Over the last couple of years, I've mentioned Alicia Caine's Served Up Fresh website a number of times. For business savvy portraits photographers visiting her site is kind of like going to Mecca. I am not talking about just her product offers. Read her blog!

While equating it to a religious experience may be taking it a bit too far, let me tell you that I believe her guides: Happy Place Business Plan, Easy as Pie Pricing, Piece of Cake Marketing and the retired LuxUndercover are all resources portrait photographers interested in succeeding should buy, read and re-read.

Look, while I am now be an affiliate of her's, I bought every one of those products and devoured them when they first came out. In fact, thanks to these foundational guide books, I now think of myself more as a portrait photographer than ever before. Part of what she does well in each of these workbooks is she gives you a chance to think about your business in a very different way. When light bulbs pop on constantly, it's easy to see the kind of value that's delivered within the pages of these guide books. The worksheets have nudged me along a very different path than I was going on before.

Alicia is offering a rare (and I do mean rare because of how high the discount is) and epic summer sale of her products, now through Wednesday, July 24th.

You can purchase Happy Place Business Plan for $74.50, Easy as Pie Pricing for $174.50, Piece of Cake Marketing for $174.50 and the MegaPack (Easy as Pie + Happy Place) is for $197.50.

These are are all 50% off! Plus, the first 25 100 people to use the coupon code “EPICSALE” gets you Alicia's bonus download of her retired ebook LuxUndercover (valued at $149). If you ever wanted to get your branding and customer service right for high end clients, this book is priceless.

The sale doesn't last forever and given that Alicia is hinting at a new site and new products in the Fall, these may just not be offered in the future. The sale ends July 24th.

As I've said above, I am an affiliate and make a small commission on each sale (helps support this website).

Do you ever wonder what your value proposition is to your potential client? In other words, what do you bring to the table that your “rightest” client will eat up and then thank you for it by paying you what you are really worth?

It's a simple question. But it's not so easy to answer or explain. Thankfully, Angela Pointon of Steel Toe Images has a new book out called “Worth More: A Simple Way To Create The Photography Brand, Pricing and Packages That Command The Money You Deserve.” [affiliate]

Long title, I know.

I just got done reading an advance review copy and I have to tell you the worksheets and exercises she puts you through are the very first steps any photographer must take to create a sustaining and successful business. It's critical that you define who your clients need to be and then work through your pricing and packaging that meets your target client's expectations. There is really no better way to synchronize your values with those of your clients.

From Worth More: “So we’re going to figure out your ONE awesome thing by conducting another written exercise. And honestly, there’s a chance you’re not doing anything awesome right now.”

When things are in sync, you get to make a living at something you love to do. No one can or should deny you that, especially you. So, here is what I am urging you to do. Watch this video below. Based on what you hear from Angela, figure out if you ant to be a thriving photographer or a struggling photographer. If it is the former, buy Angela's book. It's on sale from today through June 23 for $79. It goes up to $99 after that date.

Angela also sent me this infographic that allows you to compare the two different photographers in the world: thriving or struggling –

Now, let me be very clear about one thing. As I read through the e-book, Angela wants you to complete exercise after exercise so that the answers guide you to some startling and positive conclusions. If you are the type that buys info products and just sits on them, don't buy this book. That would be a sheer waste of money. However, if you are open to trying new things and actually doing what Angela prescribes, I'll guarantee that you will see incredible results.

So, why should you buy Angela Pointon's e-book? Very simply, reading it and doing the exercises will be transformative (with a little elbow grease) for your bottom line. Imagine not having to struggle to find the “rightest” clients. Imagine having time to spend with your loved ones. Imagine being able to create a nest egg that keeps growing. All because you spent a few hours gaining some much needed clarity on whom you want to serve and why.

For me saving $20 is still something. I'm going to bet it is for you too. So, get the book before the price jumps on June 24th.

Jen Basford is the owner of Seniors Ignite, an organization dedicated to providing next-level senior portrait photography education to photographers to help them grow their business. She also owns 3 girls photography in Edmond, Oklahoma. She is best known for fashion-inspired high school senior portraits and the annual must-see fashion show she puts on for upcoming seniors each spring. Jen is one of the top senior portrait photographers in the Midwest largely due to her out-of-the-box approach to marketing and client relationships. Follow Jen on Twitter.

