339: James Broadbent – Blogging as a photography business growth tool and how to do it easily

339: James Broadbent - Blogging as a photography business growth tool and how to do it easily

Speaker 1: 00:00:00 This is Photo Biz Xposed episode number 339 and today we're talking blogging with the photography business owner who generates over 1000 leads per year and he puts that down to consistent blogging. I'm talking about James Broadbent and that interview is coming up in just a minute.

Speaker 2: 00:00:22 Are you planning to have a successful wedding and portrait photography business? Join Andrew as he interviews successful photographers and business experts to fast track your success. Welcome to the Photo Biz Xposed podcast with your host Andrew Hellmich

Speaker 1: 00:00:43 from impact images and welcome to this episode of the podcast. Looking forward to bringing you James's interview in just a minute before we get into that. I'm back here in Australia in Terrigal in my home based studio recording today, back from Bali, had a fantastic time there. Ended up reading four complete books, which is a good indication of the kind of holiday that it was. I'm not going to go any further into the Bali holiday now, but when I came back I was looking to do two separate things in regards to recommending other photographers and it was very, very frustrating, so I wanted to share with you these two things that I struggle with to make sure you aren't making the same mistakes. The very first one was I was looking for a photographer from a premium member's Facebook group to recommend to a client inquiry I had for a job that I just couldn't do.

Speaker 1: 00:01:33 It was in an area that I don't service and I thought, okay, this would be great to recommend to one of the premium members who does live in that area. I've got a name from the group for a photographer who would be perfectly suited to this job and because it was a commercial job, I wanted to pass on a phone number to this client inquiry because they wanted to talk to the photographer to see if they were going to be a good fit. I went to the website of the photographer, no phone number anywhere. It was so frustrating. Yes, there was an email address. I looked on the about page on the contact page in the footer up in the head out there. There was just no phone number anywhere I went to their Facebook page, no phone number. It was very frustrating. So if you have a website, please, please include your phone number some way.

Speaker 1: 00:02:22 You should also have exactly what kind of photography you provide and the area that you service that will be good for your SEO. Plus it helps the potential client know exactly right away if you are the right or potentially the right photographer for them that you do to kind of photography that thereafter and that you service the area that they live in and make it easy for them to contact you. And one of the things I hear is clients don't like to talk on the phone anymore. That's totally fine, but we should always give them the option to call us. We should be available to our clients if they want to use the phone, leave a voicemail or potentially get you on the phone. Fantastic. That's great. Let's give them that option. If they want to use email this, give them that option. If they want to use your contact form, give them that option.

Speaker 1: 00:03:09 If they want to send you a PM via Facebook or Instagram, to me that's totally fine too. Yes, it gets a bit awkward to manage all those different forms of communication, those different avenues of communication. And there's nothing wrong with you bringing everything back to email or back to back to the phone if that's the way you operate or via Facebook messenger, if that's what you prefer, but give your client the choice to do what they want to do to get in touch with you. And the second, the second instance was something along the same lines. I wanted to recommend a local photographer to a marriage celebrant. I'd seen this photographer's work. I loved his work. I had been introduced to him once before, but I could not remember his first name, which sounds crazy. I know, but I did remember his business name, so I Googled him, went to his website.

Speaker 1: 00:03:54 Do you think I could find his first name anywhere on the website? He didn't exist. It wasn't on his about page. It was absolutely nowhere. I went to his Facebook page. It wasn't there either. I ended up having to go to his Instagram account and find where he posted photos of previous clients and they'd use his name to thank him, which was like way too much time and effort to send him a referral. It should have been a lot easier than that. Again, make sure you have your name on your about page. Make it easy for people to relate to you to get to know you. I mean, we've talked so much about branding and about pages in the past on different episodes with people like Anna Puma, Kristen Kalp, Nadia, Mellie, and so many others. Make it easy for your clients to connect with you to get to know you and feel like they could be friends with you, that you're, that the idea of the perfect photographer for them and one of the easiest ways to do that is to include your name and also the names of your staff.

Speaker 1: 00:04:57 If you do have any staff, maybe you have a partner, a spouse, a wife or husband working in the business, talk about them, use their name. If you have a dog or a cat, use their name to this could even go back to the discussion we had a few episodes ago with any pain who was horrified at the thought that some photographers were referring to their staff. As the girls use people's names. It's nice. It helps any outside of connect with you and your brand and also with your start because that's, that's ultimately what we want. We want those connections. That's what branding is all about. All right, that's enough of a rant. Include those details. Please, please, please include those details on your website. If you don't already have them there, go and check. Pause the podcast, go and check on your website if you have a phone number and your name and anyone related to your business, have their names in there as well if it's appropriate.

Speaker 1: 00:05:57 In last week's episode, I had returning guests, Joey Wright, who is the swimwear and lifestyle photographer based in Florida in the U S by all accounts, he has created a fantastic lifestyle business for himself. He's curated a fantastic portfolio on Instagram, which is seeing him bring in more and more commercial clients as well as branding type jobs for swimwear companies. He even has a sponsor now paying him to show their smoking products alongside some of his Instagram posts. Definitely get back and have a listen to that interview with Joey. If you're interested in learning about curating a fantastic Instagram feed that's going to actually bring you clients and are sticking to your vision for your photography can pay off in the long run. If you stick to your guns and you stay passionate and committed to the style of photography that you love to shoot.

Speaker 3: 00:06:54 Photo Biz Exposed interviews with photographers to help you build a better photography business.

Speaker 1: 00:07:03 Alrighty, we're going to jump into this interview with James Broadbent in just a second. If you are hearing this announcement, it does usually mean that you'll only be hearing half the interview with today's guests, but that's not the case for today because you will be hearing the full interview today with James. In addition to hearing the full interview with James, you'll also have access to a 20% discount off the narrative blogging platform if you use the promo code photo basics so you can save 20% but I will let you know, premium members will be saving more than 20% with their promo code for narrative if they decide to go on and use the platform for their blogging. After listening to what James has to say about how blogging has had such a huge impact on the success of his business, so as always, there is something extra in every single episode for premium members.

Speaker 1: 00:07:56 If you want to check that out, head over to [inaudible] dot com forward slash try and for $1 you can get a 30 day trial membership. You can access the extra discount code from James today for the narrative platform. Plus you get access to the full back catalog. You get access to all the rebates and specials and discounts that premium members get, you'll get an invite to the members Facebook group, one of the friendliest, most supportive groups. You will find four photographers in the world and I'll also help you get started in your very own mastermind group. All that for a $1 trial membership. Head over to https://photobizx.com/try to check that out.

Speaker 3: 00:08:36 Welcome. It's time for Andrew's special guest.

