The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that shook Haiti to its foundation last week and the aftershocks that followed – including the magnitude 6.1 quake that hit Haiti this morning – have dominated headlines of many photography sites, blogs and forums as photographers struggle to understand the extent of the damage and how to respond.

There were thoughtful posts and stories on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and PDN (Photo District News) websites over the motivations behind and the wisdom of photographers – especially freelancers without professional or relief group affiliations – rushing to Haiti, a country now struggling with a lack of food, water, energy and other supplies.

There were similarly heated discussions within threads such as Heading to Haiti, and Is anyone on the ground in Haiti on the Lightstalkers forums that highlighted a rift within the photographic community between those who expressed concerns that travel by outsiders to such a resource-strained country was simply exploitative and self-serving, and others who defended the moves, noting it is the duty of photojournalists to bear witness and document history.

In fact, there was plenty of support for the latter argument stirring images both of destruction and deliverance began to appear online. The Big Picture posted a series of candid scenes in the earthquake’s wake as did a post highlighting the work of photographer Jan Grarup on the Danish site Fotobloggen. Grarup’s images even came with a warning urging viewer discretion. On the other end of the spectrum, a link to updates from NPR Photographers in Haiti chronicled stories of hope, including one of the now-famous images of Sharla Chand of New Jersey who was pulled smiling and in good condition from the rubble of the collapsed Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince.

We and others, including our friends at liveBooks, were impressed by the response of many photographers who came up with creative ways to generate donations and encouraged others to do the same. Notable among them was Miami celebrity photographer Brian Smith’s list of five places to donate for Haitian Earthquake Relief, and a link by fashion photographer Nick Zantop to an International Committee of the Red Cross site that allows you to register to locate missing relatives.

In addition, Bay Area photographer and photography rights advocate Lane Hartwell spearheaded an effort by San Francisco Bay Area photographers to collaborate on a fundraising magazine for Haitian relief.  Called Haiti: Oné Respe, the $12 magazine’s title comes from a traditional Haitian greeting meaning “honor and respect.”  It includes images from pre-earthquake Haiti and combined with essays and it is being produced by MagCloud, an HP web service that prints on demand and that reportedly donated its printing costs. Proceeds will go to the American Red Cross International Response Fund for Haiti relief.  

Do you know of other photography-related relief efforts not highlighted here? If so, please post them in the comments section below.

The turning of the year is a great time either to get your photography business rolling or implement new practices to kick it into high gear.  While possessing first-rate technical skills and taking compelling photographs may give you an edge over competitors, establishing your photography business and competing effectively requires you to think strategically and to secure a firm grip on the management and financial aspects of your business.

Whether you’re just starting out or a seasoned pro, this is a great time to time to determine what works, what doesn’t, and to adopt practices that will strengthen your operations, drive revenues and boost profits. Take a look at the following list of five New Year’s photography business resolutions and select the right ones for you.

• Create a business plan (or revisit the one you have): Writing a business plan is a critical step in the success of any small business.  It can serve as a roadmap for building and managing your business. If you have an existing business plan, revisit it and ask the hard questions: Did your business accomplish what you set out to do this past year? Why or why not? Make notes on what steps may help you achieve unfulfilled goals and determine what goals need to be revised. Your new or revised business plan should include realistic and specific goals, as well as concrete steps for reaching those goals. For example,
  • Set a goal of reaching three clients per month. Then create an offer designed to bring in those customers. This could be a New Year’s email to your current client base that extends discounts to those who refer business to you and promotion codes for new customers who come to you via referral. Include gift suggestions for all occasions, including photo calendar gifts for the New Year, family portraits for a special anniversary, or pet portraits for birthday gifts or notecards.
    