Let's face it – things have CHANGED in the senior portrait industry. It wasn't all that long ago that you could gather some cool images, pair them with a great special, give out your number and the phone would start ringing. Your senior season would be half full before you knew it, with clients booking out months in advance.

But that doesn't work anymore. That's right, I said it. THAT DOESN'T WORK ANYMORE.

So you've got two choices here – you can either get mad and argue with me about that fact, or you can change your tactics and put together a marketing plan aimed at your target market. In order to move forward you must first change your OUTLOOK before you can change the OUTCOME. And if you're not ready to do that then stop reading right here. You can come back to this post when you're ready to move forward with a positive attitude.

When the phone stops ringing, and when your books aren't full, it's tempting to panic and react immediately by trying to push your services onto the market. “50% off sale!” “Book now!” “Discount sessions available!” But this only confuses your client base and hurts your brand. It is also a turn-off to your audience.

So what SHOULD you do then? You need clients in order to get sales, so how do you get the phone to ring?

1) Go Backwards Instead Of Forwards

This sounds counterintuitive, but it actually works. If you haven't already done so, sign up for an account with Sticky Albums – these custom mobile apps are one of the best and least expensive marketing tools on the planet. Then make a list of all your best senior clients (and by ‘best' I mean those that love you and love what you do, regardless of what they spent).

Create a Sticky Album with the images from their session – customized with your studio branding – and put a value-added time-sensitive call to action at the end of the album. Send these custom apps to your senior clients and let them know they can share them with all of their friends. Do this with your upcoming senior models as well.

Create value-added incentives for your clients to share these apps, and watch the marketing go viral. This is a great non-pushy way to get in front of your target market and give them a reason to book!

2) Blog

Update your blog with images of your current work. But be careful – it's tempting to post images of everyone and everything, but this is where you can separate yourself from the competition. Show only your best work, and show only the types of images you want to shoot. If you don't particularly like shooting sessions outdoors, then don't show outdoor images.

Create a blog schedule and post regularly on your blog, and talk about the sessions, the people, and the experiences that make you different. Include some posts about businesses in your community where you recommend your clients shop, and then send an email to those businesses with a link to your blog post.

Extend your reach, and create a relationship with your target clients. People want to be associated with success, and this can help make you look busy and in demand while establishing you as the senior portrait expert in your community.

3) Get Out And Be Seen

Attend all of the events at your target high schools – sporting events, drama productions, auctions, charity fundraisers, performances, etc. Bring your camera and take candid photographs of the kids having fun (with permission from the school or organizers, of course). Pass out cards with your blog or facebook page URL, and let everyone know that you will post the images online for them to see, share, and tag themselves. Build your name and a relationship with your target market and you will increase trust with your audience. This gives you a platform with which to market your senior business in a way that is real and genuine.

Want more ideas for low cost marketing that will grow your senior business? Check out this FREE guide from Seniors Ignite and let us help you book more clients year round.

Joy Vertz, Milwaukee WI, is a photographer who is passionate about the business side. Having started in her basement in 2003 and now running two profitable studios, she has seen (and learned) a lot about what it takes to run a successful, smooth operation. She routinely blogs and educates about pricing, marketing, workflow and process. Joy holds a degree in Studio Art from Lawrence University. Follow Joy on Instagram & Twitter: @joyvertz

In my 10 years in business, one of the most frequently received questions is not about photography at all, it is about pricing. And photographers tend to struggle with pricing because let's face it: Numbers don't come naturally to artists. This is the most common pain that photographers feel in their business because pricing causes stress, confusion for clients, and sometimes even business failure. Pricing your photography is a big deal – and it is something that can make or break a company.

That's why, when I was looking through some “how-to” material recently and saw the following advice, it got my attention immediately…not in a good way:

“Do research on your competition: What are the other photographers in your area charging? Evaluate them and their price lists and see how your work rates in comparison to theirs. Key factors in this comparison can include customer service, image quality, and overall professionalism.”

Now that I've fought my battles in the pricing war (and have some hard-won experience and confidence on my side), it's a lot easier to see why advice like that is such a trap. It's asking you to find your value by looking at what everyone else does. Let's look at some reasons why, although it might seem like a good idea, it really isn't.

First, every business is unique and their price list will reflect their individuality. There's no way to completely know all of the reasons someone else chose their pricing and whether those choices were made on solid business experiences and practices. For all you know, they might have been guessing or worse yet, copying their competition.

