happened in Orlando and the things that happened in Paris, interject, and so part of the automation is you do need to be the human behind it and yes you're a solopreneur, and yes you might be doing this content strategy on your own, but automation does not mean set it and forget it. It also means being aware of what's going on in the world and being aware that you may have a tweet scheduled today and maybe today is not the day to talk about happy weddings, today is the day to send your condolences, or to not say anything depending on your brand and your message. I was actually speaking yesterday to a group of photographers in Connecticut about blogging and social media and the question was asked can the tools, like CoSchedule, can they break into the automation, and I thought, "No, I don't think so," but I put that to you. You guys are creating the automation, is there ever a moment like a terrorist attack where you would break that automation by the process or would you send out an e-mail and contact? Are you guys doing any policing like that?

Nathan : That's funny, I just wrote or co-wrote a post for SCM Rush on that exact topic, specifically because we are a social media scheduling tool and my advice that I had given was we can't control something like that because what is a crisis for somebody somewhere may not be for another person. I gave the example like if a terrorist bombed a museum it would make sense for a museum on the other side of the world to maybe send their condolences, but it does not make sense for the mechanic in Fargo, North Dakota to do anything like that. What a crisis is for a specific company may not be for another company. We can't control that but it does go back to your point where it's there is a human nature behind it and you have to use your best judgement as a person and just to tie that back to CoSchedule a little bit, because that's what we've been talking about a lot today, let's say you can easily look at your calender today, see all of your social messages and easily just drag and drop them to a different date. That's something you can do in 30 seconds, literally. We make it really easy to do that.

Scott: Has CoSchedule considered an emergency paused button?

Nathan : That's an interesting request. To pause all messages with the click of a button, no we have not ... That's the first I've actually heard of that one.

Scott: You heard it here first.

Nathan: I'll write it down after this.

Rachel: I think that's the fear in automation. That's the feedback that I get from photographers who are out there who are blogging. Tamara Lackey is a great example. She's a very world renowned photographer, we've interviewed her on the podcast and we've asked her for these tools and her answer is, "I don't use them because I don't want to lose that human element," but at the same time she's out shooting, she's out speaking so her time is absolutely at a premium, and with these tools getting stronger it allows her and others to be able to have the time versus content benefit, because the things that I tell photographers it here are companies that have full jobs devoted to just social media. How do you, as a photographer when you're running every aspect of your business compete, and that's where the tools are vital.

Scott: Let's dig into some content marketing a little bit. Do you want to talk ... My voice just cracked a little bit. That was awesome. Do you want to ... Great for a podcast. Do you want to talk a little bit about what content marketing is and then maybe let's brainstorm how a wedding photographer can do some content marketing.

Nathan : Yes, definitely. Content marketing is providing helpful content that your audience wants and seeks out on their own without you necessarily pushing it on them. That's one of the best ways that I can say. A lot of times content marketing takes the form of educational content. Think about someone who wants to learn how to do something. That's where all these how to articles come into play. If you can teach someone how to do something that's in our audience base, that's content marketing a lot of times. Other times it can be fun. There are tools out there that just exist just to help people have some fun. The headline analyzer could be one of those ... I guess it's also helpful because the outcome is you get a headline that should increase your shares, but there are a lot of tools or games, gamification, that sort of thing, and basically content marketing is a way to reach your audience in a way that's not just hype, but in a way that's helpful, and that's a term from Jay Bear, who's the president at Convince and Convert, content marketing as about help not hype.

Rachel: Yes, that's really good.

Nathan : I think that a wedding photographer could definitely do some of this with the easiest way likely through a blog. I'm thinking about their target audience as in obviously newly engaged people. What do they actually want to see so that they can make a decision to buy your services, and I think it boils down to honestly something that would be really easy to do would be to show them your past work. It's probably a lot to do with your past packages. I think a lot ... Are you that modern, hip? Do you do that or are you a more classically trained wedding photographer, I don't know, but what I'm trying to say is use your blog to somehow show your unique style and that's likely what an audience like that would want to know. I think a word only blog would not work for you. I think that image galleries are a lot more important. NextGEN, right?

