Episode 181 - Blog Boost

In this episode of "Get Your Shoot Together," Kira Derryberry and Mary Fisk-Taylor geek out on all things digital marketing and productivity for photographers. They chat about using Chat GPT to give your WordPress blog a makeover, dive into SEO tricks, and share why backlinks are your new best friend for getting noticed online. Plus, they spill the tea on cool AI tools like SEMrush and how hiring a virtual assistant can save you tons of time. Whether you're looking to level up your website game or just curious about the latest in digital marketing, this episode is packed with tips to help you crush it in the photography biz. And don’t forget to check out their upcoming workshops to take your skills even further!

This episode was written and performed by Mary Fisk-Taylor and Kira Derryberry, produced by Kira Derryberry and edited by Joel North.

Transcript

Here’s the corrected transcript with names and revisions for clarity and readability:

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**Kira Derryberry:** 0:00  
This week's episode is brought to you by our friends at RetouchUp. RetouchUp: Work smarter, not harder. Welcome to *Get Your Shoot Together*, the photographer's podcast where we discuss studio business, life, and keeping it all in line.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 0:17  
And I'm Mary Fisk-Taylor.

**Kira Derryberry:** 0:19  
Hello, Mary Fisk-Taylor.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 0:22  
Hello! Happy week.

**Kira Derryberry:** 0:26  
It's a big week here. Lucy just started high school. I know... I'm sorry, your "18 summers" thing makes me so unhappy.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 0:39  
I'm sorry, I know.

**Kira Derryberry:** 0:42  
I know, oh gosh. Anyway, I was a mess. I already talked to you this week. I was a mess the first day of school. She was fine. Yeah, I was a mess. It just felt like kindergarten, like that first day of kindergarten—like sending her off into this unknown, big thing, right?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 1:02  
No, it was hard. Yeah, and I actually got to see you. So this is, guys, where we are. This is Thursday the 15th, so this will come out in a week or so, but we judged MIR on Monday together. It’s the first time, I think, we've been on a panel all year together.

**Kira Derryberry:** 1:17  
Yeah, I think, for sure.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 1:18  
So we judged MIR together, and Kira, as usual, was a champ of a judge. But I could just look at her face and know that inside...

**Kira Derryberry:** 1:32  
Yeah, I got on, we were on camera, and I was like, "Guys, you’re being served. I ugly cried earlier today, so I’m here to judge." And I was happy for it because it gave me something to focus on.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 1:46  
It was a good day for that, but yeah, looking at pretty images is good for the soul, right? Like, that's a happy thing.

**Kira Derryberry:** 1:52  
You know me, I love getting together with a group of my besties and just talking about art. Like, that's fun for me.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 2:00  
Yeah, that is crazy fun for you. But it was fun, and congrats to all the people that are happy, and I'm sorry for the people that aren't. But I need to give a big shout-out to our friend Robin Thompson, who got her second IE. She's been entering for a little bit, and now I think she’s two away from her Master's. So she's got a little bit of time, and I just want to give her a big shout-out because she really has worked her butt off. 

**Kira Derryberry:** 2:39  
Congratulations, Robin! We're so excited for you, and we both know how hard you've worked on that, so it’s great. You know, you and I both have read some of the feedback—actually, good and bad. Every month, it’s like this—even before MIR and everything else. 

**Kira Derryberry:** 2:54  
It’s always this way. Some people are really happy, and some people are really not happy. But I guess it's a good time to remind people what that “low potential” category means because I think it stings—it does sting.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 3:18  
Yeah, absolutely, and I get it. I've been doing some critiques on images that were in the low potential category this morning. Just to reiterate—and I've been saying this in my critiques—this does not mean that you’re terrible.

**Kira Derryberry:** 3:31  
I say the same thing.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 3:32  
This doesn’t mean that this isn’t an image that your client loved. It just means that it doesn’t meet the criteria we are looking for to earn a merit, and it has too far to go to get there.

**Kira Derryberry:** 3:48  
Exactly. So, guys, it’s low potential to achieve a merit, not a low potential image. I get that it's hard to wrap your head around that, but it’s low potential to meet a merit, not a low potential image. We have 12 elements we dig into, and I try to use those when I critique. I know you do as well, Mary. We all do. 

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 4:08  
Oh, I can't give you any advice, or I don’t want to sit here and spin some yarn of “do this, maybe do that, and it’ll merit” if I really don’t believe it will. I’d rather you go out and create something new or find something else and bring that to the table than to spend more money on an image that I don’t think I would ever be able to merit. And that’s just my opinion. That’s why there are five of us.

**Kira Derryberry:** 4:39  
Exactly. It's designed to help you move on from it to something better. There could be another frame from the same session, and the critique could point out something that you go, “Oh, I do have another image that probably works better for what she’s saying—this angle or that angle or whatever.”

