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Scott: Welcome to episode 28. My name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz , and I'm joined by my host Rachel Conley from FotoSkribe. Hi Rachel.

Rachel: Hi Scott, how are you?

Scott: I'm doing well. Last episode was a fun one and I'm really excited to dive into today's episode because we have somebody that I've known for many years on the show and somebody I've respected for many years and happy to call my friend. Somebody that you and I have been working with for some cool stuff here in Connecticut. There should be a lot of cool stuff to talk about, plus there is a lot of news today.

Rachel: I know.

Scott: A lot of news. Today we have Seshu. He is a father, a husband, a photographer and a blogger based in Avon Connecticut. After working at espn.com as a photo editor and assistant director of communications for a prep school in connecticut, Seshu returned to his photographic route to create striking but natural portraits of people from all walks of life. As a blogger, Seshu's Tiffinbox is a labor of love. If you haven't heard of Tiffinbox you'll learn more about it today. It is a fantastic resource for photographers on the internet. Seshu seeks to inspire photographers to fearlessly cross the bridge between craft and commerce to ultimately create a sustainable and creative photography business. Welcome to the show Seshu, we are very happy to have you.

Seshu: Thank you so much for the great introduction. I appreciate it man. It's great to be here.

Scott: Totally.

Rachel: We are very glad to have you. Tiffinbox is definitely a resource that I've gone to many, many times. I'm excited to share with our listeners and then talk about things WordPress and others.

Scott: Before we dig into photography, I just wanted to share, a little backstory on my relationship with Seshu. I've known him for, I don't even know how many years at this point. We met on probably Twitter many years ago if I'm not ...

Seshu: I think you were stalking me yes.

Scott: Yeah, i might have been stalking you on Twitter, I don't know.

Seshu: That's the story yes, or I was stalking you. I don't know.

Scott: Seshu was on my list of photographers that I would want to photograph my wedding. If you haven't seen any of Seshu's wedding photographs you need to check them out. I would say, do you still mostly, the weddings that you still do, do you still mostly do Indian weddings or they are a mixture now?

Seshu: I consider them multicultural weddings. Invariably either the husband or the wife or the bridegroom, whoever, they are from different walks of life. They are not from the same culture. They are usually from different cultures. That usually excites more than anything else.

Scott: The photographs are always so vibrant, so much fun, and that attracted me to his work instantly. I decided that when I was eventually getting married I would want Seshu to photograph it. My wife and I got married in Mexico. We could not afford to bring a photographer with us. Instead of hiring Seshu to photograph the wedding, Seshu did our engagement photos. We went up to Connecticut and spent a weekend there and he photographed us. I was very happy to be able to have somebody that I enjoyed their work to actually hire that person.

Seshu: There you go.

Rachel: I never knew that. I love that. That's awesome. Seshu and I met at Inspire which is a conference, here in the Northeast for photographers, many years ago when it first started. We have sort of grown, I've grown FotoSkribe, and you've grown Tiffinbox along the same trajectory for sure. It's been interesting to watch businesses grow and people grow.

Seshu: I think it's important to state that I've learned from both of you over the years. That's the beauty about all of this is that yes, you may have liked my photography Scott, but every time I look at a resource for WordPress, I'm looking at you. You are my speed dial, I told you that before. Rachel, blogging is such an important part of my life, I look at you and everything that you've done on FotoSkribe, amazing, truly amazing. You haven't done this just for yourself, you have helped many photographers really advance their business in a way that they would have never thought of. Think of it, when I came into the photography business, honestly I remember. I won't mention the name of the photographers but they were telling me, they were spending something like, $5,000-6,000 for ads space in magazines.

Again, I won't mention the magazines either, but it would, it boggled my mind. I was like, "Why are they doing this? There is no way they are tracking any of that stuff? There is no way of knowing how many people are looking at that ad and then calling you and saying, "Hi, I saw you on this magazine, and that's why I'm calling you."" Blogging can do that, and that's why I have a huge amount of respect for both of you for doing what you do. It's a really, it's like a one, two punch on both sides, right?

Rachel: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Seshu: You teach about WordPress, you teach about blogging. Its a great fit.

Rachel: Think of five years ago, ten years ago, those magazines were so much more relevant than they are now, just because of how we consume media. To be a photographer you have to learn the craft, and then you have to keep up with all this other stuff which is so hard because it's constantly changing. We should go right into the WordPress news on that note because we have some big changes.

Scott: Yeah, there is a lot of stuff. Usually we have about like two or three things of news, today we've got I think six or so. The first one is, there is a beta plugin currently in testing, and I've been playing with this, it's in consideration for WordPress version 5.0. This plugin enables frontend editing, tongue twister, similar to medium.com. If you've ever used mediun.com which is a Twitter company, you could basically go to a page or a post that you've made and click edit and the edit right in the front without going to a backend interface.

This plugin which we'll link to in the show notes requires certain things like the REST API. Sorry, that's very advanced but it's another plugin that's not yet fully included in WordPress core but they are slowly bringing it into WordPress core. It requires that and it requires a beta of WordPress, not the current WordPress, in order for that to be used. There is a possibility for being included in WordPress 5.0 which would be brilliant because it would be beautiful, very quick and easy to edit any post or page content from anywhere on the frontend.

Rachel: What level of knowledge of WordPress do you think you have to use for it? It doesn't seem like a beginner thing to me.

Scott: Here is the cool part. You know on the frontend of WordPress normally where you are logged, you've got the admin bar at the top?

Rachel: Right.

Scott: Right now, if you hit edit, while you are on a post, if you hit edit it goes to the backend to the edit post, right? With this plugin installed, when you hit edit you can just edit right inline, it doesn't go anywhere.

Rachel: No, I understand the theory of it, but like installing it and making it work.

Scott: Right now, I would not recommend for any novice to try it, because it's, first of all still beta, I wouldn't use that on a live site. Two, it requires two other things. It requires that plugin, plus the REST API plugin, plus the WordPress beta. I would not recommend anybody to, any novice to try it. I will just say, it's beautiful, it's still kind of buggy, it still needs a lot of work, but it's beautiful and if they do adopt it in the WordPress 5.0, I will be so happy.

Rachel: Definitely [crosstalk 00:07:45].

Seshu: I have a question for you guys. Is this adoption, is that going to be something that comes only because of all of us start pushing WordPress to say, "Hi, you've got to put this in there, because it's going to make our lives easier?"

Scott: Yes and no, basically, the way that WordPress core development works is, people who see a need for something WordPress can develop what they call a, I think they call it like a core plugin which basically is a plugin intended to go on WordPress core. Then, the people who are in charge of that next version of WordPress, because that gets rotated at every version, they actually vote on which will be included. They have meetings to discuss it and then it goes out to be beta tested, which this one is right now. Literally anybody can install it but, it's just a matter of I guess the influencers for that version of WordPress to want to make it happen.

Rachel: They have a really good team structure for each. You would think WordPress 5.0 would be a huge jam.

Scott: It should be.

Rachel: But they really try, each, like 4.7 it has significant increases, 4.8 will have significant increases. They don't only do it on the .0s, they are really good about rotating it through. They try to do two to three updates a year, which is a really rigorous schedule to be on especially on opensource which means anybody can contribute.

Scott: 5.0 should be a pretty significant release because typically the big 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. The big .0s releases usually have some sort of significant change. By the looks of it, 5.0 might be a user interface thing because again one of the biggest complaints to WordPress is it's not as pretty as Square.

Rachel: For sure.

Scott: My guess based on the betas and what's happening right now in WordPress, my guess is 5.0 will be a big user interface improvement.

Rachel: We'll keep an eye on it.

Seshu: To the point that one of the webinar attendees mentioned just a couple of days ago, Scott and I were on a webinar and one of the attendees said, "For a photographer who has no knowledge of coding, how crazy is WordPress?" I think what Scott and I said, it's not that crazy, you just have to get used to the user interface."

Scott: Interface.

Seshu: And this sounds like it might just make it even easier for people like her. That's great.

Rachel: You'd think WordPress is aware of it and that's what they are trying to do, that's where they are trying to go.

Scott: The next bit of news, WordCamp US, the big WordCamp. There is WordCamps pretty much every week all around the work. Once a year is the WordCamp US. It used to be called WordCamp San Francisco. Last year it was Philadelphia because last year was the first year they switched it from WordCamp San Francisco to WordCamp US. This is the one where Matt Mullenweg does his big official State of The Word Keynote. What they did decide to do is WordCamp US will be in the same location for two years and then rotate. This year will be the second year in Philadelphia. I will be there, I know a coworker of mine will be there. I hope others will be there. It's going to be a really fun WordCamp.

Next year it will be in a new location though. Before I get that, if you haven't purchased a ticket for WordCamp Philly you still can, and they are also selling livestreaming tickets. If you can't actually make it to Philly, you can stream the sessions if you really want to that way.

Rachel: Which I recommend. I did that last year and I got the t-shirts. I felt like, I wasn't there, but I was as close to being as you could get.

Scott: This episode of the podcast is actually going to be live on Thanksgiving here in the United States. Next Thursday, one week from today.

Rachel: When is the WordCamp?

Scott: WordCamp is December 2nd. Tickets might be a little bit tighter at that point. I think the livestreaming, I don't think they have a cap on it.

Rachel: I don't think so.

Scott: You better do that. Speaking of WordCamp US, next year, they just announced, 2017-2018 will be held in Nashville. I would like to attend that. We'll see what happens.

Rachel: That would be awesome.

Scott: That would be awesome.

Rachel: Isn't Imaging in Nashville normally too?

Scott: Yeah, I think it's in Nashville this year, Imaging. The photo conference.

Rachel: And they have been in the past. It's a good place to have a conference is what I hear.

Scott: Yeah.

Seshu: It's a good party town but it's also known for its technology. It's really a good make up.

Rachel: And music, it's very well known for music.

Seshu: Music, absolutely.

Scott: The last two bits of news are kind of related. One is, WordPress 4.7 is around the corner. Right now, 4.7 beta 4 is out, which means the first RC version will be out very soon. Basically its a release candidate, it's post-beta, this is going to be a final release where they fine tune and more people will wind up using it and find more bugs. They usually do a release candidate in 1, 2, and 3 or so, depending on bug finds, and then it gets released. Expect WordPress 4.7 very soon. There is not any major changes except for the next bit of news that I think is super important for photographers to know.

This will be a good conversation. WordPress 4.7 is removing auto-generation of alt text when you use the media library. Currently, if you upload a photo that you did a title or a caption inside of light room and you upload that into WordPress, right now, pre-WordPress 4.7, it will automatically fill in the alt text for SEO purposes, for that image, based on either the title or description or caption of whatever is included in the metadata that WordPress can see.

Rachel: For photographers this was a good thing because you could rename your images to include the keywords like wedding at Boston and then the name of your photography company and then those keywords would automatically go up into the alt text to be used positively for SEO without you having to do those extra steps.

Scott: There is some positives and negatives to this. The positive is that screen readers for people who need the computer screen to be read to them, somebody who is blind for example.

Rachel: With a disability.

Scott: With a disability, the screen reader would all the text in the page and then read the image. The image, which might have an automated, alt text generation. If all it is a keyword.

Rachel: It doesn't tell you what it is.

Scott: It doesn't tell you what it is.

Rachel: Which is what the alt text was built for.

Scott: Correct.

Rachel: The change is good for what the alt text is built for not so good for the SEO purposes that it's been pulled into using by Google, and what we as photographers rely so heavily on.

Scott: Correct. The downside is, I said 4.7 it will not automatically fill in, and if you are not paying attention and just inserting the image, your image would have no alt text.

Seshu: You know what? This is really interesting to me because you know this, I have a couple of Squarespace sites as well, and we have the same sort of issues going on at Squarespace. It's interesting how WordPress is going in this direction though. I don't know, I'm a little on the fence about this. I like the idea of having to manually add my own keywords into the alt text space but if it's once and done, I think most people will like it. Would it have been easier and simpler a path to just tell people how to do or how to use alt text tags rather than to do this kind of sort of going around thing?

Scott: Yeah, there is two solutions or a few solutions to this. One is, learn about alt text. Learn about the importance of it. As somebody, as a website owner, as a photographer who has a website, you need to learn about alt text. It is extremely important and yes you want a keyword in there but you also want it to be accessible.

Rachel: I agree with that and I think the owners isn't necessarily on us as business owners or photographers as business owners but why is Google pulling that and using it for SEO when the original purposes is truly for screen readers and for people with disability? I think the system is broken. You want to raise higher for SEO and you want to be, and so we are learning all these tips and tricks. In the conversation between Squarespace and WordPress, this was a big boon for WordPress in terms of photographers who are like I said, just have a thousand things on their plates. It's one last thing they have to do, where in Squarespace you did have to manually update it. Now you have to manually update it in WordPress. I really have mixed feelings about it because it's just one last thing that photographers had to do and now you have to do it.

Scott: I will say that there is a plugin, there is a few plugins out there that are made for image SEO. I had to come up with, think of the name, I think it's just SEO image optimizer or something like that. My guess is that plugin will be updated to bring that feature back, to order generate. That's my guess because right now its purpose, the purpose of that plugin is to crawl your site for a missing alts and to fill it in based on the file name or metadata that's there. My guess is it will do just that. It will bring it back.

Seshu: What's the name of that plugin?

Scott: I have to double check, I think it's SEO image optimizer. I'm going to look, if you guys want to keep talking, I'll see if I can find the name of it.

Rachel: Yoast has the ability too, as part of the Yoast diagnosis of any particular post that you have it on, it will search image and alt text. The functionality is there but it was just, when you are talking a photographer who is overwhelmed by this technology, it was just one last thing like, keyword it before you upload it. Upload it, it automatically gets put into alt tags.

Scott: SEO Friendly Images. It's made by a Vladimir who also makes ManageWP, or used to, I guess he still does. Godaddy just acquired them, which we shared. It has two hundred thousand active users. Its job is to automatically add alt and text attributes to added images.

Rachel: You are right. Maybe that's where we are pushing people, it's not in core anymore, which again I understand what the alt text is built for. For a person with disabilities, it really helps them to have an internet viewing experience. Those are all good things but why is Google pulling from it? Obviously these are questions we can't answer. That's my cell box, I'll get off.

Scott: Just to make sure, if you are a photographer you either, if you are a photographer with a website, which you are listening to this, hopefully you are, or you are building, either install that plugin once you update WordPress 4.7 or start manually creating your alt tags, because ...

Rachel: Just be aware of it.

Scott: Be aware of it, or just get into the habit. It's going to import the title most likely. Making it a habit, just copy, paste and title to alt, when you enter an image. It could be as simple as that.

Rachel: If you have a Scoresquare site, you should be doing the same thing there anyway. The Squarespace site strips the title totally. You still have a benefit with WordPress in that the title will come up. Squarespace changes it to what Scott? Like static.1. some very strange random image names.

Seshu: It's a string of numbers.

Rachel: Yeah, it's not good.

Seshu: Numbers, I think.

Rachel: At least WordPress still pulls in the title, with Squarespace you have to touch it, you have to change the alt tag because the title doesn't come in. If we are comparing Squarespace to WordPress, I still think WordPress has the advantage of it in this situation for photographers with image names.

Scott: There is also the advantage of being able to install one plugin, and fix it all.

Rachel: Which you can't do with Squarespace, you have to manually do it, for sure.

Seshu: I have a question for you guys though. You guys have mentioned Google and alt tag, I think somewhat important. As of Google looks at all tags and ranks your sites. Am I mistaken, is that an important attribute to look at for a photographer?

Scott: Yeah, SEO-wise, one of the components of image SEO is alt text, with your keyword in it. You want it to be a descriptive keyword of the photo but to also have the keyword that you want that image to rank well for.

Seshu: I get that but I'm trying to figure out, in terms of how a page is ranked, in terms of importance, how important is an alt tag? If there is no alt tag for an image, is that going to degrade your rank?

Scott: You won't rank.

Rachel: We don't know, because Google changes things all the time.

Scott: Yeah, they do change things all the time, but there is a few things that are a must haves and you won't rank if you don't have these must haves. What these must haves, the percentage of importance is unknown. You could have these must haves but still not rank, but you are guaranteed to not rank if you don't have these must haves.

Rachel: It makes sense why Google is pulling the alt text, right? Because it is a text based representation of the image. To rank in the Google image search is they pull very heavily from the alt text because you can't search an image. I'm sure they'll figure it out some day. I get why they do it but that's not the purpose of why the alt text was created. This is the fundamental conflict that we are having. It affects photographers more than plumbers because your business is photography. Your business is those images.

Scott: Yeah, totally.

Rachel: Beat a dead horse.

Seshu: I think one last point of that is, you just said it. I think it's even more important for photographers to not rely on just photographs on their blog or their website, write. People should be writing text. Really, stories about their weddings or their photo sessions or whatever it is. This is an opportunity to sort of remind people that writing is key.

Rachel: Three hundred words is the minimum. Three hundred words aren't hard per se. It's only like two paragraphs really if you think about it.

Seshu: I think Scott showed us a slide, it was three paragraphs. You are not that far off really.

Scott: It depends on how big your paragraph is.

