Cinnamon Girl Studio, a new advertiser to the MCP Blog, is a web design and graphic arts company based in Seattle, Washington. The design business is owned and solely operated by Timi Carl, a self taught web designer
& graphic artist. Her work ranges from designs for childrens clothing – drawings that are transferred to screenprint, blogs, print materials (business cards, stationary, postcards, banners), web design, pre-made blog & web templates.

If you cannot afford a custom blog, consider her blogger template for photographers.  Simple and professional – and affordable too – at only $12.

For today’s contest – she is offering ONE LUCKY PHOTOGRAPHER a NEW or Re-designed Blog!

Michelle Masser Photography – A redesign of Photopro in Wordpress

The Contest:
The prize will be a new blog or redesign of the winner’s blog in either Blogger or Wordpress format.

What is a redesign?

A redesign is a freshening up of an existing blog. It can may simple or a complete change… depending on the winner’s preference. Some elements that can be changed are banners & slideshows, post footers, menu buttons, backgrounds, fonts & colors. The layout can also be changed in ways like sidebar and post widths, the entire blog width, spaces & padding between elements.

What if I don’t have a blog?

If you don’t have a blog but would like one it’s as easy as signing up with Blogger or Wordpress, both are free but there are some small costs associated such as a domain name and hosting for your site if using Wordpress.  A basic template will be installed & then customized for the winner if they are new to blogging.

The contest does NOT include a domain, hosting, ecommerce (shopping cart) design, complex hand drawn art, logos.

• If you have a blog, does it helps your business? And what aspects of your blog make it successful? If it is not helping your business, what improvements need to happen so it does?

• If you do not have a blog, why do you feel you need one?  And what do you plan to do on your blog to make it work for your business?

Want more entries? Get bonus contest entries now:

Here are a few samples of Timi’s recent work:

tout-est-des-roses - A new Wordpress blog

Mia Joie - A Blogger redesign

Tim Geaney Photography (the light whisperer) – A new Blogger design

Simone Howell’s Brooch the Subject – A new Blogger design

If you are a photographer and want to improve where you rank, check out the SEO e-book for photographers. Also look into Scribe, which will help you get better optimization out of your blog posts.

Here are the 10 winners of the SEO Guides. I will be emailing each of you a code to use for your free guide.  Thank you to all who participated.

Katie Jane Parker

Jennifer Duffy

Christa Holland

Lori Alley

Wendy Donaldson

Melissa Blue

Alyssa Turner

Karin Curtis

Cyndi Henry

Andrea Lopez

SEO for photographers is so important.  When local customers are looking for a specific type of photographer, you want to rank high in Google and other search engines.

Are you a photographer?  Do you rank high in the search engines?  If not, do you want to?

This SEO for Photographers Book will help you drastically.  You can enter to win one of 1o being given away just by commenting to this post.

Here is your chance to win the SEO guide for photographers. Your photography business needs an SEO strategy to stay competitive. Zach Prez, the author of this guide and guest writer and sponsor for the MCP Blog, teaches photographers to optimize for search engine optimization. He is also consulting with MCP Actions for future SEO growth.

Contest Details:

10 SEO e-book guides will be given away to MCP readers. You could be one of the lucky ones. If you do purchase now, and win, your money will be refunded.

The Photographer’s SEO Book gives detailed step by step instructions on how you can improve your spot on Google. I just revamped parts of my site and am making adjustments to my blog so that I can come up higher in search results too. Of course it takes little work, time, and patience.  But it will be worth it. I learned so much from the book and from my consultation with Zach, the author. Zach Prez has been doing search engine optimization for small businesses for 6 years, while working full time on major SEO projects for large corporations as a full-time job.

HOW TO ENTER:

Leave a comment on the blog (not on Facebook), and let us know why you need SEO for Photographers.  Also let us know your SEO goals for your business in this upcoming year.  Make it realistic. Tell us what terms you want to rank high for and your page goal for the searches. The Photographer’s SEO Book Winners will be drawn at random on Sunday, March 7th.

For a BIG BONUS ENTRY:
I have a favor I am asking of my readers.  When I switched servers and blogs, I lost a lot of links due to a bad wordpress plug in that was installed and it hurt my rankings for over a month before I realized it.  I need some NEW links from my blog readers and customers to help my own SEO.  So if you read the MCP Photoshop Blog, watch MCP Photoshop video tutorials or enjoy MCP photoshop actions or workshops, I would love some “link love.” To link up, you can add links on your site or blog to the MCP site, blog or specific post.  Come back to the comments and share a link where you did this under the comments. Plus MCP Blog readers can check out your site too.

Plus other ways to get bonus contest entries:

Good luck everyone!

Check out another great SEO tool for writing/blogging and help support the MCP Actions Blog