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 4:55  
Or, “Oh, I do have one where the bride’s face is in the light and not away from the light.” And those are things that—because we fall in love with our work, and our clients fall in love with it, which makes us fall in love with it even more—or we make good money on it, which makes us love it even more—it’s really hard to take ourselves out of that because we enter it thinking, “My client loved this, it was on the cover of the magazine or whatever, and this was my biggest sale of the year.” That doesn’t make it a merit. Trust and believe, in almost all my critiques, some of my biggest selling images my judges would never merit. It’s low potential for a merit, not a low potential image.

**Kira Derryberry:** 5:31  
Exactly. If I put some images right now that I have in my client galleries, it’s not because they’re not good images that the client asked for, it’s that they just don’t have the level that they need to be a merit. You know what I mean? Like, a headshot is a headshot, and it could be a really fantastic headshot and answer the problem that it serves, right? But the problem that a headshot serves is not to show a high level of artistic ability and technical prowess. You know what I mean? Like, that’s not the point of it. It’s to make that person look great and solve their problem. But, you know, I don’t enter a lot of stuff that I think would get low potential because, as a judge, I just know that there’s not a whole lot we could do to make this one sing.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 6:12  
Exactly, and that’s okay because I make a lot of money making these regular Joe headshots.

**Kira Derryberry:** 6:20  
Absolutely. And it is exciting when your work is honored with a merit by entering in any competition—by the way, MIR or whatever, there are a lot of them out there. ASP is coming up, I think, this weekend. There’s MPI, there’s WPP, there are all kinds of great image competitions. 

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 7:00  
In all the comments, when somebody tries to come back and make someone feel a little better about feeling the sting, they say, “Get a mentor or get a buddy or get a friend and let them put a second set of eyes on it.” Now, Kira’s probably snickering inside because I am the worst. I never show my work to anybody. I just enter it and hope it does well. So you can relate, right?

**Kira Derryberry:** 7:10  
Oh, I can relate!

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 7:11  
It’s very hard. It’s a personal thing.

**Kira Derryberry:** 7:12  
It’s so hard to ask somebody to give you critique on something.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 7:14  
It’s just very hard, and I don’t think I’ve done it more than a handful of times. I think I’ve sent you stuff maybe once or twice. But I’m not practicing what I preach. But if you’re frustrated, ask somebody. Most of us judges, if we’re not judging the MIR the next month, are happy to look at images. I know for a fact two people that entered, not my category—I knew I wasn’t judging illustrative—and I helped them with some of their images, and they both got their Masters this month. I just said, “Hey, crop here,” or “try a black and white conversion,” or just little things that already took a merit image to another space. So there we go.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 7:50  
I just hate that “low potential

” term because I understand why it’s called that, but it’s low potential for a merit, not a low potential image. I feel like if you say it that way, it doesn’t hurt as much.

**Kira Derryberry:** 8:10  
I know, I know. And I spent some time this morning reading the comments. I don’t often comment because sometimes it’s just not a space where people are going to be open to hearing another side of it. But I can use this platform here to kind of explain it. 

**Kira Derryberry:** 8:42  
But when the accusations come across, like, “PPA is losing money,” and “PPA is…”—I can assure you that we’re not, and it’s also not about money. It’s never been about money.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 8:47  
Image competition never has been.

**Kira Derryberry:** 8:53  
No, it’s not a moneymaker, guys. Do we need money to make it stay afloat for you? Yeah, but it’s not a moneymaker. It’s also your organization, you know? It’s a non-profit, and… you know, so that kind of stuff… yeah, I have to take it with a grain of salt, just still being a board member for these last few months, you know. But I know that there are some really, really happy people out there. I’ve read their comments, and for the people who are discouraged, I would just keep encouraging you to keep going. I know how hard that sounds, especially when you’re mad. I get it—I’ve been mad about stuff, and not being able to watch it get judged. But sometimes you’re not going to be able to get the kind of feedback that you think you’re going to get by watching it judged versus the critique.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 9:36  
Absolutely.

**Kira Derryberry:** 9:37  
Absolutely. The critique—you just have to spend so much more time with it, and it explains things to you.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 9:41  
I think the people that say “bring back the old system” would be so disappointed because of the lack of conversation. I mean, there have been challenges and things like that. But honestly, guys, when you’re going through that many images—and even when it was live, you would complain that there wasn’t enough talk because we, as judges, are trained. We know we’re on the same page. It’s an amazing system, etc., etc. So, I’m not on the board anymore, but I do think, “Oh, guys, these people work so hard.” I mean, we spent all Monday afternoon—you missed picking your daughter up from high school on her first day of high school to be a judge on a panel. 

**Kira Derryberry:** 10:21  
Right.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 10:22  
And every one of us wants to merit everything. I mean, really and truly, I want to merit every image that comes around.