Speaker 1: 00:08:42 I'd been hearing about the blogging platform narrative inside the member's Facebook group and other online groups. So I had a bit of a poke around and I never really understood why anyone would want to use an external blogging platform. I went the site, I could see a bunch of bigger names in the industry were using the service, which does make it look attractive. Photographers like Jonas Peterson, Sam Hurd, India, Earl and others. And after a little more digging, not a lot, I learnt that the guy behind narrative is James Broadbent, some more Googling and I found that he and his business partner, Cameron thought are two fantastic photographers with the wedding photography business. In New Zealand, chase wild. These guys shoot in some incredible locations. They have gorgeous work as well as run workshops and sell presets. So why start a blogging platform when everything already looks crazy good in life. I'm looking forward to finding out more and I'm wrapped to have James with us now. James, welcome. Thank you. Great share with you. Andrew is life as good as it looks on your website? Chase wild. It looks like you guys live in an incredible place and shooting some great locations.

Speaker 4: 00:09:51 Yeah, I mean, I'm Kevin. I, throughout the peak of out carreer will traveling for about five to six months of the year photographing weddings. I think I've photographed weddings in about 16 different countries now. And yeah, I mean it always looks glamorous from the outside, right? What you see on the Instagram is us standing on top of mountains and working with couples in beautiful places. But yeah, I mean there's a whole lot that goes on in between that, but yeah, it's,

Speaker 1: 00:10:20 yeah, it's an amazing, it's good, isn't it? It's good. I mean, you do a lot of traveling. You've talked about the peak of your career. I mean you're too young to be on the slide. I mean, are you guys still shooting deadly?

Speaker 4: 00:10:32 Yes. So obviously as you suggested in the intro, I own another company now called narrative and we bought a blogging tool for photographers. I still photograph weddings, but this is really my nine to five now, which means that I've kind of gone from being a full time wedding photographer to being a part time wedding photographer and a full time CEO. So it's been a, it's been a bit of a quite a big change for me. Cameron still runs chase wild and obviously what's called time on that. So I'm shooting about five to 10 ish, closer to the five number of weddings each year. And I managed to manage that because we also have a full time editor or an office person who helps with all those in between year olds as well.

Speaker 1: 00:11:17 Nice. So are you limiting yourself to bookings only within New Zealand now

Speaker 4: 00:11:23 I was looking at the bookings that I have for this upcoming summer because I had someone on my team. I was like, I want to come along and like shoot a waiting with you. And I realized there was only one in Aukland and I was like, there's one day that you can come along. So I have a generally the bookings that I'm trying to take a ones which are kind of interesting. So it makes month I'm shooting the captain of old Blake's wedding and I have a few weddings that you know are the seas and interesting places. Uh, yeah. And they're always I think fun to shoot.

Speaker 1: 00:11:56 Fantastic. So what about any at your peak before you started narrative, how many weddings were you shooting or between the two of you?

Speaker 4: 00:12:02 I think I was doing between 20 and 30 like once upon a time I did 45 and that was like my introduction to wedding photography is maybe a little bit different to others in what they've experienced. But in my first year of winning struggle fee, I shot 45 weddings and it was kind of like a baptism by fire. And I pretty quickly worked out that that is not sustainable. I'm not sure if I saw my friends very much that. Yeah. And so ever since then I was sort of trying to pull it down and down and down and reduce the number we were shooting. And so I think Ken does a similar number between, between 30 as well.

Speaker 1: 00:12:38 Yeah. Right. How did you go from zero to 45 or was it a bit slower than that?

Speaker 4: 00:12:44 So I guess I shot my first wedding January, 2013 I believe it was. And I had just returned from like a big trip. Obviously they'd been traveling overseas for about six months. Um, that uh, ran a photo blog while I was traveling that live into my first booking that January and I had just returned, you know, I was like [inaudible] of a day and I didn't have a job when I got home and I was like, Oh, this wedding photography thing's pretty awesome. Like someone paid me, I think I charged $2,000 for my first wedding and I was like, bill, that was great. And the day I shot my first wedding was actually the day I became a full time wedding photographer because I didn't have another job. And so within a month I think I had about three or four more bookings and they were all very black for that summer.

Speaker 4: 00:13:32 And then June that year I shot a wedding which got ended up getting published in a magazine here. And that drove a lot of inquiries for me. So from that join to the fault line, Joan, that was the 45 weddings within one period. And yeah, when we speak at our workshops, they do sort of like, I have a little bit of, what's the word, I dunno, pain for people who are starting their businesses now because it is more difficult than it was back then. There's a lot more people trying to get into the game now. Facebook was amazing during that first year I was just running Facebook ads and they were incredibly effective. And then, you know, Facebook has kind of tanked as a way to generate leads. And then from there I found out other ways that generated a large amount of leads as well. So caseload now on average gets more than a thousand leads via the website. Yeah. And I guess through that we've been able to sustain our bookings and get a decent amount of international work and yeah, find the clients that we really enjoy working with.

Speaker 1: 00:14:39 Wow. So you just said that you sort of went straight past that we, you know, we found another way to generate the leads when Facebook tanks, what are you doing to get those leads?

Speaker 4: 00:14:47 Yeah, so I'll blog and ACO nowadays is watching, or it's a large portion of our lanes. I think when I saw that in movement of play, I relied heavily on Facebook at the beginning. And I think probably 90% of my leads were coming from Facebook. And I was like, no, this is amazing. And then a little sudden Facebook turned around and decided, you know, actually people don't want to see business posts. I mean, at that time I probably had like a thousand followers on Facebook and my posts were being seen by sometimes 10,000 people. Now it's the complete opposite, right? You're lucky if a 10th of the people who follow your Facebook page actually see your content. And so I was like, obviously Instagram was on the uptake at that time and we started to invest heavily in unscrambler. I think I sort of realized, you know, it's not a wise business decision to have one of the most important parts of your business. Your leads fully invested in the successful company, which at the turn of a few switches can kind of change that few I guess. And so that's when we realized, okay, like we need to own our lead generation a little bit more. And that means investing in SEO and our blog and spending time to ensure that they were really quality and generating a large amount of leads.

Speaker 1: 00:16:10 Unreal. I'm going to come back to that in just a second. But you said that when you started your business, you know you got paid $2,000 and you know, that was like wow, what does it cost now these days to book chase wild to photograph a wedding?

Speaker 4: 00:16:23 I'd say on average most of our couples are spending at about 7,000 that's New Zealand in the day. But it's definitely ranges depending on what package you go for and yeah, where you're getting married and stuff like that. We do adapt our pricing based on the inquiries that come through. And so yes, there's a lot of factors which will face I guess how much do you pay?

Speaker 1: 00:16:51 Sure. So if I play around with the numbers a little bit here, if you guys uh, are booking the kind of weddings that you're talking about or you guys have a multi six figure business, like things are good with the photography. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Does that make you smile?

Speaker 4: 00:17:07 Yeah, I mean it generates enough money to live in Oakland, I guess you might say. [inaudible]

Speaker 1: 00:17:16 and you mentioned there too, the N Zed D New Zealand dollar, there's not a lot of difference. Is there a lot of difference for the New Zealand and the Aussie dollar? I don't think it's a huge amount. Think we're pretty close. I think it's pretty close. Yeah. Which is a bit like that's my kid

Speaker 4: 00:17:29 90 Australians since [inaudible] dollar or something like that.