Second, do you have any interest in going back every six months to revisit your competitors pricing? I can't think of a more miserable, thankless task than that.

Lastly, you have no idea if they are profitable or struggling. They might be taking huge losses or only be in business for the tax perks, so they're ok with clearing less than minimum wage per sale. Here again, you'll never have the complete story.

Bottom line: finding the right route for your business means focusing on YOUR business, not any others. It's much more useful and rewarding to get reliable information about what you're doing than unreliable information about other shops. Plus, your business deserves your time more than they do.

A great first step that you can take would be to give up the bad habit of constantly sizing up the competition. To learn more about pricing for profit please join me in a 4-part Free Video series http://www.howtopricephotos.com.

Feuza Reis is a wedding photographer, blogger and founder of SEO for Photographer’s Bootcamp “Get Found With Fuse”. This is Feuza's second guest blog post. Read her first one as well. Follow Feuza on Twitter.

In the last few weeks, some photographers in the community have imparted SEO advice that has made me want to cringe and hide. Not only were there some major mistakes taught, some things mentioned were irresponsible and can get photographers in trouble with Google.

Here are 5 SEO myths photographers should consider reviewing:

1) Wanting To Only Rank (meaning to be on the first page of Google) For A City and/or Kind Of Photography Service You Offer

For example: NY Wedding Photographer, Los Angeles Newborn photographer, Chicago kids Photographer and so forth.

You should be including the town you live in and the towns you serve in your SEO efforts but it should not be your main SEO or only SEO goal.

Why?

Number one is, I call this the gladiator arena, everyone is bidding on adwords for this term and paying big bucks for it, this in turn will make it harder to rank. This also indicates a high competition in the organic results realm because business owners don’t understand how people actually search or how Google works.

Google is smart enough to know where the person searching is actually located and it knows how to filter it’s results accordingly. Do brides who get married in NY, Chicago or LA really live in that town? Or, do they live in surrounding towns but want to get married in the big city? I don’t have an exact answer for this but I know you can use Google’s Keyword Tool to discover the search traffic results to find out. What I do know is that Google is wise and knows what it is doing so when I hear photographers say they don’t or should not list surrounding towns, it's comical and sad.

You are missing out on organic traffic because you are underestimating Google’s algorithms. Why fight where everyone is fighting instead of going after alternative keywords, venues, wedding types, surrounding cities, and actually words and phrases clients really use like pictures of engagement photos, kids, children and not words like lifestyle, portrait, and industry related words?

Competitive keywords don’t always mean more traffic so be very careful.

2) Use The Same 2-3 Keyword Phrase On Every Single Blog Post And On All Pages Of Your Website

Although SEO is all about text and yes you should have as much text as possible and even be repetitive, variety matters.

For an engagement photo session gallery page, your page titles and description should be related to engagement photography and variations of that and not have words like Family or San Diego Wedding Photographer.

Yes Google knows that those when two things are relatable like wedding and engagement but making the page as concise and specific as possible will help the search engines navigate better and know where to go within your website. This also matters when choosing what to name your links within your pages in your category dropdowns and sub categories. Don’t use cute names for sessions but use more day to day words clients will know.

The other problem with using the same keyword all over is that it will be considered duplicate content and your pages will compete with each other and you sure don’t want that because the Google bots will leave. Remember its not your over all domain url that gets ranked per say but it is your pages and one page can be much stronger than the other and get better results. So if a search engine comes into your website and all the pages are “Seattle Wedding Photographer” it will get stuck and not know how to navigate and this will cause higher bounce rates so change your page titles, change your descriptions. Being too repetitive is also called keyword stuffing which Google has been frowning upon over and over. It can get you short term results but the long term can get you banned from Google and most of us can’t risk grey hat practices because lets face it we don’t have the bucks to pay some technician to go fix the problem if we magically disappear from google one day.

How to know if you are keyword stuffing? Optimize for humans! Make it sound natural and if it looks odd then take it out. We can optimize for the search engines all day long but at the end of the day it is humans that book us so keep your clients in mind.

3) Clients Don’t Type More Than Two or Three Keyword Phrases In Their Search

(insert jaw drop)

Longer phrase words are called “long tail” and yes there may be less traffic but if you nail a long tail keyword, Google will love you and give you priority with ranking!

As Photographer's SEO put it:

“A great thing about knowing how to choose long tail keywords is that even though the search volume for that particular keyword phrase may be lower you’ll find that there is less competition for it there for you’ll have a much better chance of breaking higher for them very quickly.”