**Kira Derryberry:** 10:25  
I really do. I was just in the judging class doing a guest appearance one day, and I had a lovely group of people that I got to work with who are potential judges. And you know, one of the things that I think all of us tried to make sure those judges, as they’re learning how to judge and as they’re deciding if they want to go further with it, do is to not immediately look for the flaws in the images. You know, to take the time and allow yourself to be impacted and enjoy the image for what it is, and then, as you look at it a little bit longer, start to see if there is something that could be improved about it or if it meets all the criteria. You know, of the 12 elements—not all of them, but you know, the 12 elements so we can move forward. But allow yourself that moment to really take it in. And, guys, I know that it’s hard to believe, but that moment can be very short.

**Kira Derryberry:** 11:13  
The longer you judge and do this, the faster you can get to that. But I can assure you that the judges are not just watching an image come up and immediately searching for flaws. That’s not how we’re trained, and that’s not how we train people.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 11:28  
Absolutely. We kind of discount the fact that, as human beings, we have the ability to scan something very quickly and make a decision. We do it all the time. You’re driving through a neighborhood and maybe you’re in the market for a new house. You’re driving through a neighborhood, you’re scanning, and you’ve probably looked at 20 houses, and you know the ones you love and the ones you don’t love. When you love it, you go back. So I immediately will put it in a category, and then I’ll look at it and go, “Maybe I was wrong,” one way or the other. But I immediately put it in one, and then I start going through the elements in my head. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes it stays the same, sometimes it goes down. But as human beings, we have that ability, and we do it every single day. We scan things, and we decide whether we love it or not, and then we look at it a little harder. And that’s what we do as a judge. We scan it, we look at it, and we put it where we think, and then we decide if we’re in the right space.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 12:26  
But one thing I will say is, if you’re one of those keyboard warriors, and God bless, you know we all have that ability, it’s the land we live in—land of the free, right? You have the freedom to say what you want. However, if you can look at yourself in the mirror and say you only say mean things when we don’t like your images or we don’t give it the score you want, but you love us when we do—maybe you’re not being fair. Because I’ve seen it, I’ve watched it pretty closely this year, and one month we’re the worst ever; they’re never entering again. And then the next month, they’re singing our praises, love everything because they got what they wanted.

**Kira Derryberry:** 13:08  
They love the feedback and the critique, or they love the score. And I mean, it’s a human element. It is, you know, maybe eventually one of the last human elements. And that’s why there’s more than one person too. But I can appreciate critique on a process that you don’t have the curtain open for you on every moment. I can understand that you would fill in the gaps during times when you’re not present to see everything. But I can assure everyone listening who has entered MIR that our judges have the utmost integrity. No one is actively trying to sabotage or look for flaws. Everyone there is there for the right reason, and to be honest with you, that’s why there are so few of us.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 13:55  
Absolutely.

**Kira Derryberry:** 13:56  
Because when a judge comes out and they’re not on the side of that philosophy behind judging, they won’t stay a judge, and that’s why it’s so hard to become a judge too.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 14:07  
Absolutely. So congrats to everyone who’s happy, and if you’re not there yet, I do encourage you to keep trying. I know Kira and I continue to enter. It was one of the best things I did starting out my career, and I continue to do it, kicking and screaming sometimes, because it is a lot to put yourself out there and to find the stuff and do the stuff, but it is well worth it. Congrats. I know a lot of people are earning their Masters, a lot of people got their Master Wedding, Master Artist, and IE little danglies coming up. So congrats on all that, or your next IE bar, whatever that is.

**Kira Derryberry:** 15:22  
So with jingle jangles, we’re going to take a quick break for our little jingle and hear from our friends at RetouchUp. We’ll be right back.

**Kira Derryberry:** 15:32  
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**Kira Derryberry:** 16:20  
So, Mary, you and I have quite a new set

 of class stuff coming up for us in this upcoming year. Yeah, you've been getting—oh my God, every—I feel like every week I see that you've finished a new certification, you know, with Google.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 16:48  
Yeah, I love how we are students of a different brand. We are.

**Kira Derryberry:** 16:51  
You go through the certifications, you get it, and then you become like this expert. I just stay up all night like playing. It’s the age difference—it’s the millennial versus the Gen.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 16:59  
What am I? Gen X?

**Kira Derryberry:** 17:01  
Yeah, Gen X.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 17:02  
Gen X. It is the difference. I want to, but I'm a big—I also love school. I love learning, so I've been taking two classes back at UVA at Darden right now, and they're both about business and digital marketing and different things. The certifications are part of me to pass this class. I'm in week six of the classes, and I've got my Google Analytics, my Google AdWords, and I just finished my HubSpot Email Marketing Certification. These are just certifications—you take the test, you learn the stuff, take the test, you know. But you do have to create a playbook every week and use what they're giving me. That is what I love right now about learning—and I don't remember it being this way when I was actually in school—is that you actually have to take the knowledge and create something with it. So we've built online businesses, and we have to make our stuff work.

**Kira Derryberry:** 17:55  
Well, I can get very much behind immediate application because if I learn something and I don't immediately use it, it's very hard for me. And that goes for everything. Like, I want to take Christy Elias' class so badly, and I am waiting for the day that I know I will have time to apply it, right? Because I will take that class, but I won't take that class if I can't immediately practice it enough to be able to do it. So I can appreciate learning that way.

