Unveiling SmugMug Pro
Many thanks to so many wonderful pros who invited us to their homes and studios this past year. Never in my career have I seen so much generosity of time while you patiently explained the nuances of your workflows.
Although we have tens of thousands of pros, many who have been with us for years, this year was different. Groups of passionate photographers approached us to say, “You’re off to a good start but it’s not enough. To become great, you need packages. Folders & favorites. Event marketing. Smart galleries. User group meetings. Coupons. Powerful SEO. A great pro lab. Better branding. Deeper customization. And more.”
So we doubled our engineering team, rolled out SmugMug User Groups, and shipped a dozen new features. You can track the details on our release notes blog.
Packages, folders & favorites, and event marketing are imminent. With luck they’ll be live for WPPI next week, but if not, come by booth #1518 for demos (and for an invite to our party Tuesday night).
Soon after they’re live, we’ll display the new SmugMug Pro logo on our site for pages you don’t brand as your own.
Now that we have so much feature momentum, you can expect some more big surprises in the not-too-distant future.
How To Sell Cards
With our latest release, you can now make a card for your customer and price it at your pro pricing :D I’ve had some questions from pros on how best to deal with selling cards, so here goes.
First, you need a good display gallery of the cards. Of course, we have cards.smugmug.com, but that won’t have your branding. Great in a pinch, but here’s another way, I’ve set up galleries on my site to show off our 5×7 cards and our 4×8 cards.
How to do this? It takes only a couple minutes, and I’ve made step-by-step instructions here on Dgrin.
Next, let your clients choose their holiday photo and then pick a card template, and some text to put on the card. You then make the card, when logged in, go to the photo in the client gallery and choose “Buy” then “create a card” – or, again, logged in, visit cards.smugmug.com and find the card you want, and click the ‘make this card’ link under the card, it will bring you right to the card maker :) Make the card, and on the ‘Create’ tab in the card maker, choose ‘just window shopping’ – the card will then be placed into your “My SmugMug Creations” gallery when finished. Go to that gallery, and use the tools menu to choose ‘Move to Gallery’ – and place it in a new gallery just for your client – e.g., ‘The Smith Family Holiday Card’.
Last step – you’ll want to price this card at your pro pricing – so, choose tools, set prices, and first apply $0 to all products, then type in your prices for the cards. Click save and voila, your done!
Introducting … PhotoFusion!
Pros: rev your engines and step your business up to the next level! Photo Fusion Workshops are circling the country to a city near you. Led by star photo- and videographers Robert Evans and Curt Apanovich, their 35 years of combined experience in the biz will reinvent the way you shoot, prep, and market your work. They’ll teach you how to use cutting-edge digital technology to merge video with still images and raise the creative bar in any field.
Check out the itinerary and book your tickets here.
Please leave room for customer cropping
We walk in your shoes, guys. Steve Mills is one of your Support Heroes, and also a very busy event photographer. Steve knows that buyers want any number of different sizes, and since SmugMug prints so many, he lets his customer choose in the cart. When he shoots, he leaves room for cropping!
With SmugMug’s cropping tool and proof delay, Steve’s customers get exactly what they want.
5×7 Folded Cards are Here!
We’re really excited about these, we’ve got dozens and dozens of designs, and more being added all the time. Holidays, of course, but don’t forget baby announcements, thank yous, invitations, and more. We’ll be adding Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthday cards, too.
Pros, we don’t have ‘em available for ordering by your customers at your pro prices yet, sorry. Here’s how I sell ‘em to my clients. More info, and help.
New Products Added!
You’ve been asking for metallic prints, and today we added ‘em, 11 different sizes :D
Poke around the catalog, you’ll see that we also added new 3:2 ratio and also square ratio, canvas sizes! And a few cool gift items, as well. Don’t forget, you’ll need to set prices for all of these items.
HEADS UP: Custom Host Name Changes Coming
If you use your own custom domain (like mine at Moon River Photography) on your SmugMug site, you’ll want to check out this thread on Dgrin for some very important changes that are happening now.
We’ll also be announcing this via release notes, and QuickNews.
SmugMug Sponsors Photo Contests
SmugMug is proud to be sponsoring two photo contests that offer up some nice booty, and also some serious recognition to the winners!
The Pop Photo Contest: Show us your Skills – Enter Now! Here is your chance to gain recognition in The 15th Annual Popular Photography Photo Contest and have the opportunity to have your work shown in the January 2009 issue of Popular Photography, the largest photo magazine in the world, as well as on PopPhoto.com.
The American Photo Contest: Don’t Miss your chance to enter The American PHOTO Annual images of the Year Event! This International Competition has become the definitive showcase of the very best in contemporary photography.
Repeat after me: "Feeds are our friends!"
We get the question a lot at the the help desk: “How do I hide the feeds button?” Don’t do it! If you are a pro, use the feeds to your advantage. Google loves the feeds, for example. I just searched for “Sierras Workshop” and came up with this as the #1 search result on Google. Click the link, and the search result on Google will take you right to a page that promotes a workshop I’m doing. Why would you ever throw away such findability? :D
Now many of you are gonna be worried about feeds and “right click protection” – I say, watermark your images, block the largest display sizes if you need to but get your name out there!
Feeds are also a great way for your customers, fans, and family to keep up on your work.
C’mon now, everyone: “Feeds are our friends!” :D As always, I’d love to hear from you if you have questions about this. Holler for me at our help desk and I or our team of Support Heroes will be there for you!
Right Click Protection and Image Security
We get this question at our help desk all the time: “HELP!!!! I thought I was protected, but so-and-so was able to get a copy of my photo from SmugMug! What Happened?????”
Right click protection is a mild deterrent, and it’s one part of your overall image security on SmugMug. It should not be the only security that you use. It can be foiled by modern browsers. Another thing to be aware of, is that when you are sending an image over the web to a browser, that image is in the viewer’s computer, in the browser’s temporary internet files. Savvy folks can find this. Also, SmugMug’s right click protection won’t carry through to images displayed in forums, emails or other websites, or to the thumbnails of your images on SmugMug.
What can you do? Use all the image protection available. Right click protect, add a watermark, and block the largest display copies. And add disabling of external links (they won’t be able to link to their myspace).
As always, holler to our Support Heroes if you have any questions at all.