Speaker 1: 00:17:32 Yeah. Right. Okay. You guys have a great business and then on top of that you've got your workshops and your presets and I can see you know where you guys would sell those out and why people will be buying a preset. Some of your work is amazing. Why even think about starting narrative? Yeah. I mean the joke that I

Speaker 4: 00:17:49 tell my friends is that I kind of thought about, you know what? I would look like to be a 45 year old wedding photographer. I it as a joke cause there are a lot of really successful, I'm lucky you added that in because I'm 48 but I think one of the things which made our brand really successful was that we're very much, we work really closely with our couples to connect with them and help them feel comfortable with us. And we're very high energy when we're shooting. And if you look at our portfolio, you see a lot of, you know, smiley people who look like they're having the best day of their life. And obviously they are, but you know, you can really draw that out. We'll have been, what's the connection that you build with them? And I think I just realized, I don't know if I can sustain that as I get older and, and I've always been an ambitious person who's, you know, trying new things.

Speaker 4: 00:18:42 I think I started my first business when I was 11 years old and so I've always been looking for problems and solutions and I'm just like, I think my partner gets sick of it. Like we'll be out and helping youth now at a restaurant. And I'm like, man, they could easily fix that problem with they just did XYZ. And so yeah, I'm drawn to, yeah, to problems and finding solutions for them. And blogging was like one of my biggest pain points as a photographer, I would spend literally a whole day, sometimes more building a blog posts because I would put so much intention into it and using Squarespace would create some, whatever you're on absolutely sucks. And I think that's kind of like the answer to the question, what she asked at the beginning, which is why would you use an external service when there's already, you know, a blogging tool within whatever your website, it's that you already have and narrative.

Speaker 4: 00:19:38 I mean, I can talk about them now, but narrative has a handful of benefits and problems that we want to solve. But some of the simple ones are, I mean, when I was traveling a lot, I hated building blog posts and in the web app because it was painfully slow and I had to wait for every single image to upload. I couldn't build a blog post on the plane and I couldn't build a blog post when I was at a hotel. So the first thing was, okay, we want people to be able to build them offline. And the next thing was, okay, we will, you know, obviously your blog post is, it's not just like a stack of images. You're if you're a wedding photographer, which most of our users are, then really your blog post is a narrative. It's a story. It's a succession of images which unfold something.

Speaker 4: 00:20:20 And so just having images stacked didn't really make sense. And so then you know, you end up stitching images together in Photoshop or some other service which allows you to stitch two or three or four photos and two one and then upload it. And then you end up with as long tedious process and you get to them and just next to each other and then you realize that the white balance is different and you've already uploaded it. See if to go back to light room, read at the image, Reese, stitch it together, every upload it and then you've just lost like the thing minutes cause you wanted to change one photo. So that was the next thing we were like look if you read it at the image in Lightroom, I want it to instantly change. And the app, you don't have to go through that tedious process and the images better side by side.

Speaker 4: 00:21:02 Well they no longer stitched images because I wanted the app to build the HTML for the blog posts. So the individual images would actually, you know, side-by-side them. It is, sorry were actually individual images. And so when people are searching in Google image search, those side-by-side images actually show as separate images with individual keywords. And if you want to pin them onto Pinterest then they're separate images. So they were kind of like the three starting points of why I wanted to build this. And it's so many other things which I can talk about later as to how I would imagine that we could improve the blogging services. And so we built a whole bunch of functionality around that.

Speaker 1: 00:21:45 Well, so really this all came about because of your struggles with blogging. So it was the reason that you wanted to pursue blogging so heavily. Was that because of the Facebook thing or because of, you know, the fact that Instagram is an outside service that could disappear?

Speaker 4: 00:22:00 Yeah. Yes, definitely. And we recognize how beneficial having a strong blog was to RSL and our lead generation. It's also, I think blogging is, it's your portfolio, it's your place to control how people see what you're showing them. But also like one of the things we talk a lot about in our workshop is that curation is key. And I actually think the difference between a good photographer and a great photographer is just curation. Because if you look at, well, you know, if I were 10 from a wedding with three to 5,000 images, they probably look pretty similar to the next person who maybe doesn't quite, isn't, I don't know what word you want to use, but it wasn't charging as much or isn't considered as great as photographer. But finding those perfect images that to get them to sh to really capture the essence of what was happening on that day and those in between moments that show how the bride was failing.

Speaker 4: 00:22:59 I'll show how you know, what was happening on that day. That's really just good curation of the content that you shot throughout the day. And then your blog is the ultimate form of the curation of that story or that day. And so whenever a couples would say to us, you know, can you show us an example of what you shot on a wedding day? We would always just send them a blog and we never ever had them say, Oh no, we want to see like everything that you've delivered. And so it's like your purest form of your portfolio of actually showing what your work looks like and just give the the couple of an idea of what they're going to receive.

Speaker 1: 00:23:34 Right. Yeah. I think one of the biggest things that you just said that really stood out to me that I haven't really heard before from a, you know, a super successful photographer is that you can be similar skill level to another photographer, but charge so much more because of your curation. I mean you're very similar in skill level, but you curate better and attract your ideal clients and are able to charge more because of it. Is that the secret curation?

Speaker 4: 00:23:59 Yeah, I think it's a big part of that. I mean, so often the images that I find that I select, the images that end up on my website or in a blog post on my Instagram are often images, which, you know, someone's there an in between moment of like I was just checking the light and I just so happened to catch this like pivot moment is bride was turning around away from me or something like that. And so for me, yeah, yes, I think that is important. And to be able to curate in that way, I think you have to be able to separate yourself from your work. And that happens, you know, in the format of time and also emotionally separate yourself from the images that you invested a lot of work into. Sometimes you spend so much time, I try to find the perfect location and the perfect lighting and you know, so you feel like these must be my best images, but sometimes they're not. Sometimes your best image was just like the bride walking to the car after the photo shoot. And so to be able to like emotionally remove yourself from your content and look at it objectively and then curate your content from that state of I think as well allows me to find those perfect moments, which you know, maybe it's a different moment with a bride just looks amazing or if it's self storytelling moment over whatever that is.

Speaker 1: 00:25:10 Yeah. I'm going to come back to narrative in just a second, but talking about curation, do you do that yourself and if so, how do you separate yourself emotionally? Do you wait a certain amount of time before you go back?

Speaker 4: 00:25:21 Yeah. So generally my workflow is after returning from a photo shoot on the Monday after the shoot or whatever it is, I'll actually put a look, a sneak peek together, um, for my client. And I actually like every single client gets a mini blog posts that I make for them and narrative. We can talk about that later as well.

Speaker 1: 00:25:40 Hang on. James, did you say you put it together on your phone? Is that what you said?

Speaker 4: 00:25:43 I know every single couple of kids, many blog posts that I make a narrative for them. And so I mean the reason why I do that is because people love having a blog post to share with your friends and family and you can't click through to that on my website. But if you searched like on Google, whatever the couple's name was, you'll see some sneak peek blog posts. Yeah. And so that's what I do on the Monday after the wedding. So there is, there's not a lot of time, you know, to separate myself emotionally from those images then. But generally the image selection process happens, you know, a month later and that's when I'll go through and do the full selection. Um, start a really good tip. I'm sure you've heard this before, it's not at the end of your shoot and work your way through to the beginning because nine times out of 10, you take the best image in a scene. You know, at the end of it seems that you don't need to look through all of the first and just amazing.