Rachel: It depends on if you have a beginning, middle, and end. I agree with the three thing but if you are just writing for words and not writing a story based which I strongly believe in. These are the relevant topic that we could dive deep into or skin the surface. This is how photography businesses are represented online nowadays. Whether you choose WordPress, which obviously we prefer because of the functionality and the customization parts, or Squarespace which is easier to use, for sure. There is a benefit to both. Then there is a thousand other options that we don't even talk about because there are so many variables that this conversation to us, it really is WordPress versus Squarespace. Knowing what both of those technologies can do and where your own personal strengths are.

Coding makes you cry, to the point where opening of WordPress is something that you just can't do. In 5.0 you may not need to open it. You may just need to have the frontend loader come in, editor, which would be great. You still know need to know about these alt texts and how you are naming it. You need to know about that even if you are using Squarespace as an easier platform to use. There are still some tweaks and functionality issues that you have to know about as a photographer there too.

Scott: Seshu, let's talk about what's going on with you.

Rachel: I know, that's what I wanted to go, what's going on with you?

Seshu: Let's see, on the photography front, I've been busy with photographing prep schools here in New England, working with an all boy school to stand in the road actually and doing a lot of work for them. Then there is families. I love photographing families and there are so many amazing families to discover right here in my own backyard. I don't have to go very far. I have to just get out there and make photographs of the kids and the parents interacting with each other. I love that.

Bringing this all back to WordPress, I've been sort of dreaming of a new version of Tiffinbox, a new design actually and because it was custom designed, I'm going to have to probably go that direction again. I say that with real joy because I think I do want Tiffinbox to be more than just what it is right now and one of the few people who I will consult happens to be on the show right now. It works out really nicely.

Rachel: Scott is my go to too.

Seshu: The cool thing is also, Scott's invited or asked whether I'd be interested in hosting my site with Imagely and I think it's going to happen too. The new year is full of great amazing things happening, and I'm looking forward to it.

Rachel: What was your decision? You are currently on Squarespace for some of your sites?

Seshu: Yeah.

Rachel: You are having the conversation of WordPress, what are the factors for you as a photographer, as a blogger, to consider when you are thinking of those things, because I think they'll be relevant for anyone let's say.

Seshu: I think so, I think the big draw was of course not wanting to mess with plugins and not wanting to just, I wanted to just post photographs, bring people in, have them look at it, and have a neat clean, little form that says, "Book a session with me," or something like that. It's easier to do, it is easier to do on Squarespace. It doesn't really take a whole lot of time. WordPress is definitely bringing me back to reality in that I want it to be more SEO friendly and we all, we have already talked about it. Squarespace is not as SEO friendly as WordPress sites are.

I want to make sure that more people find out about my works, see my work. I'm starting to write more as well. I love the interface. Even though we have talked about how crazy and ugly perhaps the WordPress interface is, I like it. I have a great time in the editing section. I love really, I enjoy the writing process. A lot of people will write in word, blocks of word and then copy and paste into word. I've never done that actually, I've just gone right to WordPress.

Rachel: You don't want do do that, because there is formatting things that come on.

Seshu: You probably know it too.

Rachel: Don't do that.

Seshu: The formatting issues would drive me crazy. It's always that idea that we can do better, and if the technology is moving in that direction why not embrace it?

Scott: Tiffinbox, why don't you share what Tiffinbox is and then we can dive into stuff that, you paid to have Tiffinbox designed?

Seshu: Yes.

Scott: Actually, I was going to say, recently but it's what? It's been like two years now or something like that.

Seshu: More than that, it's been longer than that.

Scott: Share what Tiffinbox is and then we'll talk about some of the custom stuff that you outsourced.

Seshu: For Tiffinbox, I'll give you sort of the genesis of Tiffinbox. I was finishing up my graduate degree in journalism and as a photo journalism major I was having a hard time finding information about photography and in my head I was like, "If I'm saving these links and enjoying these photographs or these galleries online, I'm sure my peers in school would enjoy it too." I started posting these links. It was essentially a big warehouse for, or a directory for photographers websites.

Rachel: What year was that?

Seshu: This was back in 2003.

Rachel: That makes sense because ...

Seshu: Back then it was just whatever it was. It was just a way for me to keep track of what was going on, who was doing what and projects. I was heavily into documentary photography and photo journalism. That was my core interest, and still is if you see bits and pieces of the conversations I have with people now, it always sort of comes back to how do you stories about people, and that kind of thing. It's grown, it's definitely grown from having me write these blog posts to having guest posts and guest bloggers on the site. That really I think grew the website to a great degree, because I have no shame in asking people and saying, "Hey, would you like to write a guest post?"

If it's a no, it's a no, it's no big deal. If it's a yes, then everybody wins, because then I can tell, "Rachel just wrote a guest blog post on Tiffinbox, go check it out." People come to check that post out, but they also check out your site. They also check out everything else that you have going on. That's the thing, that's the beauty I think of the blog as far as the way I've structured it is that, it's not really about me. It's not about me, I know that for a fact. It is about photographers and everything that's going on in their lives. For me I say, I do want to bridge that from commerce to creativity. There has to be that bridge. If you don't have that bridge, or you are not on that bridge, you are obvious, that's fine, and that's okay too.

I always like to promote the fact that this is a wonderful profession and it can be a business if it can be just sort of dealt in that way. I want to promote photographers, that's the thing. That's my goal is to promote photographers, find resources that photographers are going to really use and immediately see a result for their own business. Elevate their business in a way that they have never been able to. That's what Tiffinbox is all about.

Scott: I'm just going to, my room is getting darker, I'm going to put on some light.

Seshu: Your light just went on us.

Rachel: Just [inaudible 00:31:13]

Seshu: You guys asked about customization, here is a simple thing really is that I, the sites built on the Genesis Platform, and it's thanks to you Scott, really because I think I was going back and forth. I was in TypePad, initially, then moved to ... That's how old this is. I always moved from TypePad to WordPress. When I was looking for a theme, Scott just said, looking at StudioPress and get the Genesis Platform, I really enjoy it. I think they've done a great job and they keep up with things. It's clean code, it's light, it's all the things that you'd want a website to be. It's fast.

Rachel: Yeah, they are definitely industry standard. There is other drags and drops that you could argue in terms of depending on your level of comfort, but Genesis themes is just where everybody keeps coming back to. My question to you is, running a resource for photographers, and then being a working photographer yourself, do you, what are your opinions about seeing both sides of the industry? There are conversations around, there are educators and people in the space that don't have working business and then obviously there are working photographers who are just photographers. Where do you live in that spectrum and what has been your experience doing both?

Seshu: My opinion is that it helps. It can only help that you are a working photographer. It doesn't mean, there is no judgement against people who are not full time photographers.

Rachel: No, safe space.

Seshu: It comes down to, let me give you an example. Let's say there is strobe that's in the market, and it happens to be something that I'm interested in using myself. There is more of a chance that I'm going to be posting about that strobe or talking about it if I'm actually in the market to buying it. Like Fuji system, I'm about to go full on Fuji basically.

Rachel: Really?

Scott: I thought you did go all Fuji.

Seshu: No, not yet. I am. The fact is, I am researching right now. I'm finding all kinds of amazing researches. I just talked to a guy named Damien Lovegrove who is an amazing photographer in England just this morning. He's got a book out and I'm going to be promoting it because it's all about the Fuji system. He's guiding people through the process of finding these, this is the kind of thing that I bring to Tiffinbox where I say, "If I'm going through this myself, it makes sense for me to talk about it as well." It's an easier sort of jump. I think that's what people see in the post as well. They wont see it as a straight hit on, "Go buy this because I'm trying to sell you a flashlight, or a camera system or whatever." It's really from, I'm really interested in this sell, maybe you are too. That's it.

Rachel: I didn't mean it to be as sensitive of an issues as I think it is. I just appreciate that you talk a lot about guest posting, you talk a lot about, but you are also living it. You are not afraid too if someone has guest posted for you, to go and guest post for them, and then to walk the walk. The fact that you have both WordPress and Squarespace, I think it's really relevant that you can have a conversation about both, because you are living it. You are living in both worlds and understand the limitations and the qualifications of both.

Scott: I kind of want to dive into the custom part of Tiffinbox a little it. We talk a lot about outsourcing on the podcast, even since the way beginning of the first few episodes. I think we've talked to people that do outsourcing, Rachel does outsourcing. I think it'd be nice to hear from your point of view as somebody who has hired somebody to design their website, although it's not your actual photography site, although it's Tiffinbox and not your actual making photos photography site. Talk about the process, did you reach out to somebody, did they reach out to you and offer something and how did that whole process go, any bumps? Things like that?

Rachel: It's a great question.

Seshu: As soon as you turned me on to StudioPress, and you asked me to go, I think it was like, "Go check it out man." That kind of thing. I did, and one of the things they have on their site is a list of designers that they recommend or they have worked with in the past. Being on that website and seeing people's names is a sense of, sort of peace and calm, because you know they are legit. They are not the high-schooler who just said, "I'm going to start up a business kind of thing." These people all have real businesses, and so I reached out to one that seemed to really have it together I guess in a way, and I liked their style perhaps. I said, "Can we talk about putting this together." She was so professional, she was amazing. She had sort of a website or a place where all the steps that she was going to be taking was outlined, number one.

Scott: Nice.

Seshu: Then, every time she did something, I would get an email saying, "Hi, it's done. Check it out." Then I would know on the beta site that, I can go and see what she's done and then give her comments. I can comment back to her. I can say, "Hi, listen. This is not the color I really wanted. The buttons are kind of ugly. I want it to be changed." Whatever it is that I wanted to say, "I can make those changes." We went back and forth, back and forth, probably for two, three weeks.

Scott: Was there an initial brain dump conversation that happened or was it all through email?

Seshu: Yeah. I wanted to give her the idea that I wanted the site to do this and that. The other thing, and really wanted to get her to understand who my audience was and what they were looking for and what kinds of thing they would appreciate, and what kind of things they probably wouldn't care for. She was really very patient and professional about all of it. She was like, "Okay, no problem." Then she came back with a proposal and said, "This is what it's going to cost. These are the changes you can make and if anything you go beyond that, then there'll be an extra charge." Everything was very transparent. I think having that transparency is very key. Having a line of communication was fantastic. I would recommend her in a heartbeat because I just loved the way she just communicated, back and forth. I knew that I was getting exactly what I was expecting.

No surprises, honestly and no speed bumps or whatever it was. Unless I decided, "Hey, listen, I want to do this thing." She'll be like, "In that case it would be another couple of days before I can get to it." I had to accept that. She was being real and I was being a little ambitious perhaps once in a while. She would set me straight and she'd say, "This is going to be another couple of hundred bucks." I'll be like, "I guess I don't have that."

It would always come back to a conversation and it was nice that she was keen on seeing it succeed. I think that's another thing too. I think a lot of people would just get into a situation that's just a money thing. She actually added my site to her portfolio as way of saying, "Hey, look, I've worked with a photographer." That may have been one of the reasons why she'd worked with me. I don't know. She had that sort of feeling that, "This is going to work for both of us, let's get this going and get it done."

Rachel: I think that's great that that was the communication, when you chose her, when you were looking at the page from Genesis, these are the people that we recommend. How did you narrow it down to just her, was it a style aesthetic, was it going to the websites? It's sort of like picking a photographer, a designer, a web designer, how did you get to that point?

Seshu: I think it was really about style and just seeing what she had done before, and really understanding that this is, and you go to her own website of course from the StudioPress website and you just see the other projects she's worked on, testimonials from her other clients, getting an understanding of what her process is like. She didn't have the whole process I think laid out but she said, "This is what we are going to do first, we are going to do this second, we are going to do third. Then delivery is going to be in a couple of weeks," or whatever it was. I love, from my perspective, if somebody is going to take the time to explain what it is that the process is going to look like, they are-

Rachel: I resonate with that too. I totally agree.

Seshu: They usually have got it together. I didn't have a whole lot of resources to just say, "Okay, $1,000, go for it." I have to be sort of very smart about it as most people will be I'm sure with their websites and just say, "This is what we want. How can you make that happen?" I think having that conversation is very important. A no obligation conversation for fifteen-twenty minutes and say, "This is what my ideas are, what do you think they are like? Am I crazy?" Then they'll come back to you and say, "It's doable, it's just more time, more money, whatever it is."

Rachel: How did you get to customization versus just modifying a template? I know a lot of photographers look at resources like ProPhoto and they have already templates that need small tweaks but aren't a complete customization like Tiffinbox. Did you think about that when you were beginning, or did you go right to full customization?

Seshu: After playing with TypePad for such a long time, I thought it was time to just sort of make the leap and make it happen where people would take notice of it. I had plans of having guest bloggers and things like that and so, if you start inviting influencers to your site, you better look nice.

Scott: I want to talk about your design evolution. As you guys were talking, I just dug into the internet archive. You want to hear some fun stuff?

Seshu: Sure.

Scott: For anybody who is listening, if you go archive.org and put in Tiffinbox.org in the search, you can actually look at the complete internet archive of Tiffinbox. Right now there is three hundred and eighty captures of Tiffinbox over the years. When I say over the years I'm talking from his evolution, like the beginning of Tiffinbox. It goes back to 2004. Over ten years right now of Tiffinbox is there.

Rachel: That's a legacy to leave behind.

Scott: I'm talking like, even like whatever is showing up. This may not have been yours, it might have been somebody owned it before you. No, it is you. 2004 was I guess this is TypePad. Anyway, I went back four years or so. In 2011 Seshu is using the Thesis theme and it was blue. The color was blue. It's a lot of blue.

Seshu: it was very hard to read.

Scott: It was very hard to read, 2012, same theme, same design but it was a white background. The reading had gotten easier but the Thesis theme he was using, the design he was using was very basic. It looked like a blog. It didn't like a media platform like Tiffinbox looks today. It looked like a blog. 2013, Seshu switched to the Genesis theme but had as is, all he did was customize the axing color, like to use this orange that he uses around Tiffinbox today. 2014, it's when he had it customized. He used the Genesis theme again but he had one custom built. That right there, that's four years of evolution. Then of course he's had very minor changes since 2014.

Rachel: After investing the time, and the money at that point, you don't need to do. Hopefully you are at a point where you'll love it and your brand can sustain. Again, this is where being on WordPress, all the backend stuff is being updated in terms of the functionality, and you don't have to change a theme that you paid all this money for, because hopefully it grows with, and knowing that it's on a Genesis theme, it will grow with it. What a great example? This is really good?

Scott: Isn't that cool? If you look at Tiffinbox today, you'll see how organized it is, how it's more of a platform, a media platform than just a blog. It is, there is many different things. There is resources, there is interviews, where he does with guests about different products for photographers and what not.

Seshu: I think the most important thing that sort of was a catalyst for my change from Thesis to the StudioPress option, Genesis framework was because I wanted it to be mobile friendly and responsive, and Thesis was not. I think, it was never going to be I think. I don't know, whatever happened to Thesis I have no idea but it's the ... It's a thing that really concerned me is that people were not seeing my posts on mobile devices. I was like, "We've got to move in that direction." I think that was ...

Rachel: That's great to be a fast adapter of that, because I think there are still photographers that aren't ... 80% of web traffic now, especially brides and families, are on the web. That's only growing. Last year it was 70, and the year before that it was fifty. It's like an exponential curve.

Seshu: I think as you probably will agree, Google is looking at mobile sites more than anything else now, anyway.

Rachel: The component of it. They are looking to make sure that it is there and it is functioning. It's a big component, but it's not the whole thing.

Scott: That's a great, really great example of the reasoning for doing, having just an eloquent website, having one that really stands for your business. Sometimes, it just requires outsourcing and doing on a budget, like Seshu did. Set a budget for yourself and talk to people, see if they can work into your budget, you'll find somebody that could do it for you. Or just get a theme that just looks great, that has customizations in itself. Let's move right into recommended plugins or themes or both. You are welcome to recommend one you've been talking about or something else, whatever you want to do, what is your recommended WordPress plugins or themes?

Seshu: I think the theme that we mentioned was the Genesis Framework. You can't go wrong with that. Scott and I talked about Divi and Scott doesn't really care for Divi but I have used Divi for one of my sites as well. It's good, it's fine, it works quickly and yes it creates short codes and all that stuff. For my client who's got a pretty much of a static website, it works fine and he's happy with it. Let me go back, Genesis, probably is the one theme I think you'd want to look at. They have come out with some really cool, I think their third party templates that are really nice looking actually for photographers in fact.

Rachel: Imagely has some. Imagely specifically has Genesis themes that are built on the Genesis framework specific for photographers. Then there are other resources that do as well to all industries, not just photography.

Scott: I will say that for any photographer who likes the Genesis themes. Genesis themes are designed for simplicity. There is very few options in it, very few color and font changes that you can make if any. They are very basic. For any photographers who would like a Genesis theme but find the options too limited, the customization I should say, too limited. Check out the Genesis Design Palette Pro. It works with pretty much every StudioPress designed Genesis theme. Studiopress is the company who makes the Genesis theme.

