Using Social Media to Grow Your Business

Use Social Media to Grow Your Business, says Carrie Wildes wedding photographer + social media diva. Carrie demonstrated how she uses social media as a marketing tool attract clients and market herself:
- she blogs about the events and people she photographs to generate buzz
- she posts "thank you" emails she receives from clients and vendors
- she pays attention to keywords (keywords depend on your business, of cohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifurse)
- she created a Google business profile (it's free)
- experiment with all social media platforms: Word Press, Twitter, Facebook, Squarespace, etc.
- she uses a blogsite as her website
- she uses hyperlinks and tags to rank her SEO
- she also uses her blogsite as her working photography archive- keywording makes even more sense now :)
- she creates photo galleries on Facebook, tags the subjects in the photo and through a link she redirects those interested to read more about the event and the subjects on her website!

But she agrees, using social media as a marketing tool takes a lot of time. It is well worth it for her and she schedules blogging and Facebooking into her work.
If you plan to follow her path, you should learn to manage your workflow and your time. She religiously blogs and monitors her Google ranking- you should do the same because it is fun and FREE!

I also suggest you follow other photographers to learn how they use social media for branding and creating a buzz!

Thank you Carrie Wildes for sharing the information and spreading your love for photography at the Menaul Gallery. I am looking forward to attending your next workshop on social media on June 6th at the Menaul Gallery in Clearwater! Special thanks to Jerri and Scott Menaul for hosting these workshops.

Brooker Creek Preserve

Shooting video was not an easy task as I have an inexpensive, tape based camera. I edited the video project using Final Cut Express and I managed to convert the file into a movie file that works on Youtube. Crunching the project THE RIGHT WAY is so important when you post your images on YouTube. If you don't keep the right parameters, your video would loose quality. This tutorial helped me crunch the video file to the right size!!!!

Bandshoot- Fires of Gomorrah is a finalist at the CL photo contest!!!!

I took some photos of the metal band, Fires of Gomorrah in Tampa. Fires of Gomorrah is the fifth on the Tampa metal charts on Reverbnation!!!!Fires of Gomorrah have performed in local bars, one including the Pegasus Lounge in Tampa. The band will play at more events organized by Market by the 7th in Ybor.

I started to shoot Rachel (Rocky) Reyes because she looked like "the tough girl." I liked her expression, tattoos and her easy going style. Rachel was a bassist at Fires of Gomorrah and is currently the band's booking agent. Rocky is also the the bass player in a local all girls metal band- In Violent Sleep.
Thank you @Rocky and @Fires of Gomorrah for the amazing photoshoot and I hope we can do more bandshoots soon!!!! This band is a separate story and I hope a music blogger pays close attention to them.
Listen to their songs on Youtube.


My photo "Fires Of Gomorrah" was selected as one of the top ten in
the Creative Loafing Photo Contest (from 500 entries)!!!! The photo was part of the Sensory Overload event and exhibition on March 26 at the Glazer's Children Museum. The framed print (along with the 10 finalist photos and the readers' selected photo) will be exhibited again at the Florida Museum of
Photographic Arts (FMOPA)-Show Us Your Neighborhood from September 8-November 6.
I posted some of my bandshots on Flickr too.