• Leverage the power of LicenseStream: Many photographers now have sites online to promote their work, but remain reluctant to post all of their work online for fear of piracy. Alternatively, they offer only a subset of their images through stock agencies. Photographer, writer and historian Joseph Sohm is among those who have turned to LicenseStream to help him address these problems and to promote, track & create new revenue streams.
  • Says Sohm: “LicenseStream empowers me to publish all of my photographs directly to my Web site and to global search engines, so that anyone can find my search-optimized photos online and pay for them with a mouse click." Sohm's “Visions of America: Photographing Democracy,” is a book of photographs taken over 30 years and across 50 states that offers a sweeping portrait of life in the United States. It recently won the Gold medal for “Best Coffee Table Book” at the 13th annual Independent Publishing Awards in New York City.
    
• Engage with Social Media: In addition to leveraging LicenseStream to publish to major search engines and other Web sites such as Flickr, photographers also are turning to a range of social media channels to share information, socialize, develop trust and authority online in a way that builds their brand and fosters relationships that help grow their business. (For more about how photographers are using social media and the results of such efforts, check out the Social Media Survey conducted by Jim Goldstein and compiled by Jim in partnership with Taylor Davidson.)
  • As we’ve written about in the ImageSpan blog a social media strategy typically involves engagement with customers and partners via multiple avenues. For example, many photographers are Blogging to Build Relationships via columns they write regularly on their websites. Alternatively, you may want to explore how LinkedIn Provides the Missing Link between Social and Professional Networking that helps you build your brand, leverage the community of Facebook for Fun and Profit or Grow Your Network with Twitter.  
    
• Don’t go it alone: Even the most experienced and successful of photographers eventually may feel they’ve hit a brick wall when it comes to cultivating their business. While many photographers will find camaraderie via online forums, it doesn’t hurt to build a community of local peers with whom to meet, share experiences, and business tips and tricks. Photographer Steve Castillo of Menlo Park recharges his batteries by meeting regularly with other photographers to swap information about the latest technologies and promotional ideas. Says Steve: “These meetings are great for learning about new ideas and for reinforcing basic promotional techniques, such as sending clients reminders that you enjoy doing business with them, and finding ways to stay connected to them.”
  
• Revisit pricing and expenses: The threshold of a New Year also is a great time to review all of your efforts in 2009 and determine which were profitable and which were not. As part of this process, it pays to revisit pricing. Are you charging enough to cover costs and grow your business? Are your prices in line with norms for the type of photography and geographic market in which you operate? Are your profits sufficient to pay for your overhead, new equipment and training? This also is a good time to review expenses. Consider sharing workspace costs, equipment, and combining different talents to collaborate on projects and expand networking circles. If your passion for photography far outweighs your business acumen, it may be worth spending a little more upfront on a business consultant who can help you run your business more efficiently and profitably. 
  

 What else is on your list? Click on the “Comments” link below to share your top New Year’s photography business resolutions with the LicenseStream community.

The sputtering economy has sparked a spike in the popularity of social networks, and particularly of one network – LinkedIn. This site provides the missing link between social and professional networking.  

Offering a huge base of users worldwide and an abundance of professional networks and workgroups, LinkedIn is a great place to establish and build your professional persona.  Its reach, range and depth are impressive. Just consider:

• LinkedIn has more than 48 million members in over 200 countries and territories around the world.
• A new member joins LinkedIn approximately every second.
• Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.
• LinkedIn offers access to more than 111,500 professional groups, including more than 270 professional groups focused on photography.

Getting started is easy. Just go to www.linkedin.com, sign up for an account (free) and complete your profile. Bear in mind that it takes time to develop your social network online. A lot depends on the connections you make, the chemistry you generate with those connections, and the market demand for the type of work you produce.

To help you get the most out of LinkedIn, here are seven best practices to strengthen and build your network of contacts and your business: 

