Pros of Being Published Online – Wedding and Event Industry Friendors

Heya, Friendors!

Every time we begin planning an Inspiration Collaboration, we talk about whether we are going to submit it for Print or to a Blog, and we are huge fans of print (oh you fancy huh?) but want to share a little bit of our thoughts on being published on blogs, because we hear it being knocked a lot and we’re not sure the whole industry has realized how dang cool the internet is yet. You might just switch up your gears after we share all it’s pros.

It’s 2016. Print, while not dead, is not the only media you need to be accredited in. Your brand needs to have an internet presence. Gotta look cool.

Since it’s online, it’s free for viewers. They don’t have to physically purchase a magazine which means more potential viewers due to easier access.

You can actually see the reach. All of the professionals involved are sharing it – you notice a bunch of new followers on Instagram, the blog (where the HUGE following is) shares it on their facebook, instagram, twitter. You can see the number of shares, the number of likes, and more, as it’s happening. The internet is where things go viral, my friends.

SEO. When people link to your site from their site, it gives Google a little flag that you’re a reputable website that people trust which means you move up in the search results pages.

Clickable link to your site. The blogs actually put clickable links in their features to your website, which not only helps SEO like we mentioned above, but also makes engaged leads click through to your site and possibly on over to your contact form. Can they click to you through a magazine? Didn’t think so.

More permanent. A new magazine issue comes out and everyone throws away the old one, but the internet won’t throw you away.

Brides are collecting inspiration and info from blogs. When you are on their favorite blog, they trust you. Six Hearts Photography once had a bride book them purely because she saw them on her two favorite blogs, Rock N Roll Bride and Offbeat Bride, within the same week. The power of the internet.

There are tons and tons more reasons we love blogs and believe they are beneficial – maybe we’ll share some more with you later. Want to share why you love getting published online? Email us at schellie@faroutgalaxy.com to share your thoughts and ideas with us.

4 Ways to Collaborate With Other Professionals – Wedding + Events Industry – Friendors Consultancy

Hey there, Friendors!

We’re firm believers in collaborating with other industry professionals even if it’s not at paying gig – so we’ve got a few ways for ya to do it and some info on how these collaborating opportunities can be beneficial.

Inspiration Collaborations. Let’s face it, these things are basically art projects we do with our professional friends – how does that not sound fun? You get creative freedom and friendship. You want a boho bride but have never gotten one? You want to start booking more city weddings? You get what you show on your website and social sites. Reach out to us to do Boho or City Inspiration Collaboration – not only will you get content to begin to attract the types of clients you want, but you also get an amazing networking opportunity AND you get published. If that isn’t one of the coolest things on the planet, we don’t know what is. Click here to Register to be a Friendor for an opportunity at an Inspiration Collaboration with us.
Guest Blog Posts. Regular old websites aren’t cutting it anymore – we’ve all got to be blogging and if we’ve gotta do it, why not do it together? If you’re a Catering company, do a guest post on all your favorite Fine China companies. If you’re any company, ask a Wedding Planner to share her ideal schedule on your blog. Not only will it be helpful to your clients and potential clients, the Friendor you feature will share it, which grows your brand – and the information might be so helpful that it just goes viral. Wouldn’t that be nuts? They may even ask to do a guest blog on you in return – a super fun way to build your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – something we ALLLLL need to do ALLLL the time. Email us at Schellie@FarOutGalaxy.com to get some guest blogging opportunities.
Networking Events. Events just for industry professionals are one of the greatest ways to meet new people. Go alone to your first one and meet everyone you can. Ask them what brings them out, talk about things other than work, and you may find someone you genuinely bond with that you could create a beautiful referral network with. Ask them to go to a future networking event with you and then actually go to the next together – but don’t get too clique-y with it; you want to make sure you stay open to new opportunities as well. Stay caught up on our blog cause we announce networking events occasionally.
Instagram Giveaways. Instagram Giveaways are good because they grow your social base – which makes you look more successful to your peers and may even drive more traffic to your website. You can get around 10 professional accounts involved, get a giveaway from a company for free, and promote the hell out of each other with it. You may find your company account growing by the hundreds overnight – all the people trying to get that Kylie Cosmetics lip gloss (or whatever the heck she’s got going on) or Starbucks giftcards, or whatever ya like. Tip: Don’t give away any of your services for free. Ever. Click here to Register for a chance to be in on our future Instagram Giveaways.