Scott: Exactly. One content marketing campaign that I would say wedding photographers should do, and I've thought this to many wedding photographers already but let's say you have 10 articles that you have. You drafted 10 articles, 1 that is about your recommended local florist for weddings, and then other is your local recommended venues for weddings, and then your local recommended suit rental, tux rental companies and then gown companies and so on, and so on, your DJ's and banks and whatnot. You have all these different articles that are talking about one thing and you schedule these over time, but at the bottom of each article is a call to action to say, "Download my wedding guide for Fargo, North Dakota," and in that wedding guide all you're doing is rounding up all of those articles in 1 pdf. A beautiful pdf with your photographs and your recommendations and you're actually asking for an e-mail address in exchange for that document.

People can get it for free without giving you anything on your blog, or they can give an e-mail address, get it all at once, and they can print it out on their home printer beautifully and now you have an e-mail address that you can then re-market to do some soft sales and some hard sales eventually and whatnot. To me, that's the ideal wedding photographer campaign.

Nathan : That's brilliant by the way. That's super smart. What are they going to search for, a newly engaged couple? They're going to start looking for DJ's. What are they going to search for? DJ's in Fargo, North Dakota. If you can own that result ... Then they're going to search for wedding photographers in Fargo, North Dakota, if you can own that result and you talk about do a huge list, put your competition on there but just trust that you're going to be better than them. That's what you need to do.

Scott: There's another advantage of doing this recommended vendors is that you can then partner with a wedding venue and if you're promoting them in exchange they're going to wind up promoting you. There's multiple benefits to it.

Rachel: I think this is a larger content marketing strategy. I love what Nathan said though about blogging each of your weddings because ... Again, this can apply to portraits, this can apply to landscapes because the other thing that brides specifically, and moms in a lot of cases are looking for, it is location specific. Here in Boston we have a venue called a state room. You can do a blog post on the State Room Boston, and then you can change that target keyword to wedding at State Room. One location, depending on how many weddings you shoot there, can told a bevy of blog posts and keywords, and then when you mix in what Scott said every 6 or say every 4 to 6 blog posts is those targeted content marketing strategy ones mixed in with your actual real weddings, that's where photographers get so overwhelmed about creating content, but if you think about it there's 52 weeks in year, if you take out the holiday's there's 50. If you shoot 30 weddings and 15 engagements, 15 of these marketing venue series, you hit 50 weeks right away.

That's what people say, "I never have enough content." You do, it's just planning it out, it's creating that editorial calender, which again, is like CoSchedule is so helpful in terms of having the editorial calender in where you're working.

Scott: Another thing you can do with if you want to just focus on a wedding venue is you can do the ultimate guide to the State House in Boston.

Nathan: I was just going to say that. That seems really smart because you not only are going to own that result as a photographer but you are showing everybody that you are the master at this venue.

Scott: You can do blog content that is talking about a 80's theme wedding and a disco wedding, a green color themed wedding. You can do all these different themes from the weddings or the best band to play the State House at your State House wedding. There's so much content you can do just around one venue. It's just amazing. Content marketing, it's a brilliant thing.

Rachel: It's a real thing, but it's a lot of work. That's the other thing that we're trying to say is there are companies out there that have teams of people devoted to just doing content. What is the easiest and the most return on your investment as a photographer when you're shooting and editing and living life and having a family and blogging gin the middle of it. I think that's where the fear comes in and the apprehension about anything to do with content marketing blogging, but fortunately there are these tools and if you use them to ... You don't even really have to use it to the fullest advantage. WordPress plus CoSchedule makes it so easy to do all this in one place that you may not be using it to it's 100%, but you don't necessarily have to do get done what you need to get done. We've talked a lot about CoSchedule and WordPress but I wanted to move into are there other things in WordPress specifically that you would recommend for photographers because you guys obviously have a strong WordPress background?