The Genesis Design Palette Pro is a plugin that adds pretty much endless color and font and whatever customization for Genesis themes, but they specifically make sure that it works with all the official Genesis themes from StudioPress. It does work with a lot of the third party ones but it's not guaranteed. Genesis Design Palette Pro, we'll link that in the show notes as well. If you are a Genesis user and you want that extra, I would recommend checking that out. Anything you want to add to close with Seshu, anything you want to share or advice?

Seshu: Can I mention two plugins?

Scott: Yeah.

Seshu: Initially I didn't think I was going to mention these but the ones I really, when I started using on Tiffinbox or my other websites are the ones you've actually suggested. Warfare, right?

Scott: Social Warfare, yeah.

Seshu: Social Warfare and OptinMonster.

Scott: OptinMonster. Those are two great ones. Social Warfare is a social sharing plugin, but it goes beyond just the standards of sharing.

Rachel: It's really growing up too. It's made some big changes in the space, and some of the other plugins that sort of fell out of this space. It is definitely emerging as a leader.

Scott: In fact, Social Warfare was born out of the Genesis community. It holds the same code quality and speed standards of all of the Genesis themes. Yes they work very well together, but social warfare will work with any theme that's well coded. It does, it holds up to the same standard which I think is an important thing. OptinMonster is a pop up lead generation type system that is not just a plugin, it's a [inaudible 00:50:06] service, you have to pay for the service in order to use the plugin. In my opinion, that is the best of all of them out there, and I've used a lot, but there are many others out there as well, which if you go back into the history of this podcast, a lot of guests are recommended. Many of the other lead generation plugins that are out there.

Rachel: OptinMonster has definitely come up a couple of times too. I think that's a good one to check out for what it does.

Scott: I'm using my webcam, I don't know, maybe the sun keeps going away, but it keeps getting dark in my room even though I keep adding more light.

Rachel: This is our first winter with the podcast, right?

Scott: Yeah.

Rachel: Because we started in December, right?

Scott: Yeah, we started recording in December but it didn't air until March for [crosstalk 00:50:57]

Rachel: I can't believe we are at twenty eight. I know it doesn't seem like a big number. For an every other week it's a big number.

Scott: We have twenty-nine scheduled. We are going to have, for anybody that's listening, we are going to have Angela Bowman next week, our next episode. She teaches a lot of photographers about WordPress in Boulder Colorado.

Rachel: I'm really excited for that because I love women who also do WordPress or use WordPress or utilize it. I think that having the conversation with both intelligent men like Seshu and women like Angela are important.

Scott: Totally.

Rachel: I'm really grateful that we get to have all of these varied opportunities.

Scott: Seshu, anything you want to end with, any advice for any of the listeners that are thinking about moving from Squarespace to WordPress or thinking about outsourcing and design, anything you want to share?

Seshu: I think I'll go back to the idea that, hopefully 2017 is a really successful year for all photographers. In my opinion and my experience actually, a lot of the success that you want can come through really just doing the work first. That work can be as simple as writing three hundred words or three fifty words per week on a regular basis. As Rachel would say and teach and has taught, do it on a consistent basis, on the same day and the same time, push it out there.

Start connecting with your clients in a way that is real, that is you, that is authentic. All that will come together. The first few weeks may seem like a struggle, trust me, writing isn't the first thing I'd think of when I look at the WordPress backend. I enjoy their process once I get going but the first few minutes it's like, "What the hell do I talk about?"

Rachel: Yeah, and that's so relevant and I'm glad you shared that because it's not easy for anyone, even professional writers, even myself I look at that blank list and I'm like, "Here we go go again." But once you are into it and once you are doing, just like photography, ten thousand hours and you are a professional.

Scott: It's that blinking cursor effect.

Seshu: I think one thing to avoid that and I've just started to do this is is, and this is an idea I'll have to give credit to Skip Cohen who said this at a, I think it was at Shutterfest a couple of years ago, in a marketing presentation. He said, "The easiest thing to do is to go out into the world, into your community, interview people and talk to people and just highlight their life." Make those connections and I'm telling you, it's opening doors. Honestly it is the way to go. It's inexpensive as in $0, yes it's going to take a little bit of time, but what are you going to do with that time anyway?

Rachel: I agree.

Seshu: Sit on Facebook? Really, I've had the pleasure of meeting so many wonderful people in my community because every week I make it a point to go out and just meet people and say, "Hey, can I take some, make some portraits of you and then get a little interview going so that we can talk about you?" That series is coming and it's going to be something that I'll be using on my new website for seshuphotography.com.

Rachel: Awesome.

Scott: That's awesome.

Seshu: The seshuphotography.com is no longer going to be on Squarespace, it's going to be on WordPress very soon, take that.

Rachel: And Imagely. That's amazing.

Seshu: Absolutely.

Scott: I'm excited to help you with that conversion.

Seshu: Thank you, man, I appreciate it.

Scott: It's going to be an eventful conversion because converting from Squarespace to WordPress is not easy as we've discussed on the podcast many times, but-

Rachel: But do it.

Scott: It will be worth it. It will be worth in the long term. Thank you Seshu for joining us today and thank you, Rachel, for being an awesome co-host.

Rachel: Thank you, Scott.

Seshu: Thank you guys. It was fun; it was real fun. A lot of fun.

Scott: Totally. Two closing notes. One, you can find the show notes from today's episode at imagely.com/podcast/28.

Seshu: 28.

Scott: Episode 30 will be a Q&A. Please, we need one more question to make ten for the ten questions for episode 30. Please submit your question or questions, because we can use it for our future episodes, at imagely.com/podcast/q.

Rachel: Q.

Scott: Until next time ...

Rachel: Bye.

Transcription was done by Rev.com

Scott: Welcome to Episode 9. My name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz, and I'm joined by my co-host Rachel from FotoSkribe. Hey, Rachel.

Rachel: Hey, Scott, how are you?

Scott: Good, how you doing?

Rachel: Good.

Scott: You got hit with that crazy snowstorm?

Rachel: No, we didn't. Here in Boston, we totally missed it, and last year, this time, we had 4 feet of snow, so I'm really excited that we got missed.

Scott: Yeah, we got hit with about 2 feet, I think just over 2 feet, and we were snowed in for a couple of days, and now I see green on the grass again because it's been raining for the past few days, so it's been-

Rachel: Sorry. I installed El Capitan and apparently it broke everything.

Scott: Yeah.

Rachel: I apologize for that.

Scott: Today we have Chamira Young on the show. Chamira is a self-proclaimed art nerd, Photoshop geek and photographer with an obsession for productivity and creativity. Chamira can be found teaching online through her website, through her podcast, ProPhotographerJourney on Udemy, Tuts+, and now she's a regular on Photofocus, which is one of my top 3 favorite podcasts.

Then you've got to add our own podcast on top of that, so I've got 4, but, you know, top 3 of not my own podcast. Her goal is to help empower individuals and small businesses to become more successful with as many tools and as much knowledge as she can provide. Welcome to the show, Chamira.

Chamira: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to chat with you 2.

Rachel: Welcome. We're very excited, and I love your mission statement. I feel like that's a really powerful stance to have, and you definitely live what you preach, so we appreciate you being here.

Chamira: Well, thank you for that.

Scott: Before we get into what's going on in your world, let's talk about a little bit of WordPress photography-related news. Just yesterday at the time of the day we're recording this, which will be on the show notes page, WordPress released 4.4.2. Now, this is kind of funny, I think this is the second time since we started the podcast that a WordPress version has been released, or maybe third time in fact.

Rachel: Yeah, no, we did 4.4, then 4.4.1, which was a security, and now we're on 4.4.2, so you can see how quickly these things are changing and you know, need updating.

Scott: Yeah, so the 4.4 is, that's a 1-point release, and that's a little bit faster than a major release being 4, 5, 6, something like that, so 4.4 was a 1-point release. This is sort of like a double point, really, so those come out faster. They're security fixes or bug fixes.

Rachel: Right.

Scott: This one is a minor fix. It should not break any site functionality. It contains 17 bug fixes that were reported in version 4.4 and 4.4.1.

Rachel: I don't know if you've seen it, but Matt Mullenweg who... Whoops, sorry, see I'm telling you, today is just going to be one of those days, guys. Matt Mullenweg, who invented WordPress, just recently did an article, and I think it was on WP Tavern about why they do 3 or 4-point releases every year. If WordPress isn't moving too fast, but if you're interested in it, and I'll find the link for the show notes, but it's a good discussion about why WordPress keeps changing to keep up with what's going on in the world.

Scott: Yeah, we'll be sure to include that in the show notes for sure. Again, like a little bit of technical lingo here, make sure you back up your sites before you do this update. Yes, it should not break your site, but do it anyway, back up your site. Okay, but let's move into a little bit of photography news related to WordPress. First is, AGLOW Magazine is now available.

Rachel: I have it right here. It's gorgeous.

Scott: I have mine here, too. Where did it go? Where did it go? Here it is. Here it is, so if you're watching the video, you can see Rachel and I both have the magazine on our desks. AGLOW Magazine is from the amazing design team at Design Aglow, and they're friends of ours, they're fantastic, so this magazine's going to be great for design and photographic inspiration.

The reason why I think that this is related to WordPress is because you can relate the design inspiration in the magazine to your WordPress website, and the Design Aglow team also has some WordPress templates for photographers using the ProPhoto theme.

Rachel: Yes, and they're beautiful.

Scott: They are quite beautiful. The other topic I want to mention is, Rachel has a new product coming out called Story First Blogging.

Rachel: Yes, we are launching next week, so by the time this podcast goes up it will be live, and they are blogging templates for photographers. This was my first product launch, and it was a definite interesting experience, but I used WordPress and got it all up to where I wanted it to be, so we will see what happens, but thank you for that, Scott.

Scott: Yes, so definitely check that out. That will be in the show notes as well.

Rachel: Great.

Scott: Chamira, what's going on in your world?

Chamira: Wow! What a loaded question. Well, I will say first off the bat, you know, as far as my own photography business is concerned, I just moved to a new city, actually. Christmas Eve, so at the moment I am in the process of rebuilding my client base in this new city, and at the same time continuing releasing new episodes with my podcast, still all my teaching.

I'm teaching more with Tuts+ right now as opposed to Udemy, and I'm also working on courses for my own platform as well, or for my own sites. There seems to be a lot going on and that's just in a nutshell there.

Rachel: Yeah.

Chamira: Yeah.

Scott: On that topic, you said you're creating courses for your own site. Will those be WordPress-based learning systems?

Chamira: You know, at the moment, yeah. Yes, actually.

Scott: Have you started exploring what plug-in and/or theme you're going to use for the learning system?

Chamira: I have, you know, as far as the theme, straight up I'll say that I love, love uDesign, which I don't know if you've heard of that one. It's just the letter U and then design.

Scott: Okay.

Chamira: I am at the point where I'm very familiar with it, even as far as customizing it, so that's pretty much what I use for most of my main sites, especially in our studios which is the hub of my creativity, and also for ProPhotographerJourney, which is my podcast.

Now, whenever I'm creating a site for myself on WordPress, I am just going in uDesign, and you can get a pretty good variation as far as style. As far as online teaching, I'm going to have to look up, it's an awesome plug-in that allows you to create your own online course, [new 00:07:03] WordPress, and they're actually headquartered in my neck of the woods, well, Ann Arbor, which is 2-and-a-half hours away, pretty close to me, close enough anyway.

Rachel: Let's actually start at the beginning Chamira, because this is one of my first times meeting you. Where did you move from and where did you move to for your photography business?

Chamira: Sure, I moved from Fair Haven, and it is probably a half hour, it's a half hour south of where I am now, so not that far away, but if you compare it to Port Huron, there's quite a bit of difference, and one thing I'm really excited about in building my client base here in Port Huron, is that there are a lot more businesses, a lot more resources in Port Huron, as compared to Fair Haven.

A lot of it, this is really a face-to-face type of town, really. I just went to a Chamber meeting this morning, Chamber of Commerce, and everybody knows everybody, you know, so if you're looking to build clients, I'm finding I really have to get out there and talk to people.

Rachel: Well it's so relevant, because photographers who do move from one location to another, you know, definitely struggle with that. Did your photography business start first and then your online teaching, or did it all start at the same time? What was the progression of that journey for you?

Chamira: You know, for me I would say that my photography business started first, and actually I'm going to have to back up a little bit and say that as far as my photography, well, I started learning to do photography in college, so the University of Michigan. Then after that, I went and worked for a publishing company, and I put the camera down for years, and I went back to it when I started working at a motorcycle magazine. That's when I got back into it.

That was around 2009, and so then I was a staff photographer. We find our own models, do our photo shoots, 80% of them in-house, and so I got experience working on a team, also dealing with models, booking hotels, all that stuff. There was illustration, design. They had me touching everything, which I really liked, and eventually I ended up leaving the magazine, on good terms, because I believe you should never burn bridges, and I went into business full time for myself.

When I did that, it was a mixture of photography, graphic design, and web design. Since then I'm trying to learn more focus, because I find I love doing so many different things. I can get a little bit scatterbrained, so with the past few years I'm trying to focus more on building my photography clients, but also the education piece. That's when I started creating online courses for other photographers.

Rachel: Okay, and where did WordPress come in for you in this journey? Was it something that was always there? Was it a newer thing. When did you sort of discover that for your website stuff?

Chamira: That would probably be around 2010, 2011, and really it came from me wanting to build my own site, and trying to pick a solution that gave me control but was still not too overwhelming. Now, at the same time I was doing graphic design, along with photography and stuff, and I kept getting requests for web design. It all tied in together.

A client, if they need, you know, a logo, they'd be like, "Oh, I need a website, too. Do you do that?" I was like, "Yeah, I'll learn WordPress," and so yeah, yeah. It's been years, it's been years now, and now I find that's what I'm the most comfortable in, but I do still touch other platforms as well when necessary.

Rachel: What other platforms do you work with?

Chamira: Mainly Zenfolio.

Rachel: Okay.

Chamira: Yeah, yeah, and they are really the muscle behind my photography website, so if you go to chamirastudios.com, that's the hub of my creativity, that links out to the podcast. It also links out to my photo website for clients, so that's a different audience there, right? It's for people looking for a photographer. I chose Zenfolio for that because of their, I love the galleries, I love the options you have with making them private. I also love the built-in sales system and fulfillment system that they have in there.

Rachel: Yeah, no, I mean this is a great intersection for photographers. I actually just saw this question on one of the boards, you know, I'm moving from Zenfolio, where should I go? The next logical step in my mind is WordPress, but you would design for Zenfolio websites, correct?

Chamira: Yes, yes, and you know I really want to clarify that... Okay, we'll have to back up to about 2012. I was using Zenfolio for my own site, and this is where I got into designing Zenfolio sites. After I created my own I realized... At the time, to be honest, the Zenfolio themes, templates they were offering, there was a bit lacking there, and that was a lot of the feedback they were getting.

I decided to create a site called Zenjoyable that would essentially... I created themes where you could purchase a theme that would work on your Zenfolio site.

Rachel: Oh, interesting, great.

Chamira: Yeah, yeah, so I've always been completely third party. I've never been paid directly from Zenfolio. I've never been an employee or even an independent contractor, although when I started Zenjoyable, I'm like, "Mmm, maybe I should write Zenfolio, like, "Hey, what's up, [crosstalk 00:12:45] doing?"

I figured if they had a problem with it I'd rather we cross that bridge, that hurdle, earlier than later, so I sent them an email, and I threw in there like, "If you want to promote my site to your audience in your newsletter, that would be awesome," and they did! They were totally cool with it, and since then we've had a good relationship. I got to, they flew me out to meet the crew, I think it was a year later, for one of the big photography conferences, I think.... oh, why am I blanking? It wasn't WPPI; it was the other big one.

Scott: Imaging?

Chamira: Yes, yes, Imaging USA, thank you. That was cool, because I got to meet the crew. I got to work alongside them in their booth and talk to their customer base.

Rachel: There was a need for that. It was what you saw, there was people who wanted to be on Zenfolio sites with the power, but they didn't have the design capabilities. This was all before Squarespace I think, correct?

Scott: Yeah, yeah.

Chamira: Yeah.

Rachel: Do you have any thoughts on Squarespace filling that niche, or do you really stick with the Zenfolio-WordPress sort of duo?

Chamira: You know, right now I stick with, nine times out of 10... Well, it depends on who I'm talking to, because I tend to recommend Squarespace to other small business owners who may not necessarily be in the photography space, but at the same time I have some friends who use Squarespace for their portfolio website, although I have never designed in Squarespace, so I don't know the ins and outs, you know, as far as how well they serve photographers.

I also just want to add really quick that, yeah, you mentioned at the time there was a need for Zenfolio, for me to be designing third party Zenfolio themes. I have since closed down Zenjoyable.com because Zenfolio, they have really improved the themes that they offer, the templates that they offer, and I really authentically felt like there was not a need so much anymore, but I still have a relationship with Zenfolio.

I'll actually be doing a webinar with them, showing people how to design their website coming up this month in February, so we still keep in touch, and my podcast was born out of my site Zenjoyable actually, so that's-

Rachel: Oh, great.

Chamira: [crosstalk 00:15:09] its own thing, and I was still doing that.