• Grow your personal and professional circles. The best recommendations – and the most credible – come from people who know you and can recommend you to colleagues/friends and to friends of friends or colleagues. Just make sure you return the favor. It’s all about networking.
• Build your personal brand. What you say and how you say it conveys a lot about you. Choose carefully the topics you comment on, what you say, and how you say it so you send a consistent message about who you are. Remember that perceptions matter – especially when someone is considering engaging your services for the first time.
• Explore Groups. LinkedIn offers a wide range of Groups, including corporate and professional groups, alumni associations, conference and non-profit groups that help LinkedIn members enhance their trusted connections. Join the ones that best suit your interests and your business.
• Engage -- be active and helpful within industry groups. You'll find interesting people in the groups who are posting questions and providing answers to questions posted by other group members. Start a discussion thread that may be of interest to the group or groups you join.  If you engage with an industry group, jump in whenever possible to answer questions that your peers submit.  If you're ever thinking that you want to ask a question in a group, just look at the list of keywords you apply to most of your images and choose one associated with a concept, technique or practice to explore. Integrate keywords into your status updates.
• Participate regularly. If you’re part of a workgroup on LinkedIn, be sure to let people know you’re there by participating regularly. Providing a Status Update can be as simple as up loading a factoid about the subject matter that you're going to be working on for the day. Alert group members to upcoming exhibits or publication of your work. Or add information about something going on in the industry that may be of interest to other people in your LinkedIn network.  Once a project is completed, be sure you connect with the people that you worked for on LinkedIn to grow your network. Better yet, ask them to provide you with a recommendation on your LinkedIn profile.
• Go prospecting for new leads. By exploring the "Answers" tab at the top of the page on LinkedIn, you will find many people asking questions and looking for help. For example, you can easily plug in one of your keywords and see who might have recently asked a question about licensing images. Jump in where you can to answer such questions because people use the Answers section of LinkedIn as a resource for information. If you were to do a search in Answers for 'Photographers' you'll see lots of people asking questions that might relate to you or could drive business to you. Like Facebook, LinkedIn indexes profiles with the major search engines. So leverage this network and watch your search results rise. Like other social networks, LinkedIn needs to be monitored. It is good to check in on it at least once or twice a week.
• Seek out fellow LicenseStream members. Many LicenseStream subscribers are affiliated with groups that have a presence on  LinkedIn. As a LicenseStream member you’re likely to connect with fellow photographers and other content creators who are members of these groups. You can find, PMA – The Worldwide Community of Imaging Associations, National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), and Wedding & Event Videographers Association International (WEVA) to name a few. Joining such groups accelerates the pace at which you connect with other professionals in your field.

We hope that you have found this initial series on social media outlets and how to use them to benefit your LicenseStream business useful.  Apply what you can and watch the results.  As additional social media tools emerge, we plan to report on them and how they can best be leveraged to serve your photography business. Stay tuned.

When putting together your social media strategy, be sure to include the one outlet that is most likely to make your life more entertaining and interesting: Facebook. This company has taken over the social networking scene for those over the age of 25, and its fastest-growing demographic is those 35 years and older.  What does this mean to a person who wants to license their images?  Your age demographic is here.  Although these people may not be directly connected to image licensing, they represent a sweet spot that you want to hit.  With Facebook’s broad reach – more than 300 million active users worldwide – Facebook represents an uber-network of potential customers.

Sure, Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with personal friends and family. Who doesn’t love to log-in to discover that a good friend is on the way to Paris, has posted an image of the latest addition to the family, or plans to meet up with 10 other mutual friends at an outdoor concert? In addition to providing an easy-to-use forum for such personal posts, Facebook provides a great social media outlet for promoting your LicenseStream business.  That said, it may be wise to post only those images you plan to use as “teasers” with links to your LicenseStream store, only very small images that are unlikely to be used elsewhere, or images that are heavily watermarked.

Why?  While Facebook states you own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and that you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings, it goes on to say in its Terms that “For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.” 

Here are a few basic steps to leveraging the power of Facebook to effectively market your business:

1. Create a Facebook account. Be sure to completely fill out your Facebook profiles so that people can learn more about you and the type of work you do.
2. Share images of your work, and provide a wide sampling of your abilities and specialties. Just be aware of the Facebook user agreement mentioned above. Be sure to include links to your LicenseStream gallery.
3. Ask a selection of clients connected to other potential customers for permission to post one of his best images to the client’s Facebook account. That way, anyone registered as a friend of the client on Facebook will see the posted image. This offers you exposure a much larger group of potential customers. The appearance of your work on that one friend’s site provides instant validation of your work, and is likely to drive additional business to you.
4. Write about what you’re doing on the wall of your Facebook page. If you are displaying your work at a real-world gallery, then use the wall to promote your show. If you’re about to publish a book of photographs, let the Facebook community know about it!
5. Create a Facebook fan page and use it as a promotional tool for your business. Highlight shows, books, new areas of endeavor, or new ways of selling your work (say, special offers or unusual pricing packages).This is a great way to establish and build on a public persona that aligns with your business. Again, make sure your profiles are complete and accurate.
6. Be sure to regularly post fresh new images to your Facebook pages that demonstrate your continued momentum as a photographer, that highlight new aspects of your work, and that serve as reminders that your services are available.
7. Join groups on Facebook that are related to your photography work and interests, and actively comment and answer questions posted in them. Actively helping others is one of the surest ways to interest them in your work.

In fact, the more you engage in social media activities and communities, the greater the chance that someone will find your work when they conduct a search for 'Professional Photographer' or “Professional Outdoor Photography,” or any one of the keywords that you might have woven into your comments, questions or responses on Facebook.

It doesn't hurt that Facebook is good for improving search results; the major search engines index fan pages and the profiles of those Facebook members who do not restrict them with their Search Privacy settings. Just remember, like Twitter, this is a community to monitor and contribute to on a daily basis.  Not every potential customer will be on Facebook or Twitter, but as with any business, the more contacts you have, the greater chance of success.

While there is no guarantee that any of these social media outlets are going to sustain themselves long-term, they are very active now and offer tremendous opportunities for building your business.

There are so many ways to participate in social media, that it's difficult to determine where to put your energy and resources.  You can easily lose your day working with various social media outlets and wind up generating minimal results.  For the third post in our series about social media tools and outlets, we're going to take a look at one of the fundamental building blocks of a social media strategy for promoting your LicenseStream business -- the Blog.

A blog is an easy and fun way to tell people what you do. It allows you to build relationships with your existing and prospective clients by regularly updating them on your activities, including upcoming exhibits, newly published works, and recent photography shoots or projects. It's also a great way to share your passion for your interests and the fun bits of information that you pick up as you experiment and gain experience through your creative work. There are several free platforms available today to help you get started, including:

• Blogger: Google's blog creation and publishing platform allows you to post text, photos and videos from the web or even a mobile phone.  It also allows you to personalize your blog with themes and gadgets. For more information, go to: www.blogger.com  

• Movable Type: A professional blog publishing platform that  makes it easy to launch a blog, manage entire websites and build a professional-grade social network with user profiles, ratings, community blogs, and forums. www.movabletype.com

• Tumblr: A versatile blogging platform that allows you to post text, links, photos, videos, music and to customize your blog with themes, colors and to post from your desktop, mobile phone, even AIM. You can also automatically post from other sites or profiles. Learn about it at www.tumblr.com 

• WordPress: Built on PHP and MySQL  and licensed under the GPL, WordPress prides itself on a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. To learn more go to www.wordpress.org

After you set up your Blog, give yourself a deadline for posting and stick to it by publishing your blog on a regular basis. The more often you post, the more of your content becomes available for the search engines to index. 

A blog offers the easiest place to implement and experiment with topics and ideas, ranging from tips on Creating New Opportunities in Tough Economic Times to information on new photographic gadgets and techniques.  In fact, a great way to gain readership for your blog is to write about the tips, tricks, gadgets and gizmos that you find useful in your work.  When you're trying out a new gadget on a shoot, be sure to report through your blog about how useful or useless it is, or what tricks make it a more valuable piece of gear. Providing your audience with useful content and links to valuable Web sites is a surefire way to foster a following and linkbacks that boost your search ranking.

It's a good idea to regularly link to articles of interest to your community, such as a recent article on the Shutterbug about how new technology and social media tools are bringing change to the business and marketing of photographic services.  (See our blog about SEO Dos where we talk about the value of creating links back to your site.