Nathan: Yes. Something that we do ... I have a friend, Dustin Stout at [crosstalk 00:37:45] yes. I don't know if you guys have talked to him.

Scott: No, I haven't talked to him yet, but that plug in's definitely come up a bunch.

Nathan : I think that, that would definitely. I'm actually remembering a conversation that we had I think two weeks ago where he talked about he's been using his plug in to increase his traffic from Pinterest, and I think for [crosstalk 00:38:10] Pinterest is huge.

Rachel: Huge, yes.

Nathan : Think about wedding photography's, I think a lot of people go to Pinterest first almost to find ideas, and what if you could publish ... Here's more content, publish blog post about wedding theme ideas and then make some longer images or compilations that will perform well on Pinterest and then make sure that people can share those out.

Scott: Let's dig in Pinterest and CoSchedule for a second because I think it's important for photographers to know that with CoSchedule by default the image that's going to be shared on social network, whether it's Pinterest or elsewhere is whatever you set as the featured image.

Nathan: That's right.

Scott: You can replace that image manually. Let's say you do a post that's about a wedding and you got five photo's in that post. You can have that post shared on Pinterest five times and in each one have it use a different image, and not have it go all at once of course, have it go a week here, a week there, a week there at the best possible times, replacing the image for each one so it's always different and it's always going to catch someone's attention who's more interested in blue versus orange, versus green, versus whatever.

Rachel: What was the plug that you were not talking not CoSchedule?

Nathan : Not CoSchedule I was talking about social warfare, or Warfare Plug In's is the actual name of the name, but the plug in itself, social warfare should be ... That's one where let's say you publish that blog post that has 4 or 5 longer images that you could consider pin worthy, that will help your readers that are on your blog pin those. If you think about someone who is doing wedding research they probably have a board for their wedding..

Rachel: Or a folder.

Nathan: Why not give them the content on your blog that is pinnable? Make it easy for them to pin; social warfare would be a really good way to do that.

Rachel: That's some kind of a two-prong approach. You can schedule your post to go to Pinterest through CoSchedule, correct?

Nathan: Yes.

Rachel: That's you sharing it on Pinterest through whatever board that you've chosen for your business and then social warfare allows your readers to share it on their board, it's just getting more content. I think you mentioned when you scroll over the image there's a way for the social media sharing bar to pop up. It has different styling features. That really is the ultimate social media strategy where you're scheduling it to go out through CoSchedule and then giving the tools to your readers to schedule through theirs as well.

Nathan : I think the last part of the ultimate strategy you would if you could one more tool just to monitor what people are sharing, just to listen to their conversation, because if you see that someone is sharing your stuff and they have grabbed a bunch of your stuff maybe it's time for you to just reach out and say, "If you have any questions about wedding photography let me know."

Rachel: What tool do you recommend for that? Do you have a tool?

Nathan: Yes, we use mention here at CoSchedule. Mention's a little bit robust, but we get lots and lots of shares everyday, but there are other tools that do that sort of thing.

Rachel: I use Lead In. Have you guys ever heard of that? It's in Hub Spot.

Nathan: Yes, it's Hub Spot.

Rachel: It's if they input anything on any kind of form it tells you how they got there. It will tell them what blog post they came in at and then who they are because that way you can reach out and say, "Hey, I saw you liked this," it's a little stalkery, but we're running businesses.

Nathan: Exactly. If it's a lead, it's a lead.

Scott: I will say that with social warfare it gives you a little bit of a mention aspect because you can put in your Twitter handle and you can put in your Pinterest handle and when somebody does pin or tweet you're getting alerted that you are mentioned, unless they edit it because they can edit it. That's the poor man's way, but again, they can edit. Mention is a great service. I don't use that currently but I have used it in the past.

Rachel: We should mention CoSchedule is a paid plug in. Are these other plug in's, social warfare ... Obviously we think it's worth every penny plus, but there are people and photographers out there looking only for free plug in's, but in this situation you got to pay the money guys.