Scott: Here's a question, and this happens in the WordPress space as well. Zenfolio themes, they're designed for their websites, are not responsive, meaning they won't adjust on mobile, and search engines now favor websites for ranking wise for SEO that are responsive. Like I said, it happens in the WordPress space, one of the most popular photography themes for WordPress is not responsive.

A lot of photographers on Zenfolio platform and on this specific theme are in a way getting hit with an SEO penalty because they're not obeying what the search engines are saying is what they want. What are your thoughts on the fact that both, whether it's WordPress or Zenfolio, not being responsive? Do you think these developers need to get up to date, or do you think that the photographer should find somebody who can make it responsive using some custom design code?

Chamira: You know, I think they do need to get up to date, honestly. Now I will say that Zenfolio has quite a few changes that they have rolled out, especially in the past year, and they have some new upcoming ones. Now, I'm supposed to have a pow-wow with them online in the next couple of weeks to find out, to get more of those details, so I honestly couldn't tell you, you know, if and when it's coming, but I feel like it's more a matter of when. That's how I personally feel.

Scott: I hope so.

Chamira: Yeah, because it's becoming something that you have to have at this point. I mean, you know, more and more people are looking at websites on their mobile device. I mean, to say that that's something that Zenfolio is not going to ever do, that would be far out there. I feel like it's a matter of time. This may be something that we address on the webinar as well.

Rachel: Great, we'll definitely link that on the show notes, so that our listeners can...

Scott: You're in a similar situation that I'm in. You have a photography business, right, where you're serving services, photography, to consumers. They're either buying prints, or they're hiring you to photograph something, but you also have education for other photographers.

Chamira: Yes.

Scott: My website fell into this sort of trap where I had the same issue. I'm offering services, and I am educating photographers, and I actually found that I got more clients because of it, which was interesting, because they thought the education that I was doing acted as social proof, and they thought that it validated the fact that I know what I'm doing, and it got me more business.

I don't see it as a downside to doing that because I'm proof that it can work. It may not work for everybody, but it can work. My question to you is when you're laying out a website now, and this is coming at you because you've done design work. When you're laying out a website if you're in a situation like that, what would you do to work around the confusion of 4 photographers versus four clients?

Chamira: You know, I feel like that's an ongoing process with me. You know, I will tell you my current solution right now is, I have my main hub website, so Chamira Studios, if you go there, right away there's a type of not quite a landing page, but up front it asks you what you're looking for, so if you're looking for photography services, head here. If you're a photographer looking for education, then click here, and it'll take you to the podcast site.

If you're a client looking for a photographer it'll take you to my portfolio site, and I've found that sometimes one person may fit into more than one category for me, so example, I was at Chamber meeting this morning, and I met a young woman who could be a potential client. She works with hotels, and you know, I said "Hey, I'll photograph your hotel. You're just building one 2 minutes from my house," so she could be a potential client.

At the same time she's an aspiring photographer who does events, and so in the same conversation, I said, "Well, I run this podcast that's going to help you get your business up and off the ground." For her I, frankly I gave her my business card that has Chamira Studios on it, so when she hits my website, she will be able to, in one click, get to the podcast if she needs to. If she wants to see my work, then that's one click to see my portfolio.

Scott: What you're doing is you're funneling people to a certain area. Actually, we talked about this in Episode 6 with Bryan Caporicci, was the funneling idea, making sure that whoever goes to your site has a clear path to wherever you need them to go, and actually the Youngrens, who we talked with in Episode 7 I think?

Rachel: No, 5.

Scott: 5, yeah, so yeah, that's right. Oh man, wait till we get to 100, how are we going to remember these? I'm already losing track, and it's only Episode 9. They also do, you know, photography. There're four photographers, and they also funnel the same way you do it, where it's on the menu, and they can choose, the difference being, theirs, they stay on theyoungrens.com.

It's just theyoungrens.com/photographers, whereas you're funneling people to basically a different site so to speak?

Chamira: Yes.

Scott: Now the branding could all be there. It all matches and everything, and, in fact, The Youngrens, it is technically a different WordPress site. They use two different sites, it's just the theme that they're using and everything they're using matches, perfectly.

Chamira: It's cohesive.

Scott: Yeah, which is so important for branding wise, so, the funneling approach is a great one. Any other tips that you might have about this approach?

Chamira: Off the top of my head, I think as far as funneling, whatever it is, however you choose to do it, your message has to be crystal clear. I'm still simplifying that process, but it's been through, frankly trial and error. In the beginning people checked out my site, say, at my church, you know, people like to see what I'm doing.

They'll come to me and they'll say, years ago, "What is it that you do? Like I saw you have a show. What's a podcast? I don't know what a podcast is. You take photos, and who do you take photos for?" Right there that was an alert that I really needed to simplify how I was communicating on my site. It's got to be as simple as possible, because people get confused very quickly, and if there's any way they can get confused, they will find a way to do so.

Rachel: I love that you're coming at it from a designer perspective, and I love that you got that feedback from people in your church, people in your world that aren't necessarily clients, because if they're confused, then your clients are definitely confused, so that's a great... We talked about the Zenfolio versus WordPress, but can you break it down a little bit?

Somebody comes to your main hub, which I love how you describe it like that, and then, is that WordPress, and then they go to Zenfolio for your photography, and they go to WordPress for your podcast? How exactly is that structured for you?

Chamira: Sure, and actually you just pretty much said it, so if you go to chamirastudios.com it says up front, this is the hub of my creativity, and at the time of this recording, now it may change as I refine my system, but there are 3 buttons, and the first one, it asks them if they're looking for my services and if they want to see my portfolio, so they go there.

If you look at the second button, it's actually 4 art collectors and interior designers, because I'm an artist as well. I've tried to suppress my artsy-creative, or creating art side, you know, and I can't, so I'm doing that. I can't suppress it, so there's a button for them.

Then the third button is, "Are you a fellow photographer looking for resources to improve your business?" There's a button that says, "Start here for that" and so, if you click my photography portfolio button, you're taken to a Zenfolio site.

If you click on the art collector button, you're taken to another area within the same site that you started on, which is WordPress. If you click on a fellow photographer looking for resources button, then you're taken off of chamirastudios.com over to prophotographerjourney.com which is another WordPress website.

As I build out courses, by the way, it's LearnDash, LMS, [inaudible 00:24:40] and that allows me to build out courses on whatever, you know, whatever domain I want that to be on. Right now I'm still trying to decide which site I'll keep them on. I'm thinking as I develop courses for the podcast, then there's a good chance I may keep them on the ProPhotographerJourney site, you know, kind of a toss-up.

Some people like to make sure they have a domain that matches the name of their course, so I'm kind of at a crossroads with that as well, because frankly I've done it both ways.

Scott: Yeah, I found that for mine, I just put it on my scottwyden.com and I just made a store section that's 4 photographers. I'm actually fine-tuning it. I just put up a new design for one of the new Imagely themes, and I'm in the process of fine-tuning my funnel to make it more perfect.

I think you touched on an interesting note on the same sort of topic. For photographers who are not teaching, 2 photographers, but photographers have multiple niches, for example, weddings, engagements, head shots, right? A lot of wedding photographers do all those. The same principle applies. You want to funnel people to the right place, and I always come back to Bryan Caporicci's website, because to me, his is the perfect example of how you funnel within photographic niches, so I'm going to make sure I link again to Bryan's website.

Rachel: You say Bryan's photography website, not the Sprouting Photographer website, right?

Scott: Yeah, so Bryan does weddings, he does portraits, he does business portraits, engagements, so when you click on Bryan's link in the show notes and you go check out his website, and make sure you listen to his episode as well, because they talk about this too, you'll notice in the top how cleanly and elegantly he funnels people, his website visitors, into such a tight area that they have no choice but to contact him and hire him. It's really neat.

Rachel: Which is the point of what these virtual storefronts are, you know, that you ultimately want them, the client, whoever the client may be, whether they're photographers or people looking for photography services to book you, right?

Scott: Let's go into, Chamira, what themes or plug-ins you recommend. Now, you already mentioned 2. You mentioned uDesign which is a theme that you're using across your sites.

Chamira: Yes, yes.

Scott: I'll make sure we link to that. You're exploring LearnDash for your learning management system for WordPress. Are there any other plug-ins that you rely on heavily for your photography website?

Chamira: You know, there are. What's funny is, I didn't even intend to mention those 2, they just came out.

Scott: That's fine, that's what it's about.

Chamira: Quickly to add about LearnDash, they're constantly making updates and they really take user feedback well, and I'm amazed at the ways that they're improving that plug-in, so I've been really impressed so far. Now, as far as additional recommendations, I did want to mention SumoMe. I assume everyone has heard of it, but if that's not the case it's essentially free tools to help you grow your email list.

They're over at sumome.com so they have a plug-in component, and they just make it really easy to add different elements on your web page as far as collecting email subscribers, you know. I currently have the bar on the top at prophotographerjourney.com. I get a ton of people that way. I have the overlay over the whole website that comes on at a certain time, and they let you get started for free, which is really nice.

Scott: Rachel, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure every episode someone's brought up a plug-in like this, right?

Rachel: Well, it's really interesting to see the variety of it because, not only is the plug-in important, but what I really love to talk about it is the thinking behind it, because for photographers who might be listening who just have just, you know, have a photography business and that's their sole income, there's still a lot of need for these email plug-ins.

Even just as a photographer, the fact that there is so much variety means that it's something that you should be checking out and finding what works best for your business, so I love that there's been... I've heard a lot of really great things about Sumo, wait, say it again.

Chamira: SumoMe.

Rachel: SumoMe, yes, because it gives you more than just the traditional pop-up option. Again the top of the website I've heard is a really big converter. I don't know, I love that there's so much variety.

Scott: They also have social sharing icons, floating icons and stuff like that. SumoMe's got a wide variety of basically website-expanding tools for sharing, for email growing, stuff like that.

Chamira: Which by the way is huge.

Scott: Oh, yeah.

Chamira: Don't get me started.

Rachel: No, I think we should talk about it because you do education, so what is your opinion on this? As a photographer what would you recommend them to do with an email list? [crosstalk 00:30:01] Let's do it.

Chamira: I'm so passionate about this because it's taken me years to catch on. I learn the hard way, I tell you, but you know, as a photographer, if you have a list, well, you can have a list that obviously has different types of people on it. You have people who are just prospects. Say they're checking you out for the first time and it's rare that they'll come to your website, look at your stuff, and reach out ready to pay you, and say, "Hey, let's book something."

Usually they have to feel you out, so if you have an autoresponder system, Aweber, whatever, where they can opt into a list and you send them, for example, a report on how to work with a photographer, or giving them tips on how to get the best out of portrait photography, like if they're going in for a session. If you're seeking to educate them, then not only are you making them easier to work with down the line if they choose you, but they get to know you.

There's that up-front benefit right there, but also, let's say you've done a shoot and you've sent them the link to their gallery. A lot of photographers will just move on to the next person. I see this, and I've done this, you know, where you're just constantly looking for new people, but that person has already paid you money. They've already interacted with you, and if you did a good job, then chances are they're going to want to work with you again.

Now, their life is going to get busy, so if you just send them off, then you may never hear from them again, but if you put them into a sequence, you know, autoresponder sequence, where you're keeping in touch with them periodically, then you can get multiple shoots over a year. If you're doing newborn photography, that baby's going to grow quickly on a monthly basis, and so you keep in touch with that family, because they may want you to do more shoots, or more photos, six months down the line, a year down the line, the kid's going to have birthdays.

If you're doing graduation photography for high-schoolers, well they're going to get married at some point, you know. You can get multiple gigs from one person.

Scott: I'd like to say, though, if you are doing autoresponders for after a client session, make sure that you stay on top of your client's personal life because, here's two situations that you need to be wary of. First, you photograph a wedding, and then you have a set Facebook post to go out a year later saying "Happy Anniversary," or an email to go out a year later as "Happy Anniversary," what if they got divorced?

Chamira: Yeah, it's huge.

Scott: Okay? Now, and we can get more tragic, right? Let's say you photograph a newborn, what if a year, you know, when the baby is supposed to hit one the baby is no longer with us?

Chamira: Yeah.

Rachel: Yeah.

Scott: If you're going to do email responders, autoresponders, or if you're going to do social scheduling, I highly encourage you to stay on top of your clients, because you don't want to make the mistake of letting something go out that can bring back bad memories and whatnot.

Chamira: That's a great point, Scott. I'm glad you brought that up, for sure.

Scott: Vanessa Joy taught about the wedding one about 2 or 3 years ago, and I've kept that in my head ever since. Every time I am teaching about this sort of topic I have to bring it up, because it's too important.

Rachel: We actually talked to Tamara Lackey about it. We had a long discussion about... Because she, in her business model, does only manual pushes and no automatic, for that reason. I think the sweet spot is in the middle, that you set up the automatic ones, but like Scott said, keep on track, you know review them before they're supposed to go out so that you can review for those sort of life circumstances, because in 99% of the cases you hope they're not getting divorced, they're not having these major life changes. In most cases those automated emails are bold for bringing them back to you, you know?

Scott: Yeah.

Chamira: Sure, and maybe it's even just planning ahead a year for sales that you're having, for example. "Hey, it's Valentine's Day," or you know, Christmas, that's a big one, but I agree. Trying to automate everything can get a little bit dicey, so yeah, a good mix is healthy.

Scott: Yeah, what I would suggest for people who want to try to automate the anniversary or a birthday, style content, is make a calendar alert and have a template made so that all you're doing is verifying that everything's okay, and then you're manually posting the content out or sending the email. All right, any other plug-ins that you want to bring up?

Chamira: I did want to mention the one that I'm using for podcasting.

Scott: Yeah.

Chamira: Blubrry PowerPress, which, it's not like I've tried a ton of podcasting plug-ins out there, but I have been very happy with them thus far, and they make podcasting for me easy. Once I had it installed, set up, you know, my RSS feed and all that good stuff, it's been smooth sailing and they do give you metrics, and if you pay a fee they'll give you more extensive metrics, but yeah, I did want to mention them.

Scott: If you're looking to do a podcast yourself for, and we talked about this as well, doing podcasting for clients and stuff like that, if you're interested in doing a podcast check out that plug-in, listen to Chamira's show, and if you've got questions about that plug-in, maybe she'll be able to help answer them for you.

Chamira: Definitely, definitely.

Scott: As I remind her, if you want to see how we're doing the podcast, we use a different plug-in, but if you want to see how we're doing the podcast, listen to Episode 1, because we talk all about it.

Rachel: Again, I love that there's options, because the one that we're using might be too technical for somebody, and the one that Chamira's using might be easier for somebody, so the power of WordPress is that there really is a solution for every situation.

Scott: Yeah.

Chamira: Yeah, and then some.

Scott: Any other plug-ins you want to bring up?

Chamira: No, I think I'll leave it at 4. I think I'm going to have 4. I'll stop there.

Scott: Sounds good. Any final thoughts you want to share? Any final advice? Anything big going on that you're about to release? Anything you want to talk about?

Chamira: You know, as far as final advice, I would say keep refining. It's a constant process. I know some people just, they think they're going to get to a point where they've quote unquote made it, where everything's, you know, perfect, unicorns flying in the sky, and "Oh this is great," but no, it's a constant process and that's what I'm finding.

With the podcast I'm trying to refine the best way to, for example, sort questions that we get from different people who listen. Even with my own photography business I'm refining what clients I focus on, so just keep trying to make it better and better. What was the second question? It's gone.

Rachel: Oh, what's going on? Do you have any releases coming up? What's going on with your business? I mean, it's interesting because you offer products to photographers, so do you think that there's stuff coming up that photographers would want to know about? I know there is, so kind of a leading question there.

Chamira: Is it? Well, we have the webinar coming up, and that will, let me give the date, that will be February 25th, so I'm not sure when this episode will be released.

Scott: Let me actually take a look, because it might be... We're doing every other Thursday, for anybody who's just listening now, so we are a little bit, a ways out. This isn't going out until actually March, but-

Chamira: Okay, and that's not a problem because maybe Zenfolio, they may have a replay of that webinar.

Rachel: Yeah.

Scott: Yeah, so make sure you get me the link and I'll make sure I include it.

Chamira: Sure.

Rachel: What is the name of your podcast specifically? Because I think there's a lot that you talk about that overlaps with our audience.

Chamira: Sure, sure. My podcast is prophotographerjourney.com, ppandj.com if you want to type a shorter name, and yeah, you know, I'm really excited for the podcast this year so far. We have 61 episodes released. We have more than that recorded. I have to record a full quarter in advance a lot of times if I want it to keep coming out regularly.

Right now we're in the process of really compiling questions and feedback from our listeners, and we're in the research phase, so I can't say anything definitive yet, but we're honing in on a solution that may help photographers run their businesses more successfully, and even the whole marketing piece which a lot of people struggle with. That's a work in progress, but as that comes out I'll be talking about it on the podcast and it'll be on the website too.

Rachel: Great.

Scott: On a personal note I was on your show, I think I was on one of the earlier episodes.

Chamira: Ah! It was way early, before I had a decent microphone.

Rachel: I've got to get one, too.

Scott: I just want to say, you know, you're all over the place with your education, and I'm really happy to see you over at the Photofocus website on a regular basis, so congratulations on that because that's a really cool thing.

