CONVERSATION WITH BELINDA JACKSON

ONLINE SUCCESS WITH BLOGGING AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

You can listen to our conversations on the website and ask questions prior to our interviews. Find out about our next conversation by checking the promotions panel on the right. Alternatively, if you are a Gold Member of Ezi Pix, you can listen to the entire Program of conversations to date, including our conversations with outstanding Photographers by visiting the resource library in the Gold Members Area. See you on the other side.

 TRANSCRIPT

CONVERSATION WITH BELINDA JACKSON OF

WEB CHAMELEON

Welcome to the Ezi Pix conversations with professionals and today I’m talking with Belinda Jackson from Web Chameleon. Welcome to the program Belinda..

Thanks Julie, it’s great to be here.

And Belinda has worked with clients to improve their online marketing efforts for more than 5 years now but also has more than 14 years previous experience in things like marketing and sales and graphic design and IT, so today Belinda will be sharing her expert tips and advice just to help your business succeed online and mine too resulting in obviously more prospects, clients sales and higher profits and that’s what we all want.

Belinda, you’ve got the perfect background for moving into the business of helping businesses market themselves through blogging and online marketing and the more recent trend of viral marketing or social media. Can you tell us a bit about how you got started in online marketing?

Sure, thanks Julie. Well, I’ve got a long background in marketing. I did my marketing degree a number of years ago and about 5 or 6 years ago I was working overseas in London for a company and I was working as their marketing manager and it was really my first insight into the world of online marketing. They had me pretty much doing all of their online marketing. I was working on Search Engine Optimisation so I was working on getting their website found in the search engines. I was working on their email marketing and the entire business was actually run online and we had clients all over the world…very small company it was, but big, big turnover and clients all over the world so it was really exciting and it taught me some lessons that have been invaluable in moving forward. Since forming my business back here in Australia it’s been an ongoing education for me in the world of online marketing and I just find that it’s such an amazing medium for small businesses or photographers, solo businesses. It’s a great way of getting publicity and visibility in the marketplace and for showcasing products and services. So I just love it as a medium and these days marketing rules I’d say have changed and so much more is going on online and we’re more in a world of referrals and recommendations and using blogging and social medium and things like that so my background in marketing has led to me being more specialised in online marketing because I find it so effective.

Thanks Belinda. So I noticed you mentioned it’s great for publicity and showcasing products and services. Now Ezi Pix Photography of course we all want to showcase our products being our photographs and our services being our ability to go out and take photos for someone and be commissioned to do that. So I’m wondering Belinda, where does someone start and how does blogging, what are the steps they would use with blogging to help their business particularly say in photography?

Sure. Maybe I’ll just start by giving a bit of an overview of blogging, what it is and how it could benefit your business. A blog is a type of website also known as a web log. Traditionally years ago it was like an online diary or journal and it’s progressed further from there but these days what a blog could mean to you is it’s a type of website that’s easy to set up and maintain so you’re able to set up a free blog. There’s a few services where you can do this including Wordpress.com and blogger.com or you can set up your own domain and have a blog sitting on their as well with Wordpress.org but a blog will enable you to have a presence online. When I say showcase your products online what I mean is you can actually set up pages on your blog and you can set up posts. For example each time you have a new photograph that you’d like to showcase then you would upload that to a page on your blog and it would be visible to the world. You can direct people to that.

It’s also a great way for you to discuss or talk about your ideas, what you’re working on, if you’ve got any exhibitions going on or anything that your involved with, it’s a great way to put that on there. So it’s also a way for you to be in the marketplace and let people know what you’re doing and the reason why a blog can be so cost effective is because of the software that runs it. It can be free or very low cost, even if you have it set up on your own domain and it’s very easy to use so generally once it’s set up you can log into the back end of your blog and you can easily upload images or content as you need to.

And so if someone wants to send someone from their blog to their full website is that able to be done?

Absolutely. The thing with your blog is that you’ll be able to post content and articles as you’re going along. You could have links within the content across to your portfolio on Ezi Pix. You could have links to anywhere else on the internet. It becomes a connector as well so connecting other websites together. You could, if you’ve got another website, in side column of your blog you could have a permanent banner that promotes your other website and if anyone clicks on that it takes them across there as well.

That’s great, it sounds like it’s the place to go for connecting and it sounds as you said easy to set up and easy to maintain. We mentioned social networking or social media before so again, can you just take us through how someone would get started with social media?