Speaker 1: 00:26:35 I've never heard that, but that's a great tip. So he actually used something like do you use photo mechanic or do you straight into Lightroom and go backwards from the end of the day? Yeah,

Speaker 4: 00:26:44 yeah, yeah. So you need something like photo mechanic, which is fast. And I think that's also part of it. Like I generally do my image selection and spending on the shoot somewhere between half an hour and an hour and a half for three to 5,000 images. Which sounds, you know, a little bit contradictory to what I was saying in the terms of like curation is so important. But pretty much all I'm looking at is the bride and the groom space and everything else, like the composition or whatever else is going on in that, and I'll work that out later. I'm just going to select all the images where you know he or she or he and he and she and she are going to look at it and go, Oh my goodness, I look amazing. And that's just like initially that's all I'm selecting. And then I'll over select by probably 50% more than I'm actually going to deliver. And then as I go through and either the image does strip out a bunch of the Easter stuff and sometimes you end up with a few doubles. But I think also that's probably part of the key of the curation processes. Like don't overthink it too much, just you know, like is this good? Is he or she going to love it? You so know and silly that way.

Speaker 1: 00:27:52 Cool. All right. Just so we haven't totally lost the listener, just explain what narrative is because I was a bit surprised that it's an app that you download to your desktop or laptop. It's not cloud based, is it?

Speaker 4: 00:28:04 Correct. So yes, narrative as an app which you download to your computer. Currently we only have currently only support Mac. There will be a windows version lighter. One of the reasons why it's the app that you download onto your computer is because of what I mentioned earlier, which is that we want the product to work offline and we want it to be incredibly fast. And so that's why you download locally to your computer. When you publish with the Meritus publishing service. If you're on WordPress, there's a plugin which drops that blog post straight into your WordPress website. If you're on Squarespace or any other platform, then it will give you a piece of code. You click that, copies it to clipboard and drops the whole blog posts into your website that way. All right,

Speaker 1: 00:28:50 I'm going to ask you more about the technical details in a second. And let me go back to curation now. So let's say you'd done a curation for the clients, you know, whatever happens with them, happens with them, but how are you curating for your blog posts? Cause that's what's responsible for these thousand leads. That's what I want to hear about.

Speaker 4: 00:29:06 Yeah. I think the like the curation or the storytelling process from a blog post stuff when I'm shooting, obviously because if I don't have the content that I need to create a good blog post, then I'm not gonna be able to create that blog post from the outset. You'll notice that all of our blogs start some form of storytelling, which is some kind of context sitting. So you know, if I flew in for that wedding and I came in on a plane, then it would start with a photo of, you know, maybe outside their plane window and in some wider shots of the context. Like if this was an elopement in the Faroe islands, then like Baylor is a reason why that couple traveled to that place to have their allotment or whatever it wasn't. So let's tell a little bit about the beauty of that.

Speaker 4: 00:29:48 So there's always starts with some wide shots to fit the context of where we are. And then generally from there had some detailed shots of maybe the house they were getting ready at or a few of the other unique details about the day. And then quite often if I'm introduced to Tim a couple, I might start with some wide shots of the couple in the context and they can get a little bit close to itself. They're inside a house. Then maybe it's some wider shots of the, you know, the inside of the house and then the outside of the house and then get a little bit closer. And I genuinely actually shoot in that format as well, which makes things really simple when it comes to building a blog post because the images are already, or I can the order that I need them, I'll start by shooting pretty much every scene.

Speaker 4: 00:30:31 I have a format which is true, some really wide conjectural shots and my 35, the couple in the context of where they are, shoot some sort of portrait shots with probably my 50, um, you know, in portrait. And so this is the couple of business who they are, maybe what they're wearing and, and then shoot some tighter shots. Probably also with the 50 of them engaging in that location. And so it might be, you know, a shot of one of them. What's the M's, the other person's hair or tie the shot of the airing that she's wearing or something like that. And so that, I mean you've probably heard this one before as well, but that's generally the format that you see movies happen as well. So most things you start with like a wide contextual sitting shot, something about the subject and then something about what the subject was doing.

Speaker 4: 00:31:21 And you said that's a really nice way to just tell a story. So this would work in the album is going to work for the clients. It's going to work in a slideshow. It's going to work as a blog. Yeah. Yup, yup. Totally. So what you are asking, how do I do that curation process for a blog post? So yeah, each same. Generally we'll start with some textural contextual setting and introduce you to who it is that's in that scene and then tell you a little about about what they're doing. And that same and as I love giving images, the space to breathe to slow the person down is they're sort of viewing the blog posts. And so you're noticing,

Speaker 5: 00:32:01 right.

Speaker 4: 00:32:01 Um, to crop your images in to create a little bit of space around the images as well. And that's something that's quite unique narrative. You might need to actually see an example to understand what I mean, you know, if there's one photo that you really wanted to stand out then you can and have yes. Spicer around the outside. Got it, got it. So, okay, just some technical staff or technical details, how many images are you looking for for, for a good blog post from say a wedding? I think most of my blogs probably have about a hundred images in them from a wedding. If it was the multi-day shoot then it might be as much as the 150. Wow. Okay. So a lot. Yeah. And this is always like a struggle. Cause I mean I'm a hundred image blog posts that's massive. And I think that average number of images that narrative uses use there is about it. But you know, for someone to actually view that post, I mean it takes a long time to scroll through a post site that, but I think that's sort of what you need to be able to

Speaker 1: 00:33:07 the story of the day, I guess. For sure. And then what about the copy, the companies, the actual images, are you writing that? Are you having your couples and clients writing that copy? Oh, don't talk to me about coffee.

Speaker 4: 00:33:21 I suck at writing. That's probably one of my biggest weaknesses. So generally I'll write some copy and in all like send it to cam or send it to my girlfriend and get her to rewrite it or something like that. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not great at it.

Speaker 1: 00:33:40 Okay. Well then that really then begs the question about the SEO component because isn't copy vital for successful SEO?

Speaker 4: 00:33:49 Yeah. And so I can, you know, copy it. It's vital for SEO but not elegant writing, right? And so I just need to make sure I get the right keywords and each post to ensure that that post is going to rank for what I would like it to rank for. So for example, let's say I want to rank a post for Faroe Island and wedding photographer. Fun thanks to the Google Faroe Island wedding photography. You'll see one of my quite old pre narrative blog posts in there. And so we're number one on Google for that Google search. So after I do a shoot, I'll sit down and go, okay, what do I actually want to rank for and Google and ensure that I structure the posts which has post title, the URL, the body context, the meta description and the titles of the images as well around a like a term which I want this post to rank for.

