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ForegroundWeb Newsletter
YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF PHOTO WEBSITE ADVICE & INSPIRATION.
IN TODAY’S EMAIL:
⚡️ 3 Quick tips: leftover admin logins, the enquiry reply nobody proofreads, a homepage dragged back to 1999
🧠 Main Topic: Your site can decay for a year before anything looks broken
📷 Website Spotlight: Dacia Vu Photography
🔍 SEO: Nobody scrolls down to you, they search again
🌐 From the Trenches: Pixieset adds an email list, Google's storefront-photo verification, PhotoBizX on the $17 lead
🎙️ I'm on the Marketing Mentor podcast
Ilise Benun had me on episode 560, out this week, to talk about how I get myself onto podcasts. Then she read the actual pitch email I'd sent her out loud and took it apart on air.
She didn't say yes because of that pitch, though. She said yes because someone had told her I'm generous when I'm on a show. The email got me in front of her, the reputation did the rest.
I've done around 15 of these now and not one has produced a booking I could trace the week after. People do turn up 3 years later saying they heard me somewhere, and photographers undervalue that badly, mostly because there's nothing to measure on the Monday.
QUICK TIPS
1. 🔑 Who still has an admin login on your website?
Count the administrator accounts on your website right now.
I do routine checks on sites I built years ago, and one came back dirty last week. Someone had got in and was publishing gambling spam as blog posts. Over 2,000 of them.
None of it showed on the homepage, which is why the owner never spotted it. The spam posts weren't in the menu or linked from anywhere, they just sat at their own URLs with the site name in every title, and Google was picking them up through the sitemap.
But the spam was only the symptom, the real find was the user list.
That site had a whole pile of administrator accounts on it, none of them the owner's, none of them mine. Three were leftovers from a support company that had done some work years earlier. One of the rest is almost certainly how the door opened in the first place.
An old admin login doesn't expire when the working relationship does. It sits there with a password that may well have leaked somewhere else by now 🤷.
So go and look (in WordPress it's under Users). Anyone on that list you don't recognise, or stopped working with, gets deleted, then change your own password while you're in there.
Who's still holding an admin login on YOUR site?
2. 📧 Nobody proofreads the email that answers every enquiry
The email that does most of your selling is the one you never read.
On an audit for a wedding photographer I asked for his actual enquiry replies, both versions, the short one and the long one. Neither had been read properly in a long time.
The short one still had a line saying here's a quick look at a few links for you, with nothing under it. The links had gone at some point, the sentence hadn't. The long one pasted the same testimonials paragraph in twice, one after the other.
Neither is fatal. But that email is the first thing a couple gets from you after they've decided they like your work, and they're reading it to work out whether you're organised enough to be trusted with the day. A dangling sentence and a paragraph sent twice both answer that question for you.
It happens because the reply is a template that gets edited a bit at a time over the years. Nobody proofreads their own boilerplate. You skim the top of it and hit send.
So open it today and read the whole thing out loud, as if you were the couple getting it.
When did you last read your own enquiry reply, end to end?
