Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break. Did you splurge on Black Friday? What did you buy? I'll reveal my list of goodies soon. But with today being Cyber Monday, I wanted you all to get access to what I consider to be the three best deals for photographers:

Deal # 1: Web Marketing Guides For Photographers

Zach Prez is the prolific writer behind the best books on social media marketing for photographers. Yes, that's a testimonial based on my own experience. I have learned so much from Zach that I have decided to endorse his products here on Tiffinbox.

He is extending his Black Friday specials through the end of today. If you are struggling to get your social media groove on, you will be doing yourself a favor by diving in and buying one or all of his e-books.

Save 30% on my Web Design Guide $70 $49
Photographer's Guide to a Killer Web Presence has 122 pages that analyze the world’s top photography websites, blogs, Facebook and Twitter pages, and email newsletters to show you simple design tactics to attract new business.

Save 57% on my Intro Web Guide + Blogging Guide $58 $24.50

Save 50% on my Intro Web Guide $29 $14.50
usiness building recommendations focused on search engines (SEO), social media, and email marketing.

Save 50% on my Blogging Guide $29 $14.50
Photogrpahy Blog Success has 60 pages teaching photographers how to get more business from your blog.

Save 30% on my Self-Study Workshop $89 $62
Web Marketing for Photographers Workshop walks through SEO, blogging, social media, tracking, and everything you need for getting more sales online. Includes multiple ebooks, action worksheets, and videos.

Save 30% on Individual Coaching $500 $350 most savings
The fastest way to succeed is with personal phone consulting. I review your website and talk you through everything you need to know to excel in search. All my ebooks are included for your reference after our call.

Visit Photography Web Marketing Guide, to learn more about what Zach has to offer you.

Deal # 2: All Fundy Products at 30% Off!

Andrew “Fundy” Funderburg is the brains behind Album Builder, Image Brander, Prosper, Action Matic, Blog Collage, Workflow and Album Proofer. That's a dizzying array of products for sure and knowing Fundy, he is cooking up even more goodies for us in 2012. If you are a wedding photographer, you probably already know these products. He is offering them all up for 30% off today. Now, you've an even better reason to jump in and buy his products.

Click here to visit Fundy SOS and learn more about what he has to offer you and your business.

Deal #3: Kubota Tools: $50 Off Photoshop Products + Receive $50 Kubota Bucks!

Kevin Kubota and his team in Bend, Oregon sure know a thing or two about Photoshop actions. While I wrote about Lightroom and Photoshop Adobe Camera Raw presets yesterday, all … and I mean … all my images are retouched using Kubota's Photoshop actions. If you are interested in seeing some examples, ask me in the comments section below. For more details about this offer, please contact Kubota Tools.

I know I had said 3 deals, but I just stumbled across this last one and figured you should know about it.

Deal #4: Zack Arias' OneLight DVD

The opportunity to learn from a modern-day master of lighting is what I called a “no-brainer.” And that's what you'll be doing when you buy Zack's truly awesome DVD. You will learn the fundamentals of lighting. You will learn to be at ease with off-camera strobes. You will learn to not spend a crap load of money on useless doo-dads but keep things simple. This DVD liberated me personally from the fear … yes, I was afraid … of using my flash. At 50% off, it bears repeating … this is a no-brainer. You should get it. It's $75, but only till 11.59 pm EST. (btw, I don't make a dime for endorsing his DVD) Or, buy the OneLight Field Guide and save 25% off.

Disclosure Of Material Connection

A familiar lament among wedding and portrait photographers goes like this – “I found my images on another photographer's site and they are using them as their own.”

Thievery online isn't anything new. People have been, um, “borrowing” images for a long time. As one person erroneously told me, “If it's on the web, it's public domain.”

Yeah, right.

If you are a professional you'll want to protect your images. I recall Michael Grecco‘s tedious, but necessary workflow where he sends a batch of his images to the US Copyright Office ever time he wraps up a photo shoot. That takes some discipline, no doubt.

Registering your images at the US Copyright Office is the first step. But I have to wonder how many of us actively do it. When ownership of an image online does come into question, we've had TinEye for some time. You may have also used Myows (which claims to provide free online copyright protection).

Now Google wants to get into that sandbox too.

