Here goes the Schedule, people. Keep up.

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20.

7pm Go Bee Soiree Party with Sara France and sponsored by Pictage

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 21

12pm Pictage User Group Think Tank meeting… Check out their new blog The Photo Life and see what’s happening at a PUG near you!

For much of the day, we’ll be on the tradeshow floor, gathering prizes for our Tuesday platform talk (see below!). If you find us and ask about Olive, you might just win a prize. Try it. Mention Olive AND Jules Cafe and you will get one for sure!

Speaking of Jules Cafe, check out our new SHOP and enter CAFE2011 for cool discounts on everything from Jules NEW Presets & Textures to our very popular Essential Starter Consult Kit!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 22

3:30pm – 5:30pm Platform Presentation Studio B Preboard by February 18 at the following link: www.preboard.net
The talk is gonna rock, and you don’t want to miss it. If ONLY for the amazing prizes we will be handing out.
Here’s a list of some of the prizes you may find yourself the recipient of, some of our favorite peeps:

Oh, and we’ll be speaking too, in the midst of handing out a plethora of prizes. Found out more:

How to be a Rockstar in your own backyard
We will talk about developing win-win Creative Marketing Events with local businesses to raise the level of awareness in your own community about who you are and what you have to offer. We will cover marketing, sales, pre-visualization, and the important stuff in-between. Learn how to effectively understand your clients’ needs and deliver products and services that your clients’ can’t live without. Come and join us as we talk about some fun and innovative ways to market to clients that will translate into the bottom line for your business — new clients.

7pm – 9pm: Then we go straight from our Platform to a really fun Panel Discussion at the Grand Garden Arena:
Women in Contemporary Photography. We will be joined by some other AMAZING women photographers including Sarah Petty, Catherine Hall, Kay Eskridge, Lindsay Adler, Dawn Shields, Jessica Claire, and Jasmine Star. We’ll be discussing ideas and philosophies of how we’ve made things work in this competitive field.

And Tuesday doesn’t end there!

9pm Nikon party with Junebug weddings! We’ll stop by before heading out to the final resting place…

9pm. to whenever! After all that, you can find us rocking out at Pictage’s Signature Event, Studio 54 It’s Big, It’s Bold, and It’s BACK. Get More at Studio 54.

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 23

11a.m. You can find us at the KODAK booth along with Kenny Kim

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 24

9am. We are thrilled to do a another performance for the fabulous Photo Ignite with Kevin Kubota. We’ll be joined by some pretty groovy people, including Scott Bourne, Becker, Jasmine Star, Jed & Vicki Taufer, and some new names that you will not want to miss!

We’ll add more as more comes in, but for now, we hope to see you there, and can’t wait for next week!

Joy & Jules

Hi Everyone and Happy Holidays!

Hope you are winding down your Holiday crunch and can take some time for yourself this season. One of the ways you can do that is by taking time to look to the future and think about how you want to structure your photography business to fit your life, and not the other way around.

Jules’ wedding photography business hits its TEN year anniversary this January, 2011, so we are thrilled to be part of this JoySTART your year event with Sarah Petty and her fabulous team. Take the opportunity to learn from so many great photographers about a number of topics… Pick and choose what works for you!

JoySTART Your Year is tailored to whatever education level you are at, starting on December 29, 2010 for FOUR Wednesdays in a row. You don’t have to listen for hours, you can digest small chunks of info, or just tune into the info that you want.

**The best part is that it is all FREE.**

Check it out below:

Learn how to market your business or become more efficient using:
Search Engine Optimization
Social Media
Branding
Workflow
Charitable Marketing

And if you’re looking at expanding into a new niche or need more marketing ideas for your photography business, there are also programs on:
Weddings
Pets
Families
Boudoir
Babies / Kids
High School Seniors

Happiest of Holidays to you and yours this season,

Much love,

Jules & Joy

I only brought my iphone — hey, Chase says the best Camera is the one you have with you — and still got some really fun stuff.  It was so neat to see everything behind the scenes and then watch it again on the Instant Replay.  The whole experience left me with some great new friends and a new respect for all that goes into a live production.  At one point, Tamara was utilizing now famous white board to take notes and called me in to help.  Phew its a lot of work to be on camera!  And Tamara did it for five straight days.   That girl amazes me.

Alison Henrie shot the last picture of me and Tamara, just wanted to give her a little blog love.  Thanks, Alison!  It was so fantastic to meet you!

thanks again for including me, Tamara!  Fabulous job to the entire team at CreativeLive.

A fun shot photographer Jeff Rodgers sent to me during taping. Look ma, I'm on the internet!

Tamara up front and center, while the "famous white board" is still white!

Me, T, and Jerry G! Jerry had a cameo critiquing photos. I was the one who chose from the Flickr stream, so it was fun to see what he said about them!

i love this shot of Chase and his gorgeous wife, Kate. You gotta love a man who can rock a scarf like that.

Chase Jarvis and Tamara Lackey chattin it up on CreativeLive

Behind the scenes!

I stole this from the blog of the talented Alison Henrie! Thank you!

I’m pretty sure you’re sick of folks like me telling you that content is king and that you must produce reams of it in order to compete these days, so I won’t put you through any more of that kind of silly talk.

