They assume that if you’re getting photographs for $500, than automatically the photographs are total shit, they take no factors in to consideration, they don’t take how many hours, what they get, nothing, they automatically assume you’re service is crap. The reason for this is that they are threatened by your very existence. They’ll spread lies and smear your service every chance they get, that’s why I always recommend placing your photographs in an online gallery, so clients can decide if your service is worth it.

Lets examine a few different generic scenarios where a $500 wedding package will be a huge success;

• Economically deprived area’s. Area’s with a history of poverty, and poor people who are raised on a nickel. I know it’s hard to comprehend for these elitists that weddings exists in the sub 20k per year salary demographics, and that people do get married who make less per year, than their expensive suit but it happens. It’s called a niche market that virtually every photographer looks over! I’m not talking about area’s that are just starting to suffer from the recent collapse, but ones that have had problems dating back 20+ years.
• You have virtually no overhead as a business. For some reason, it’s beyond the realm of possibility to these people that smaller photography studios might not have a huge over head. Maybe they own their own studio, the ground its on, the building it’s housed in, and all the equipment inside has paid for itself time and time again. You don’t always need the newest and best camera or lighting to get the best pictures, so rushing out and getting the latest craze is only doing your clients harm by increasing their costs
• You want to target that low-income market by offering a simple package, and count on doing 3-4 weddings per month from it. Money is money and it all spends after all right? And if you love what you’re doing, than it shouldn’t be an issue working on a Saturday or Sunday.

There are probably plenty of other instances where the market helps determine the price, and guess what your services are only worth what people are willing to pay for them. So if you live in an area where no one wants to pay $995 for three hours of photography, than you’re going to be out of business rather quick, you have to adapt to your surroundings and the market.

Lets examine what a $500 wedding package should consist of:

• 3-4 hours of photography at max (about $125 per hour at first glance)
• A proof CD & online proofs (if you’re using a 3rd party service and paying more than $7 a month you’re being robbed for being a noob and not hosting it yourself)
• A list of items that really cost you no additional charges but you include with the service description (like free 30 minutes travel time, black and white, selective coloring pictures.)

So you have 3-4 hours of photography assuming you take 1 picture a minute that’s usable it will give you 240 images to process. Assuming my average processing time of 30 seconds per image, that’s an additional 2 hours. So now the actual wedding time is 6 hours. (Slight decrease to sub $100/hr). But that’s your final cost, it doesn’t cost you a single dollar more after this and you can now add items to their service. Now for the package itself, $500 is a nice amount of change for a lot of people and assuming you get 20 weddings per year, thats going to be $10,000 alone on just the weddings with virtually no overhead.

So based off $10k per year a lone in just 120 hours of work you’re looking at about $83.34 per hour. Not real shabby, but $10k per year is chump change. The real money maker is now in pushing the sale of a few prints and addons to their package. Throw a proof book priced at $150, and assume half your customers by that, (+1,500) add in the 10×10 leather bound albums for $350 and assume half your customers by those (+3,500), throw in lets say an additional $20k worth of prints from these weddings total, which at most should cost you $893.34 cents to print. (+19106.66) because lets face it, the newly weds still have money to order after getting the budget photography service.

That brings your grand total of sales off weddings $34,106.66 alone. Thats almost $35k per year for doing something you love on the weekends most likely do you know how many people would die for a job like that? Figure in if you do family portraits and seniors your total income should clear well over $50k per year on under probably 1000 hours per year. So that’s $50k per year in what I’ll assume a low income area (hence the reason to offer the package).

To wrap it all up, off our $50k per year assumption lets assume $20k of that went to expenses for advertising, utilities, business insurance, and misc costs. That’ll be a business profit of $30k per year, and if you can’t run a photography studio on $30k per year in a low income area, you shouldn’t have one to begin with. The best part about targeting this demographic is that they don’t seem to complain, and are generally extremely content with the service they’ve been given, that’s priceless to me right there not having to do with some bridezilla and her lunatic diva mother who just can’t seem to be satisfied.

Oh and btw in case anyone is wondering how exactly I got these figures, they were taken from our 2009 income figures for a photography studio I work at, that offers the “Budget” plan (yes the very one that “sucks”). 2009 was the year we introduced this plan after 3 consecutive years of falling income, and it has saved the photography studio. In conclusion, each photographer is different and if they are lucky enough live in the USA where they’re free to set their prices as they see fit. People who bash the “budget” photographer without taking circumstances into consideration are probably egocentric, manically self-centered, lunatics who no one wants to be around any way.