**Kira Derryberry:** 18:27  
I’m doing it in a homeschool way.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 18:29  
Yeah, that's fair. But yeah, I've been building out quite a bit. Actually, it's frightening how much I learn every day just working on my own little "what if I could make this" kind of project, and then doing that kind of research and development on it. Our methods have gotten both of us to a place where now we're actually teaching classes on some of these things.

**Kira Derryberry:** 18:57  
Mary’s got a platform at Imaging USA on Tuesday morning, and you're going to be on a panel later that day, right?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 19:07  
I think so. That’s what Angela and I talked about last week. It’s kind of cool to be doing stuff with PPA on the education team again. I did Charities for 12 years, then on the board for 10 years, so I wasn’t allowed to be in those arenas anymore because I was in a different arena. So it's kind of fun to be back where I started with PPA, helping with the education build-out and things like that—content, the podcast. So yeah, I'll have some stuff going on, but digital marketing is obviously a very hot topic. You're touching on the Chat GPT piece, but digital marketing overall. I mean, first of all, marketing is just—what is marketing, right? Marketing is really just—it's a verb, and it just means to shape the market. That’s all it really means—to shape the market, which is…

**Kira Derryberry:** 20:08  
What’s your dictionary? [Laughs]

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 20:13  
[Laughs] Well, I think they have a better definition than that, but it's shaping it to drive sales. That’s all it is. You want to speak to the audience that you want to serve, you want to create content that’s going to make them want to use you, and then, hopefully, come in and fill the need. The whole Story Brand thing is: fill the need and solve the problem. That’s all marketing is. I think we get really wound up about it because it is hard. And I will also say—and let me say this right now—I’ve probably had more people this year than ever reach out and talk to me about just frustrations with marketing and concerns about their small business and taking on second jobs to supplement income because their studios—even people that have been running full-time have been. And, let’s be honest, you and I have even, probably more this year than ever, reached out and said, “Hey, I think we’re going to skip that because I need to really be more conscientious about my finances right now.”

**Kira Derryberry:** 21:04  
Right now. It’s a slower year.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 21:06  
Yeah, that’s for sure. And I think everyone’s feeling it. Everybody needs to know that—it’s not just you. I’ve heard it across the board. That does not mean that it’s not going to come back. That does not mean that we’re failing. And this is something I’m giving myself my own pep talk because I was getting my hair cut the other day and they cut off six inches of my hair, by the way, which is insane. It just feels… like, it’s bouncy.

**Kira Derryberry:** 21:31  
It is bouncy.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 21:33  
It is bouncy because my hair does have some body, but I didn’t realize he cut so much off. But I was saying it’s like—you know, it really took a lot of me to come today because my depression is high because I’m not hitting my goals, and that’s really hard for me. I take that very personally, so I am only sharing that to be very candid with you guys, that it’s not just you—we’re all kind of doing it. However, one thing I want to remind you is something that my teachers, way back forever and ever, when I was in school and my current teachers are reminding us—you know, when things are down, you should actually up your marketing, not remove it or start chipping away at it, which is our first instinct. But the good news is, that’s what we’re going to talk about.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 22:11  
We have digital marketing, whereas I believe fully in traditional marketing and in-person marketing. Those are important. Traditional marketing certainly can cost more money, but digital marketing, besides the price of our time—which is immeasurable—can help us. So, even though it’s hard, try to spend some time on this piece and maybe some of these things will help you that we’re going to talk about today. Digital marketing—whereas, again, I do truly believe in traditional marketing, which is going to be your snail mail…

**Kira Derryberry:** 22:43  
Or, you know, all the things. Yeah, we just talked about direct mail recently.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 22:46  
Yeah, I think they’re all important. But digital marketing, versus a one-way communication channel, is a two-way communication channel. You get real-time feedback. Quite often, if I mail something, it may be a week or so or more before I hear back. Well, if you post something, it’s real-time feedback. Traditional marketing is slower to optimize, whereas digital marketing is a lot faster.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 23:07  
You can be hyper-targeted to the people that you want to reach, and it can be incredibly personalized. Whether it’s email marketing, where you're automating and putting people into groups, or you’re sending a very specific email to people that you think or know has a graduating high school senior or about to turn two-year-old. You can really hyper-target your digital marketing, whereas in your traditional marketing, you’re kind of blanketing and hitting all the hot spots. I think we need both, by the way. I think we need all of it. But digital marketing has some great benefits, in addition to the fact that it doesn’t have a high cost attached to it, except for our time and energy.

**Kira Derryberry:** 23:48  
Well, the good news is that when things are slow, you’ve got a little more time to throw at it, right?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 23:54  
Correct.