Sure. The social media or social networking is a topic that is hot at the moment and it’s in the media, we’ve all been hearing about Twitter and we’ve been hearing about FaceBook and lots of other different variations as well. We’ve also been hearing about blogging a lot, but blogging has been more in the media for longer so the newer... I mean I’m hearing it on the news and on the morning shows all the time now about these social Medias. So what they are is they are websites where people can connect with each other so I’ll just give you a bit of an example I’m going to give you an introduction to both FaceBook and Twitter cause they just seem to be the most popular ones and the ones that are getting a lot of publicity these days. So FaceBook is actually an application online where you can connect with people both professionally and personally so you can connect with old school friends and in fact that’s how FaceBook first started. FaceBook has 125 million active members so it’s a huge network. On FaceBook you can have a profile where you have a bit of information about yourself. You can include a link across to your portfolio on Ezi Pix, you can include a link to your blog or your website and you can update on FaceBook where if you have new images you can upload them to the gallery on FaceBook so all of your friends, and your friends are people that you have connected with on FaceBook, are able to see when you’ve uploaded new images and you can also update news items and things like that. So you can connect and you can have other people keeping in touch with you and knowing what’s going on with your work and personal as well.

So with Twitter…Twitter is a newer service but it’s starting to take off as well and it’s a social networking site as well, but it’s also a bit like a mini blog. The concept of Twitter actually revolves around the question of “What are you doing now?” and with Twitter you can answer this question with as little or as often as you like, but your answer must be contained within 140 characters so basically a sentence. So all you do on Twitter is you update what it is you’re working on so “I’ve just been out photographing the Nature down the road” or what you’ve been working on. And how that works is that you can actually connect with other people on Twitter and people that actually follow what your updates are, are called your followers and then you can follow other people and see what they’re updates are as well. Twitter has less users than FaceBook but it is growing. It’s growing very fast and with both of these mediums the big benefit to you is that it’s providing you with visibility for yourself and for your business. It’s enabling you to have a presence online and it’s enabling you to promote the work that you’re doing, the photographs that you’re taking and promote if you have them a blog and a website as well and to drive people across to those. It’s also a way for you to build relationships with your network so these are your friends or business associates or people that you’ve simply connected with via these mediums. So if you wanted to learn more about those the website for FaceBook is www.facebook.com if you’re not already on there and it seems these days that everyone you talk to is already on FaceBook, and Twitter is www.twitter.com

Thank you for that Belinda. I am on FaceBook and I do have lot’s of friends. Can I just ask you if I’ve got friends on there, a lot of the friends I’ve got already know about my business. How does it help me gain additional…is it going to get out to other people…is it going to get to fiends of friends is what I’m asking?

Well, I guess from a point of view of if you’re on FaceBook and if you’re uploading photos and some of your friends comment on them it will also show on their news feed. So a news feed is the updates that are going on so other people may see your photos because of people that comment and on other peoples news feeds so you may find someone sees your photo there and they might send through a friend request because they’d like to see more. With Twitter people can actually run searches so they can be searching for different keywords and topics. They may be searching for photographers and they may be able to find you that way. So there’s different ways of being found and both mediums, as you connect in with more people, it’s the whole ‘so many degrees of separation’. People can connect you with other people that may be interested in your services.

Ok, I think I get it now. So it can just double and then triple and then go from there. Right, do the participants, people that want to go onto FaceBook and Twitter need experience with online marketing? Or people that want to go on and do a blog, or start a blog, do they need to be experienced to gain these tips or use these tools?

Not really, I mean it’s just a matter of being interested and motivated. I would suggest hopping along and having a look at the websites, the social media websites. There is so much information available online at the moment in regards to these topics. You need to be able to dedicate a little bit of time to learning about it and understanding it so you can best use it, but even if you were to just have a look at both and then decide to just start with one of them so that you’re not overwhelming yourself with too much. Probably FaceBook does have more users, but at the moment Twitter is definitely the hot one and it’s tending to be more where people are being found as well, so it’s getting a lot of media attention. On Twitter there is a lot of journalists and things like that and they seem to be…it’s a way of getting found by these people as well, so if you wanted to get some media or publicity, you know, just by having a presence on there may allow you to pop into their visibility. But you don’t need to be overly experienced. We all have to learn on the job as they say. Even those of us that are talking about this topic, we’re all still learning as well, because remember all these mediums they’re still pretty new it’s so new that in fact we’re all still learning how to best utilise but I have a number of different clients and friends that are using these mediums and getting great results. Actually getting work from it so it can work.