Chamira: Thank you. They're a cool group of people and they make me want to be better.

Rachel: That is a great place to be, right?

Chamira: Yeah, yeah.

Scott: We are happy to share that our first Q&A episode will happen as our next episode, Episode 10. This won't come out until, you know, and by the time that Episode 9 is live, Episode 10 will already have been recorded.

Rachel: We're planning on trying to do these check-in episodes every 10.

Scott: Every 10, yeah, so the goal is to answer about 10 questions, hopefully look at 10. I think we're at 7 questions so far for Episode 10, but the goal is to get 10 questions, because we plan to do Q&As every 10 episodes, but if you have any questions to ask at any time, please ask your questions at imagely.com/podcast/q, okay?

That will bring you to a form where you can fill in your question, and it'll just be sent to Rachel and I and we will be able to include that. If it's a question that we can answer on the show, we will answer on the show. Thank you Chamira for joining us today. Thank you Rachel for being an awesome co-host.

Rachel: Thank you Scott. I wasn't sure if there was an audio switch there. I got some weird...but we'll go back and listen, but I did want to talk into that, that the Q&A episodes will be between Scott and I and there are no dumb questions. If you really have a burning WordPress question or photography website question that you've always wanted to ask, please feel free to reach out.

We don't have to use your name, but I promise you, if you have the question there's at least 10, 12, 100 other people that have the same question, so we really want to help.

Scott: Yeah. You'll be able to find where to find Chamira on the show notes, so you'll be able to click over easily and find her there, and you can find the show notes from today's episode at imagely.com/podcast/9.

Rachel: 9.

Scott: Until next time.

Chamira: Awesome.

Rachel: Thank you so much.

Chamira: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Transcription done by Rev.com
Scott: Welcome to the WordPress Photography podcast where we strive to make work risk easier for all photographers around the world. I'm your host, Scott Wyden Kivowitz, and I'm the community and blog wrangler at Imagely. I'm joined by my co-host Rachel Conley, who is the founder of Photo Scribe. This is episode 3. Hey, Rachel.

Rachel: Hi, Scott. How are you?

Scott: Good, how are you?

Rachel: Good.

Scott: We spoke last week twice doing episode 1 and 2, and now we're doing episode 3 with someone special. Today we're delighted to have Tamara Lackey as our guest. Tamara's a renowned professional photographer, speaker, and author. She is a children's and celebrity portrait photographer who uses a lifestyle approach, humor, and friendliness to create beautiful portraits. If you have seen any of her lectures in person, then you will understand why I say humor, because there're a lot of giggles that go on when she's doing her sessions. Tamara has created multiple creative live courses and regularly educates photographers in the reDefine show. She's also the co-creator of Lush Albums and the heart behind Beautiful Together, a non-profit in support of children waiting for families. Tamara has her feet in many areas, and as you will here, she has a passion behind everything she does. Welcome, Tamara. We're so glad you're with us.

Tamara: Thank you. That was a lovely introduction. Thank you.

Scott: I'm available for hire if you ever need an introduction anywhere.

Rachel: Yes, and I just wanted to chime in. I really do believe that you are the heart of the photography industry right now. I love what you're leading, in terms of the Beautiful Together and how that connects to Lush Albums, and just allowing photographers to see how creative and passionate you are, and then learn from you and be creative and passionate in their own businesses.

Tamara: Thank you so much. That was wonderful. That was great, guys. Thank you. Bye. [crosstalk 00:02:00].

Rachel: And we're done.

Scott: In going with the tradition of the WordPress Photography Podcast, we're going to start out with a bit of WordPress photography related news. Then we'll get on with the show. The only bit of news I have, which has come out before this weekend, the time we're recording this, at least, but it became official this weekend. Word Camp US just happened in Philadelphia, and I had the pleasure of attending. There were about 2,000 attendees over the weekend. It was huge. A lot of great sessions. A lot of cool booths to check out. There was one booth was giving out Google Cardboard.

Tamara: Nice.

Scott: That was fun. The instructions were in, I think, Japanese, so I had to figure out how to assemble it myself.

Tamara: Nice.

Scott: To the bit of news that came from that was actual that WordPress now powers over 25% of websites. That means that 1 out of every four websites you visit run on WordPress. That's massive, and that means that 1 out of 4 photographers use WordPress.

Rachel: Yeah, well, we hope.

Scott: That's pretty crazy. Either of you have any thoughts on just how massive that really is?

Rachel: I think that's so exciting. I watched the live-stream. I wasn't able to make it, and Scott had one job. I wanted that Yoast. The had a little LEGO thing. That's all I wanted. He couldn't find it.

Scott: So Joost and his, I think that's how you pronounce his name, his real name. His nick name is Yoast, but his entire team, the Yoast team, they were wearing sweaters that said "Yoast Team", if you found Joost, then you could actually get a custom LEGO that says "Yoast" on it. I did not find him. I did get some other cool swag, like the Google Cardboard. There's some cool stuff that I got, but I really wanted the LEGO thing as well, because I'm a big LEGO fan, and this-

Rachel: We all love ... We recommend that plugin to every photographer too. Yeah, I was actually going through my WordPress shirts. They've become gym shirts, and I have 20 different WordPress shirts that I wear to the gym over and over and over. I'm thinking, "Man, the people at the gym must think I do nothing but WordPress all the time."

Scott: Yeah, mine go from wearing them out to being PJ shirts, and then I'm saving the ones that just shrunk too much, and they're going to become a quilt, a WordPress quilt.

Rachel: Oh, that's nice.

Scott: Yeah, eventually, eventually.

Rachel: We may really be into WordPress, if you can't tell.

Tamara: I know. I'm listening to you guys like, "I don't think I'm in this club. This is a thing."

Scott: Yeah, so this is the beauty about this podcast is that we're having guests come on that like WordPress, that use WordPress, but aren't as geeky, nerdy into WordPress as Rachel and I. It'll be a nice balance. Speaking of you, what's going on with you, Tamara? What's new?

Tamara: First of all, just to comment on that. You said 1 out of 4 sites on the internet, I, from my narrow scope in the industry, I thought that number was a lot higher. You guys announced that it was a shock. I think that most people I know use WordPress.

Scott: Yeah, and it's interesting. There's, I think, BuiltWith is the name of the website, has some on-going [inaudible 00:05:45], and every year they push out an update of this is the percentage increase that WordPress had. This is the percentage increase that Square Space had, and so on. When you compare WordPress to all the others, and there're a lot of others, everyone else is small fries.

Tamara: Oh, so they're dominating, and then there's a bunch of other people in that 75%?

Scott: Yeah.

Tamara: Okay.

Scott: Yeah, so like Microsoft front page is one. Just as a funny note, Microsoft has their own front page that they sell, or at least used to. I don't know if they still do, and they use WordPress themselves.

Rachel: Right, and I think that's where the photography industry gets a little skewed too because I think there're a lot of people that have their home pages on a different platform, and then there blog page is on WordPress. We're trying to educate moving into a content management system where you have everything on WordPress; even we're running this podcast through WordPress. It has so many applications, and we're focusing strictly on the photography industry because I think that's where a lot of that confusion comes in. What can I use WordPress for? Our answer is everything.

Scott: Right. Yeah, so anyway, yeah, it is, I think, some people do think it's much bigger than it is. It is still quite large, so that's always good, but yeah. What is going on in your world?

Tamara: Obviously time of year, our studio, I run a portrait studio with several [inaudible 00:07:12] photographers, and everybody's just slammed. We're all just trying to get everything done. I actually am in a better position, because I'm focusing more on some commercial work right now, which isn't as deadline driven this time of year, and I like it a lot better. It's really nice.

Rachel: Yeah, this time of year is killer. I'm trying to tell everyone, "Keep blogging. It's so important," but they're like, "We are slammed. Wait until Christmas."

Tamara: "We can't breathe." Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of that. I was definitely in the thick of that for the first few years running my business. I remember wrapping up client takeaways at 10 pm on Christmas Eve. It's just kind of nuts, and I have not done that since very consciously and on purpose. We just keep moving our deadline dates back, but I find that everybody appreciates it, because they want to get their stuff done too. Anyway, in the photography world it's kind of a maddening pace for some people right now, and I feel, like I said, fortunate to not be as thickly in that space.

From the perspective of Beautiful Together, you guys mentioned that that's obviously where a lot of my focus and attention is right now. We've been able to do some good fundraisers this time of year, which is excellent. It's nice, because not only do ... Beautiful Together is a non-profit in support of children waiting for families, and we do projects, which are very end-to-end. Specifically we start a project, we get it ... Actually, we should identify a project, like renovating a bathroom or an orphanage. We get it funded by taking photographs and sharing it and social media and everything. We get some incredible donations from very big-hearted people who want to support that. We take that money, pay a project team, and kind of oversee it as best we can, and then we're done.

End-to-end projects, of which we've done four in the last six months, but we also have these funds that are ongoing, and we're partnering with organizations that are doing amazing work but may not have the reach that we can help provide [inaudible 00:09:06] together. Those are ongoing sort of things. We've just written two nice checks that are 100% just pass-along donations to two organizations that are doing grass roots work on the ground in Africa right now. It's really good.

Rachel: That's great.

Tamara: Yeah, that's kind of the best part of this work is when you just kind of say, "Here you go," you know?

Rachel: Yeah, and you were on there this summer, correct?

Tamara: Correct. Yeah, I went back this summer. That was our fourth time, and I'm going back again in February again.

Rachel: Yeah, as a photographer, how do you find traveling with your cameras and equipment when you go to places like this for charities like this? Do you find that it's difficult?

Tamara: I made a decision ... My family and I, we travel every summer for two solid months. We live in North Carolina, Chapel Hill. We leave at the beginning of the summer, we come back at the end of the summer. Part of that is because we just have a commitment to travel and see the world. Part of that is because summer in North Carolina is brutal. The idea of raising your children to be citizens of the world and better understand the dangers of this "us versus them" philosophy, all of that, but along with that, seeing all those places, you want to document it and photograph it. The first couple years I brought a lot more gear with me, and I learned very quickly that I don't want the entire summer to be a photo shoot. I want it to be an experience that I'm documenting. That's very different. By that very nature, I started eliminating gear. This past summer I got it down to one camera body, one lens, one polarizing filter, and that was it. No, no, and an add-on microphone for video, to do some video clips for Beautiful Together.

Scott: What's that lens that you typically take with you?

Tamara: For this one, I brought the Nikkor 24-70 F 2 8 lens. I brought the Nikon D8-10. That was my camera. That was my lens. Polarizing filter, and then a Sennheiser mic that I was able to add a little boom mic kind of thing. I got a lot done with that little kit. I always recommend to people if you know you're traveling, especially where there's a lot of physical movement, where you're moving around a lot, pare down the gear and rent in certain places if you need additional equipment as you go.

Rachel: That's a great idea.

Tamara: Yeah.

Scott: That's for sure.

Rachel: Did you find ... I know the 8-10 has really big files. Did you find that traveling and not being ... How did you handle file management while not being at your studio?

Tamara: External 1 terabyte drive.

Rachel: Oh, yeah.

Scott: I use a Western Digital My Passport Wireless, which is really great, because I just take the SD card out of my D8=10 or my D F, throw it into there, it sucks it in automatically as soon as it sees the card, sucks all the photos in, and then I can access them through wi-fi if I want. I know that they're safe on a, I think it's a 2 terabyte internal drive in this thing. It's that big, not that big.

Tamara: I like how you say "sucks it in" versus "import". Is that like the new technology.

Scott: Yeah, so I just like the term "sucks it in" rather than "import". I just think it's a little bit ...

Tamara: Less aggressive?

Rachel: The geek terminology.

Scott: Yeah, it's like I want your photos on my drive instead of-

Rachel: Right now.

Tamara: I want them now.

Scott: Yeah, "Give them to me. Give me those photos."

Tamara: I like it.

Rachel: We're all Nikon users. That might be the first time that's happened on here. Yeah.

Tamara: Yay.

Scott: This episode's sponsored by Nikon.

Rachel: I know, right?

Tamara: I know, right?

Rachel: We've talked about gear and sort of the travel stuff. How do you use WordPress for you, your businesses, all of the entities that you oversee and manage?

Tamara: I've used WordPress forever, and when I say "I use WordPress", I have hired people to set up WordPress for me, to be very clear. I have slowly and somewhat grudgingly learned enough about WordPress on the backend that I can now make adjustment and update things and be more handy with jumping in and out. I really wrestled with that, because as a studio owner and just a business person in general, I always advocate for outsource it. Do what you do really well, get very, very good at it, be able to charge at a level that's [inaudible 00:13:40] with your effort and your ability, and hire everybody else to do the rest. By that same token, I have had people who work in web development who can basically help build customized sites for me over the years. I really recognize that the lay of, "I need something fixed," or, "I need a shift," and then having to wait to hear back, it was worth learning more. I kind of buckled down and spent probably about six weeks just getting up to speed a little bit more on the stuff I'd need to do so I could just drop in and help something out.

By that logic, over the course of, I would say about ten years now, I've had about seven sites developed in WordPress used for different things. Currently, my big sites that I'm using are tamaralackey.com, tamaralackeyblog.com, beautifultogether.org. I'm trying to think. Two other sites are now have been built in Squarespace that we are going to transition over to WordPress, which I talked to Scott about for very valid reasons. Specifically having jumped in both ways, you can see the difference building in WordPress and the longevity and the richness of the experience in WordPress over time versus other experiences I've had.

Rachel: What was your decision to choose Squarespace for those few other entities at the time? Was it just ease of use? Was it trying something new?

Tamara: It was. I wanted a site up, and I wanted it quickly, and I wanted a template that was pretty good that I could customize right away. I felt like it would take too long, and they would require additional customization that I didn't want to pay for at the time for other sites. That's why I chose Squarespace at the time, not just for lushalbums.com and capturinglifebetter.com, two sites that are built on Squarespace, but also for a portion that I added onto tamaralackey.com that's all built in WordPress.

Rachel: Oh, interesting. Do you see Google Analytics change between having two of those things connected?

Tamara: I see a hit to my SEO since I started doing stuff with Squarespace, unfortunately.

Scott: Yeah, search engines tend to favor WordPress. What I'm going to say kind of goes against what we typically say about WordPress. Search engines tend to favor WordPress SEO wise, because search engines look at it as a blog that you're going to produce blog content, and that's fresh content that's ever changing. Even though we know that WordPress can be a static website without a blog, search engines know if you're using WordPress, you're most likely blogging. It's going to look at that first and favor that because it knows the content's going to be moving and adjusting. Is there any features inside of Squarespace that now that you've got a couple of sites on Squarespace and a couple on WordPress, are there any features in Squarespace that you think need to be in WordPress that you haven't come across yourself?

Tamara: Yeah, when I'm talking to new photographers, a lot of my mentor sessions or workshops, people want a website up. They still feel like they've got to do it all. They feel there's this mentality that if I haven't made money yet, I can't spend money, which I'm always trying to reverse. I'm like, "You have to spend." Anyway, but if I haven't made money yet, I have to do it all myself, and so they become kind of web developers. I've seen people working on their website for three months in WordPress just trying to figure it all out as they go versus honing their photography craft. I will always suggest start with a Squarespace or a Zenfolio. Get a great looking site up right away that's super simple that maybe isn't extremely customized and may not give you the best SEO, but get something out there right away, because I think they struggle with feeling there's this perception that WordPress is going to take a while, whereas you can grab a template site and be up and running pretty quickly. That's one of the suggestions I give to people, versus trying hard to learn the ins and out of WordPress or even coding their HTML site. I've seen people doing all of it.

Scott: Do you think one of the things-

Tamara: Wait, did I answer your question? Did I answer your question?

Scott: A little bit. A little bit.

Tamara: A little bit, okay.

Scott: I think where you're going with this is what I'm going to ask is going to solidify that.

Tamara: Okay, you're going to bring me back home. I like that.

Scott: Do you think that what WordPress needs is the ability for somebody to just do a couple clicks, get up and running with a site designed with some dummy content there that you could just go and adjust and not have to do much design at all?

Tamara: Yeah. What WordPress needs is a turn key solution where you jump in and you've got a gorgeous looking thing there, but you get all that back-end richness. By that I mean you can do a ton more with it. You're not limited. You're not frustrated by the fact that when you're trying to ... Squarespace, the idea of it, the template driven go is great. When you try to do more modifications to it than are inherently possible, you're banging your head against the wall, whereas you can do a ton of that with WordPress, especially with the right theme and plugins and such. The flexibility of it can be astounding with WordPress, and that's just not what you're going to get when you want to quickly get a site up and running, which is why my suggestion's been like, "Get something up and then slowly create a great WordPress site." WordPress could have that now, and you could skip that kind of getting [inaudible 00:19:22] this, moving this, et cetera. That'd be awesome. That'd be the perfect solution

Rachel: Squarespace is nice too, because you can start developing content, you can start blogging once a week at the same day and same time, which is what we recommend for what they call "dynamic content", and that's what SEO likes. Then there are plugins in WordPress that'll pull in all that Squarespace content, so you don't just lose it. It can actually get transferred over. That's the worry with some of the other types of ... That's why if you're not using WordPress, I actually do recommend Squarespace, because it's all in one. It has everything. It's easy to get up, and then you can start creating that content, and pull it into WordPress easier when you're ready.