Speaker 4: 00:34:40 So for that example of the fair on wedding photographer one, I decided the keywords there, Island wedding photographer as well. I was going to bring full for that blog post and a narrative. It actually asks you what are your focus keywords? And the ad will give you feedback on each of those sections, your title, your emitted description, your body content and your image keywords to help you ensure that your building your posts in such a way that you will rank for those keywords and what narrative cannot do and is of the art of choosing what those keywords. And so generally you can just take a quick Google and have a look at what other people are doing for maybe some other location and just try and avoid what they're doing and keep your head into what you think your couples might be Googling. Or if you do have quite good rank in SEO because a lot of blogs have shared your content, then you know, maybe you do want to go our Braylee Comintern.

Speaker 4: 00:35:39 But for example, we actually don't try and rank for Oakland wedding photographer, which is the city that we live in because everybody is trying to rank for that. So I don't really use that as focus keywords for any of our content because it's going to take a lot of work to get to the top of Google for that. And I can just go off to, I can just pick all bunch of other smaller cherries like Oh, for one blog post I might choose the name of the venue or for one of the blog posts that ranks quite well is just waiting. I think one of them was like warehouse weeding. And so you sort of need to think a little bit outside of the box in terms of what might a bride or groom be searching on the lead up to their wedding. You know, from an inspiration to speak of and use those kinds of terms for your focus keywords.

Speaker 4: 00:36:28 And that's a great way to get your content in front of a bride or groom as alien as possible. And that's really the goal. And it doesn't start with the focus keywords for the actual blog posts because every single image inside your blog posts, you have an opportunity to rank for a different keyword as well. So by setting the image title in the hits, you can keyword every single image. And this is where narrative comes back in. That seems to be such a pain point for me because once I exploded the images from Lightroom, ice and rename every single image with whatever I wanted the image to rent for, so maybe it was the name of the florist or the name of the person who made shoes or whatever. And then I'd have to go on and sit there. And as the old tag and my website as well with narrative, whenever you click on an image on the right hand side, you can sit what you'd like that image title or B to B and it will automatically sit the old tag as that, that same term as well.

Speaker 4: 00:37:26 And so you can actually select multiple images and images and see the same high school folder. Okay, so you've actually changed the image name and the alt text for the image inside narrative and it's not affecting correct. Actual original files. Well, when it's published, the name will be renamed in the old takes will be set on your website to what you've seen that too. And narrative. And so what that means is it gives you like literally hundreds of keywords that you can rank for. So if you Google pinnacles allotment, the photographer, the first mentioned that you see is one of my images, and that's actually just one image inside of blog posts that has that keyword set. And so you can structure every single image you take, sit back and go, if a bride or groom was looking for inspiration about, you know, locations or whatever items, whatever that thing might search to leading up to a wedding, that's your opportunity to rank for those times and bride and groom's and people looking for inspiration. They go to Google image search and Google image search looks at, I mean it will still look, so obviously the body content in the title and the URL, but predominantly it's looking at what the image title is and what the politics is to that image.

Speaker 1: 00:38:45 Right. Okay. So I've got that. So you've got your 80 to a hundred images, I'm guessing you do, you import them into narrative or you just, they just automatically see each other? How does that part work?

Speaker 4: 00:38:57 Yeah. So, yeah, there's a few ways that you can do this. But so with narrative, you just select a photo where the images currently belong. So if you've exported all of the images just to, you know, upload and deliver to the client, then you can just select that photo is generally the easiest way to do it. And then if you use ratings like star ratings or colorations and that's also quite a tidy way, if you can apply those ratings before you explode, the narrative will recognize those rankings. And you can filter out, you know, everything has three Sao hires going to be a blog post image. But generally I do the filtering and narrative. And so you've got the panel on the left hand side, we can see all the images that you've imported, um, hit the space bar and it will enlarge them and you can quickly like view the images is a feature narrative, which is like a magic wand and you can just click it and it will just drop the content into the blog post.

Speaker 4: 00:39:50 And I was looking at something on India Earl's Instagram a couple days ago and she was showing up this feature and she said that what she does is she just drops all the images into a pose and does the opposite. She deletes them out. And so the way in which that magic one builds blog posts is that it doesn't just drop all the images and stacked, it creates like a layout for you and then you can drag and drop images around from there or delete them or or so forth. So generally most of the curation that I'm doing is a narrative. And then if I, as I said earlier, I've got two images next to each other and decided, Oh, this one will be better, it was black and white, then I can return to light room and breathe that same image and I just need to override the same image file and it will update the narrative straight away.

Speaker 1: 00:40:34 Right. Okay. So what is the client? You want the client to have a color version and you want narrative to feature a black and white. So then did you duplicate the image and make one black and white and then Marine poured it?

Speaker 4: 00:40:45 Well, like usually I would have exploded the images, uploaded them to my client image delivery. So, and then I'm building the blog post off to Ben. So they just going to get what they can again. And it probably is some cases where you know the client got a color and on the website it has a black and white.

Speaker 1: 00:41:03 Okay, got it. And then so inside narrative, so you're doing all this offline. It's a basically building a full blog post inside the narrative app. You give it a title, you're renaming, you're adding your old tags, you add your copy. So let's say it looks great, I'm guessing you can add links in there as well if you want to link to other blog posts and things like that. So you've done all that. What happens next? Like is there a publish button lock on WordPress?

Speaker 4: 00:41:28 Yeah. Yeah. So once you've done that full process and you know you've got feedback on the SEO and you've got a narrative is disease, red, orange and green lights. You've got, you know, all green lights for your SEO. Are you ready to get onto your website? You hit publish. If you haven't already connected narrative to your website, then it's going to ask you what's your website URL and what are you publishing with. So with the example of would price, you'd select WordPress and still allow WordPress plug in and then it will automatically drop that blog post onto your website. So it will publish it as a draft and there will be a little button and visit page. It would take you directly to that blog post and you can preview it before you sit at line. Some people like to, you know, put a little audio thing at the beginning or maybe put something else at the end of the blog posts and you can still eat it. What's above and below the narrative log posts while you're inside geo. Which site? Log editor.

Speaker 1: 00:42:25 Okay, hang on. Sorry. So what can you do? So if I want to add some audio at the beginning, for example, like a music track, I do that inside my blog editor or I do that inside narrative. You do that inside your blog, the editor. Right. Just to finish it off. So the narrative blog

Speaker 4: 00:42:38 of course, which show if you're on Gutenberg, which has the new WordPress editor, then you'll see the full blog posts there and you can just drop in a block above that.

Speaker 1: 00:42:47 Okay. Yes. Got it. Got it. So this will work with, if a photographer has a Wix website or WordPress or Squarespace, it doesn't matter where their website is hosted. Yeah. As long as you have the ability to drop in a code block, then you can use narrative on your website. Okay. So then let's say for a WordPress user, cause that's what I am and I understand it. I'll drop in the code into my post. And then are you guys hosting the images for me? Cause the images must be, they gotta be somewhere online, don't they? Or are they going on to my website server?

Speaker 4: 00:43:18 Yeah. So just to clarify, for WordPress, you on have to drop the code in because word, that's the one exclusion.

Speaker 1: 00:43:25 There's a plugin, there's a plugin. Right. Okay. So the narrative

Speaker 4: 00:43:29 we'll will just automatically appear in that blog post and all of the images will show up when you know when that blog post renders.