1. All in one SEO Pack – This has been an all-time favorite of mine since it’s release years ago, and makes almost everyone’s list of best wordpress plugins. It’s no secret that AIOSP increase your presence in the search engines by simple adjustments to your blog that’d take you hours to complete yourself.

2. Lifestream – Lifestream is a social media plugin that takes all your feeds from various sites like Twitter and Facebook and turns them into a weekly digest post of what you’ve been doing.

3, NoSpamNX – Since installing NoSpamNX my blog and pingback spam has been non-existent. This is by far the best and most convenient method for blocking all those automated spam bots that plague the internet.

4. Page Links To – How many times have you wanted to post a link to another section of your site like the forums for example, but didn’t want the trouble of editing templates? Then Page Links To is your perfect 301 redirect solution.

5. StatPress SEOlution – The best stats tracking program that’s integrated with wordpress. Track where your visitors are in real time, and where they’ve been, how they got to your site, and what keywords are bringing you the most traffic.

6. Wordpress Download Monitor – If you offer downloads or files from your blog, then keeping track of who is downloading them and how many times they’ve been downloaded can help you decide if it was worth the time or not.

7. NextGen Gallery – What blog would be complete without at least one gallery? NextGen Gallery is an awesome free gallery addition to wordpress that supports lightboxes and additional styling so you can easily customize it.

8. Google XML Sitemaps – Build sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines so they know where your content is, and they can crawl it more efficently.

With those 8 additions to a basic wordpress installation you’ll have an extremely powerful and customized blog to build from and achieve whatever goals you’ve set for it. I personally keep all these modifications in a folder on my Mac so whenever I start a new wordpress site, or I assist someone with their site, I can simply upload them in one shot nice and fast like.

Any way, if you want to check out the newest Photography forums on the internet, visit Aperture Photography Forums, register and learn about all the wonderful aspects of photography.

The secret is all in the timing, if you are only online during the day or early afternoon, you’ll be competing against a lot of people, many of whom don’t get the concept of the site and will bid, bid, bid and will end up costing you hundreds in bid credits. Most of the time big ticket items will only go once per day, but they’ll last all day and then at night slow down until a winner gets the item.

To increase your chances of winning the following ways are way to dominate Beezid to make thousands by heading over to eBay after you win and selling the item.

• Try to only use Beezid late at night in the EST or CST time-zones. Bidding greatly slows down during these times as well as site usage.
• Don’t get into a bidding war with people you see using the AutoBid feature.
• Don’t use all your credits on one item. Diversify and try to only a max of 5 times to win the item. Each bid is going to cost you roughly .60 cents.
• Research the item and try to find the last 3 averaging ending bids, when the item is getting close to the highest one you can expect it to end soon.
• Try to bid with a full 20 seconds left and hope you can sneak by the bidders.

With those steps you can easily use Beezid to earn thousands of dollars per month with minimal effort and bidding only on select items at opertune times.

By serving parallel downloads, you’re avoiding the latency involved with 50 sequental requests and if you’ve performed this to the fullest optimization you’re essentially turning it into 50 requests at one time eliminating the latency issue. To get around this we are going to create subdomains to serve the new image, javascript and css files from. This is a relatively easy process and even the most novice user can do it, if you know how to create a subdomain in cPanel then you can handle this.

First you need to organize everything properly, create folders for javascript, css and images. Stick each type of file in their respective folder, images go in the images folder and etc for proper parallelism of downloads.

After you’ve got your site organized properly login to cPanel and navigate to subdomains

Next in the subdomain box you can enter anything you want, but for organization and to easily recall what is going where I suggest naming your subdomain to match the name of your folder (ex: images.domain.com, css.domain.com)

Once you create subdomains for all your folders you need to update your paths for your respective site. Make all your images call from your images subdomain (images.domain.com) your CSS point to css.domain.com and so forth.