While Google doesn't offer to protect your images, it appears that this new service will help you search for them. So, if you were to have any question about where or how your images are being used, all it would take is popping them into the search engine and finding where it appears online. Given their larger database, I suspect this is going to be an important tool for photographers who are serious about their art.

Now, what else could you do to protect your images? Well, here is something that my friend Mark Higgins told me about. Instead of retaining your original file name, say, “DSC_3456.jpg,” rename it like so – “110616-smith-park-sb-001.jpg”

So, try and give each of your images a unique file name, if you can.

The other thing that might help is to use the “Alternate text” field to fill it in with text describing the image. This is easily done if you have a WordPress blog. As you upload an image, you'll be given a set of fields to fill out if you wish. The Title and Alternate Text fields (red in color in the screengrab below) are the most important as search engines count on these fields to understand and file away or index what it is they are looking at.

If the description of the image matches the content of your blog post, then search engines are more likely to link the two and give it a higher priority.

When it comes time to ascertain whether you are indeed the owner of an image or a clutch of images, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind, based on the information that you have baked into the files before they go online, that you photographed them.

There is more to search engine optimization, of course, so take the time to learn about it from the best. I highly recommend Zach Prez's Web Marketing Guide + Photography Blog Success ebooks. Yes, they are both affiliate links but I promote them only because I have found it very beneficial to me and feel they may be of use to you as well.

So, will Google's new ‘Image Search' option give photographers some peace of mind that their images aren't being used or misused anywhere outside of their control?

To give credit where credit is due, this blog post was inspired by A Photo Editor.

Update: It's nice to see other photographers discuss this new Google service. Read my friend Scott Wyden's review.

Andrew “Fundy” Funderburg, is no stranger to Tiffinbox. Read his previous contribution about his album designing program for wedding and portrait photographers. In full disclosure I have to tell you that he and I are collaborating on SociRoll, the social media marketing tool he discusses briefly in this guest blog post.

I’d like to start off by saying that I am at the top of the list of haters of social media tools being used to spam people. Do not use social media to spam your followers.

So, the question is, why would I invent a program for automating Social Media marketing. The answer is simply that I have more things to share with my friends and followers than I have time in the day to share.

Social Media is all about making connections with people. For me it is about making deep connections. I’m not the type of person always tweeting and posting a ton of personal information. Sure, I’ll hop on Facebook and Twitter during the weekend and talk about the movie I’m going to see or whether my kids won their basketball games. But, during the week, I post a few personal things–mostly information about photography and the business of photography.

We strive to collect and provide some of the best content in the wedding and portrait industry. Content that we create and share today is still valuable in one or two months. If we manually update everything on Facebook and Twitter, all of this old content is lost. We constantly have new followers and friends and these new people will be just as interested in our old content as our new content.

Since August of 2010, we’ve written 150+ blog posts. More than 100 of these blog posts are related to the business of wedding and portrait photography. There are articles on everything from how to price wedding albums to how to sell portrait packages and everything in between. I want to make sure that our followers see this info.

It would be physically impossible for me to make sure that each one of these blog posts is featured in a tweet once a day. I would lose track of what I shared yesterday, probably miss some things, duplicate some things, etc. The point here is that if I have SociRoll auto post one of my blog posts every day, or even twice a day, we won’t repeat sharing a blog post for 3 months. And then we take into account the fact that if something doesn’t show up in your Twitter in the last five minutes, we won’t see it. The chances of someone seeing repeated Tweets is very low.

Now, let’s take a professional photographer. Let’s say the average wedding photographer shoots 30 weddings and 40 portraits a year. That’s 70 blog posts a year. Then let’s say they have been in business for 3 years. That’s more than 200 blog posts. Sharing one of these (or even two of these) events on their Facebook fanpage every day will seriously add to their brand and their site traffic.

So, do we set it and forget it? No. We let SociRoll do the heavy lifting for us, and we work hard to respond to people, retweet our friends, add personal touches, etc. But we know that our content that we’ve worked extremely hard to create is being shared among our friends and followers. Here's how to get started with SociRoll.

Going to try something new for Monday's – will give you all a weekly wrap up from the previous week, just in case you have missed reading a post or watching a tutorial or video interview.

Love The Products & Services Posted On Tiffinbox? talked about how some of the reviews of products and services mentioned on Tiffinbox have actually been very useful to you and your photography business.