Tamara: How do you pull it in? When you mean pull it in, you mean you can take all the content over, and then just do some reformatting, or it's ready to go, or what?

Scott: I think she really means it sucks it in.

Tamara: Of course it does.

Rachel: There you go. I think it just pulls in ... It's the database to database connection, because both WordPress and Squarespace are built on sort of that database platform. It'll pull in the text and the pictures. Then you always have to go in and sort of reformat it when you're doing a new ... Even WordPress to WordPress, having a new theme, but at least you don't have to re-write, and you're not going to lose all those blog posts, and you're not going to lose all those keywords and stuff that you've done. [crosstalk 00:20:46]-

Tamara: Yeah, so that's just within WordPress that having upgraded my website or blog over the years, some of the older posts are just like, "Oh god, they're a mess." I've got to go in and re-format, and is it worth it, et cetera. Yeah.

Rachel: Right.

Scott: Right. Yeah, unfortunately there's going to be some styling loss, but there is a way for anybody who is on Squarespace and wants to go to WordPress, there is a way ... There's actually multiple ways that you could actually get from Squarespace to WordPress. Same thing if you're on-

Tamara: How does the average person do it? What do you recommend?

Scott: I think there's two or three different plugins that actually will do the conversion for you.

Rachel: I've done it. I don't remember the exact plugin I used, but it was very seamless compared to ... I've pulled in older WordPress installs and had a harder time getting that into a newer WordPress than Squarespace to WordPress.

Tamara: Wow. I did not know that. That's interesting. Is there a cat there, or is someone subtly sad.

Rachel: No, can you hear that stupid thing? Hold on.

Tamara: No, it's sweet. I just didn't know if someone was ... Every time I hear a cat slightly in the background, I think someone's really sad.

Scott: She locks her cat ... We both lock our cats out of our rooms when we're doing this. Mine usually just scratches. It doesn't whine.

Tamara: We can bring all our animals together, because I have three dogs. Can you imagine if we just brought them all on in a room and tried to talk?

Rachel: We interrupt this podcast. You'd think the children in my life would be more ... No, it's the cats.

Tamara: It's the cats.

Rachel: Always. Right.

Scott: There's also, for anybody who uses Tumblr or Movable Type or LiveJournal, there's a whole bunch of different importers that WordPress can do if you're on a ... There're some very popular photographers that use Tumblr, and I never understood why they use Tumblr because you're very limited, more limited to what you are with Squarespace. The advantage of Tumblr is you get that social network atmosphere going with it, but for anybody who wants to go from a Tumblr to a WordPress site, there's an importer for that, and it works well. Yeah, it's-

Tamara: Oh, I have a question.

Scott: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tamara: I have a question.

Scott: Go for it.

Tamara: I've been trying to solve this issue for a while, and I've had two or three developers tell me they can, and then it didn't work. When you post something like a blog post, and then you share it on social media, it seems like the ability to have those comments aggregated in one solid place that's there and doesn't make people do triple sign ins and this and that. It doesn't seem like we have that technology working yet. Am I wrong, because it seems like you're cannibalizing the audience so often by taking one piece of content and sharing it everywhere? What's the deal?

Scott: It's kind of funny. Literally episode 2, Christine [tremmolay 00:23:39] mentioned the plugin that does exactly that.

Tamara: Does it work though? What is it?

Scott: She uses it. I've never tried it. It's called Social.

Rachel: It's called Social.

Scott: It's called Social.

Tamara: Social?

Scott: Made by Mail Chimp, the email marketing company.

Tamara: Tell me more about this mythical Social.

Scott: Social, you connect your Facebook, you connect Twitter, all that kind of stuff. Then it literally monitors mentions and discussion, public mentions and discussion with your URL in it, and sucks it all in as WordPress comments on your site.

Tamara: Sucks it all in.

Rachel: That's number three.

Scott: Yeah, I got ... Hey.

Tamara: So it sucks it all in. Go on.

Scott: It sucks it in. That's really funny. When we do the transcription and I do the grammar checks, it's going to be like, "Overuse of this phrase."

Rachel: I think we have to add the caveat that any plugin that does all of this, it connects with Facebook or Twitter, it's all subject to their APIs. Facebook breaks things all the time, which is part of the problem.

Tamara: Because I remember Disqus was supposed to fix this issue, and it didn't.

Rachel: Right.

Scott: Yeah, there's Disqus. There's also another plugin. I can't remember what it's called, but it ... I'll have to look it up. It's something like Comments Plus or something like that. All it does is gives you the ability to have people comment with Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Facebook or whatever all on the one comment field. I don't know if it imports the comments from the outside sources.

Tamara: That's what I wondered, because case in point, even beyond what we just mentioned, I'll have a blog post, and I'll share it on Facebook. Then I have to share it on my business Facebook, because I started out on Facebook, and then it capped me at 5,000. Then I had to open up the other account. Now I have those two. Then it'll put it on Twitter, et cetera. Someone on Facebook 1 will ask a really great question that I'll answer in detail, and then somebody on Facebook 2 will as the same question. Then somebody on the blog will ask the same question, and I'm like, "Just get together, people."

Rachel: There's the comment stuff that you're talking about, but then there's also the re-sharing and Christine ... We talked about this in episode 2. There's the Social plugin, our plugins to make all the comments go in one place, but then there's the next tier, which is the Co-Schedule, or Buffer, or Hootsuite of the world which then can take your one blog post and push it out to different places so that you're not manually doing that. It doesn't exactly solve the problem of the comments, but, at least, it helps it so that you're not manually putting it in all those different places. It-

Tamara: [crosstalk 00:26:19]. My understanding from SEO perspective, especially with Google+ and all that is that you should be rephrasing it anyway. You shouldn't be just blasting it across.

Rachel: Yeah, I found different times helps if you don't have the time to do the different copyrighting. Just scheduling it so that one goes live, and then an hour later goes to a different social media, and then an hour later it goes to a different social media. Google thinks all those balls are still juggling. It's hard. What do you automate and what do you keep personal? At what point do you just let it go a little bit, because it just gets so overwhelming? It's like a full-time job.

Tamara: Right, but like ... Okay, so my concern about the automating and the reason why I've never done it is because, gosh, look what just happened in Paris recently, how horrible that was. Everybody online was just sharing grief and horror, and it was very emotional. Then you've got somebody like, "Nabisco crackers!" It's just like, whoa, not a good time. I say that all the time when we have a big international incident or international, those times, I think, can really backfire and be very insensitive.

Rachel: Yeah, we discussed that too, and it is timely. It's interesting. I was a television major at September 11th, 2001, and we were studying the habits of television because we didn't have the internet like we did now. After September 11th, all of these television stations pulled their ads, because they didn't want to have that be associated with this tragic world event. Then again what you mentioned with the Paris stuff, we still have these ads going out, just like you said, but they're modified, and they're sort of cloaked as tweets and Facebook posts. I think matter no whether you automate it or keep, you always have to be aware of what's going on in the world. If something goes out, it's okay to delete it or to retract it and say, "I'm so sorry guys. That just went out, and I agree with the sentiment or this sentiment." It's hard.

Scott: To tie that into photographers specifically, I've seen this firsthand happen, and I've talked to a bunch of wedding photographers who have actually ran into this exact situation. A lot of wedding photographers will schedule out a year out from a wedding a happy anniversary, congratulations, blah blah blah, one year, you've done it, woo-hoo, you rock [crosstalk 00:28:50].

Tamara: [crosstalk 00:28:50] dangerous. You see the danger in that. Go on.

Scott: Imagine when that couple gets divorced and you, first, don't know that the couple got divorced, and second, let that go out. Here's one that's ... This happened to me recently. It has nothing to do with scheduling, but it's sort of related to that. I photographed a couple that got engaged, and they were supposed to get married the week after photo plus on Halloween. They broke up. They did not get married. Now I had their engagement photos in my portfolio. I forgot to remove it from my portfolio. I was speaking at Canada Photo Convention next October. They aggregated some of my photos for a graphic that they put together and sent it to me for approval, and they used that photo. I had to ask them to swap it out for a different photo. Same sort of thing. You got to be careful. Automation's great because it does save time, but at the same time, really got to pay attention to what you're automating. Can it have bad timing for the people you photographed or the subject you photographed or an event? Can it relate to an event somewhere somehow?

Tamara: Yeah, and the same thing that you mentioned with wedding photography, it's true for family portraits. Families break apart, and couples break apart, and I've had over the ... I've been shooting for almost 13 years now, and I've had not an incredible amount, but I would say probably, at least, a handful of times where people have reached out and just said, "You know what? When I search my name, our family photo comes up. Can you take that down?" I've had to ... Most the times if there's a way to take quickly it down, I happily do. I may not know about it until they contact me. Another case where it becomes more difficult is on a site that you think is dead, like an old blog that you didn't even remember that's still there, because you transferred to another site, and you didn't officially shut it down. I've had time where it appears like a photo's just ghosting up there. I don't know how to find this anymore.

In the one specific case, that's what we found. We found an old blog that I didn't even realize was still there that was just being auto-renewed, and I had to scroll down and find this one post. I was shocked it was there. All of it.

Rachel: Yeah, and that's a really good another point for WordPress. WordPress, I've been using it for 10 years. If you have one installation for all those 10 years and you've changed themes and you've changed plugins, but your actual database has stayed relatively the same, you don't have those same kind of problems of Blogger to LiveJournal to WordPress to Squarespace. Because once it's up on the internet, it's really hard to find and take down, but it does. I think the other thing that we're not talking about, and it applies to both weddings and families is that people die, children die, parents die. Your blog can also become sort of a memorial in a positive and a negative.

I had a wedding client who shot the wedding, she blogged it, and then the groom committed suicide. He was a member of a band, and so the blog itself went hugely viral. At that point, what do you do? What is the ethics behind it? Do you take it down? She reached out to the bride and said, "What do you want me to do?" For the bride, she said she wanted to keep it up in his memory, but there has to be that communication between the photographer and the [crosstalk 00:32:33]. "What do you want me to do, because I will ..." At that point, it's not about marketing. It's not about ... It's about you, and it's about your emotions. This is a good discussion, because WordPress can do it all, but should it?

Tamara: Right, right. Exactly. The photographer did the right thing reaching out, because we automatically sometimes feel like, "Well, if it were me ..." But that doesn't mean that's what they would want.

Rachel: Right, right, and you can't ... She also printed, because they were in discussions for the album. This all happened so suddenly. She printed every single print and brought it to the funeral. I thought that was such a nice gesture, because we don't necessarily have those prints in our lives. After all this, when are you going to get it printed? Not only is there online component of being a photographer, but there's also that tactical like, "Here's your print. Here's your image. Here is your memory of that person."

Tamara: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Rachel: How do we transition out of this, [inaudible 00:33:31]?

Scott: Yeah. Let's move on to what you recommend as far as different WordPress products, like themes, plugins, anything like that. Are there any that are your favorite that you like to use on multiple sites, or ones that you just fell in love with? One of the obvious, which we talked about this before we started recording, and it also came up already on the show is our favorite LEGO creator, Yoast SEO. I know that is one that you enjoy that we all enjoy, and it's one that we recommend every photographer to be using to help improve their SEO. What others do you really, really enjoy?

Tamara: Yeah, one of the reasons I like that one is because what we were just talking about, I can get really lost in the work and the words and imagery. I'm not sitting there thinking about keywords or count or anything like that at all. It's really nice to kind of feel like there's someone right there just saying, "Okay. Red, yellow, green."

Rachel: Yeah, I love that.

Tamara: "This post sucks. This could be better. This is exactly how you could do it." Yeah, I love that. Shareaholic, it's interesting enough, because ... I think there's probably other plugins similar to it, but that's the one that we use on our blog. I like the fact that you can not only suggest people share it, but I also found that initially when I had it on there, it was at the bottom of every post. By simply just adding it to the top of the post as well, it seemed to increase shareability too. It kind of gets people thinking, "Oh yeah, I should either like that or share it or whatever." I like that for that reason. It's the top of mine. "Hey, if you like this," without saying, "Hey, if you like this, share it."

Scott: Those Shareaholic has another feature built in that is great for keeping people on your site looking around. It's a feature called "related posts".

Tamara: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Scott: That's a great feature inside of that to turn on as well. Now you have the social sharing aspect and you have related posts, which show up underneath each blog article and are either related by post or tag, depending on how the algorithm is made.

Tamara: A moment, please. I'm taking a note.

Rachel: I know. I love that part of that plugin, because I have clients who manually do related posts, because they want it to be ... That is so much work, and you have an extensive knowledge of your blog posts. What did you blog a year ago? I don't know.

Tamara: I don't know.

Rachel: Yeah, so it's-

Tamara: Exactly. Related posts, I'm going to add that. Thank you. Let's keep going with the recommendation.

Rachel: Well, tell us what you like?

Tamara: Oh right, that's my job. Okay. I like that. I like the Shareaholic. I like ... Well actually, this is something that I worked with a web developer to semi-create. It's not exactly done there, but it's called Subscriber Counter. I don't think that's an actual plugin so much as a modified aggregation of social count, which can be very helpful, in terms of altering people to other social media accounts that you have, because everybody kind of has their favorites. There are people who would never jump to Twitter, but they love Facebook, et cetera. It's a way of not only alerting people to other accounts you've got going on, but also if as you're somebody who wants to work with different sponsors or companies, that can be actually really helpful. I first saw an option of it on an author's blog, and I found it really helpful, because it helped me to jump over and see some of the other accounts and find what I wanted to follow. As I say that term, I don't know that that's a thing. I think it was kind of a cobbled together effort.

Scott: Yeah, so you're saying that you had that custom made for your site?

Tamara: Yes.

Scott: Okay. Yeah, so there's a bunch that exist that-

Tamara: The custom making thing is super cool.

Scott: Yeah, it is.

Rachel: It took a little bit of money to find a developer though. That's the problem nowadays is there's so much with WordPress, but if you hire someone that you don't necessarily trust, it's sort of like with photography. You get what you pay for. There's the $50 photographers and there's the $500 photographers. That also exists in the developer world. I don't know. I personally recommend plugins when in doubt, because you know that there's a support team, with the caveat that it's a plugin that's been supported.

Tamara: Yeah, because they do kind of just stop being supported.

Rachel: Yeah, and this is where the WordPress world gets overwhelming, and this is where photographers dive in and they think, "I want that, but wow, to get it, you have to go through a thousand different hoops."

Tamara: Yeah, yeah. I'm ... Yeah.

Scott: I do have a recommendation for somebody who wants one that's already made. Now this recommendation is actually going to take care of two of your recommendations in one shot.

Tamara: Wow, it's a multi-recommendation. It's going to suck it all in.

Scott: Yes, yes, there you go.

Rachel: That's four.

Tamara: All right, I'm ready. I'm writing.

Scott: Although I love Shareaholic and they've been around for a long time, the people over at Elegant Themes have a plugin that I love that once it came out, I switched right away. It's called Monarch, and it's basically just like Shareaholic as far as the social sharing goes, but it also has a follow option with subscriber counts.

Tamara: What?

Rachel: I'm going to write it down too.

Scott: It's a very light-weight plugin, so it doesn't slow down sites at all, and Elegant Themes keeps up to date with all of the social media algorithm changes like what Rachel said with Facebook changing non-stop. Since owning the plugin, I think they have updated it twice with Facebook updates specifically. Yeah, so Monarch is cool, and I'll link to that as well. It does not have-

Tamara: [crosstalk 00:39:43] like the butterfly?

Scott: Yeah, like the butterfly. It does not have related posts built in like Shareaholic does, but there's other plugins that do related posts for anybody who wants that separate. Yeah, but Monarch, as far as social sharing goes and as far as social follow goes, extremely flexible, extremely light-weight, and very pretty.

Rachel: I really like Elegant Themes as a ... Tamara, you had mentioned a theme that you use for your Beautiful Together.

Tamara: [Avonna 00:40:16].

Rachel: Yeah, and you want to talk about that? I know you mentioned that a little bit before we sort of ...

Tamara: Yeah, so the web developer we've been working with for a while, 8 Dot Graphics, initially Sarah, we had recommended to her a specific theme that I had found that was built for what Beautiful Together does. We showcase projects. We help try to solicit donations, be able to showcase where the work's going to. It was built pretty much ... I'm trying to think of the name of the theme. It was some ... I don't know. It was [inaudible 00:40:50] kind of charities. There are three main charity site kind of themes. When I first suggested it, the feedback was that the concern was it was pretty rigid. It does exactly that and nothing more, so if you want to change, you want to grow, you want to adjust the focus, it's going to be hard to do that, but we still implemented it and had it for a few months, and found exactly what the warning had been to be something that was too restrictive.

We just couldn't make anything shift, so we switched to [Avonna 00:41:18], and customized it to look exactly like what we'd initially built. The transition was really seamless looking to the outside viewer, but now we had all this great ability to adjust things, both on the backend and on the front-end in a way that really helped make a lot more of these projects come to life, gave us a lot more flexibility to showcase unique ways people were raising funds, doing really cool things. Just stuff that we weren't able to do. It's funny because you can get a little bit into a theme and then find that you're completely locked down. I appreciate the most flexible themes that let you just kind of ... The sky's the limit. What can I uniquely do here?