That’s all we’ve got for now – see ya on a future Monday.

xoxo,

Friendors Consultancy

Keeping Up With The Future Of Social Media – Friendors Consultancy

We here at Friendors are social people – online and IRL, and we have one simple task and question for you that will make you think about the future of social media and how your company is keeping up.

When you walk around at weddings and events, we want you to look at what gusts are doing on their phones during the reception. What do you see on their screens?

It used to be Instagram, where they photographed their photo booth photo strips and uploaded them, photographed the first dance, the cake cutting, and more, but we guarantee if you walk around and peek over everyone’s shoulders (yes, seriously), mostly everyone at that event is Snapchatting it instead of Instagramming now.

We’ve been watching the change happen for weeks, even the past few months now. That’s not to say that Instagram is null and void, just that popular social media platforms are expanding and so should we.

If you’re not on Snapchat, we say now is the time to join.

If the guests are on Snapchat, why aren’t you?

Here’s our tip to ya: don’t be old. Your clients stay the same age – act like you do too and keep up with social sites. 😉

Our Snapchat usernames:

@xofriendors

@faroutgalaxy

Our Instagram handles:

@friendors

@faroutgalaxy

xoxo,

Friendors

4 Reasons You Shouldn’t Book That Client You Have a Bad Feeling About – Friendor

Sometimes you go to a meeting with a potential client, a lead, and things just click. You’re flowing off each others vibes, you laugh on the same ques, and share the same vision for the big day. And their outfit is great.

Sometimes, although we may not like to admit it, we go to a meeting with a lead that is the opposite – conversation lacks, you think their burlap idea is so 2011, they ask if you can do ‘this’ and then proceed to show you someone else’s work (that’s totally not your style!) but, for some reason, they still book you. Why? Because you let them. Because they invested time with you and you didn’t refer them to someone else like maybe you should have.

We’re here to share with you 4 Reasons why, in an industry that gives us the freedom to do so, you should follow your gut when it comes to choosing your own clients, and how to let go of the idea that all incoming leads are potential clients.

1. Referring out may get you referrals in

If you do contemporary creative photography but your lead is only showing you traditional work as inspiration, you may not be the best match. Sure, you can do traditional work (no problem) but is that the type of work you want to advertise? Is it something you’re not bored doing? Won’t you feel like a sell out? Will your client be happy? Isn’t it best to send Suzy and Bobby down to the local traditional studio? (you know, since you can recognize the photos they’re showing you from that studio anyways?) Who knows, that studio just may send over their modern clients to you that they realize aren’t a fit for them.

2. Don’t tarnish your brand. You get what you show.

If you photograph in a style that’s a little too edgy for someone (while perfect for others), but you give in to a sale (hey, you needed the money!) and tone it down and shoot a full wedding traditionally, sure, you got their money – along with a bunch of photos you can’t use for anything and a really boring experience. Your brand means something and has it’s own style and there are clients out there who will love you for what you do; don’t tarnish your style.

You want to constantly be creating work that you can use for marketing purposes so you can get more work you like. If you keep doing rustic style weddings when you really want to industrial city weddings, you’ve got to make a change. How? You get what you show. Present your #InspirationCollaboration concept to us and we just may help ya. (seriously, this changed our professionals game when it comes to targeting the right client)

3. Your Unhappiness

If you book someone who may not be the best fit, you’re bound to be miserable the entire process, doing both you and the client a disservice. If you get anxiety when their name pops up in your email, sign a little and roll your eyes as you say “what now?” (we’ve all experienced this with a client before), you can usually look back and realize all the warning signs of the bad match. Listen to those signs in the future.

4. Unhappy Clients = Bad Reviews

You’ve booked someone who you had a gut feeling you shouldn’t have and now not only are you stuck with them for a years time (depending on how far in advance they book you) but you’re most likely stuck with them unhappy. For like, ever. That client isn’t unhappy with you just for the time you work with them; they’re unhappy with you for the rest of their lives because their wedding is a once in a life time experience and they didn’t like you. You may have done a perfect job, a job someone else would have given you a five star review for, but that doesn’t matter. A bad match is a bad match. Bad matches lead to unhappy parties. What do you get from unhappy clients? Unhappy reviews.

