Before you say – hey – where’d you get these plugins from – if you your site is hosted at wordpress.com you only get to use the plugins they okay for you. So the blog your reading now is a self-hosted WordPress blog. Now what are the really necessary plugins that any WordPress site should have? All In One SEO Pack (or something to help make SEO easier). Google XML Sitemaps (this does exactly what [more]
HELP YOUR FELLOW PHOTOGRAPHERS Alexa is the service that tracks how many visitors come to your site. The company is owned by Amazon. Now – why should you care? Because search engines use this information as part (what part I don’t know) of the formula to figure out your site’s popularity. Well, you say, that’s fine but how does Alexa even do that sort of thing? To the best of my knowledge it’s based on [more]
IN A WORD: DO NOT SIGN UP WITH ANYONE THAT MAKES THE BULK OF THEIR MONEY FROM WHAT YOU PAY THEM. With that said, you can read on. They called and left a message about two weeks ago. The message said that she was calling from a firm that hooked up artists with buyers; that they had reviewed my work and liked it very much and wanted to talk to me about promoting it. I [more]
It’s funny how things happen, especially as concerns creating a business plan for a small business. I’ve had the Zazzle Store for at least a year, maybe more and it has pulled in some money around the holidays but other than that it has been pretty dead. It takes a tremendous amount of work to “push” any products into a customer’s hands. On the other hand – as with Zazzle – once the work is [more]
Selling Photography on the Web is Difficult My photography store (www.BeckermanPhoto.com) went up (or maybe I should say down) in 1999. During my first year of selling photography on the web, I sold one print! And that was paid for by check. And that check bounced. So during my first full year I lost money on my one sale since I had to pay the bank fee for the bounced check (luckily I still had [more]
Here’s the link to the previous post about SEO for Photographers. SEO Part II The search engine of today has the power to make or break a small business. And most photographers are running a small business. They can’t afford to pay for ads. If you are in a popular niche in the real world, and can get that niche keyword phrase ranked so that it shows up on the first or second page, and [more]
Photographers have it tough when it comes to achieving decent rankings in search engines for the very simple reason that search engines are not yet smart enough to understand images. However, they don’t really understand language either (if you ask me). But after years of having decent rankings for my key phrases, I can give you the following bits of advice: Figure out what your primary keyword phrase is. You can’t even begin to think [more]
In the previous Google Base post about this somewhat arcane subject, I wrote about the difficulty of getting any traction for my prints in this section, namely when you do a google search and then click on SHOPPING. Google Merchant Dashboard The SHOPPING link (on the left) brings you to what are called FEEDS which are simply files in a particular layout with products that Google can then evaluate in certain ways and decide whether [more]
Central Park Portrait by Dave Beckerman | Make Your Own Book I picked the smallest size book (7 x 7 inches) on Blurb (and did it as a photo book softcover) Black and white images were profiled to sRGB (as recommended) and in Lightroom, they were set to Black and White (similar to using the b&w filter in Photoshop). Image sizes were all set so that the longest side was 3500 px They were “pre-sharpened) [more]
First they called it Froogle. Then Google Base. And recently the name became the Merchant Center. This is where Bing and Google are going head-to-head. Bing wants to be the goto place for people searching for stuff to buy. And Google has added the Shopping link so that you can see what’s for sale. And so I was looking at this wondering what I had to do to put my own photos up for sale [more]
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