Rachel: Yeah, and that's also the benefit of using WordPress. I always describe it as the theme is the dress, and the WordPress backend is the skeleton. You could change the dresses, and you still will have what we talked about before with the formatting issues, especially if there're any short codes in your theme. Going from theme to theme with short codes will mess up formatting things, but I love the flexibility that you're not going to lose any of your data. You're not going to lose those blog posts. You're not going to lose those little text blurbs that take how long to write, but by putting on a new theme, you have a whole almost new re-branded site.

Tamara: Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Scott: On that topic, there're a lot of themes that include this functionality, different short codes and whatnot inside of the themes. In more recent years, I'd say in the last year or two, it's the whole methodology of theme design has changed. They want themes to themes, and the functionality to be plugins. Even the Photo Karate theme, the gallery system has always been built into the theme. E-commerce and the galleries were always built in. Then when we built NextGEN gallery and NextGEN Pro, we decided actually to strip out that gallery system and replace it with the plugin functionality instead. Actually I think today or tomorrow, we're actually releasing the updated Photo Karate theme where you're no longer using the gallery built into the theme. We're not using the plugin. It's important that when you get a theme, any photographers that are listening or watching, when you're looking at a theme, make sure you get one where whatever functionality that you like that the theme comes with, that that functionality is actually a plugin included with the theme, not just a theme, because typically if it's a plugin, you can use it on any theme.

For example, if you're using the Photo Karate theme, and your galleries and e-commerce are built on NextGEN gallery and NextGEN Pro and you want to switch themes to something else, you can do that and retain all of your galleries and e-commerce. The Elegant Themes, they also have this thing called the Divvy theme. Right up until about two months ago, the Divvy theme, their drag and drop system was built into the theme. Now it's a plugin, so you have the theme and you have the plugin.

Rachel: We probably lost 50% of you, because that was really technical.

Scott: It was really technical.

Tamara: Wait, so if the WordPress is the skeleton and the theme is the dress, the plugins are the accessories?

Rachel: I feel like the plugins are the engine, like the heart.

Tamara: [crosstalk 00:44:46] the dress though? We got to stay in the [inaudible 00:44:49].

Scott: The plugins could be pockets and zippers.

Rachel: That's good.

Tamara: Pockets and zippers?

Rachel: Functionality.

Tamara: That's because they're built into the dress?

Rachel: Right. Yeah, they have to work in conjunction.

Tamara: Right, but what you're saying is that you should have more and more of your site driven by plugins versus a theme.

Scott: Pretty much.

Rachel: Yeah, so a theme really should just be an overcoat. This is a hard analogy.

Tamara: Right, and the plugins are the bra and panties.

Rachel: Yes, I was going to go with underpants too. That's awesome.

Tamara: I like it.

Rachel: We should say that I think this is where the sites like Squarespace come in, because you hear everything that Scott just said, and you're like, "What is he talking about? How do I do that? How do I get that? Am I doing it the right way?" This is where I think services like Imagely are coming in because it's going to be a place where photographers can go and get an all-in-one solution and ask those questions. There's going to be that ... Am I correct, Scott? That they're going to be able to have a place where they can communicate and ask those questions? How do you envision that going?

Scott: Yeah, so for those who don't know what Imagely is or is going to be, because we haven't launched just yet, it's going to be turn key managed websites for photographers all built on WordPress. The beauty about it is that you'll be able to quickly-

Tamara: It's so overdue.

Rachel: Especially for photographers. Absolutely.

Tamara: So overdue.

Scott: You'll have the ability to quickly get a WordPress website launched with pre-installed themes and plugins for photographers. For example, Yoast SEO will be pre-installed with every single website, because every photographer needs Yoast SEO, but-

Tamara: But can you take it out if you don't want it for some reason?

Scott: Yes.

Tamara: Okay.

Scott: The other thing is that you'll have ... It's still WordPress. You still have control. You can do whatever you want. If you don't want any of the themes or any of the plugins, delete them and just use Imagely as a host.

Tamara: You can keep the pockets sewn up on the dress.

Scott: Yes, yes.

Rachel: We're going to run this one.

Tamara: That might [crosstalk 00:46:59]. I know, right? Metaphor. That's the word I was looking for. Yes, go.

Scott: Nice. The way that we're going to be able to help photographers is through our email support, mostly. We do have social media. There are Facebook groups. I have one that I've started, WordPress for Photographers, it's a Facebook group, and I think it has-

Rachel: Yes, and it's great if you have questions.

Scott: Yeah. I think it has close to 300 members at this point.

Tamara: 301.

Scott: We're getting ... I swear I get like ten requests everyday to join, but a lot of them are like the people that just join everywhere, and they're not obvious photographers, so I don't approve everybody. If you are requesting to join the WordPress for Photographers Facebook group, make sure it's obvious that you are a photographer.

Tamara: I hope I get in. I hope I get in. I hope I get in.

Rachel: Not you.

Scott: Tamara Lackey not allowed.

Rachel: I know.

Scott: The main source for any Imagely customers to get their questions answered are really going to be contacting support. Our support team's fantastic, but this is not about Imagely though.

Rachel: The reason I brought up Imagely is because that when you start talking about WordPress and the technical, and I experience it myself, if something breaks, your heart stops, because you're like, "Who do I go to to help fix it?" If you don't have the right partners, like Tamara says she's working with a development company, that's got to be such a peace of mind to know that you can ask those questions, not sound stupid. Especially as a woman entrepreneur, it's hard to manage through some of this and think like, "Wow, that might have been a really dumb question, but I really truly didn't know the answer until you just told me." The benefit of a service like Squarespace is you can email them a question and [crosstalk 00:48:46].

Tamara: Well people get intimidated.

Rachel: Right, and that's part of what we're trying to do with the podcast too is try to break it down and try to help where are the pockets, where are the zippers, where does it all go, and how do you keep up with it as it's changing? WordCamp Philadelphia thought-

Scott: Actually-

Tamara: Dry cleaning.

Rachel: You've got to upgrade and clean up.

Scott: WordPress 4.4 I believe is coming out today, so for anybody who's listening, by the time that you actually do listen to this, WordPress 4.4 will be out through our-

Rachel: And you should be upgraded.

Scott: You should be upgraded. It's a big upgrade. There're a lot of cool things that have been improved. It's mostly accessibility stuff and a few other styling changes.

Tamara: I have a WordPress question since I'm talking to you guys right now. When you are prompted to upgrade WordPress, because you get the kind of ... I, in the past, have had an experience where it's broken things.

Rachel: Correct.

Tamara: I liken it to upgrading your operating system. All right, now it's time for El Capitan, and now this doesn't work for me anymore, or I just blew this application out of the water, because it doesn't play with El Capitan and all that sort of stuff. What do you suggest to people when they have an upgrade push like that?

Scott: Backup your website. Make sure you have a backup solution.

Tamara: Don't most hosts back it up for you? Aren't they supposed to have your last 24 hours, 48 hours et cetera?

Scott: Not every host does, but yes, you should without a doubt.

Rachel: I actually recommend VaultPress, which is run by automatic. It's $55 a year for the light plan, and it is separate from your host, because your host should have one, but sometimes they don't always capture all the database stuff. VaultPress is one. There are others. Do you have some recommendations for off-site backup?

Tamara: Wait, just real quick. Vault Press, $55 a year, and they basically just backup your online presence for you?

Rachel: Correct.

Scott: Their lower plans do it once a day. Their higher plans do it more times a day. You can go as high and have real-time backups as well as security scans, and even hack, what do they call it, hack recovery-

Rachel: Protection?

Scott: -or something like that where they actually fix your site if you're hacked.

Rachel: Right. That's the other reason I like the VaultPress is that-

Tamara: I like that, because I've been hacked a few times.

Rachel: -because if you call ... Yeah, and if you call your host, they will walk you through it on the phone, and sometimes you're like, "What are you talking about? Can you just do it for me?" They say no, whereas VaultPress, because it's a paid service, you say, "Can you just do it for me," and they say yes, and they do it for you.

Tamara: That's always nice, just saying.

Scott: There is a host that's launching fairly soon that does have 30 day stored daily backups as well as security scanning built into their price plan.

Rachel: Really?

Scott: Yeah. I do recommend having a secondary as well, because-

Rachel: So that ... Let's get all the way back to what Tamara had asked us, which was should you upgrade? Yes. You have a backup, so when you upgrade, if it breaks, you can always revert back. Then the second recommendation is wait a week, seven days, five business days. Let the first adopters break it and fix it.

Scott: Exactly. Now WordPress updates are tested thoroughly. What was I going with this? Even if it does break for you, yes, you can revert if you have a backup, but I do recommend waiting the seven days, just like what Rachel said. However, there are some updates that WordPress will push automatically. They will force WordPress to update. Those are only major security updates.

Rachel: Yeah, so in that situation it's more beneficial to the greater good to do it because then there'll be less hacking and maybe more slight plugins, but then they'll break it. The other key is if you upgrade your version of WordPress, also go in and upgrade your plugins. Then if the plugins release another update in two days, go in and update those as well. It's staying on top of all of the updates, not just one at a time and doing it and leaving. We've all been guilty of it. I've updated, and then walked away from my site for a week, and come back and been like, "Where did all these other updates come from?"

Tamara: Yeah, well see, and I think we bring up ... This whole topic is exactly why small business owners become kind of exhausted with all this. There's a lot of rules to follow with this. There's a lot of rules to follow with upgrading your machine. There's a lot of technology built into any kind of work you do to own your own business, especially if you want to do it efficiently and you want to keep up with the latest developments and technologies. Every small business person could have their own tech support company working for them, and it becomes a lot.

Scott: This is where in the past-

Tamara: This is assuming nothing's broken. This isn't assuming we don't have a lemon, you don't have a weird bug, you don't have a ...

Scott: This is why in the past couple to a few years managed WordPress hosting has been on the rise, because when you pay for managed WordPress hosting, the pricing is a little bit higher on a monthly basis, but they're making sure your site up. They actually have ... They built algorithms to have the automated [inaudible 00:54:14] done, but then they also have humans behind there to react if something does happen. They take care of the backups. They take care of the updates of WordPress for you, and if they get notified the site goes down after the update, they revert and then look into it for you. There's a lot of-

Tamara: So does Imagely do this?

Scott: Imagely is a managed WordPress host. There's a lot of that built into this.

Tamara: What, what? What, what?

Rachel: We should mention GoDaddy and WP Engine, and there are other options. We are talking about Imagely, because we're talking about for photographers. Imagely is a company built for photographers where WP Engine is a giant company and handles, who knows, CNN and everything. It's [crosstalk 00:55:03]-

Tamara: Is there a vault kind of hacking protection service with managed hosting as well?

Scott: Yeah, so most managed hosts have some sort of security scanning as well as security prevention built in. WP Engine I believe uses one of the top security companies for WordPress is called Sucuri, it's S-U-C-U-R-I. They even have a plugin in the repo that you can install and scan your website, but I believe WP Engine uses Sucuri to do monthly or whatever scans. Synthesis I believe has it, and they do more often scan, they do scans with Sucuri more often. GoDaddy has their own system. I'm not sure what they use for security, but they do have their own. There's Pagely, there's Flywheel. There's so many out there that do manage, and all the pricing just varies across the board.

Rachel: That's the problem is that you're paying more than just a hosting plan. You're paying someone to ask question.

Scott: Yeah, and that's one of the ... I wanted to get there too is the fact that when you pay for a managed WordPress listing, you're also paying for somebody to talk to with any WordPress questions. They're there; they're passion WordPress people that will answer whatever questions that you have, if humanly possible.

Rachel: This has been such a good discussion, but we are definitely over our 45 minute time.

Scott: I guess in closing, do you have any final thoughts that you want to bring up, share anything else with the listeners and viewers?

Rachel: And what was the-

Tamara: No, I mean just ...

Rachel: Go ahead.

Tamara: Say again?

Rachel: I just wanted to make sure you tell them where they can find you. We'll have it in the show notes, but in case they want to learn more about who you are.

Tamara: You can go to my WordPress site at tamaralackey.com, and then from there you can kind of hit all the social media sites and blogs and stuff, as well as Beautiful Together, beautifultogether.org. Yeah, I guess in closing, I like that people are paying attention to the fact that how do you make this easier for small business people, because you're ... In keeping with our whole idea of the metaphor, but really one of the things I've always said is that people used to think it was all about your store front or all that sort of stuff. It really is your website, even if you are in a really visible spot, people are still going to your website first and often. That needs to be taken care of and managed, and none of us want to be ... I should say none of us. I personally, and the vast majority of photographers I speak to do not want to be web developers, or else we'd be web developers.

Rachel: Correct. Right.

Tamara: That would have been our chosen profession, and instead we want to be able to utilize all the benefits of it, but stay focused on what we do and what we do well. I'm psyched.

Scott: Great, thank you very much.

Rachel: Thank you.

Scott: Thank you, Tamara, for joining us today, and thank you for Rachel for being an awesome co-host. You can find the show notes at imagely.com/podcast/3, and be sure to subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play.

Rachel: Thank you.

Scott: Thank you, and we'll talk soon.

Rachel: Bye.

Tamara: Bye.

Transcription was done by Rev.com, using their AI (artificial intellegence) generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video or listening to the episode.

Scott:
What do you call a photo taken by a cat, a paw-trit. Welcome to episode 107. My name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz and I'm joined by my guest, Kimberly Anderson. Kimberly Anderson is the voice behind Red Curl Creative, a copywriting service for photographers and wedding professionals. A reformed wedding photographer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Kim hung up her camera after a 20 year run vowing, never to eat saucy chicken on a Saturday, again, and dusted off her English degree. Now she's the voice behind Red Curl Creative, a done-for-you copywriting service. And she also teaches photographers and other wedding pros how to write more effectively on their websites, blogs, and social media with her course Write Better Words, which we'll be talking about today. She believes very few people are terrible writers, or as terrible writers as they think they are. And she helps them find the words to attract better clients. Now, Kimberly wrote her bio, which I basically just read to you and I stumbled a little bit, but I'm not the best reader, so it happens. But you can tell she writes pretty well. So if I read it better...

Kimberly:
That's all right. We're not hiring you for your voiceover work. It's all right.

Scott:
That's true. That's true. I've always thought about getting into voiceover though. Because I feel like it'd be fun.

Kimberly:
Yeah.

Scott:
Don't you think it would be fun to do that?

Kimberly:
Yeah. I do. Yeah. I do.

Scott:
I feel like the people who do that probably have some of the most fun. The bloopers and stuff are probably so much so great to listen to.

Kimberly:
Yeah.

Scott:
Yeah. So what's going on with you, Kim. I'm glad that I got you on here. We've got a lot to talk about. And so what's going on with you?

Kimberly:
Well, I'm just living the dream over here in Milwaukee, Scott. Teaching people how to write better words, doing things for photographers and wedding pros. Just basically trying to help people get over their fear of putting words down on virtual paper. That's what I'm all about.

Scott:
Yeah. The ad image that we always come up... have people come to us and say, what should I change the dummy content to, and things like that? So we're going to get into topics about this stuff. And so let's just dive right in.

Kimberly:
Sure.

Scott:
When it comes to writing the words on your photography sites, it's super important to get it right. But getting it right isn't always that obvious. So can you talk a bit about what you should think about when writing effective copy? I'm pretty sure you'd to call this woo woo work.

Kimberly:
It is woo woo work. You can't skip the woo. I say that all the time. And the woo woo work is that tapping into who exactly you're talking to. I find a lot of times the people that struggle the most with copy on their website is they don't know who they're talking to. I mean, they know what kind of clients they want, but they haven't drilled down and they haven't done the hard work to figure out exactly who they want to appeal to. And there's a couple reasons for that. Sometimes it's, they want to appeal to everyone, which is never a good idea. This just really dilutes your copy. And sometimes it's they're scared to make people go away. They want the opportunity to talk to everyone, which makes sense. But there's a fine line between repelling people you don't want and stating what you do. So the people who hire you are very clear about what you do.

Scott:
Yeah. And I feel like in a way, and a pretty important way, at that is, if you're someone like me, that's a dad. Right? And your target market, maybe it's family portraits, but maybe your target market is not the mom in the family, but actually the dad. Right?

Kimberly:
Right. Yeah.

Scott:
And maybe your ideal client is a very masculine dad. Right? So the words you write may not be lighter tone. They may not be on the more feminine side. It might be that you're writing in a way that really a very masculine dad would connect with. Right?

Kimberly:
For sure. Like, yeah. Say if you had that type of person and that was your ideal client or the people you worked with the most, something like military animals comes to mind with this. What do they want? They want the facts. They want to know, how long is this going to take? How are you going to make this easy for me? It's a very, very different audience that you're writing to than the mom that wants the family portraits to hang on the walls. I mean that dad is probably going to want to know what exactly should I wear. He's going to have a lot of questions that are very drilled down and less esoteric than the mother. And if you're writing to the mother, he's not going to connect with that.

