Do you place enough importance on your keywords? If you do your own key wording do you spend enough time on the task? If your agency handles it do you check on them? I recently had an image go up on Getty’s site; An image of an impossible golfing green. In the picture is a small grassy area perched atop a steep rock formation on the jagged California coastline. It is hard to spot in the image at a thumbnail size, but as with any golfing green, a flag hangs from the pole that protrudes up from the hole.

Searching for golf, Chakras, and the Internet

If you do a search for golf on Getty’s site, you won’t find the image. Not yet, anyway, because that keyword was omitted. This is hardly the first time an important keyword has been omitted by an agency, and I am certainly not the only one it happens to. Another example of an egregious keyword omission happened with an image of Chakras. I even submitted the file with the name of jl_Chakra_001. But it took me weeks to get them to finally add that keyword! In yet another example, an image I created to symbolize communication and the Internet does not include either of those keywords, and Getty maintains that neither keyword is appropriate for the image. Oh well, I guess you can’t win every battle.

Mistakes are going to happen

If you made the most perfect stock photo ever, and it nobody ever saw it because of missing or inappropriate keywords, it would not sell as well as a mediocre image that was will key worded. In a sense, the keywords are more important than the image. People perform key wording; mistakes are going to happen. But its extremely important for all of us photographers to make sure that our keywords are done as well as possible whether we do them ourselves, or whether it is a matter of checking on the key wording of our agencies.

My strategy, the best and most appropriate keywords

As I write this I have just finished spending hours key wording the images on my own website. I still have hundreds to go, too. My strategy is not to load as many key words as possible with any given image, but rather to do as clear and concise a job as possible. I want people who search my site to find just what they are looking for and have as good an experience as possible. I don’t want them to have to wade through a lot of images that are not what they are looking for. Further, we have all heard it said that it isn’t nice to fool Mother Nature…and it isn’t nice to try and fool Google either! So when you do your key wording, think about the person who might be looking to find that image, and help them find it by providing the best and most appropriate key words you can.

Now and the future

I firmly believe that one of the best things you or any of us can do to help our stock photography businesses, both now and for the future, is to make sure the images are thoroughly and properly key worded. It might even be more important than the making of the images themselves.

Firstly, what are promotional mugs? Promotional mugs are a form of marketing and advertising. They can be used to convey a brand and get your enterprise recognized throughout the country or even the world. Mugs are available in a wide variety of styles, colours, shapes, and materials. You can opt for a conventional ceramic mug, a stylish earthenware coffee mug, mugs made from bone china, metallic mugs, vacuum mugs, environmentally friendly plastic mugs and more. To cut a long story short, there is a promotional mug for everyone, and you should find out which is for you and your company. For example, an elderly member of the work force in a CEO position would be slightly more interested in a traditional and conventional mug made of bone china or even perhaps a ceramic mug. A trendy plastic mug will never catch their attention or come up to their liking. In contrast, when targeting the younger work force, designer promotional mugs will be much more effective than their conventional counterparts will.

To find the promotional mug style that is suitable for each member of the work force shall now be made easier for you, your promotional marketing campaign can get off to a flying start by taking into account the following steps. You don’t want to be wasting your marketing budget on mugs that your work force and customers will throw in the bin or hide away in a cupboard; you need to make sure the money is being spent on mugs that will be used time and time again.

What is the budget you have to spend on your promotional mug marketing campaign? Determining this will help you personalized promotional mug supplier find you the best mug deal.

Then you’ll need to work out who your target market is, who is your audience? You need to be considering age, sex, industry, position and other such demographic issues. Once you have identified your target groups you need to choose a mug style and design that will cater to their tastes including factors such as size, type, colour…

Here comes the most important part…branding! It is obvious that you will be branding you mugs, because otherwise there isn’t much point in spending money on this whole process! Again in this step you will have a number of choices: You can select the mug’s colour based on your company’s colours, you could add the logo of your company, you could even add a personalized message thanking customers, staff etc for their support or if you have a motto or a statement you would like to put across you might even like to consider adding that. Another quite interesting idea is adding a photo or image to your mug creating photo mugs, which can be slightly more alluring than your standard logo mug. Obviously, you don’t want the branding on the mug to be too overpowering, because we’re fairly sure your clients and staff don’t want to be feeling like they are walking advertisements for your company. Instead, how about trying to make your clients feel proud of having one of your mugs in their hands? There are a number of printing methods for you to get the right promotional mug for you business… You can choose direct screen-printing, silkscreen printing, laser etching, digital printing and sublimation for example.

If you’re still having trouble finding the right promotional tool for you, or if you’re not sure if mugs are the best promotional item for you there are always marketing executives available, take a look at www.yell.com for your nearest one. They will help to point you in the right direction by considering your needs and budget, they should be able to lay out a plan for your campaign and even suggest which market segment to design your personalized promotional mugs to. Enlisting the aid of a marketing expert might reduce the amount you spend in the long term on your advertising as consultation eliminates any element of risk that might appear when you plan your promotional activity yourself.

www.MugGifts4U.co.uk is one shop you can get promotional mugs from online, other shops include; http://www.t-shirts-mugs-n-more.co.uk.

Many have heard of the story of the Harvard graduating class. They asked who had goals and how many of them had written them down. Only 3% had written them down and when they checked in on those 3% twenty years later, they were earning ten times as much as the other grads combined. First of all, the study didn’t really exist other than in goal setting seminars and books, but in reality, since that story has been told for decades, other studies have been done that do show astonishing results.

So lets look at the reality of it all. If we do write down our goals or put pictures of things we desire or a lifestyle we hope to achieve one day on our refrigerator, it is no doubt going to keep us focused on them. We can go so far as to put ourselves in the goal by taking pictures of ourselves in that car we want or in front of the home we desire. We can have fun with it and put ourselves in any picture we want these days with computer software.

When we see ourselves in the picture often enough, it seems normal. Just like any other photo in our album. When you get nostalgic and look through your old photo albums, don’t you start to relive the moments to the point where you actually feel younger or can remember how your were feeling at the time the photo was taken? 

So if seeing something often enough, helps our mind to believe that it is possible, why don’t we all have dream boards around our homes and goal sheets in our pockets. I’ve personally seen such dream boards in the homes of millionaire associates of mine and seen folded up index cards in their wallets that have thirty or sixty day personal goals for health, business and other things they want. Each time they look in their wallet, they see the card. Sometimes they take it out, unfold it and read what it says usually to discover that they can cross something off as accomplished.

In order to achieve our goals we need to see them, either in writing or in picture form. When we see them often enough, we believe and it is only a matter of time till we accomplish them. It never fails to amaze me the stories I’ve heard from hundreds of people over the years and witnessed in my own life.

If you have a personal story, share it as a comment.