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.

Are you a photography business owner looking for music to place on your photography business website?  Many photography website templates (especially flash ones) allow you to upload mp3 files that will play on your website pages.  This may sound like a great idea, especially if you like music and have some great songs that you would like to upload.  However, here are a few considerations to keep in mind before you upload…

Musical Tastes

Not everyone has the same musical taste as you.  In fact, it is highly likely that they don’t .  Consider all the types of music out there today from Top 40 to Hip Hop, to Country.  Now what do you like?  What are the chances that your website visitors will like the same thing?  It is highly unlikely.  The more likely response is that they will not appreciate the music near as much as you do.

Quiet is Bliss

When you are using the internet, what else are you often doing? For many people browsing the internet takes place in an office with other workers, at home with the TV or radio playing or maybe while you are talking with someone else or on the phone.  So if suddenly you are in one of these situations and a loud song starts emanating from your speakers it may surprise you, your co-workers, your friends, etc.  You will probably reach for the speaker mute button as soon as you can.  You might even close the website to quell the sudden noise. This is a natural reflex but it surely is not what you want to encourage from your website visitors.

Royalty Issues

Another item to consider is the legality of placing music on your website.  Most of the time this is actually outside your rights based on the license granted when you purchased the music.  If you just ripped the music from a CD, then in essence you are replaying the music for an audience which is an illegal use of the music.  In order to get around this, you must either purchase a license which enables you to play the music on your website or you must upload only royalty free music.  A google search can take you to many places where you can find royalty free music, but it will not include the popular tunes today and will likely consist mostly of instrumental tracks.  So while you will at least be legal, you probably won’t like the selection of music available.

The upside of music

Okay so we just went over some of the issues with using music on your photography website. So what is the upside? Well if your visitor likes the music, they may enjoy listening while they browse your picture gallery.  Will this make them more likely to book a session?  I have no proof that it will.  It may, but I wouldn’t bet my business on it.

The Bottom Line

So as you can probably guess, my recommendation is to avoid putting music on your photography business website.  There is just too much of a downside in lost or annoyed visitors to justify the few positive reactions that you may receive.

Creating a photography website can be very intimidated to the photography business owner.  Typically as photographers, we have a great eye for design, patterns and color so our first inclination is to make a website that appeals to our visual nature.  However, little attention is paid to the actual purpose of the website which eventually leads to a beautiful but ineffective website.

The purpose of this article is to help the home based or studio based photography business owner to establish an effective website.  First of what is the definition of an effective website for your business?

In short, an effective website for a photography business is one that:

1. Brings in new clients
2. Helps retain current clients
3. Screens out bad clients

If you already have a website and it is not doing each of those three things, then it is time for a major overhaul.  All of these three objectives are easily achievable.  In fact new technology on the internet makes it easier than ever to reach new clients and stay in touch with your current clients.

There are also a few other considerations to keep in mind when building your website.  These will make your life a whole lot easier and save you a lot of money.  These consideration are:

Easy to update

If it is difficult to update your website, then you will never do it. Anything that takes too much time is the first thing to go when things get busy and you can’t afford to have a website that is more pain than profit.   But when you have a site that is easy to update, it will always have fresh new content for your current clients to look at.  This will help them return to you again and again.

Inexpensive

Most small business owners don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a website. Nor do they have hundreds of dollars to spend each month on maintaining it.  The good news is that it is possible to build a highly effective website for very little money up front.  I have never built a site that cost more than $200.  In many cases, there was no upfront cost at all except for the hosting fee.  And by choosing the right webhost your monthly cost for webhosting will be less than the price of a single movie ticket.

Professional Appearance

Putting out a bad first impression is worse than no impression at all. So your website needs to present an appearance that impresses your potential clients. Now above I mentioned that photographers often make the mistake of spending all their time on the website design and none on the marketing effectiveness.  So why here do I say that the design is important?  Well  you are in the photography business which is a highly visual enterprise.  So you don’t want to come across as amateur by having a poorly designed and ugly website.  Luckily it is easy to have a great looking site without losing any of the marketing effectiveness.

Engages the visitor

When you visit a website how long is your average stay?  It is probably less than 10 seconds.  This is about average.  So you can see how important it is to grab your visitors attention and provide them what they want quickly and easily.  If your website visitor has to endure endless animations, slow-loading images, or a splash page you are essentially driving them away.

Tracks Results

The single most important item in successful businesses is the ability to track what works.  By knowing how and why people are visiting your site, you will be able to capitalize on trends and increase visitors. All of which means more clients for you! This is actually very easy using a free tool put  by Google called Google Analytics. By inserting a small piece of code on your site you are able to see how visitors arrived at your site, what areas they visited and where the left.  This is invaluable in targeting your marketing campaign.

So there are a few considerations and rules to live by in setting up your photography business website.  I wish you the best success in your business endeavors!