Statics state that 20% of what has been searched in Google in the last 90 days has NEVER which indicates we humans have a lot to say and alot has not been said yet. SEO MOZ’s long term graph shows:

“It's wonderful to deal with keywords that have 5,000 searches a day, or even 500 searches a day, but in reality, these “popular” search terms actually make up less than 30% of the searches performed on the web. The remaining 70% lie in what's called the “long tail” of search. The long tail contains hundreds of millions of unique searches that might be conducted a few times in any given day, but, when taken together, they comprise the majority of the world's demand for information through search engines.”

Another point I want to state in regards to using long tail phrases is that for the most types of photography services offered, it is more women than men doing the actual search: think of brides, moms, secretaries, teens etc. Of course men search too. In fact, I have a lot of grooms calling me but I believe men do more the paying and showing up and women do more the searching online. So if it's women mostly searching for my service (of course this is my opinion and there are many exceptions) and women speak on average 10,000 words a day vs men who generally speak 3,000 words a day, do you really think women while searching will want to save on vocabulary? Is is true that we live in a fast paced society and people can save some words because they are in a rush but the words saved based on what you see on Google keyword tool result are prepositions. When searching for something new and an unfamiliar topic like hiring a photographer for an event, wedding, portrait session, we will use more words to describe what we are looking for because for most of our clients this is something new to them completely.

I had to recently search about pulling teeth since my eight year son’s teeth are growing in before falling out and they were very loose too. Do you think I searched 2 word phrases like tooth pulling or a full sentence? I actually searched something like: “how do you when to pull a child’s tooth? How to safely pull a tooth? Is it safe to pull your child’s teeth and so forth?”

Brides, moms and people for the most part when searching online for a topic they are not used to will elaborate using their words. Things like “where to find? what is? who is the best?,” and so forth.

So, don’t ignore longer keyword phrases especially when blogging.

4) Creating Dummy Pages

Cringe and cringe. How could I call creating content pages for my clients, the ones who book me, pay for my services dummy pages? Or worse, create fake urls to link back to my website? This can be done if you are an expert but you have to know what you are doing so just be aware of possible consequences in doing so.

So you ask: “Feuza, you have never purchased an url with keywords?” Of course I have and will in a heartbeat if a keyword is available. But I am a huge fan of creating content pages on your actual website and even blog because it can be huge for SEO. Perhaps do a redirect or forward the URL once but not a dozen times and create fake websites. And please don’t purchase any backlinks on fiverr!

At the end of the day, I don’t care if you are getting business from referrals only, from Facebook only or from online only the number one tip to book new clients is BE A RESOURCE. One of the things I teach for blogging is think of every customer service question you have ever had and do a blog post to answer it for present clients and future clients.

When you help someone find a place to buy something, to photograph at a venue, they will remember you and be your fan. That is the power of social media sometimes. You will get your return-on-investment, or ROI, later and it can be hard to tell the true source of that booking. But by providing valuable information to your end user, you will see results.

Be genuine about your content pages and optimize for humans especially since Google has been coming down on these kinds of methods more and more. You should try and have variety in content you do provide. You can also break down your frequently asked questions and have a page for each question. However, remember not to write the exact same thing on blog content page that you do on your website content page because it can be viewed as duplicate content.

5) “I Can’t Be In Google Places Because I Work From Home”

Some of you don’t want strangers to have your home address. I get that. But, as service providers many of us do work from home and some of our work, like boudoir photography, is more of a private service.

While you do indeed need to provide your real address, you can mask the address in your Google Places listing by providing many cities you do serve. Yelp does something similar.

As per Google’s guidelines:

“Address (required): The address should look exactly the way you'd write it on a standard mailing envelope. If you are a service-area business, you'll be able to hide your address in a few steps. We recommend listing suite numbers in Address Line 2.”

To view the rest of the guidelines visit HERE!

So don’t hesitate in getting your Google listings as local SEO gets more and more powerful. Another good tip is to Google yourself under Google Maps to see what comes up and to see if you are listed or Google has wrong information about your business.

As you can see my listing does not have my actual address but just the town I live in:

In summary it is up to each business to do due diligence and be compliant. Some may disagree with my views on some things but there are some facts that can not be ignored. I suggest white hat practices especially if you don’t know what you are doing and don’t have an SEO support team to get found!