**Kira Derryberry:** 23:55  
That’s how it’s been for me the past couple of weeks. At first, it was slow because I was like, well, I know it’s slow for me because I’m not putting the effort in because it’s summer, and going back to school is always a weird time or whatever. But I think I also just didn’t look ahead. And so when I say slow, I mean like a headshot day has two people in it rather than a fully booked day, and that’s how it was this week. My Tuesday and Wednesday were light. I had two headshots a day, and I was like, okay.

**Kira Derryberry:** 24:33  
So what that gave me the opportunity to do was actually spend some time fixing some stuff, working on marketing ideas like you’re talking about, and those most easily accessible ones that you can put

 out immediately are digital ones. But it also gave me an opportunity to run some exercises through some of the AI resources that we’ve got now.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:08  
Oh, cool.

**Kira Derryberry:** 25:09  
Yeah, to see if my time, while low, would be better spent fixing some stuff.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:13  
Now, when you say running things, are you running them through Chat GPT?

**Kira Derryberry:** 25:19  
Chat GPT, yes.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:20  
Okay, just making sure I was on that page.

**Kira Derryberry:** 25:21  
But I do believe that there are other GPT models that you could run.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:35  
A hundred percent.

**Kira Derryberry:** 25:35  
The reason I like Chat GPT is that it does have the ability to browse the internet, which more and more of them are getting.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:39  
Only if you have the subscription.

**Kira Derryberry:** 25:43  
Right, right.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:45  
Most of us are running it on 4.0, and 5 should be coming out any day now.

**Kira Derryberry:** 25:51  
Really?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 25:53  
Yeah, but you have to be paying. Just so, if you’re running the free version, you cannot browse the internet, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a ton of information, guys. Chat is just machine learning. It’s all it is, and machine learning has been around forever. But if you’re not paying for the chat right now—4.0—then you aren’t able to browse the internet. I just want to make sure we say that, and it is like $20, $25 a month.

**Kira Derryberry:** 26:04  
I believe it’s worth it because it’s like a subscription tool.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 26:07  
Twenty.

**Kira Derryberry:** 26:08  
So let me give you an example of what I did. This was an experiment to see if it worked. My blog—I haven’t touched it in a really long time. My history in life was that I was a web designer, and I was able to do all these things, so it was set up correctly a long time ago, but I haven’t looked at it in a really long time. As far as, like, are the best practices still good? Am I still doing the best practices to make sure the images are labeled correctly, that these titles work correctly, and so on? So I’m going to read this prompt that I put into it, and I encourage you to try this if you have the downtime—not you, Mary, I mean, but others who are listening—if you have the downtime. Prompts are what matter when it comes to GPT, if you want to get the most out of it.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 26:58  
I just want to ask a question. This is where she shines. So the point here is she’s putting a prompt, meaning she is typing into Chat GPT what she wants. But the key here, guys, is with any marketing, you have to—I think a lot of times, we do this, we just start typing things, and it’s like, oh, it’s the Wild West out there, and it’s really fun. But for marketing purposes, she has determined a goal, she’s determined an outcome, and that’s where she’s coming from. That’s the key piece I think we’re missing with digital marketing. So, Kira, you said, “Oh, my blog, blah, blah,” but what did you want to know? What was the outcome going to produce? I think we have to fill in that blank, right?

**Kira Derryberry:** 27:46  
That’s a great example of having the end in mind.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 27:50  
Yes, because if we don’t...

**Kira Derryberry:** 27:54  
It’ll give you more than you can ever need to know.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 27:58  
And that’s where we start going down the rabbit hole of, oh, something shiny, something new. So what were you hoping to find? 

**Kira Derryberry:** 28:06  
I wanted to know if my website, my WordPress website—are the blog posts doing the most for me in today’s SEO market? 

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 28:15  
There you go.

**Kira Derryberry:** 28:17  
Is it optimized in the best way it can be? Are the titles worded correctly, and so on? All these articles I’ve written in the past, all these titles I’ve come up with on my own, and everything I’ve done to it I’ve done on my own without any assistance from AI.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 28:35  
But you do have a web design background, so most of us don’t have that.

**Kira Derryberry:** 28:38  
I didn’t.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 28:39  
Yeah, that was all Spanish. [Laughs]

**Kira Derryberry:** 28:41  
Yeah, because most of us hear it as another language. You might go, if you were trying to get what I’m getting, like, you might say, “Please look at my website and tell me if it’s SEO-friendly.”

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 28:54  
Okay.

**Kira Derryberry:** 28:56  
Because that’s all you know, right? But Chat GPT is going to give you a pretty vague, generic response, you know what I mean? But it doesn’t really know what you want specifically, so you have to be specific. So I’m going to read you the prompt, okay? So first, I’m going to tell it who it is.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 29:23  
Correct.

**Kira Derryberry:** 29:24  
I’m going to tell it how I want it to act—to take on this persona.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 29:27  
Correct.

**Kira Derryberry:** 29:28  
So I say, “I want you to be a blog and SEO expert who specializes in WordPress websites. I would like you to review my blog posts from 2021 to 2023 and do the following…” Now, the following, guys, is because I know the language.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 29:44  
Okay.