Speaker 1: 00:43:38 Okay, so I'm going to come back to that in one second. But Squarespace similar cause they're the two big ones aren't they? Yes. A square space. I'm sure my Squarespace students have done this

Speaker 4: 00:43:46 where you open up a new blog post to you, you go, you add an insert block and you just add a code block narrative. We'll give you a little piece of code which is essentially the HTML that never is built or that blog post and you can drop them that code block and then we knew when the page loads or a few brief refresh the page, the whole blog posts will be there on your website. And the great thing about that code block is that if you go back to narrative and you make a change, like I want to swap these images around, I want to do this, I want to do that. You just said update in narrative and it will instantly change on your website. You don't need to go back and copy code again and put it back onto a week.

Speaker 1: 00:44:25 All right, that's nice. Is that the same for WordPress? Yeah. Oh that is cool. Okay, so let's say go back to WordPress cause I'm a hundred percent familiar with that. When I upload, I've got the blog place and there are the images from the blog going to be a my resource? Are they on my server? Yes.

Speaker 4: 00:44:40 When a person hits that website, the images, we use a service called cloud place to distribute the images. That means they are held in 180 places around the world and so that and shows that the content on your website will load like ridiculously fast. And I guess it was another reason also why blogs are important from an SEO perspective, you need to make sure that your blog posts offloading really, really quickly. It's a narrative that has a bunch of snotty things to ensure that the right images, only the images, that person is viewing loads. So if you hit a narrative blog question, someone's website, it'll load almost instantly. And then as they scroll, everything that's about to enter the page gets loaded. And before they enter, and Google loves FOS websites, so they just, they're shed from what's called a really fast CDN and they turn to show that that page loads really fast.

Speaker 1: 00:45:34 Right. Okay. So what's happening with image resizing? Who's handling that? Do I have to put everything through JPEG mini first before I upload them into narrative?

Speaker 4: 00:45:45 No scenario takes care of that. Obviously it will resize the images actually it's really smart. So it resizes Olivia images to five different image sizes. And so depending on what device the piston is viewing your website on, like there's no point in delivering 1500 wide Pixel images if fuel viewing on an iPhone like this also going to increase the page load time. And so we'll just deliver the size of the image that that person actually needs heading that page. And you know, like I think a lot of people websites are scary, right? And you're a photographer, you're an artist, you don't really want to know about all the technical details of like, okay, I need to put these size images in person mismatch and so forth. Narrative takes care of all of that for you so you can just drop in your full size images and to the ad and it does all of the resizing and compression for you.

Speaker 1: 00:46:37 Nice. Awesome. Do I need to have a really good internet connection to make all this work?

Speaker 4: 00:46:44 No, no, not at all. I mean like we said, you can go to blog posts offline and then when you hit publish, upload all of the images. If you have like if you were still on dial up, that load time would take a little bit longer but you can just like go and have a coffee and like read top load and it will bam on your website when you bag. But generally it happens like within a minute or two you'll find it. It's already live on your site.

Speaker 1: 00:47:10 Right. Okay. I am not 100% across all the technicalities of SEO, but with the fact that you guys are generating, you know, around a thousand leads per year with your blog post and because of SEO, which I'm assuming are all on narrative, then even though I'm uploading my keywords and my copy and my titles and my old tags into narrative and it's going off to be, um, you know, I can't remember the name of the service you're using, that the code must still show that those keywords are for my website. They belong to me. Is that right? Yep.

Speaker 4: 00:47:44 Yeah. So everything that you've put into a narrative blog posts, Google will read that when it scrapes your website.

Speaker 1: 00:47:49 Okay. That is really cool cause that was my biggest fear or worry was thinking, well hang on, why would I use a third party service and give them the SEO benefits when it's all my work? But that's not the way it works.

Speaker 4: 00:48:00 Yeah. I mean the way the Google scraper works is as it trolls, the engineer lands on each page and it looks at what's on that page and it goes cool. There's all these images here and then it finds all the keywords from those images and then obviously stores it in its whole system. So here on Google image search and you search, I don't know the example that I gave Pinnacle's wedding photographer. Yeah. And you'll find that image of mine, you click on it, it says this images on this page, on this website, you can click through to that page and that's how you people find the content.

Speaker 1: 00:48:32 Okay. Yeah. So I'm on this page now. I Googled pinnacles alignment photographer. Yeah, I can see that the first AREC and even more than the first three, you look like yours. Maybe even more. I hover over it and I can see HTTPS colon slash slash www.chase wild.com/weddings so that's attributed to you and that's sitting inside a narrative blog, is that right? Yep. Yep. That's cool. That is really cool. All right. What other things can you do with this? I love the fact you can edit later and updates on your website. Is there any other reasons why we would want to use narrative or any, I mean is there any reason why you wouldn't use it?

Speaker 4: 00:49:13 Yeah, so when we signed up for our website, we started using Squarespace and I'm, one of the main reasons we did that was because obviously nerves and an existing in the blog post code was a little bit better than WordPress. And then we had always sort of wanted to jump ship and to be honest, we haven't done it yet, but the reason why we didn't it was because our blog held all of our, pretty much 90% of the content of our website and we were like, look, we've moved to another website host and I'm going to have to like rebuild all of those blog posts again. But because you have them on the app, on your computer, if you move to a new website hosts, then you can just re-publish all of those blogs once he jumped ship. And so if you need to jump from once it was to another, then you've got the freedom to go wherever you want and all the time you've invested into, you know, the most timely part of your website isn't lost.

Speaker 4: 00:50:02 I like that. So that's obviously a really nice benefit. Within narrative, you can automatically add interest buttons. You can add Facebook comments section at the bottom of your blog posts really quickly and easily. I actually think that if, I can't verify this, but I actually think that this helps out SEO quite a law as well. If you haven't Facebook's comments section at the bottom of your blog posts and people interacting with that post and commenting it, then that's just another thing which Google goes, okay, this must be an interesting good content because people are interacting with it.

Speaker 1: 00:50:35 Yeah, you've got that social proof. So I'm guessing then that you would send the blog posts obviously to your clients and they'll get their friends to share that URL and then they comment, yeah, share. Cool. Yeah,

Speaker 4: 00:50:44 and then we've done a few things to just visually make blog posts more beautiful as well. So that you can add, we call it animation to your blog posts. And so as a person scrolls, rather than just having the images, you know, slide on what would just be there as a person scrolls, you can sit them so that they fade in or slide on just to make your website feel a little bit more special and stand out from the crowd. And then another really awesome feature which I love, is that I noticed when a lot of people were looking at blog posts on a mobile phone, particularly when you're creating a post, we've got images side by side, we've got images stacked in a certain way and it quite small. I would see people like benching design men and I was like, it's not the best experience as a user visiting that website. So there's also a Lightbox feature where within a blog post you can click on any photo and it will enlarge the image full screen. And so, you know, you can obviously just see what's in that image a little bit easier.

Speaker 1: 00:51:43 I like that. That's cool. Um, one of the things I have noticed with the blog posts that have been published or narrative and the ones that I've seen, they all look pretty beautiful. Is that because you're restricting the typeface options that people can use?