That sounds great, and I hear that Sir Richard Brandson is a Twitter. So wouldn’t it be nice if he commissioned one of Ezi Pix Photographers to do his work? Maybe on his little, one of his Virgin Islands. Ha. So back to just blogging for a minute and I believe that you can get good search engine results from having a blog, can you tell us a bit about how that works?

Sure. The thing with search engine optimisation, what search engine optimisation is, is actually optimising your website or your blog to be found on the search engines so if someone goes to Google and they search for photographer and they put in your suburb or your area, you want to be found because these days people are, prospects are going to Google searching for all kinds of products and services so you really need to have visibility there because that’s where you need to be to be found. So the reason why blogging is so beneficial for search engine marketing is a couple of reasons. One is the software that runs the blog. In what I talk about, what I use and recommend is Wordpress and Wordpress has been built in a way that straight away optimises for search engines cause it’s cleanly built and, not to go into all the nitty gritty technical details, but the way that the software is put together is going to benefit you. Then from there there’s a few tweaks that you can actually do to a blog to actually optimise it further. There’s what’s called plug-in’s and a plug-in is an additional little piece of software that’s free in most cases that you can add to your Wordpress Blog to add extra functionality. There’s on particular plug-in that’s very popular that I use and recommend and that optimises your blog further and that’s called SEO All-In-One and what that does is it enables you to actually…whenever you post an article or a piece of content to your blog you can specify the title, the title of the post, you can specify the keywords and a description. So that’s the things that Google look at and it allows you to basically optimise further.

The other reason why Blogs are so beneficial for search engine optimisation is actually because you’re actually posting content on a regular basis. Chances are when you’re posting content you’re using your keywords, so if you are blogging you need to make sure that you’re including words as well as your images and what that means is you could include the words photographer, photography in a way that also reads ok. The suburbs that your photos are taken so that you may get found if someone searches for a photographer in a particular subject name. So you are able to actually have more content that Google or the other search engines can actually find and index and therefore returning results. These days the search engine optimisation, the social media that we’ve just talked about is coming into play as well, so actually having visibility on those social medias can actually help to drive traffic and Google are starting to pick up on people’s profiles on those types of sites as well so it’s well worth putting the effort in because you really need to be found these days on Google and the search engines. I’m sure you’ll agree.

Yes, I do agree. I can’t believe all of that you just told me because some of that I already do and other things I don’t. So I believe that making also helps if you have a feedback to your own.

Another thing is that I believe that you do some online programs and services yourself that can help businesses or photographers and participants as well as some free reports that you’re doing. Can you run us through the sort of things that you offer?

Sure. I generally work with small business and solo businesses to utilise online marketing to improve their business, to generate leads, to attract, retain and convert leads into clients, which ultimately leads to more sales and profits for their business.

On my main website which is webchameleon.com.au you can actually download a free report which is all around online marketing and 6 specific online marketing strategies that you can use to do all of that…attract and retain clients and convert clients.

The other website that I have which is a program specifically around the topic of blogging is the businessbloggingprogram.com and that’s actually a program I put together last year that’s just being refreshed at the moment. I actually delve into blogging and how to best utilise it and how to also integrate blogging with the social media because these days what’s happening is you’re needing to integrate these mediums together so that you’re linking across between the two. So if you post a new piece a new piece of content to your blog, it will automatically get posted to your Twitter profile and your FaceBook profile. You can do all kinds of stuff like that that seems really like maybe that would be difficult or complex but in actual fact if you know how to do it it’s not so difficult. So the business blogging program is where I actually walk people through step by step how to do that type of thing.

There the main ones that you might want to have a look at, I mean that’s what my whole business is about. It’s about helping other people utilise these online marketing strategies.

That sounds fantastic. So the outcome for participants is if they come to webchameleon.com.au they can find a free report on online marketing strategies…

Yep

Which will help them gain more prospects and clients, and if they go to the business blogging program, it’s about; you will basically teach them how to integrate it between the social media and blogging and hopefully make it much easier for them. Does that sound about right?

Yes, it does sound right.

Excellent. So I’d like our listeners and members to know exactly how to find you. The best way is through the website. Can you just give us those couple of website addresses again?