Robert Norman wrote a guest blog post on How To Use CardMunch To Manage Business Cards, an application for your iPhone that will scan and save your data. Pretty cool!

Leon Sandoval from Colorati came back to Tiffinbox for another guest blog post about < a href="https://tiffinbox.org/how-do-you-keyword-your-digital-images/">keyboarding digital files. He had two short tutorials on using Lightroom or Bridge, whichever works best for your workflow.

Blair Phillips has a handle on using video to attract high school senior clients to his studio. In his guest blog, “Video Speaks Louder Than Words,” he tells us just how he goes about it.

Lastly, I had an opportunity to speak and interview David Hobby, the photographer/teacher behind Strobist, a veritable repository for off-camera flash users. David also spoke about his new project “HOCO360,” photographing the people and events in Howard County, Maryland. Check it out!

P.S. This weekly wrap idea was highly influenced by the awesome Copyblogger blog. You ought to check it out too.

Tiffinbox, at its core, is about providing solutions and resources for photographers, by building a community of “go-givers.”

Will you join me in making this happen?

For 2011 and beyond I am looking to grow Tiffinbox into something much bigger. As the diversity of guest blogs have shown in 2010, I know that a group effort is much more interesting for all.

7 Things You Can Expect From Tiffinbox In 2011?

1) Video Interviews with photographers

2) Tips on how you can use social media to grow your photography business

3) Portfolios from emerging photographers that will inspire you

4) Reviews of the following:
– popular Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets
– photography equipment
– workshop DVDs, seminars and conventions
– online solutions to streamline your studio workflow

5) More fun contests and giveaways of products you will actually use

6) Opinion-editorials on a variety of topics (some even controversial because we still need to discuss them!)

7) A brand new design that will make it easier to find and share information and connect with other photographers

Seeking Your Support

So, if you are just starting out, or, you've been in the photography industry, for a while, I would love to hear from you. If you have any questions, suggestions, tips or heck, even strong opinions about one topic or another, please feel free to email me at – seshu at tiffinbox dot org.

I might be able to answer your question(s) or someone who has guest blogged here might jump in. Or, even better, someone who hasn't written for Tiffinbox before might offer an answer in the form of a quick article.

a) Guest Blogging For Tiffinbox

My heartfelt thank you's to ALL the 2010 guest bloggers here on Tiffinbox.

If you are interested or even ready to guest blog for Tiffinbox, feel free to submit your ideas now. I am scheduling guest posts for 2011 and will publish them in the order they are received. The sooner you send me your pitch, the sooner your post will show up on the site.

If you have been following my Twitter stream @PicSeshu, you'll know that I am pretty good about promoting the articles you see here on Tiffinbox.

The benefits of guest blogging can be summarized by these three points:

1) Helps you take the first steps in establishing yourself as a credible authority
2) Link back to your site from mine (happens to be a PR5 site)
3) Gain a loyal following of your own if you publish regularly here

b) Tiffinbox began as a labor of love. It will remain so for the most part, but I do have expenses to deal with. If you find the content here valuable, please consider the following 7 ways to support this site:

1) Express yourself. Write a guest blog post.

2) Make a small monthly donation of $1 or more (my PayPal address is – fei8ht at gmail dot com)

3) Buy the e-books you see on the right hand side of this site. I wouldn't recommend anything if I didn't think it was of value. Yes, I make a small commission off of each sale.

4) Buy all your camera equipment from Adorama using this affiliate link: http://www.adorama.com/?kbid=66174. Their prices are competitive and their customer service is awesome!

5) If you are into blogging yourself, consider using WordPress and the Thesis Theme (great for SEO) and Hostgator for your hosting needs. Go on click on those affiliate links and sign up.

6) Help Me Spread the word! Tell your friends, blog about Tiffinbox, Tweet or use Facebook to mention a specific blog post.

7) Sponsor a series of posts in a particular month. Contact me for details on ways that I can help publicize your company in exchange as well.

The end goal at Tiffinbox is to create a community of passionate photographers who are looking to openly learn from each other, elevate their craft and thrive in their businesses together.

Thoughts, reactions, responses, suggestions or opinions? Sound off below in the comments. I would love to hear from you, especially if it is constructive. [grin]

Happy New Year To You All!