A blog also provides a great place to experiment with a keyword strategy, since it provides an ongoing opportunity to weave into your posts keywords associated with your content.  If you just uploaded great new images from this summer's Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada into your LicenseStream account, then you'd surely want to use the name of the event, some information about the art installation or event you captured, such as "Exploding Man" and a phrase or two capturing key images at the event, such as "Burning Man bicycles," or "Burning Man robots." While initially you may find it cumbersome and time consuming to provide such detail about your photo shoots, the payoff is great if you keep at it. Over time, your search results will improve.

If you have a personal website, another way to help boost your search index ranking is to choose carefully the URL you'll use for your blog. It is best if the blog's URL is tied closely to that of your website. For example "your blog.your website's URL.com" or "your website's URL/blog."  Attaching your blog to your URL makes it very easy to find in a Web search.  It also is likely to increase your search index ranking because each time the search engines crawl the Web and find a new post, it increases the relevance of that URL.

After you've published a few blog posts, take time to actively promote your blog by connecting your readers to other social media outlets where you have a presence, participate and post regular updates. If you have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account, then include a link on your blog for those pages, or link directly from posts on those sites to your blog as you may with Tumblr.  Be sure to check your blog each week to see if anyone has posted comments that call for a reply. You wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to connect with a potential client.

Once you have your blog up and running, be sure to share it with us!  Here are a few examples of photographer blogs we've found useful and interesting:

• Chuck Eckert's blog: http://chuckeckert.blogspot.com/

• Rob Haggart's "A Photo Editor": http://www.aphotoeditor.com/

• Chase Jarvis' blog: http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/

• Joe Pobereskin's "Eat at Joe's" blog: http://cafejoetogo.blogspot.com/

• Marc Silber's blog: http://www.silberstudios.com/blog/ 

• Dave Walsh's blog: http://www.davewalshphoto.com/blog/

To continue with our series on social media, a very popular social media outlet is Twitter.  If you haven’t heard of Twitter, then this is a great place to learn a little about this wildly popular and easy-to-use service for growing your network and your business.

What is Twitter?  

A real-time, short messaging service, Twitter works over multiple networks and devices, enabling its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Twitter allows colleagues, business associates, friends and family to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to a simple question: What are you doing? As simple as it sounds, its reach is extensive and it can serve as an incredibly rich vehicle for disseminating information, given its ability to connect with people across a wide array of interests, geographies and time zones from your desktop, mobile phone or other PDA – as long as you can keep each communication to 140 characters (with spaces).

To find out how to set up an account and get started, take a look at our previous LicenseStream Insight blog posting. Once you're set up, be sure to populate your Twitter account with tweets on an ongoing basis - three a day is a good place to start if you have the time, including one at the start of business, a second during the lunch hour, and a third at the close of business.  

After you’ve added several tweets, start following people.  If they find what you are tweeting about helpful or interesting they'll follow you. A good way to find people to follow is to visit http://search.twitter.com/  and type in a few keywords that relate to your creative work. For example, if you specialize in images of Western shorebirds, then simply type in like ""professional photographer or “Bird photographers.” To find like-minded LicenseStream users, try following the LicenseStream or ImageSpan Twitter streams. After you start to follow interesting news and people related to your work, you'll build up a following in no time.

What do you Tweet about and how do you incorporate your keywords into your tweets?

Tweets can be anything that you think will add value to the people who follow you. Your blog would be a good thing to tweet about. It can be something as simple as, "I just published a new blog post about licensing dog photography” with a link back to your post. Since you’re limited to 140 characters, you’ll want to use a shortened URL (try one of the services for shortening URLs such as bit.ly (link= http://bit.ly/ or Tiny URL (link= http://www.tiny.cc/). Alternatively, you can tweet about one of your images, incorporating keywords that relate to your business, and simply add a link to your LicenseStream gallery to your tweet.

The best way to build relationships is to be helpful to your Twitter following. So share a helpful photographic tip or trick, or provide a link to an article of interest to your followers.  Share your passion for your work by alerting them to a new photography exhibit, a book about photographic techniques, or another photographer you admire. Again, think about including keywords that relate directly to your business or specialty. You may find your Twitter stream, if not your Web site, promoted in turn. With a built-in limit of 140 characters, no single tweet has to be overly complicated.