Scott:
It's funny you brought the military thing. I've never thought about military families specifically being a target audience, which obviously they totally can. And I'm sure they are too many photographers, but I write for military people.

Kimberly:
Oh. Do you? Okay.

Scott:
Yeah. Because the way that you describe it, it's true. They're very matter of fact. And I'm that way as well. So I naturally tend to write way more than I need to, to detail every aspect of things.

Kimberly:
Yeah. Very common. Yep.

Scott:
So, yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's so interesting. Okay. Yeah. This is great already. Most web designs, WordPress themes and whatnot, all come with some sort of dummy content, which I just mentioned a little earlier in the show. It's a placeholder. I mean, Imagely themes, photo karate themes, ProPhoto flow themes, they all come with these placeholder content for the site owners to then fill in with our own copy.

Kimberly:
Right.

Scott:
But people aren't bound to the paragraph here and there, or the three bullet points. They can add five bullet points. Right?

Kimberly:
They can.

Scott:
They're not bound to that. Right. So can you talk about your suggestions, your thoughts about placeholder dummy content versus what photographers should be doing?

Kimberly:
Sure. So this is something that is fascinating to me. Just because you're creative and you're a great photographer doesn't mean that, that translates into the written word. And you can be creative in one part of your brain and not in the other. Way back when I was in photo school, I took a sketch course, and I was so excited about this course because I thought, well, I'm a photographer. Right? I'm artistic. I like to take photos. I like to draw. I like... I just assumed. And I was terrible at it. It was a completely different dimension for me. So going back to the Laura Ipsen, when you open up a theme and you start typing into that theme, what's happening is, if you are not used to writing a lot, your brain shuts down. It sees here's this little space that's got room for four sentences and three bullet points.

Kimberly:
And that's what I have to put there. And that's not at all the case. You're going to laugh at me for saying this, but themes lie to you when it comes to copy. So you really need to write that stuff outside of your template. I encourage people to write as much as they can in a Word doc or a Google doc, whatever you're happy with. Write in chunks, and then start moving those chunks into your website. And there might be parts that you don't use on, say on your homepage. It's starting to be a little crowded, but you have this paragraph that you really like where you're explaining something. Well, that's great. Just move it to your FAQs. I mean, there's lots of different ways you can do the copy and people get very drilled down into the fact that if I'm writing on the homepage, I've got these spots to fill. And you do not have to.

Scott:
Right. It's so true. One thing that Imagely does is we actually fill it in with actual, albeit they might be short, but we'll fill it in with a short bio that's a made up thing. We won't use the actual, Laura [inaudible 00:09:10] nonsense that doesn't make any sense, but it's still the same thing where we're kind of telling you three lines is your paragraph. When in reality it could be how ever very long you want it to be.

Kimberly:
It could be. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott:
Yeah.

Kimberly:
It just really stifles your creativity when you have to write inside the template.

Scott:
Yep. Yeah. I personally like to write in either Google docs and use Grammarly inside of Google docs to help me pretty things up a bit. Or inside of Grammarly or inside of Hemingway, which is also another great app, free or paid, depending on what you want.

Kimberly:
Right.

Scott:
So speaking of Google docs, for the photographers who hate to type page copy, blog content, or anything like that, even social posts. Right? That you don't actually go to Facebook and type it, you can type it in a Google doc, let's say your draft. For people who hate the typing process, who more prefer things like talking to a human being, could you share some tips for alternative methods for writing content?

Kimberly:
Sure. Yeah. And this is, again, very common. People are like, I'm a terrible typist, or... There's something really weird to people that happens when they put those fingers on the keyboards if they're already scared of writing. I equate it to whenever I see an Excel spreadsheet. The minute I see that spreadsheet, I start to sweat because I don't understand how to make those columns work. I'm terrible at math. That part of my brain does not work.

Scott:
You have to be Jamie Swanson to really swoon over an Excel spreadsheet.

Kimberly:
Yeah. She knows very well of my dislike of spreadsheets. And she will always say, you can put it in a doc if you want. I'm like good. So, yeah. If that's the case with you, if that's really hard for you, then both Word, Google, they all have voice to type. It's free. And I use it quite often when I'm brainstorming. If I'm sitting around and I'm trying to think of blog topics, and I'm just cruising around the internet and I'm looking at things and I'm reading things, I will just... You can open up a Word doc, put on your headphones, if you want. And just start talking. What I do recommend, though, is you don't watch it as it transcribes onto the page because it will mess you up. The more you do it though, the more it gets to know your voice and your cadence, and it'll get it 90% ish right.

Kimberly:
So this isn't for final copy, obviously, but it is a great place if you just need to get it all out. You just need the blab, you can do it in your own documents and then go back and pull out the little parts that you want to say and refine them and type them out. Another great app is Otter AI. I have the app on my phone, and then it also is an online service where you can upload to transcripts. But if I am driving around or in the middle of the night, I have a good idea. I just click on that and I talk right into my phone and it transcribes it.

Kimberly:
And then it also uploads it to the cloud. So I have another copy of it there. I'm a weird one for waking up in the middle of the night and thinking of ideas. Three to 4:00 AM is my prime time brain time for being creative for some reason. If that happens then I just opened up the app and I talk into it for a few minutes and close it up. And sometimes when I go back to Otter to see what I have in there in my little treasure trove, some of it's brilliant. And some of it's like, what was I talking about?

Kimberly:
And it has nothing to do with the way it was transcribed. It's like, you were not fully awake when you decided this was a good idea. You don't have to type it. Even if you're doing social media, cell phones have the little record button where you can go in and you can talk into your phone and then just double check it and make sure everything's grammatically correct and stuff before you hit upload. So if that's your hangup, it's an easy way around that.

Scott:
So I have two things in this topic. One, on the Imagely blog, it's an older article and video, but it's still very valid, because there hasn't changed. I have a video and article all about Google doc and doing this in Google doc and the limitations of it. So you can actually see me doing it and show there's things like punctuation, where you have to say period in order for it to do a period. Because otherwise it's one giant paragraph.

Scott:
So there's some issues with it. But for the most part, I mean, it's Google's AI. So it's very intelligent to figure out what you're saying. The other thing I want to share, similar to Otter is another app that you could try, which to me, in my opinion, there's a slight advantage is Rev dot com who actually does the transcriptions for this podcast. So they have an AI based, very, very affordable AI based transcription service, which we use for the episodes. You can actually opt for a human transcription so that it's more accurate and they have both Android and Apple apps, iOS apps, as well, that you can record on your phone and then have a human translate it instead of AI if you want.

Kimberly:
Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. I didn't know that about the human with Rev. That's great. It is much more accurate. Rev is much more accurate, in general.

Scott:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Otter is great, of course. And also very affordable. I mean they have free and then there's paid. But yeah. So there's options. I'm going to link to all these in the show notes so no worries there for anybody who is trying to keep up with this. It'll be in the show notes. Okay. So everybody's favorite topic, blogging. It's so important for a business. Whether photographers believe it or not, it really is important. Besides from being able to connect with your audience, blogs help you attract new clients, but they're not just limited to your websites. They can be used in other ways. And by your website, I don't mean just your website overall. I mean, it's not just limited to just blog posts. Can you share ways that you think photographers can repurpose the blog content they're writing so that they can help their business in other ways?

Kimberly:
Absolutely. I'm big on repurposing. It's my jam. I think that people don't need to reinvent the wheel. They don't need to work as hard as they are. When you're blogging and you have some information that's really good. Because we're all blogging in shorter paragraphs, phrases, whatever. You can go through in a blog, I just actually did it just before we got on this podcast. I was just editing a blog post for somebody. And I pulled out six social media things for her from the blog. Here you go. Post this with a picture of this. Post this, and then add a little bit on here. Post this and tell them why you love photos hanging on your walls. So if you go through your old blogs, and I'm not talking about the client centered blogs where you blog about somebody's wedding, those you can find nuggets in here and there, I'm talking more about evergreen blogs or blogs you've written about engagement sessions, or the best place for family photos in Sioux Falls or whatever.

Kimberly:
You can go through and pull out one of those bullet points. Let's take the Sioux Falls, for example. You blog about a park that you really love. And right now it's early summer and the peonies are blooming. Go back. Pull out that little chunk. Post it on your social media, and then add a photo from a session you had there. Boom. Done. Out the door. You can do that with every single blog post you do. The blog posts, I just referred to where I pulled out five social media posts, I said to her, go in. I want you to schedule these out every Wednesday right now for the next five weeks you have social media content.

Kimberly:
And she was like, I can do that. And I'm like, yes. You can do that. First of all, the people who are reading your blog are probably a different audience than the people that are on your social media. And also, it all moves so fast. Not everyone sees all your content. So just because you're like, well, I don't want to post that on Facebook because I already said it on my blog. It's fine. Go ahead and do it. The people who have seen it twice won't care, but there's a better chance that they haven't seen it at all.

Scott:
I think that's a fantastic way to do it. And one thing they can do once the blog post is published and they start pushing these out on social is if it's Facebook, for example, don't include the link in the post with the photo, but instead make the first comment being the link to the blog post. So people who care about it are going to check the comments. They are going to see, oh, somebody commented. They're going to look at it and say, oh great. They shared a link to even more about this. Right?

Kimberly:
Yes. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:18:32] And make them work for you. You can even turn your blog content into PDF guides to send your clients.

Scott:
Yes.

Kimberly:
You can link in them in your response emails. Oh. I love that venue. Here's a link to a blog where I shot it for Barbie and Ken's wedding. Besides the SEO benefits, there's just, so...

Scott:
Barbie and Ken.

Kimberly:
That's always my go to.

Scott:
Nice.

Kimberly:
There's so many benefits to blogging and every time I read on a Facebook board or wherever blogging is dead. I think, oh, you are so, so wrong. It's like saying digital will never catch on. It's not true.

Scott:
Right. Yeah. On the topic of creating a PDF, I've got a whole course, which I'll link to in the show notes on lead generation for photographers. And one of the big part of this is a strategic blogging to the point where you're taking specific blog posts that you're creating and turning them into a lead magnet for existing clients or that you want to get back or new leads that want to convert to clients.

Kimberly:
That's awesome.

Scott:
So it's another way that you can repurpose. It's not just social media. It's not just PDFs for clients. It's a variety of things. It's emails. It's replies. It's a whole slew of different things as so many things you can turn them into.

Kimberly:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Scott:
So one thing that I like to drill into the Imagely community is the use of social proof like testimonials. There's a variety of different social proof type things, but I know that you're a fan of testimonials.

Kimberly:
I am.

Scott:
So can you share your opinions and thoughts on these and whatnot?

Kimberly:
I love testimonials because they're free copy. You know? I mean, your clients are literally giving you the words you need to attract other clients like them. And so many people feel weird about them. And I do get that. It is weird the first couple of times you asked for them, but then once you get them, it almost becomes addictive. I ask everyone for testimonials all the time. Because it's social proof and it's true. Right? I didn't make that stuff up. They're not going to give me a testimonial if they didn't really enjoy working with me and you can use them in so many ways. You can use them in your website. It's a great thing to do. If you're not big on writing, you should be putting testimonials on your website. Just in between those pretty pictures of yours, start filling it up with some of the words people have said about you, because they're telling your potential client, this is how they made me feel.

Kimberly:
This is what they did for me. And that person is going to immediately make that brain connection of, well, I want that. That's how I want to feel. And beyond on your website, you can use them for social media. Again, going back to that scheduling it out, photographers, especially, get very hung up on, wall, what if I don't have a photo to go with it, and you don't need a photo. You can make a little template in Canva with your logo on it. There's a ton of them in there make a standard one with your logo in there and then just drop them in there. Even if you... Just a portion of it. And then you have these little beautiful little badges where people are saying nice things about you that you can post.

Scott:
I will say though, that if you do have a photo of the client or a photo that you did for that client who left you a nice review to definitely include it.

Kimberly:
Oh. Absolutely.

Scott:
With that that testimonial.

Kimberly:
Sure.

Scott:
But it's not a hundred percent necessary, but if you have it, you're better to include it.

Kimberly:
Of course.

Scott:
But if you don't, then I do like the Canva approach for various things.

Kimberly:
Yeah. It makes it easy. Also, they can be great for call to action buttons. You know, the buttons on your site that you put in that say learn more or whatever. Hey, just, you don't have to use that learn more. Your template will allow you to change the words in there. So one of the things I love to do with those is like I had someone who recently said that I wrote... I was a rad writer or something. I wrote her rad content. So underneath that quote by her, I have a call to action button that says, get your rad copy now. So when people click on it, you know their content. So you can use them in more ways than just bragging about yourself so your mom knows you're cool.

Scott:
One of my testimonials is from another photographer that I've worked with a lot over the years, somebody I've known for a long, long time. And he left me a nice review years ago just saying, Scott is a bad ass photographer. So I should totally have a button saying that you're bad ass portraits.

Kimberly:
You should. You should. I mean, because that's microcopy and whenever you can use that microcopy in unexpected ways, people love it. It makes you seem more human. It sets you apart from the other people, because it gives them a little chuckle or makes them look twice. So yeah. Use that stuff.

Scott:
Yeah. That's good. That's really good advice to do. Because those call to action button, they get boring. So yeah. I want to do a quick shout out to Seshu from Connecticut Headshots. He left a nice review on the podcast. He said, "A podcast that goes to distance, Scott presents issues and topics in this podcast that are both interesting and important to photographers and they do so with style and substance. It's one of my favorite podcasts and I highly recommend you listen." So thank you, Seshu, for that nice review on Apple podcasts. So, Kim, tell me. You got a course that you had been working on and by the time that this episode airs, it will probably be out and then ready for everybody, I think. Either way, we're going to link to in the show notes so it'll be there for everybody to find, but can you share a bit about your course? Because, obviously, you know what you're doing when you talk about writing. You know what you're doing when you're writing, you know... You're talking about it so nicely, so yeah. Can you tell everybody about this course?

Kimberly:
Yeah. So the course idea came from a couple things. First I do a lot of writing obviously for photographers and as much as I love writing for people there comes a point unless you are making the big bucks where you have to do some of your own content. And so the idea from the course came from the idea that I wanted to help photographers get over the fact that they saw themselves as people who couldn't write. And I'll see it all the time. I'll see these really wonderful things they say on Facebook. And I'll be like, what do you mean you can't write? That was great. But it, again, goes back to what you believe you're good at. So I started the course, it's called Write Better Words, to help photographers understand that writing, it's a framework. Right?

Kimberly:
We're not writing a great American novel. We're not Stephen King. When you're writing words on your website and on your social media, it's to connect you with your clients, it's much more personal. And then also has a hint of conversion in they're trying to get those people from being lookers to buyers. So when you follow a framework, it's much less intimidating also, especially, in the case of the pandemic. It just happened. A lot of people are pivoting their offers. They're adding in new things. They're changing the way they're doing business. And unless you have the funds to pay a professional copywriter several thousand dollars every six months to a year to change your copy, you've got to go in there and do your own. And being able to feel secure that what you're saying is coming from the heart and just connecting with your clients.

Kimberly:
I just think it's so important. I relate it to back in the day when we all had websites that none of us... We couldn't change anything on the backend. Right? There was no Imagely. You had to pay someone a ton of money. Send over the copy. And then if you wanted anything changed, you had to wait. That's not the case anymore. Just like anything else, you have to learn how to do something so that you can make those changes on the fly. So the idea is that I wanted them to feel better about their words.

Scott:
Nice. Yeah. I'm looking forward to, to learning from you as this course gets built out, and released to the public. And I think I might have mentioned this to you, but I am a dyslexic blogger and content creator.

Kimberly:
I had no idea when you told me that. I was like, really?

Scott:
Yeah. So that's one of the reasons why I stumble when I read and also why I have to run my writing through a bunch of different tools and then my wife for her red pen as well. So yeah. So I feel like not only is your course going to help me think more about the words that I actually type out or write down, my handwriting sucks, it'll probably be typing more than anything, but I feel like it'll also helped me with that disability that I have to get past the... On top of the tools that I use on a regular basis anyway.

Kimberly:
Great. Awesome.

Scott:
For me, I look forward for that and I'm sure others will benefit, as well. So I'm glad that you're doing this.

Kimberly:
Thank you. I am too. It's been fun.

Scott:
Yeah. We're going to wrap it up. I just want to say thank you, Kim, for joining me today. I'm going to link to everywhere people can find you in the show notes, but if you can please share the absolute best place for everybody to find more information about you.

Kimberly:
Absolutely. If you want to find out more about me and you went to hire me to write the words for you, you can find me at red curl creative dot com and also on Facebook. If you want to learn more about writing your own words, you can find us on Facebook. We have a private group. It's called Write Better Words for Photographers and Wedding Pros. So just ask to join and I'll let you in. And we post all sorts of free content in there and prompts. Yesterday. I think I posted 10 or 12 different blog post ideas for people. So try to give them stuff to encourage and empower them to come up with their own ideas. So either place you can find me.

Scott:
Awesome. So you can find all the places to find Kim at the show notes and everything else that was referenced in this episode at Imagely dot com slash podcast slash one zero seven. Don't forget to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast, Spotify, Pandora, Google Play, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time.

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.