Scott: It's an investment.

Nathan : I'm not sure if social warfare is a paid plug in. I know Mention is a paid tool, I don't believe it's actually a WordPress plug in. To your point on paying, I think it's the value of your time. How much is your time worth compared to the few bucks that you'd spend on a tool that could save you that time?

Scott: Social warfare has a free version, it's quite limited compared to their paid version. The paid version, it's not that expensive, I think it's like $39. The paid version is well worth it, just stop buying coffee and breakfast for a couple of weeks and you've covered social warfare.

Rachel: Again, this just brings into that larger conversation, the reason that these plug in's are premium plug in's is because they have the functionality to save you time and make you money in your business. You can quantify those leads and turning into bookings and these tools are the things that help you get there.

Nathan: If you book one package because you use social warfare, I'm sure you're making more than $39.

Scott: Yes.

Rachel: One would hope.

Scott: I hope so. If you're charging less than $39 for a photography session, something else is up.

Rachel: There's a bigger conversation.

Scott: Actually next week on my own blog I have an article, I think it's called ... Actually I got to pull it up because I got to double check, but I think it's actually called "This Photo is worth $7,480" or something like that. It is called ... I'm actually loading up CoSchedule. Here it goes.

Rachel: I think pricing is the second most asked question other than websites, right?

Scott: Yes. The article is called, "This Photograph is Not Free, It's $10,695". I'm going to be talking about why a photograph ... If somebody wants to pay me, $100 for a job and I turn them down, and they wonder why.

Nathan: That's a great headline by the way. I'm jealous over here.

Rachel: We should headlines with numbers always do better, the top 5 things, ten thousand dollars, it's just amazing how quickly those numbers translate to people.

Nathan: I've done a lot of research on that and headlines with numbers, whether it's a percent or dollars like that or just lists, they always do better.

Scott: According to the CoSchedule headline analyzer the headline, "This Photograph is Not free, It's $10,695" gets a B+ or a 68 score out of 100. That's pretty good.

Nathan: A 68 is good.

Rachel: Awesome. Is there anything else you guys want to chat on relating to photography, CoSchedule, and WordPress?

Scott: I think we covered a pretty good amount. I think that we gave photographers a pretty good incentive to invest in tools, whether it's CoSchedule or someone else, tools to.

Rachel: There are other tools out there.

Scott: Whether it's content marketing or social media or outsource blogging, whatever it is, you have an incentive to outsource and to pay for services that will make your job easier. This has been an ongoing trend in the whole podcast. When we talked to Jared Bauman from shoot dot edit we talked about outsourcing something like post processing that every photographer does, it's the same thing. If it's going to make your job easier as a photographer and a business owner and get you out there making more photographs and getting in more clients then do the outsourcing and get these services if you can fit it into your budget, and hopefully if you are getting it into your budget you're making more money. It pays for itself. I think we gave everybody's who's listening a pretty good incentive to do so, beyond just CoSchedule in general, just overall.

Rachel: Nathan, where can we find you on the web?

Nathan: You can find me at coschedule.com, and our blog is coschedule.com/blog. If you want some tips on just marketing and general, I promise they're not pushy. Our blog posts are dedicated to helping you learn this stuff. Definitely, check it out.

Scott: Awesome. Thank you, Nathan, for us joining us today. Thank you, Rachel, for being an awesome cco-host

Rachel: Thank you, Scott.

Scott: You can find the show notes from today's episode at imagely.com/podcast/24.

Rachel: 24. I won't be here for 25. That will be Scott and it will be a short snippet. Hopefully that will be good for you to absorb whatever you need to absorb, and then again, if you have questions for us please send them in. We are looking forward to episode #30 being our next Q&A episode.

Scott: It's possible that won't ... Depending on when we schedule that I might be just back from Canada Photo Convention talking about image SEO. We might be talking about that a little bit.

Rachel: Awesome. I love it.

Scott: Until next time.

Rachel: See you later.

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