Speaker 4: 00:51:57 No. So when you and narrative, you add a text law, then you don't choose a font, you just choose from the fonts that are already on your website. So you can choose H one H two H three or paragraph. And so whatever you're using on your website, it will automatically assign that same font when it loads on your word.

Speaker 1: 00:52:19 Okay. So if the photographer has a beautiful looking website, it's gonna look beautiful in narrative.

Speaker 4: 00:52:25 When they creating it in the narrative app, it's just going to use like San Francisco, which is the standard native Apple farm. And when you publish it to a website, and if I've chosen paragraph as the font type, then it's going to have the exact same font size and color and font as what's on my website.

Speaker 1: 00:52:45 Okay. So, yeah. So if you have a beautiful website already, it's going to continue to look beautiful if you use now here, got, I kind of look, things that I do with my blog posts is I have image captions. Is that possible? If I want to,

Speaker 4: 00:53:01 no, you could add takes throughout the post if you want. So how are you using image captions? Are you using them on a hollow or on,

Speaker 1: 00:53:09 uh, no, no. So sometimes I'll add like a caption under the image. I do it when I actually upload an image if I'm using WordPress. And so that caption will appear under the image, so that's not, yeah, yeah,

Speaker 4: 00:53:20 yeah, yeah, I understand. So yeah, you can add ticks and within the posts you can in tick box under an image and add that. But generally the people who are building blog posts, like I said at the average number of images in an irritable pluses page and they creating long form image blog posts and you don't going to caption it?

Speaker 1: 00:53:39 No, no, no, no, no, definitely not. So then I could sit, I don't have to have 80 images in a row. I can have, you know, 10 and then have another text block. Then another 15 and a text block. I can do that. Yup. Yup. Okay, but not individual captions. You mentioned there that most of your users are wedding photographers that any portrait photographers using the service. Yeah, we do have,

Speaker 4: 00:53:59 phew and like I said, you really experienced that pain point of swears by some WordPress. When you sat to deal with large numbers of images in your blog posts, if you will just dropping in, you know you did a portrait photo shoot for Gucci and he came away with 20 images or even list, you know, images thin and you wanted to put them all into a portfolio piece on your website. You know you could pretty quickly just drop them into a post and even if you needed to reorder them, it wouldn't be too painful. If you're a photographer and you're putting on 20 or more images than geo blog posts, then you really should be using narrative because that's where you're going to find the benefits. Particularly from a time saving perspective in terms of getting that content onto your website whole lot quicker.

Speaker 1: 00:54:43 For sure. And what about cost? Yep.

Speaker 4: 00:54:47 Free plans that carry on. Essentially how much she use the product. So depending on how many blog posts you publish from six bucks a month, and the most expensive one is $12 a month for all on an annual plan. And we've sent through a little coupon you away. So the listeners of photo Bez can have a little

Speaker 1: 00:55:09 discount. No thank you.

Speaker 4: 00:55:12 That will give them 20% off any of the narrative plans. Oh, fantastic. Okay. And coupon, I believe it's photo biz X. Photo B

Speaker 1: 00:55:20 is X Xes look, so let's make it really easy for the listener. If you want to go and check out now, where's the website? Where's the best place to go?

Speaker 4: 00:55:29 narrative.is, Oh, you'll find outwards then.

Speaker 1: 00:55:31 Okay, so if you only go and check that out. Narrative dot S O if you use the, so you said the coupon code, photo B is X, they can get 20% off the, that's super easy. Super simple. Yeah. So for $6 a month if that's the starting price. So is that for someone who's, you know, only you know, she intended 20 what does it really depend on? The amount of weddings that are uploading or the number of images per blog post,

Speaker 4: 00:55:53 number of blog posts they creating. So you can make those courses because you want, most values is, are on the plan that can see people. I'll post and Hazel, so not unlimited plan as well.

Speaker 1: 00:56:04 Okay. Okay. So for the photographer that's starting out, they're not going to be up for very much at all. And then as your business grows and you build up with the different plan, you grow into it. Yup. Very cool. Hey, what's the dot S O four it's a, it looks nice. It does more than available. Okay. So it's not a certain country, it's not nothing to do with New Zealand or photography or you guys? No, I mean I don't usually say this but [inaudible] actually put some Malia but it just kind of like narrative software or you know it just looks really tight on I'll the first time I saw it I wonder why. So that's cool. Yeah. You can think about the pricing for narrative is that

Speaker 4: 00:56:47 I like, it depends on how much you value your time at ride, but that plan that has 50 blog posts, that's 108 you is stay a year. You know most people say that they pay off the product and first time they use it, cause I mean in my case it was taking me a day to build a blog post and how much do you value your time out on an alley? Right? I mean it's going to vary for anyone but I guess you know, if you were taking two or three hours to go to blog posts and most people say they can do it and tend to tend to 30 minutes of narrative, then you do, you pay it off the first time you use it mean hopefully you're blogging more than once a year.

Speaker 1: 00:57:23 Once you start using narrative and it's like that's one thing that

Speaker 4: 00:57:26 you all the values is well not you know, a lot of our users say to us, they're like, look I just wasn't, you know, finding the time to blog because I found it so painful. But I knew that it was like one of the most important things that I needed to be doing intensive, getting my first content onto my website and generating new leads. And now that I have narrative I'd just like, I'd blog almost everything and there's some really cool stories that I'll use as have Cintas. Like you know, I spoke my first destination reading once I started using narrative or you know, I'm noticing that my blog posts and now showing up on page one of Google for the terms that I'm ranking for and like we love to hear those stories and whenever we see them we like share them with our team. And it's always really exciting to see like people improving their businesses, not just saving time but actually having a bit of photography business cause they use products.

Speaker 1: 00:58:15 That is awesome. Do you actually have a Facebook group where you have members sharing their blog posts so you can know people could see what other people are doing. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 00:58:25 If you just search a narrative community, you'll find that you don't need to be amendment to be in that group, see you out and just jump in and see what other people are creating and yeah, at the moment we're doing, we're giving away a prize every single week in that group to people who share their posts as well. So jump in there and have a look at what people are doing.

Speaker 1: 00:58:45 Oh, that's good. All right. I'll add links obviously to narrative, so also to the Facebook group so listeners can find that. I'll have details about the coupon code as well and make, can I just ask two quick things to finish off? Let's say I've got my client's images in a folder and the client has their images. Now it's now my blog post folder. I've linked that to narrative and my blog post is the live on narrative and can I move that folder now on my computer or does it have to stay, you know where originated you can move it. It's kind of somewhat to

Speaker 4: 00:59:15 like if you move a folder in light room and then you reopen up that catalog, it like it, it's to say, Hey, can you relocate these images so that I can say them. You actually can and narrative. Like if you've moved images off the computer but you want to just like change, you know, delete a photo, we'll swap to close around. You don't need the images still on the community. You can just make that change and then hit update and then that change will happen on the post on your website.

Speaker 1: 00:59:41 Got it. And are these the kinds of questions that you can ask inside the Facebook group? Is that where we'd get help? Yeah. Cool. Yeah, of course. We've also,

Speaker 4: 00:59:49 we've got support team based and Barcelona and here in New Zealand. So we'd get about, we're online about 15 hours a day, so you can just jump on the website and ask a question and our support team can help you as well.