Sure, my main website is www.webchameleon.com.au and the other website specifically around blogging is www.businessbloggingprogram.com and both of those websites you can go along to and both of them provide you with access to some free information and give you some information on the other services and products that I do offer through my business so please do go along to those websites if you think you could benefit and I’m sure you can benefit from learning more about these topics.

I’m sure they can too. Now I do have my hardest question of all to ask you at the end which is… you’re top three tips for online success in these areas. If you can fill us in on that, what do you think?

Sure. Ok, I’m glad you pre-warned me that you were asking that question. So I would say that number one is to be educated because if you can understand what it is that you’re going to be utilising and why you’re doing it, you’re going to have more confidence. I find so many people get overwhelmed with all this information and they just don’t know where to start. There are so many opportunities online but sometimes having too many opportunities can mean that nothing happens because you’re just overwhelmed with it all. So first of all get educated. Another website I didn’t mention there is my own blog. Ha, of course I should have mentioned that. It’s www.blogbybelinda.com If you hop along to that website, blogbybelinda.com and you click on the link, I think there’s the link there for social media, there’s a few videos on there, around Twitter, an introduction to Twitter and there’s lots of information on there on blogging and things like that so as far as getting educated…and that’s completely free. You can read some of that information as well. It will also give you a good overview of what a blog can look like. So number one is to be educated so that you’ve got your confidence to actually implement some of these strategies, and by being educated will allow you to make a decision to which strategies are right for you.

Number two is to actually dedicate some time to implementing these strategies because they do take some time. In order to do that you need to give some priority to these strategies, so if you learn a bit more about and you decide that you think, yes, I think these could work for me, put some time in your weekly diary to actually spend on these strategies. If you do decide to go ahead and start utilising things like Twitter and Facebook you probably need to even dedicate, even if it’s only a small of time, on a daily basis to actually using these mediums. So number two is to dedicate time and priority to the strategies that are right for you.

Number three is to be consistent. If you decide to go ahead and start a blog, then you need to be consistent. Blogs and social media are not strategies that are a one hit wonder, they are not something that you can start and use for a month and then say, no it’s not working or no I’m bored with that. They won’t work. So if you make the decision you need to be consistent. For blogging it does take a bit of time to start to get a profile in there. And you need to get out and look at other blogs, other photographers blogs, start commenting on those so you start driving people back to your blog and getting people commenting on yours, and the only way you can do that is by building ongoing relationships with people online and being consistent in posting content to your blog and also being consistent in using the social media. So that’s my top three tips Julie.

They are great tips. I’ll be using them all. Thanks Belinda, and I believe you’ve got a special offer for Ezi Pix members today. I’ll just pass over to you to tell us what that is.

Thanks Julie. The Business Blogging Program which is my program where I walk you through step by step how to set up a blog, how to market your blog, how to manage it and how to get the most benefit from it and also within that program we cover how to utilise and integrate with social media…that program which is normally $297 for the complete access, Ezi Pix members will get a $50 discount off that program. So I’m going to give Julie a discount coupon that you can use if you go ahead and purchase that so you can find that I believe on the member’s site. So a $50 discount for any Ezi Pix members and we’d love to have you on board.

Thank you, that’s such a generous offer, $50 discount. So you’ll find that coupon code in the Gold Members area. Fantastic, thanks Belinda. And don’t forget if you want to visit Belinda’s site, www.webchameleon.com.au This pretty much does conclude our interview for today and thank you so much for joining us Belinda, you’ve given me and hopefully all our members and visitors a great value content today and I’m sure we can all go out straight away and start gaining visitors to our portfolios and our websites so thank you so much for joining us.

That’s ok Julie, it’s a pleasure to be hear. I hope what I’ve talked about today will give people a few tips and a bit of education so they can utilise that best in their business. Thank you.

Thank you and I’m sure it will and I hope to have you back again one day. Thanks Belinda

Bye

And good bye to all our members and listeners.

This conversation has been proudly brought to you by the

‘Ezi Pix Conversations with Professionals Program’

to help you better understand your photography business and how to improve it.

You can listen to our conversations on the website and ask questions prior to our interviews. Find out about our next conversation by checking the promotions panel on the right. Alternatively, if you are a Gold Member of Ezi Pix, you can listen to the entire Program of conversations to date, including our conversations with outstanding Photographers by visiting the resource library in the Gold Members Area. See you on the other side.

Julie and The Ezi Pix Training Team