If you want an easy way to monitor and track how much of an improvement this makes, download Mozilla FireFox, Firebug and Google Pagespeed tool. If you need some great hosting that uses cPanel check out HostGator

<ifModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 259200000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 259200000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 259200000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 60480000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 21600000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 21600000 seconds"
</ifModule>
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  <filesMatch "\\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=25920000, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(css)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=6048000, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(js)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2160000, private"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(xml|txt)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2160000, public, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\\.(html|htm|php)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=1, private, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  Header unset ETag
</ifModule>
FileETag None
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  Header unset Last-Modified
</ifModule>

I’ll assume you’ve got vBulletin 4 installed and configured already. Lets get started then…

First login to cPanel for your domain and go to the subdomains section.

Setup a new subdomain. You can set the subdomain name to anything you want. In my example I just use images1 images2 etc. You could use a more descriptive subdomain name to keep things easy to remember (ex: clientscript.domain.com). For the document root, point it to your images directory you want to serve from a different subdomain. In the example I’ve used the images/cms folder for this one.

Next you’ll need to login to your adminCP for vBulletin 4, click on Styles & Templates -> Style Manager -> {Your Skin} from the drop down menu select “StyleVars”

Once your in the new StlyeVars system, click on “Image Paths” over on the left. It’s easier if you also check the hide variables so you can find it easier.

Once you’re there you’ll notice all the different folders that serve images. I suggest creating a subdomain for each folder that serves images, in the picture above you can kinda see that I have a few already setup. The next step is to enter the newly created subdomain as the full path for the image directory. Since I created the images5.domain.com and pointed it to the cms folder of images, I enter that into the cms field.

You simply repeat this for each image directory and you’ll have your vBulletin 4 optimized and little overhead due to objects on the page.  You can see that I’ve got a few already setup and it improved my google page load score from a 66 to almost 79 by adding all the image directories this way.

BONUS TIP:

You can futher optimize by following the above by doing the same for the clientscript folder. As shown above I created clientscript.subdomain.com and pointed it to the clientscript folder. Then I modifed the headinclude template and changed the location of the clientscript call.

Lightroom has saved me countless hours of setting up page templates in Photoshop, dragging dropping, resizing, and cropping images to fit by using their Page Templates system (Under the Print Menu). I’ve set up about 5 jobs so far we commonly do in the photography studio (4×6 wallets (2), 8×10 wallet sheet (8), 5×7, 8×10 (borderless) and 8×10 on Legal paper). You can import these presets by going to the Print screen in Lightroom, and selecting the preset files (Don’t forget to download and extract) from your hard drive.

Hopefully this saves you as much time as it has myself, and you can use these presets in your work flow.

Lightroom Print Templates (105)

Feel free to redistribute these and simply include a link back to this post if you appreciate the work and time I’ve possibly saved you

So you’re probably wondering what good is the long tail? Honestly I can see it working in specific applications; such as digital downloads, one page sales sites, however the long tail is only going to produce garbage traffic for a large percentage of webmasters out there. The good thing about long tail search is if you’re a webmaster who just loves to see a hit to their site, then you’re going to love the long tail; however if you’re a more in depth webmaster and into stats and tracking what the people are doing while they’re there, and if they come back, you’re going to be disappointed.

The long tail search results generally have a high bounce rate (usually near 100%) and a low return rate (usually about 0%). How does that help your site? What benefit are you getting if a person comes to your site, views one page then leaves, never comes back and doesn’t partake in any action for your site? It’s just a hit in your log, a inflated stat to show off to your friends, and nothing more! A conversation probably goes like this for 90% of webmasters who are going nuts for the long tail:

Bob: “Hey John, check it out I got 43251 visitors from google last month”
John: “Thats great bob, how much did you earn, how many came back, and how many viewed more than one page?”
Bob: “Well John, 40000 of those were one hit wonders from obscure keywords, they didn’t come back, and my earnings are still flat”
John: “Hey Bob, then what good is 43251 visitors from Google, if they don’t contribute to your site?”
Bob: “Well they look good in stats, hopefully I don’t have to explain them to any one else”
John: “They sure do Bob, they sure do…”

Like our friends Bob & John above, have you taken a look at the results from “Long Tail” keywords? I’d like to hear your thoughts and results with the long tail of search results. Don’t get me wrong, Long Tail search is a real thing, and if applied correctly to certain sites it can be beneficial, however this article only covers the scope of forums, and if you think the login tail is good or bad for the site.