What I will say is that people today have come to expect to find information about any product, service, company, individual, cause or challenge they face by simply turning to the search engine of their choice. So, if they’re not finding content that you’ve produced that provides them that information, even if someone referred them directly to you, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t be worthy of their trust.

I guess I am going to tell you that you’ve got to commit to content production, but you’ve got to make it a part of your overall strategy and you’ve got to produce content with an eye on doing two things – educating and building trust.

These two categories of your content strategy must be delivered through the creation of very specific forms of content and not simply through sheer volume. Every business is now a publishing business, so you’ve got to start to think like one.

Content that builds trust

• Blog – Yes, I think a blog is the absolute starting point for your content strategy because it makes content production, syndication and sharing so easy. The search engines love blog content as well and this is the place where you can organize a great deal of your editorial thinking. Content produced on a blog can easily be expanded and adapted to become content for articles, workshops and ebooks.
• Social media – The first step in the social media content game is to claim all the free opportunities to create social media profiles on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, but also in Business Week, Entrepreneur and Inc magazine communities. Building rich profiles, and optimizing links, images and videos that point back to your main site is an important part of the content as strategy play.
• Reviews – Ratings and reviews sites such as Yelp!, MerchantCircle and CitySearch have become mainstream user generated content hubs. Throw in the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing all allow folks to rate and review businesses and you’ve got an increasingly important category of content that you must participate in. You’ll never have total control over this category, but ignore it and it may be one of the most damaging to your brand. Get proactive and monitor this channel aggressively.
• Testimonials – Customer testimonials are a powerful form of content. Every business today should seek customer content in multiple forms – written, audio and video. This content adds important trust building endorsements and makes for great brand building assets out there on Google and YouTube.

Content that educates

• The Point of View White Paper – Every business should have a well developed core story that’s documented in the form of a white paper of eBook. This content must dive deeply into what makes your firm different, what your secret sauce is, how you approach customer service, and why you do what you do. I wrote extensively about this idea in The Referral Engine. This is the primer for your educational content push.
• Seminars - Today, people want information packaged in ways that will help them get what they want. Presentations, workshop and seminars (online and off) are tremendous ways to provide education with the added punch of engagement. Turning your point of view white paper into a 45 minute value packed session is one of the most effective ways to generate, nurture, and convert leads.
• FAQs – There are those that want to know one very specific thing about your company or approach and these learners get the most value out of the traditional frequently asked questions approach. There’s no denying the value of information packaged in this format, but go beyond the questions that routinely get asked and include those that should get asked but don’t. Particularly the ones that help position you favorably against your competition.
• Success stories - Building rich examples of actual clients succeeding through the use of your product or service offerings is a tremendous way to help people learn from other individuals and business just like them. When prospects see themselves in a success story we can more easily transport them to a place where they can imagine getting those same results. This is another form of content that begs to be produced in video.

All of the above elements should be built into your marketing plan with a process to create, update and curate each.

So, what’s your content game plan look like?

Featuring Jessica Claire, Kevin Kubota, Joy Bianchi Brown & Jules Bianchi, Julia Woods, Kia Bondurant, Sandy Puc, Bev & Tim Walden, Scott & Adina Hayne, Ron Nichols and Sarah Petty, you’ll learn soup to nuts what it takes to sell your art.

These top-earning photographers will teach you what they do to:

P.S. If you can’t tune in on 10.10.10 or just want to learn how to sell better immediately, you can pre-purchase the event and start listening NOW for $59. The regular price for this event is $99 starting 10.10.10 so you can save $40 by buying today and get priority access to $10 selling tools from our speakers.

If you missed the talk, here is a list of the speaking engagements I will be doing over the next several months (PLUS there are a FEW more that I’m not allowed to mention yet!) I am actually doing a few of these talks WITH my sister, Joy, and we are so flattered to have been asked to participate in such an amazing list of educational events. (Please choose a few to attend so that my mom isn’t only one there!)

August 23, 2010: WPPI Roadshow in Irvine
October 20, 2010: Professional Photographers of the Sacramento Valley
November 6, 2010: Kevin Kubota’s SummitUP
November 9-11,2010: Pictage’s PartnerCon
February 20, 2010: Wedding & Portrait Photographer’s International (WPPI)

Thank you to Tom O’Connor for shooting these pics of us at the NCPP event.

Check it out:

Where: 5772 Thornhill Drive, Oakland CA 94611

Join San Francisco-based wedding and portrait photographer Kimberly Sayre for an evening of cool workflow and post processing techniques! Explore some of the brand-new features of Adobe Lightroom 3, learn creative time-saving techniques that make your images pop while giving you your life back, preview the brand-new Cottage Industry Lightroom 3 preset pack, and mix and mingle with all your friends!

We will provide wine and coffee and water, and if you’d like to bring a treat to share, please do! We really appreciate the community that has been happening at Jules Cafe.

Come join us and tell a friend!

We’ll be meeting at our studio on Thornhill in Montclair, so come on by.

Please RSVP on our Meet Up page. If it’s full, email joy at joy@julesbianchi.com and we’ll see what we can do (space is limited). Hope to see you there!