Speaker 1: 01:00:02 Hi James. One last thing I did say there's, I need two more questions. What if, what if I've got a plan with narrative? I've been loving it, but for some reason I just want to step away. It could be temporarily. It could be I'm having a baby, not me personally, and I'm closing down my business for a short time. Maybe I want to move to a different platform, whatever. What happens? Yes,

Speaker 4: 01:00:23 like most of the citizens you're using for like your website, Squarespace or whatever. A narrative is also a subscription service. So if you close the subscription in your narrative blog posts, we'll go offline. Obviously you hear that and you're like, Oh my gosh, like that's really scary. I don't want my post about a plan of revisit so much time. And then we allow you to keep all of your blog posts live for only $18 a year. And so if you, you know, maybe you decide Nick's here. I'm not going to be a wedding photographer and so, but I still want all of that content online. You can just switch to, we call it a parking plan and it just means that all of your posts stay online.

Speaker 1: 01:01:00 Wow. By that $10 a year. Serious.

Speaker 4: 01:01:04 Yeah. I mean it's, it's just it to, I guess, you know, just to keep them alive. Yeah. So yeah, it's obviously, it's really cheap.

Speaker 1: 01:01:11 That is amazing. That's incredible.

Speaker 4: 01:01:14 You also have the ability, if you want to export the whole blog posts as stitched images. So side-by-side images will be one image and you can just upload a blog posts that way. And that's just export JPEG feature. Obviously you miss out on a bunch of the SEO ones and a bunch of the other benefits of, you know, narrow ballplayers, letting fast and resizing images. But that's also an option,

Speaker 1: 01:01:38 right? No one's ever going to do that if it's $10 a year to keep them live by that. That's super generous. I've never heard of anything like that. That's amazing. So there's no way that you'd look past that. I mean, you're an absolute inspiration. I love the solution that you've come up with. I love your work. I love, I love your entrepreneurial mind and what you've created here. It's been a real pleasure. James might thank you so much for spending the time and sharing what you have.

Speaker 4: 01:02:01 Oh, cool. Great. Show Andrew, and let me know if you're ever in Oakland. We'll go grab a coffee.

Speaker 1: 01:02:05 Well, that sounds really all, that sounds very expensive. You know, they can't be more deer than Sydney, surely. I hope not.

Speaker 4: 01:02:13 Yeah, I mean, yeah,

Speaker 1: 01:02:16 I guess you'll see when you, when you come. All right guys, it's been a pleasure. Thanks again. Great. Thanks Andrew. I hope you'll enjoy that interview with James Broadbent as much as I did. James, if you are listening again, might thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you did. I've already said it, but I really do love everything about your business model, your entrepreneurial approach to business and life. You really are an inspiration and again, Mike, thank you so much for coming on and sharing what you did for you, the listener. I do hope you got as much from James as I did. I hope that interview answered a lot of your questions in regards to blogging, what to blog, how to blog. Also the narrative app which I've seen so much about inside the member's Facebook group and don't forget you have available to you a promo code.

Speaker 1: 01:03:08 PhotoBiz X is the promo code to save you 20% of any of the narrative plans and of course if you are a premium member, there is something extra for you. You'll be getting access to a slightly different promo code with an even bigger discount for you. That'll be available to you in the members area and also make that available inside the member's Facebook group and via email and talking about promo codes and links. If you check out the show notes for today's episode, I've got links there to anything and everything that James mentioned, including the promo code. You can find that this week at https://photobizx.com/339e now in those show notes, I've got some examples of James, his beautiful work. It really is fantastic. I've got links to anything and everything that he mentioned and I've also got a comments area at the very bottom of the show notes, so if you do have any followup questions for James, feel free to hit him up there. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, if you are a premium member, I'll be adding James into the members' Facebook group so you'll have easy access to him there as well. So everything's there in the show notes at https://photobizx.com/339.

Speaker 1: 01:04:23 one big shout out for today's episode and this one goes to Columbus, Ohio. Family photographer Brian Kellogg who is based in the United States. He left a five star rating and a lovely review in iTunes for the podcast. He says, I wanted to let you know about the recent success with my new portrait photography business. After listening to this podcast and hiring a photography business coach, I moved into a new studio two months ago. I made a record, $3,000 plus sale and booked five portrait sessions. Today, my portrait sales average was $300 and now the average is $1,470 for this month. I'm doing 15 sessions a month, soon to be 20 to 30 sessions a month with all year round income. The goal for next year is $20,000 per month. He goes on to say a big thanks goes to the photo business X podcast helped me early on in the beginning and I hope the photo business podcast community will all shine with me in 2020 Brian, congratulations. That is fantastic. First of all, on your success. That is amazing. I can't wait to follow up and hear how you go. In fact, I'm going to be in touch with you and we're going to set up a members only episode and interview with you to hear exactly how you've achieved the success that you have. So again, congratulations looking forward to having you on the show in 2020 and thanks again for leaving that rating and review made. It really does help me and the podcast get found in iTunes.

Speaker 3: 01:05:55 You're listening to the number one photography business podcast with Andrew helmets, PhotoBiz x.com

Speaker 1: 01:06:04 just before we close out today's episode, next week when the podcast is due to go live is the day before Christmas Eve and the following week is very, very close to new year's day and I know they are the best times to be thinking about business because if there's ever a time we need to relax and just take a break. It's over that Christmas and new year period. So instead of releasing some heavily business focused episodes over the next two weeks, we're going to do something different. The plan is to get together with members on a live zoom call next Monday morning and I've got details about this in the show notes for premium members and also inside the members Facebook group. We're going to get together on a zoom call. This is a group call and we're going to chat about you and your business and one thing that you're planning to do differently to up your game in 2020 what's one thing that's working for you now in 2019 that you're gonna double down on for next year and hopefully we're going to have a chance to cover an embarrassing moment that you've had while shooting or working that you're happy to share.

Speaker 1: 01:07:08 And it can be anything from the first year of shooting up until now, there's going to be drinks involved. It doesn't need to be alcohol, but it certainly won't be discouraged. So come along to that zoom call if you can. The plan will be to record the audio from that call. I'm going to release them or that as a podcast episode or two, but really I'd love it if you could make it to the live call. So we're going to have a bit of a party to celebrate the end of year. We can hear a little bit about you and your business. Put a face to a name and enjoy each other's company in person for an hour or two. Next Monday. Could be your Sunday, depending on the part of the world that you're living in and listening from. But I've got details about the time zones, the timing, the link to join the zoom call. It's all there. It's all coming to you in today's show notes in the member's Facebook group and also via email. So look out for that one. I really do hope you can make it to the live call next week. Alrighty, that is it for me for this episode, for this week. I hope you have a fantastic week ahead and I'll,

Speaker 3: 01:08:12 if you've enjoyed this episode x.com

Speaker 2: 01:08:17 join the conversation, leave a comment and share your thoughts on the interview with Andrew and today's special guest.