Best USA Photographers Blog

January 23, 2010
Our world is changing - WATCH THIS. It is our future - Embrace it.
We are assuming that you have watched not only the video below, but the one below that. A special thanks to our friends Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. They are awesome for confusing us with the facts. Now we can change our minds and start thinking in the right direction before it is too late. You'll see some big changes this year. Hope you join us.

January 5, 2010
Best USA Photographers has a new owner
Details and plans will be forthcoming. Please give us some time to create.

October 8, 2009
Everyone should understand this. Must see video
If you think you are one of the best photographers in your state and you need help in getting into social media go to our potential members page. You will still have to pass strict Selection Committee standards and an interview. BUT if you do you'll see amazing things happen with your web site. The video below gives you a taste of what Social Media can do for you. Best USA Photographers will make Social Media easier for their members.

October 3, 2009
The Next Step
We are in the process of sending out feelers to potential new members. The Selection Commitee liking your site and work is only is part of the process. But it is a first big step. We want to make an example out of each of our members, but we need input. We can do a lot for you, but it also means that you have to send us images to brag about your work, fill out the questionnaire so we can do our thing. So that is the next step.

September 24, 2009
New "Buyers not Lookers" Ranking
There are three key stats for determining your sites relevance. Without relevance you have no buyers. Up until now these factors have all been looked at separately. We have created a formula that combines all three legs of this buyer's stool because they are all important. Now you have a way to evaluate who you do business with and what your competitors are doing. Currently all 3 stats are treated equal, but over the next three months testing will be done to see if some should be weighted more than others. Naturally our examples are with photography sites. You can use the formula for any industry or your competition.

Google knows, do you?
It is all about relevance now, not Page Rank or links to your site. Here's proof.

September 9, 2009
$500 Bonus -Questionnaires are coming in - new must read
September 3, I sent out questionnaires to members and we are receiving some great responses. Thank you. If you have not received yours call us. We have actually extended the $500 bonus deadline to to September 18th instead of the 14th because we did not consider Labor Day Weekend. So turn in the questionnaire by then and you will receive the $500 private consultation package on your web site.

Today we put up a new article that really shows the effectiveness of list building and keeping in touch with your contacts. Take a look at the stats. It will blow you away. To read the stats see the link in yesterday's post.

September 8, 2009
Are you making business decisions based on current facts?
A membership organization is only good if it brings you business. I can't complain, Best USA Photographers was bringing me lots of business, but there were a few members that said it didn't. So I had to re-evaluate what I was doing, that they were not. What I discovered was 9 new things that were really bringing me business, even though the Best USA Photographers web site was the catalyst. I also realized that 99.9% of the photographers don't have a clue, or the time to learn these 10 things, or the money to implement them. That is why we restructured Best USA Photographers to a public relations firm rather than a portfolio site. Any one of the new 9 programs would take a minimum of $40,000 plus time to put together. That's $400,000. The only way to do it is together as a group.

Since photographers are not going to put money on a crap shoot, we had to test our 10 components. We wanted to make sure that what worked for me would work for them. If you want to base your business on solid data here are some stats of how we increased traffic on the average of 252% in one month. We think you will find this study based on statistics from a third party very interesting. It clearly shows that the list building component is very worthwhile. 100% increased their traffic significantly and 41 out of the 57 more than doubled their traffic in one month. We only used 1% of our list and this is only one of our 10 new marketing components.

Getting traffic to your site is one thing converting them to buyers is another. There are other components that will help with that, but first you have to get the buyer's attention.

Aug 10th 2009
We struck a nerve somewhere when we published the stats of leading photography websites for " time-on-site" and "bounce rate." Our statistics program tells us IP addresses of visitors and how long someone is on each page of our website (These are the same stats Alexa uses to compile data). Suddenly our traffic from India and Cypress has increased considerably. Our web master tells us two interesting facts about the foreign data; 1) the entries onto our site are spaced evenly in time, which means a machine is being used and, 2) they only go to one page and log off after 14 seconds. This has effected our time-on-site and our bounce rate for the last two weeks. It is a real cheap shot by someone, but we have only begun and eventually they will have to put on 100 machines to effect us. Finding the foreign companies that are doing it is not hard, we just need to find out who hired them. If they keep doing it, we will find them and everyone will know the honesty behind their company.

July 27th 2009
WOW, what a great 20 days since we last wrote. Phones ringing, requests for membership increasing and people continue to love the site. Best USA Photographers has moved up to the number one spot for "Bounce Rate" and we increased our "Time-on-Site" 3 month average per user to 28.5 minutes, making it far and above the next closest which is 12.5 minutes.

Best USA Photographers 3 month world-wide ranking after less than a month of our new pages has increased to 372,449 and our US ranking is 55,535. The U.S. ranking is out of all the web sites in the U.S. I want to see it after we have had three months on our new site. That would be October 4th.

In September when we add more photographers, we will launch our Social Media campaign, then you will see huge changes not only on our site but the individual sites of our photographers.

In the next day or two we will be placing a new article on how to evaluate your site using a no-cost web tool called Alexa. Look for it under articles. One of our goals is to provide our photographers ways to improve their own sites. What we have found is that if a photographer is not getting business from our site it is not because people are not going there, but there is not a call to action on the photographer's site. We hope to change all that.

July 7th 2009
We got the site up on July 4th like we promised. We are still working on connecting all the forms though. And we have to check links and spell check.

Alexa.com compiles stats on all web sites and on the June 24th (before we put up new pages) we looked at our stats. Of all the top photography sites they had listed we did very well. If your average viewer stays on a site for 3 minutes that is good, 5 minutes is excellent - 10 minutes is unheard of. We lead all photography sites with 13.9 minutes in a 3 month average. July 6th we checked it and our 3 month average jumped to 18.7 minutes. Our 7 day average was 40.3. Will it stay up there? I doubt it, but it won't hurt our 3 month average. Here's a page to look at and if you click on the links listed on 7-27-09 you will be taken to the stats page for the leading photography sites.

The other factor that tells you the quality of your visitors is the bounce rate. Which is what percent of your visitors only visit one page before they leave. So if you had 10,000 visitors that day and a bounce rate of 60%, you only had 4,000 visitors that cared enough to visit another page. The lower the percentage the better. On June 24th we were in 10th place with a 33% bounce rate which is excellent for a 3 month average. On the 6th, Best USA Photographers moved up to 2nd best in the bounce category with a 26.3%. Our 7 day average was 10.3%. We'll work on that.

I am excited (as you can tell) because we have been too busy to tell anyone about the changes yet. We're still working on content and programs. Hopefully we will send out a press release in a couple weeks.

Thank you for loving our site.

July 4th 2009: Best USA Photographers changed over from a portfolio site to a public relations firm today. We will be in what we call "Beta PR Mode" till the end of the year. This is where we take our existing photographers that started out with us and a few more that we will pick up this month and next, and start marketing. From September to December we will be seeking ways to promote their work. See Consumer Specials for an idea of some of our new programs and projects. Together we will keep customers happy.

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