**Kira Derryberry:** 29:45  
So, Mary, I’ll post this prompt on our page.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 29:49  
Okay.

**Kira Derryberry:** 29:50  
So I tell it: “Review titles, images, tags, copy, alt tags, descriptions, captions, and give me back each of these items reworded or rewritten as necessary. Do this for each of those blog posts appearing within those years. Here is the link to my website.” Now, nobody who doesn’t have the background that I have is going to think, one, to tell it who it is, and two, to have that detailed list. But I encourage you, whenever you’re using it for any other example of things, to go look at what are all the fields in whatever it is you’re working on, and list those fields. That’s all I did. I went to WordPress and said, “What is everything I have to fill out for a blog post?” And I just put them all here.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 30:39  
Okay.

**Kira Derryberry:** 30:40  
So then it came back and said—and I won’t bore you with the entirety, but it says, “I reviewed the blog posts on your site from 2021 to 2023. Below are suggestions for improving titles, images, tags, copy, alt tags, descriptions, and captions for each blog post.” So it started with number one and gave me the current title, a new suggested title, the current alt tag, a new suggested alt tag, and it goes on and on like that. It’ll say “current description, suggested description.” I love that because it allows me to see what I already have and what it modified. You know what I mean? It’s like when we were on the board, Mary, and we would make a motion, and it would say, “Here’s the text that we’re changing, with all the things struck through, and here’s what we’re changing it to.” It’s just so you can make sure you’re not losing anything that makes it what it originally was, and that now it still does the job it was doing before, but better.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 31:48  
I love that.

**Kira Derryberry:** 31:50  
So that’s what I’m going to be teaching—not just the blog post thing, but that’s the kind of prompting I’m going to be teaching in that one-day workshop that’s going to be a pre-con at Imaging USA.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 32:01  
Correct.

**Kira Derryberry:** 32:03  
That’s the way I’m going to make you guys think. I’m also teaching next month, if you’re in the Florida

 area, I’m teaching a four-day intensive on this too. But this is the kind of research and productivity stuff that you and I have been working on lately. This is the time, guys, when you’ve got downtime, to implement these things and experiment with those things.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 32:26  
Absolutely, and I think—and I don’t know what you think about this—but doing that with your blog or anything really on your website, you can go through and do that on your homepage, you can do it on anything. But also, if you want to take it to the next level, because we all know that links are so huge for SEO reasons, then you could also ask it, “Do you have any suggestions or recommendations where I could add backlinks to any of my blog posts?”

**Kira Derryberry:** 32:55  
Oh, yeah.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 32:56  
So when I did that…

**Kira Derryberry:** 32:58  
You can get deeper.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 32:59  
Yeah, it went back and said, “Oh yeah, because you referenced this shop’s dress or this wedding coordinator or whatever.” It gave me an opportunity to go in and find places to add backlinks that, obviously, with the permission of the other vendor… Now I have backlinks on most of my blog posts, which has made a huge difference. And what I mean by a backlink is, say it’s a wedding blog post, then I go in and add a link for the florist, the coordinator, the reception venue, etc. You can also do that with your portrait posts. You have to be a little more creative, but if they had hair and makeup done, you can do that. Or if you were at a certain park or place in your town, you can even put in a travel link. If it’s in Virginia Beach, I can put in the department of tourism. If there’s a certain shop they got their clothing from, whatever it is, or if they’re business owners that they want, you can backlink their own business, which can be a real benefit. Certainly for high school seniors, you can add the backlinks for the schools. Adding those backlinks has been huge for me. If I had to sit there and go through all that and find that, A) I probably would have missed some, got tired, or probably not gotten through them all, but it makes a huge difference. This is where we can harness that digital marketing power—in this case, Chat GPT—and save hundreds of hours of time, in my opinion, doing that.

**Kira Derryberry:** 34:15  
So you know what we could do too? Because ask me if I’ve implemented these changes it suggested.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 34:22  
Probably not.

**Kira Derryberry:** 34:23  
No, I haven’t done it, Mary. All I wanted to do was see if it would do it. And then I was disarmed at how much it wanted me to change, because I was like, “Oh, it’s real bad. Okay.” Years ago, when I was updating my website from an old theme to a new theme, I made some changes, but a lot of my images had to be resized and a lot of my content had to be redone because it was all an old version of WordPress and new stuff was available. So I needed all of the old blog posts to be updated to this new version. I hired somebody on Fiverr, I gave them editor capabilities on WordPress, and they were able to go through— I mean, I could remove their access at any time, but they were able to go through my website and do this one task for me. Just go through, resize the images, and update the links, and make sure everything was correct. I was thinking, you know, it might be time to do that again because I have too many spinning plates, but I want this, I want to do this. So in addition to needing all those backlinks for those posts like you talked about, I need to also be looking at the URL slugs, right?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 36:00  
Yep, absolutely.