A potential client sent out the door to a different professional may seem like a failure, a sale lost, but referring a bad match to someone who may be a good match for them is the only ethical way to run your business. Every client that you get should be the perfect client for you and you the perfect professional for them – exactly what they need. How do you know if a client is a bad match? Your gut, we say.

An App EVERYONE Should Have That Tells You Everything You Need to Know About The Sun – Friendors Consultancy

Hello, Friendors! Hope you’re having a swell Monday. We sure are! We’re in Las Vegas for WPPI, Wedding and Portrait Photographers International, and we’re loving every bit of each of the classes.

Let’s get to it. We have an app on our phones that we think you should have too – especially Wedding Planners, Coordinators, and Photographers.

Clients often ask what time they should have their ceremony in order to get the most daylight, what time to do their first dance as the sun is setting, etc, and we know you can totally just look things up on the internet but we have a quicker and easy way to tell them exactly what they wanna know – down to the very minute. 😉

This app is called Sunrise Sunset Lite and is available in the Apple Store. You select a specific date and it tells you the sunrise time, sunset time, the beginning of civil twilight, the end of civil twilight, and more. Your clients will thank you when you can answer their sunlight questions within seconds.

P.S. Your future with this app is so bright you should probably put some shades on. Protect those pretty eyeballs.

Saving Time + Money as an Entrepreneur – Productivity Tips – Friendors Consultancy

Top of the morning to ya, friendors! We’ve been thinking a lot about saving time and money as an Entrepreneur and wanted to share just a few productivity tips that we do with you.

One of the best tips we ever heard uttered was from a speaker at WPPI, and forgive us because we can’t remember who it was, but they said the first thing for you to do to save time and money was to automate your life and outsource tasks that you don’t enjoy or that don’t directly make you money. There were two specific examples given.

We were doing both of these things before we heard this speaker, feeling a little guilty over it and mainly blaming it on our laziness and desire to make life easy, but after hearing it said by someone on stage, realized that these things are actually really beneficial to our company and wanted to preach you our ways.

Example: Instead of buying your toilet paper and paper towels at the grocery store, set up Amazon’s Subscription Service to automatically deliver these items to you on a schedule – you won’t have to waste your valuable time shopping for this anymore and it’s the same price. It just arrives in a big ol’ box on your front doorstep. Put everything you can on this Subscribe and Save program. We get our Brushing Rinse, TP, feminine products, and more delivered straight to our home. This will save you 10 – 20 minutes in the store, the gas money, and many last minute trips when you run out of toilet paper. Time is money.

Example: Instead of cleaning your own home, find a service or individual to come in once a week and get it spick and span. While they are cleaning, you can be doing something beneficial for your company, that you actually enjoy, that makes you many times more than you’re paying for the cleaning. We felt really guilty about doing this for a long time (stereotypes that you’re a spoiled diva if you don’t clean your own home), but the truth is that not cleaning your own home (of course still pick up after yourself) will transform your life in magical ways and no guilt should be felt, especially when it frees you up to benefit your business and well being.

Since we see the benefit of these things, we searched the internet and found some articles about personal productivity and saving money and are sharing them with you below.

Hope you can incorporate some of these productivity and money saving tips into your life and business!

Have any tips you want to share with us? Email us at schellie@faroutgalaxy.com 😉

xoxo

YOU CAN NOW EASILY SWITCH BETWEEN ACCOUNTS ON INSTAGRAM

THE WORLD JUST GOT SO MUCH BETTER.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL THIS IS THE REAL DEAL.

YOU CAN NOW EASILY SWITCH BETWEEN ACCOUNTS ON INSTAGRAM – A DREAM COME TRUE.

FORGIVE US FOR OUR ALL CAPS AND LACK OF PUNCTUATION WE ARE JUST SO DARN EXCITED.

NO MORE LOGGING IN AND OUT. UP TO FIVE ACCOUNTS.

