If you are like me, you are an Iphone addict. I am ashamed to admit it but it has greatly simplified my life. Now if you are a wedding photographer it can also help you organize your business. I ran across this app the other day SmartStudio.
SmartStudio: Wedding Photographer Studio Manager empowers wedding photographers to manage their entire studio from the day a prospective bride calls to the day the final product is delivered all from the iPhone or iPod touch.

SmartStudio enables wedding photographers to track and manage payments across multiple bookings and payment milestones, capture prospective clients and manage bookings with shot lists, package deliverables, itineraries, contacts, crew members and more.

Below is a video tour:

Check out the website of the developer here: http://gorillagroup.net/

I myself am not a wedding photographer so I have not tried the app, but if you have used it, please let me know what you thought of it by leaving a comment below…

WordPress users for a long time have utilized plug-ins to extend their blogging platform in numerous ways. However, where most plug-ins have only worked to protect your feed, a plug-in by Chetan Gole, WP-CopyProtect helps you by protecting your content from those that would misuse it by visiting your site directly.

The plug-in itself is very simple and user-friendly so you don’t need to be a techy person to learn how to use it.

Here is How it Works. WP-CopyProtect functions in two ways. First it disables the right click on the visitor’s mouse on your site and the second is it stops anyone from using text selection. To do this, it uses well-established JavaScripts that the plug-in itself will place into your site’s footer at the click of the mouse.

When you first install WP-CopyProtect, and visit the settings page, you’re given a screen with the option to enable or disable both right click text selection on your site. You can also select a specific warning that will appear when visitors try to right click on your site.

Now, here’s how to install Copyprotect on WordPress.

1. First, extract and upload only WP-PreventCopyBlogs.php to the /wp-content/plugins/directory
2. Activate the plug-in through the ‘Plug-ins’ menu in WordPress
3. Go to Settings and then WP-CopyProtect to configure it to whatever suits you.
4. You have to provide your database details. For this, You have to create a mysql database under a user and all information in the settings page. If you don’t provide them, the plug-in will work but it won’t be able to track the information of your visitors who tried to copy your contents.
5. If you need to track the visitors, you can either open your database from console or from the admin page itself.

Once you’ve finished, the plug-in will work great. Blocking any fraudulent visitors, securing your contents and even tracking your visitors down.

Akismet is one of the most popular plug-ins that every WordPress blogger uses. Akismet is not only popular with WordPress bloggers but it’s totally free, is updated regularly, already built-in with WordPress set up file and works perfectly, blocking any spam your blog gets. Once installed, Akismet closely monitors all comments posted on your blog and if it suspects anything suspicious, it marks them as spam and sends them to the spam folder. This is how Akismet secures your blog from being spammed.

However, many new users get confused when they try to activate Akismet because it asks for an API key to get the plug-in activated so you can use it on your blog. But don’t worry, the API key for Akismet plugin comes free and it takes just a minute to generate your unique WordPress API key. You can get your API key on your welcome email from WordPress.

Remember, that until you get a WordPress API key, Akismet spam feature won’t work on your blog. However you can generate one Akismet key and use it to activate Akismet on all your blogs.

How to Activate Akismet:

First, you’ll need to go to wordpress.com and sign up for a free account.
When asked, select the second option – “Just a username, please.“

After successful registration, WordPress will send a verification mail to your email. Remember to provide a real email address. If you don’t get the email try looking at your spam folder just in case.
Open that email then scroll down there you’ll find your WordPress.com API key. It looks like the one below on the screenshot.

Copy that API key and paste it in your Akismet API Key field. Next, click on Update.

Now, you have your Akismet plugin successfully verified and working. One last note, you can access the comments secured by Akismet when you follow a link called Akismet Spam located just below the comments tab. There, you can save any comments that aren’t really spam just in case they end up there.

Now you are finished!

Remember to save that email for future use. You might need that API key to verify Akismet on other WordPress blogs as well.

If you are a professional photographer with a staff of one person, it can be quite overwhelming to handle all of the marketing tasks in addition to your photography work.  More often than not, this leads to no marketing happening at all.  One solution to this problem is to purchase photography marketing templates rather than attempt to make them yourself.  It is too easy to believe that just because you have Photoshop you have to do all of your design materials. This is not true. There is a wealth of marketing materials out there that are available for use.  Some of it is even available for free.

If you are a baby photographer, then I highly suggest that you look at the free “Bella Baby Marketing System” created by Sandy Schurz.  She has graciously made this complete marketing system available to anyone for no cost.  It includes over 2 gigabytes of files with business cards, gift certificates, ads, promotional materials, punch cards, stickers and more.

The complete system is available for download at brand-ography.com.

In addition to the “Bella Baby Marketing System” there are also available complete branding packages.  These branding packages contain everything you need to establish a distinct look for you business.  Each branding package contains full PSD files for logos, banners, business cars, thank you cards, flyers, brochures and more.  There are a variety of colors and styles.  Each package can also be easily modified to fit your particular style.

There is also another free item at Brand-ography.com.  It is a complete Portrait Experience that you can offer to your clients to help prepare them for their sessions.  I highly suggest you take a look at this download.  Again it is offered with all of the high resolution PSD files that can easily be modified.

One other item available at Brand-ography.com (albeit for a nominal fee) is a complete marketing system called the “Fabulous Ten”.  This product shows you step by step how to establish you own marketing network among fellow small business owners in your town.  This network will provide discounts and specials to their clients for your business.   This is a great way to tap into the clientele of targeted business that match your target demographic. If all this sounds difficult to you, don’t worry as it is all spelled out completely in the “Fabulous Ten” guide.  As with all the products on this site, the full resolution PSD files are included to provide easy customization and modification.

So if you are looking for marketing templates for your photography business, I highly suggest that you checkout Brand-ography.com.  The free items are well worth the visit!

Let’s take a look at what categories are used for. Essentially they are a means to file your blog posts into separate “drawers” if you will. That way if someone wants to view all your posts on wedding photography, they could click the “Wedding” category and see those related posts.

Now the way they are displayed is dependent on the theme you are using. Themes will display categories in different ways, but typically categories will show up as some kind of link list in a sidebar widget or as menu items in your navigation bar. So while it would be great to have a category named…

“Memphis Senior Photographer”

that would look funny in a menu. So the alternative is to have a category called “Seniors” but to have the slug for that category to be “Memphis Senior Photographer”. The slug is what is used in the URL if you have the category displayed in your permalinks.

I set my permalinks to:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%

This will then include the year, date, category slug and postname in the URL for that particular blog post.

If I made a keyword specific slug for that category, then that keyword will appear in the URL which will help that blog post in the search engines.

Okay, that was a lot of background. So what you really want to know is what to do. Well here is what I recommend.

1-Determine what keywords you want to rank for. You should include what people will search when looking for your services. This means most likely your city + type of photography + photographer. Example would be “Memphis Senior Photographer”. Would you like to rank #1 in google for that term? Then that should be a keyword of yours. Don’t try for a single word such as senior because it is highly unlikely you will rank high for that term in google due to competition and the traffic searching for that term is not likely looking for your services.

2-Create categories based on the types of photography you offer. (Weddings, Seniors, Families, etc). When you blog about a session, choose the category that it would fall under.

3-When creating the categories, don’t use the default slug which would be a lower case version of your category title. Add your city before and photographer after the category name. That will create a keyword based slug such as: “memphis-wedding-

4-Set your permalinks to /%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%. That will include the category slug and your post in the URL. The year and month are optional but if you post a lot it provides efficiencies for WordPress itself.