**Kira Derryberry:** 36:01  
Because I’m sure that’s something you guys have been covering, right? What does that actual URL say in it, right? So I need to make sure that all of those permalinks are good and correct. So what if I got all the information I needed for every single blog post I had? What if I just found someone on Fiverr, made them a WordPress editor, and had them do it for me?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 36:25  
A hundred percent on Fiverr, or you, like a lot of us, have—you can have a VA that just has a minimum amount of time they spend on your website. So first of all, you might need to hire them for a larger project to get you started, to begin with, but then you can have a VA that, for a certain number of hours a month, updates or does this. You can just share a Dropbox folder or whatever it is where they’re just going in and constantly, at least once a month, going in and changing out some images, changing out some verbiage, changing something out on your website. Again, Google loves that—they love that—and it’s going to help your SEO. Having a VA do that for you, you don’t have to think about it. It’s not a huge investment. However, it’s something that can make a big difference in your online presence, i.e., your digital marketing, because our website is our front door to our digital marketing. It just is. I mean, I know there was a trend years ago where websites were just not a thing, “Just have a blog,” or “Just have social.” I don’t believe that. I do think—and I can tell because, hopefully, all of us are tracking our data or we’re going to start tracking our data—people are coming into my website. They are coming into my website. I can see it. I can see it in my analytics on Google. Not only that, I see if they’re coming in on a phone. And if they are, is it iOS or is it an Apple or is it an Android? And I also know if they’re coming in on a desktop. The funny thing is, my data shows they’re hitting a link somewhere, probably from social media or an email. They go to my site on their phone, and then they get home or get to work and go on a desktop. Over 50% of my people are going to my website on a desktop. That is a good indicator. The reason is they found it intriguing enough on their little phone to then remember to check it out when they get to a desktop computer or a laptop computer. 

**Kira Derryberry:** 37:52  
Do you guys understand what I’m saying?

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 37:54  
Yeah, that’s how I operate too. I definitely don’t want to spend a lot of time on a phone website. I want to spend more time on a full-blown desktop.

**Kira Derryberry:** 38:01  
But people won’t do that if they’re not interested. So that is a very big positive for me. Google has a free advisor—you can have a free person. I have a Google Ads person, and I have a Google Analytics person that I can meet with every month if I want to. They will go through things with me. If they’re a Google expert or they work for Google and they’re telling me, “This is a great thing, this is a great indicator,” then hey, I’m going to listen to that. Again, it’s completely free. If you go into your Google Ads account, it’ll pop up, “Do you want to make an appointment with one of our agents?” Say yes.

**Kira Derryberry:** 38:33  
Oh, I didn’t know that, that’s great.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 38:39  
I had a Google Analytics person just last week, and I had a disconnect. They got it all connected. It was a disconnect, and they found something from my website to Google that was not working properly, and we got it fixed on the spot. So absolutely check that out. To hire a VA or to go with someone on Fiverr, which is the same thing, by the way. You could use a great program called SEMrush, and if you’re not using SEMrush, I highly recommend it. There is a free version that’ll get you started to check it out if you like it. I think it’s worth investing in, but what SEMrush will do is it can help you with keywords, SEO content, all the stuff, competitor analysis, and it’s S-E-M-R-U-S-H.com. Check it out. My brother-in-law told me about this several years ago. I was too busy to give it a second thought. I’m now addicted to SEMrush, but it’ll compare my website to every other website around me. It gives me an analysis on how mine is performing versus theirs. It’s kind of scary, the amount of information. This is AI. SEMrush is an AI program. It’s something you can run in the background that’ll keep you alerted very quickly if something needs to be fixed or changed. In my opinion, it’s worth the investment. Or, you know, again, there is a really nice little free version that you can use, because it does add up. I mean, it’s quite a bit of money—I think it’s like 140 bucks a month. But check out the free version

 and see what you think. You might be able to find a more basic plan or whatever. Or you can use a VA or someone else to do it for you. That’s another option if you don’t want to. Some people don’t want to do it yet. But if you haven’t used, have you used SEMrush?

**Kira Derryberry:** 40:31  
No.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 40:32  
Oh my gosh, you will love it. Your brother-in-law was telling me all kinds of stuff, and I felt shamed. I was like, oh God, I better fix this.

**Kira Derryberry:** 40:36  
I need to fix this. [Laughs]

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 40:39  
Absolutely, absolutely. 

**Kira Derryberry:** 40:41  
So I need to fix that. I need to fix my analytics. There’s also…what is it, the crawling? Every once in a while, I get an email that says there were several issues with crawling the site.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 40:55  
Google found…

**Kira Derryberry:** 40:58  
Cloudflare is another piece.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 40:59  
Cloudflare.

**Kira Derryberry:** 40:58  
Yeah, SEMrush and Cloudflare—sorry, guys, Amazon’s here, and the dogs are going insane. SEMrush and Cloudflare are two things you can use. There’s also…I think it’s called EmailJet, EmailJet.com. If you’re doing a lot of email marketing and you’re finding that a lot of your content is bouncing or something like that, then they can help you fix your email so that it stops going into the spam folder. Somehow, something along the way happened where my email got flagged. It happens a lot.

