Business Day Thursday: Make Yourself Famous Fast! Here’s An Amazing Way To Promote Your Business! & New Contest Announced!

Good Morning Everybody,

I can’t believe it, I sent out an email yesterday about our brand new FREE Digital Design Webcast and we have nearly 800 signed up already!  Wow!  Yep, looks like it’s going to be a sellout.  I’ve also talked with Michael Sheasby about covering some real sizzle points on LumaPix – it’s shaping up to be a great program.  Hope you can make it!

Hey gang, I am super excited about my post today. I’ve spent half the day putting it together for you so I hope you like it.  I going to tell you about a web site that I stumbled on yesterday and had me engrossed for two hours checking out all it’s cool features.  The more I played around on the site the more excited I got.  Let’s get right to it because today’s post really ROCKS!!!!

Make Yourself Famous Fast: Here’s An Amazing Way To Promote Your Business!

OK, here’s the back story. I was checking emails late yesterday afternoon and saw I had several new folks following me on Twitter.  I always check out the followers to see if I want to follow back.  The qualifier for me – don’t tell me what you had for lunch, it’s all about rich content.

I checked out several of John Lasurdo tweets and liked what I saw.  The one that got me fired up the most was the link to this really cool site Issuu.com [link].  A quick trip over, 30 minutes of checking it out and I was hooked – and hooked in a big way!  My brain began churning with all kinds of ideas on how a photographer could use this service in their business.  The more I thought about it, the more ideas kept popping into my head.  And, you want to know the best news – it’s FREE!!  Let me tell you what I came up with in that short time last evening

The Wonderment Of Issuu – A Few Of My Suggestions

• Promoting and marketing your business
• Sizzling your blog and website
• Client proofing
• Company newsletters
• Studio guides like clothing suggestions for photo shoots
• PowerPoint presentations for training
• Downloading documents like contracts, portrait suggestions, wedding shoot sheets, and other studio forms
• And the list goes on and on!

OK, I Was Stoked - Had to Give It A Try

My first thought was getting a wedding album up to see what it looked like on Issuu.com.  It was way cool!!  It took me a grand total of less than 30 minutes to get my first “wedding album e-book” published – and it looked great! Check it out below – what do you think?

Open publication - Free publishing - More album

 

Next I thought,”How about a Bar Mitzvah Album?” 30 minutes later it was online too. Over the course of the next few hours, I had uploaded 4 albums, 1 PowerPoint Presentation, and 1 DOC file wedding article. Here’s what my Issuu library looks like now.

 

But here is the “LIVE” embedded version where you can browse all my publications to date.  Just click away and enjoy!

 

Issuu will let you upload a nice variety of file formats including PDF, DOC, PPT, ODT, WPD, SXW, RTF, ODP, and SXI which is what makes it so versatile for a photography business. Maximum file size is 100 megs and up to 500 pages, making all my uploads well within the document requirements.

Embed It In Your Blog and watch in Full Screen Mode – Very Cool Viewing Experience!

You’ve got a few choices when viewing your uploaded albums.  You can easily link to them with the link associated with each album.  For instance, here is a link to a Black & White wedding album I uploaded.  It was a special collection of images that the bride’s mother loved.  Check it out right here.

OK, David, Just How Are You Doing It?  LumaPix Is Our Secret Weapon.

Next Thursday we have our Digital Design Webcast happening right here at DigitalProTalk – one more time, here is the link to register.  I’ll give you the specifics then.  But let me give you a general overview today.

You’ve heard me say it a million times – LumaPix has been our secret weapon for fast, easy album design around here for nearly 8 years.  LumaPIx:FotoFusion literally redeemed us from Photoshop purgatory years ago.

LumaPix also has one very powerful, little known feature built in to the software – it let’s you save out your album design as a PDF file – PDF file like Issuu wants to see when uploading.  Also LumaPix let’s you save out your double page spreads as separate pages which Issuu can now display properly.  Here are the LumaPix settings I used to export my albums to a PDF.

DAZNOTE: Issuu likes to see a normal “Page 1”  We design our Designer albums – the “coffee table” albums with a double page spread opening.  Be sure to change the first double page spread to a single album page or cover sheet so LumaPix doesn’t split it.

Or you could change that first page to a single page before exporting, otherwise Lumapix will split that page and all your pages will be offset by one page upon uploading to Issuu.  This sounds more complicated than it is – I’ll go into more detail in next week’s webcast.

Anyway, this combination of LumaPix PDF export and Issuu PDF upload makes the magic happen!  Both programs were made for each other perfectly.  And its this combo that really opens up the doors for powerful marketing and promotions for your studio.

We’ve got special pricing on all our LumaPix MAC [link] and PC [link]bundles over at our Digital Resource Center right here.  You may want to pick up your copy before next week’s Digital Design Webcast.

Issuu Offers A Very Compelling Viewing Experience!

Just look how great these albums look on my blog.  Go ahead and play around with some of the viewing options in Issuu. 

You can display the album pages in full screen view as shown above or as thumbnails below and navigate to any part of the album you desire.  If you look at the full screen view above, you’ll also see opt to print or email the page too.

Check out the entire “LIVE” Bar Mitzvah album below – it’s fun to just page through it and enjoy the entire day again. Be sure to view it in full screen mode.

Open publication - Free publishing - More album

 

Kicking In Your Marketing Afterburners

Do you know the power of possibilities with Issuu? Everything you turn into and album, you upload to Issuu.  You can set up different bookshelves for each category of images.  You could have one for weddings, families, high school seniors – whatever.  What a fabulous way for your potential clients to preview a large body of your work!

Don’t stop there either.  Anything you have as a DOC file you can upload into Issuu. Think studio guides like clothing suggestions for photo shoots, documents like contracts, portrait suggestions, wedding shoot sheets, other studio forms – the list goes on and on!  Here is a DOC file I shot up to Issuu this morning. 

The article is a few years old but that’s besides the point – it’s still easy to get the info up there.  I’ve even set this document to be downloaded if you would like to keep it.  There’s some good suggestions in it.

Anyway, you get the idea and after playing around on Issuu’s site, I’m sure you get a lot more ideas too. 

How About A Little Contest

I’ve thrown tons of ideas up here for you guys and girls today.  I’m looking for 20 more different ideas to share with our DPT readers.  If we get 20 different unique ideas, I’ll award the winner my Summer Success Collection (on sale now for $59 - $500 value)

Post your suggestions in the Comments section following this blog post please – please NOT on Facebook because those posts sometimes end up in my spam folder.  Anyway, I’d love to see what you come up with.

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Hey gang, that’s it for me today.  I’ve spent the entire morning getting this post up, but I’ve sure been having a great time learning the ins and outs of Issuu too.  I sure hope you get as excited about it as I am. And, don’t forget to send in some suggestions – let’s see what our creative DigitalProTalk readers come up with.

On that note gang, I’ve got to get back to my real job.  I’ll see you tomorrow for a short post. 

Have a great rest of the day,

David