CLICK HERE TO LEARN HOW TO ADD AND SWITCH BETWEEN INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS

*make sure you have the correct phone version and updated instagram / some people are saying it’s not working for them so rumors are there may be a roll out, but it’s working for us

FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM @FRIENDORS

How to Know if They Read Your Email – Friendors Consultancy

So, we were putting together an email for someone we admire the other day and were struggling with how to reach out to them. We thought, if we message them on Facebook or Instagram, we’ll be able to see when they read our message vs emailing where we don’t know if it hit their spam box, got lost, or if they read it but are just entirely too busy and cool to respond.

The struggle of being a millennial. Ugh. This desire to know is valid, and since emailing is much more professional, we wondered if there was something out there that tracked when emails you sent were read – to clients, employees and contractors of your team, people you admire, etc – just like social sites do.

Wouldn’t that be SO nice? You’d be able to see when your team members read your email and how long it took them to reply after reading, rest easily knowing that your email to that business you really admire was received and not lost, and so much more. So, we searched. Our search wasn’t long. It was quite short, actually. But, then again, this download is just for Gmail.

We are now officially users and fans of MailTrack, a downloadable in the Google Chrome store. It’s free for the basic package and prices are around 4.95 if you wanna start adding fancy features (which we don’t find necessary).

We thought you should know about this, gmail users.

Anyways, download this shizz. You’ll like it.

Click here to download MailTrack.

Sure, this may not be an issue you want to stress about, may even be something that would give you anxiety to know, but it works for us. 😉

How to Invite ALL Your Friends to Like Your Facebook Page AT ONCE – Friendors Consultancy

Hi there, Friendors!

We all know how important social media has become in the buying process, how important it is to be visible on the internet, and dare I say, well liked. We all know we should invite our Facebook friends, and everyone else for that matter, to like our Facebook business page, so why haven’t we? We can go ahead and answer that for you now – it’s so dang time consuming, that’s why. No one wants to sit at their computer and hit an individual button that says “invite” next to every.single.one of their 2,485 friends.

But what if you could hit just a few buttons and invite ALL of your friends list AT ONCE to like your page? Would you do it? How many likes do you think you would accrue?

We tested this, a code a Friendor introduced us to a while ago, with Far Out Galaxy on their Facebook Page and the results were seriously amaze balls. At 2:00pm, we followed the procedure below, and by 5:00 pm we had 75+ new page likes. Now, 75+ is no big number, but it seems like friends are still steadily liking the page as they login and see the notification, and 75+ likes is quite a feat for a 3 hour time period on something that took us less than one minute to do. Turns out that friends come out when you invite them. 😉 Thanks, Friends!

Now follow the instructions below to get your friends to come out and like your page.

Do this in Google Chrome on a Windows Computer.
Since you’re inviting your friends, you’ll need to be logged into your personal account. Go to your personal timeline and you will see the “Your Pages” tab in the top right side bar – click on your page. It will then take you to your business page. Once you are on your page, a statistics box will be directly beneath your profile photo, with things like your response time, how many people you reached this week, etc. Click on “Invite friends to like This Page”.
A box will pop up with all of your friends. Scroll ALLLLL the way to the bottom of the pop up until you can’t scroll anymore because it won’t populate more friends.
Open the Java Script Console, a feature intended for developers, by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + J
In the Console, Copy and Paste the code below EXACTLY as it is, beginning with j and ending with }, then press Enter and wait. The pop up will close after it has invited all of your friends.

javascript:var inputs = document.getElementsByClassName(‘uiButton _1sm’); for(var i=0; i<inputs.length;i++) { inputs[i].click(); }

WALLAH. Now you can sit back and enjoy the notifications of your friends that actually like you liking your page. Some people might say this is spamming – we simply say it’s a work around the silly system. 😉

Talk to ya next Monday!

xoxo,

Friendors Consultancy

2015 Best Nine – Friendors Consultancy

We’re sure you’ve seen them circulating the internet, a collage of everyone’s most liked photos on Instagram, but do you know how to get your own? We’ve had a few people ask us so we figured we just post the link on our blog!

The image below is our 9 most liked; click it to go to our Instagram. Then, click the link below the image to generate your Best Nine Instagram images from 2015.

Click here to generate a collage of your 9 most liked Instagram images of 2015.