**Kira Derryberry:** 41:39  
Oh yeah, it happens a lot.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 41:40  
I send out a lot of emails, and it got flagged. So I had to go in and get that fixed, and they were able to help get that fixed. That’s a huge piece. Like, I’m spending a lot of money every month on emails. I do a lot of email marketing, which I truly believe in, and I know it works. But if too big a percentage of it is going into spam, then I’m really wasting a lot of money. So I think it’s called EmailJet.

**Kira Derryberry:** 42:08  
Yeah, EmailJet, okay, I think so.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 42:11  
Well, I’m definitely going to check it out, and then I’m going to hire somebody to…I’m going to get all the content and just give it to somebody else to do because I would be more comfortable…I guess you could hire somebody to do all this for you, but I’d rather know what’s changing and then hand it off.

**Kira Derryberry:** 42:25  
Right, I agree. And if you don’t know, how can you…you know, you gotta know to tell. I’m a big believer in that as well, only because I spent a lot of my years not knowing and just saying, “Fix it, fix it.” I’ve spent a lot of time and money—I’ve spent a lot of money—and I, for the first time probably ever, can go on my website, do all these things myself, so now I feel like I’m coming from a better place to hire people, which I will fully admit. Me leaving last year, I would have said just pay somebody to do it. Well, I’ve really sat down and learned it, so now I know if it’s working or not, which…

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 43:02  
Yeah, because that’s a real good way to get hosed by somebody, right?

**Kira Derryberry:** 43:06  
Exactly.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 43:07  
To not really understand what it is they do.

**Kira Derryberry:** 43:09  
Exactly.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 43:09  
And just trusting them.

**Kira Derryberry:** 43:10  
Exactly, I don’t know. I would just like an implementer.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 43:13  
I did a lot of that for a lot of years, and I didn’t know if they were phoning it in or doing a great job or not. Now I can track it pretty much—I can track it very quickly. Check those resources out. It’s not scary to get people on the back end of your website to add these things. They can’t steal your idea—I’ve had some people worry about that—they can’t really do much. I mean, if your website is backed up and copied, worst case scenario, you can just go back in and set your website back up. They don’t have access to anything else. They can’t personally steal from you. I’ve had some people be very leery of VAs or hiring, so it really isn’t that scary. Plus, if these people are on a platform like Fiverr—there are several of them, and I can’t think of the names—you can get the verified pros.

**Kira Derryberry:** 43:53  
They’re vetted, they’re vetted.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 43:55  
And that’s—or go on LinkedIn and ask people you trust who they’re using, because I guarantee you a lot of people are using these people.

**Kira Derryberry:** 44:02  
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s okay to just like—it’s like, what is it? TaskRabbit? There are things you can just task out, and that’s okay. Maybe you’re going to find somebody you can keep coming to do some of these things, and they might end up being a valuable member of your team.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 44:12  
Absolutely, just because my brother-in-law loves them so much. He’s like, use this person. I don’t know what he’s using them for, but it’s not maybe what we need, but…

**Kira Derryberry:** 44:23  
No, he’s doing blogs.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 44:27  
Actually, I could just ask.

**Kira Derryberry:** 44:28  
Yeah, ask John about this guy because evidently, he’s amazing.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 44:30  
He’s setting the world on fire, so I certainly, when I start doing more video, will be hiring out my editing and stuff, so absolutely.

**Kira Derryberry:** 44:41  
Absolutely, all right, wonderful. Wow, look, we did another one, Mary.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 44:43  
Here we go.

**Kira Derryberry:** 44:44  
Another one, there we go.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 44:45  
All right, you guys, make sure that you catch Mary’s presentation at Imaging USA. Registration is open right now, and the hotel block is open right now, so go ahead and just get all that stuff taken care of.

**Kira Derryberry:** 44:55  
Book that stuff today, go see Mary on Tuesday—twice—and then come in super early and see me. 

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 45:02  
Stay all week.

**Kira Derryberry:** 45:03  
Stay all week. Thursday, I’m giving that one-day pre-con. That is an extra cost, so make sure you sign up for that. There’s only limited space in that room, too, for us to do a big one-day deep dive into this. And then if you’re super into this and you are in the Florida area and you want a four-day intensive seminar on Chat GPT, prompting, and productivity tips like I showed you today, you can sign up for Florida School, which is put on by FPP Online, the Florida Professional Photographers. FPPOline.com is where you can register for that, and that’s happening next month, September 21st through 24th. So, all right, we got all our things out. All right, you guys can follow us on Instagram at Get Your Shoot Together, follow us on Facebook at Get Your Shoot Together, and email us at girl@getyourshoottogether.com, and listen to us anywhere podcasts are played. We will see you guys next time.

**Mary Fisk-Taylor:** 46:00  
Thanks, y'all, see you next time.