Twitter is more of a conversational medium than a blog, so you’ll be more successful if you monitor and add value on a regular basis.  You'll find responding to people and posting new tweets to be a relatively quick process and one that is very addictive.

Twitter’s conversational style also lends itself to some provocative dialogue. In some cases, you may directly or indirectly solicit honest feedback about your ideas or your work. When appropriate, take the initiative to respond in a positive, thoughtful way to Tweets that may be negative or potentially harmful to your business. Just remember that because of the speed with which tweets can be deployed and Twitter’s highly viral nature, Twitter should be used with caution. So you may want to think twice before blasting a rival or other offending entity with a blistering tweet.

Used prudently, Twitter provides a great service for fostering relationships with other photographers, customers and highly-qualified potential customers. As we’ve highlighted, your tweets can help build your search engine ranking by directing link backs to your site. Such linkbacks also increase page views for your online gallery.  All these benefits build your business and increase your capacity for making money from your images.

In our previous LicenseStream Insight Blog posts, we’ve talked a lot about keywording and SEO.  Now seems like a good time to talk about tying your keyword strategy into your social media activities.   Why? Because after you’ve selected keywords to generate search results and drive customer traffic to your website and/or LicenseStream gallery, those targeted keywords can serve as the critical threads that tie together all of your social media marketing activities. Over time, this concerted effort will help move your images or other content and your websites or galleries near the top of search results.

Our goal with this post, and with the series of posts on social media that follow, is to help you maximize the promotional work that you do elsewhere on the Web, including on your own website and third-party sites that host your work, to build your LicenseStream business.

Leveraging your Keyword Strategy to Understand Where Your Audience Lives Online

Your keyword strategy should focus on applying to your images or other content those words or phrases that are relevant and most likely to be used by potential buyers searching online for you, your work, your style or your type of work across a range of social media outlets. Put yourself in the mindset of the target market for your images or other content, and ask plenty of questions of current and prospective customers to find out what terms and techniques they use as well as what sites they frequent when they search online for the types of images, video clips or other content you offer. The better you understand your market and how buyers search for images or other content, the better for developing a keyword strategy and for understanding where your audience spends its time online. You may discover that the best prospects for your work may be spending their time on sites other than where you’ve been trying to reach them. To learn more, see our previous post on Keywording for Search Results

Using LicenseStream to Bolster Your Social Media Outreach

Once you’ve selected and applied keywords to your images or other content, LicenseStream provides you with a tremendous head start to bolstering your social media outreach. With LicenseStream, you can attach keywords to your images and other content and then publish them directly to your own or other Web sites, such as Flickr, and major search engines so that anyone, anywhere can find your content and license it with a mouse click. To learn more about linking your online images on other Web sites, including Flickr, to a LicenseStream licensing page, visit our previous post on Using HTML to Market Your Content.

Keep Keywords Consistent Across Social Media Channels

In addition to leveraging LicenseStream to publish to major search engines and other Web sites such as Flickr, there are plenty of other social media channels to leverage, including a blog, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. Whatever social media channels you choose, it helps to reiterate the most effective keywords you assign to your images or other content across all of your marketing and communication efforts – online and off. For example, if you specialize in images of Labrador puppies, it may help to include the words "Labrador photos" or “puppy pictures” in all of your print as well as your online advertising, client presentations, blog posts, Tweets or articles you might write to promote your animal photography business, as well as in your website copy, your page meta-titles, meta-descriptions and meta-keywords. Simply keeping your keywords in mind and using them where appropriate will do the trick. Learn more about keywording and search engine optimization strategies by checking out 10 Dos of SEO Practices, and 10 Don’ts of SEO Practices.

If you're going to spend time creating and building a LicenseStream business, it only makes sense to focus on promotional activities that will show a good return on your investment.  Social media channels provide excellent and inexpensive promotional tools. In upcoming LicenseStream Insights blogs, we’ll share information about some of our favorite social media tools and how to best leverage them to build your business.