116: Glowing Google Reviews with Christine Dammann

Sabrina: On today’s episode of the shoot it straight podcast, I have my dear friend, Christine Damon, and we are talking all about Google reviews. So yes, Christine and I are both photographers, and we are coming at this from the perspective of photographers. But hear me when I say, no matter what kind of small business owner you are, this episode has something for you today.

We are talking about why Google reviews are so important, how you can use them in your marketing, And more importantly, how to get more of them. And if you’ve been in business for a while and you are struggling to get Google reviews, we talk about what the issue probably is and why that might be happening.

Christine also shares a story about her business before and after she had lots of Google reviews. And we also discuss the dreaded fear of. What happens if I get a bad review, trust me, this episode is so great and so valuable, and I can’t wait to dive in. So let’s get started. Welcome to the shoot it straight podcast.

I’m your host, Sabrina Gephardt. Here I will share an honest take on what it’s like to be a female creative entrepreneur while balancing business, motherhood, and life. Myself, along with my guests will get vulnerable through honest conversations and relatable stories because we’re willing to go there. If you’re trying to find balance in this exciting place, you’re in yet willing to talk about the hard stuff too.

The shoot it straight podcast is here to share practical and tangible takeaways. to help you shoot it straight.

Welcome to the shoot it straight podcast, my friends. I am so excited about today’s guest because she’s literally one of my favorite people. We have been friends for years. She is the most kind, encouraging. And fun person ever. I’ve literally never met anybody who meets her and is not just automatically obsessed.

Uh, my only complaint is that she does not live very close to me and that makes me sad because I don’t get to see her very often. But today is also special because this is the first interview in a Series that I’m going to do and I can’t wait for you to hear it. So for the next seven weeks, I’m going to be featuring other photography educators, and we’re going to be talking about their offers and their expertise.

What is so special about these women is that they are all currently enrolled in my education blueprint. If you’re new around here, I’ve shared about it a little on the podcast. This is a new mastermind that I offered this year for experienced photographers who were ready to step into the education space.

And so for the next seven weeks, I’m going to chat with each of them so that you, my loyal listeners can learn from them and their expertise. And you can also give them some love, which I’m going to encourage you to do. So today we are kicking off this series with my good friend, Christine Damon. So before we jump into the episode, my friend, please tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

Christine: Hi, thank you for having me. That intro was so nice. Oh my gosh. I’m lucky to know you. So thank you. Hi everybody. My name is Christine Damon. I am a lifestyle family photographer in San Diego, California. And I also enjoy helping other photographers realize their potential and build businesses they are proud of through in person and online mentoring.

A little bit about me. I’m obsessed with houseplants and have turned our home into my own personal jungle where I live with my husband, two sons and our puppy.

Sabrina: I’m so glad to have you. If you do not follow Christine on Instagram, please pause what you’re doing right now and go do that. Because if you are interested in plant material life and also pup, puppy life, um, and motherhood and like, didn’t you used to have like a series about your Trader Joe faves?

I feel like that’s fallen off a little bit. Yeah,

Christine: you know, I get embarrassed because I’m like not an influencer, but when I find something I love, I love to share it. And then I get a lot of people telling me like, I tried that, I tried this. So I just need to go back and peruse the aisles and find some new things.

Sabrina: Yeah, your, your social media account is a really fun one to follow. So guys, you need to be following her. Okay. So, We’re going to talk in today’s episode about something that I know as a longtime educator gets overlooked by a lot of photographers. And it really is a shame because it is small, but it has a very mighty impact on your business.

And we’re going to be talking about the importance of Google reviews. So Christine, let’s start at the very, very beginning. Why do you think Google reviews are so important to a business?

Christine: Reviews are huge and most people look to a review when they’re investing in a large purchase. I know I do. They are proof that the person or if you’re a service person like we are as photographers are proof you can deliver a high quality photography and give a great experience to your clients and it helps build trust when potential clients read that other people have had a great experience with us.

Sabrina: I know that you and I believe the same thing about reviews. Like I am, I’m ordering something from Amazon at least once a week. Let’s be honest, probably more than that. And if it’s something I’ve never ordered before, I am reading the reviews. And if it does, yes. And if it does not get good reviews, It’s out.

It’s out of my cart. And this is actually something that I’m teaching my teenager right now. My daughter is almost 17. And so she now has her own Amazon account can place her own orders because she has her own bank card and all this, like she’s becoming an adult human, which is wild, but I’m having to teach her about reviews because I cannot tell you how many times she has ordered something without looking at that because she’s just this naive little baby human.

And then we get it in the mail and it’s like some ridiculous, yeah, it’s horrible. And then I’m the one that has to go deal with the returns. So I’m teaching her the importance of like, Look at how many ratings it has. Read what people are saying. Google reviews are so important. And even if it’s not about a shirt on Amazon or something for your house, people want to know what an experience with you is like.

And they do that through reading reviews. Hopefully we just sold them on like, okay, okay. We need to get some good reviews, but technically speaking, can just anyone start asking for Google reviews or something? Is there something that you have to do before you can start asking for reviews?

Christine: All right. The very first thing I would do when I first started asking for your views and everything was see where I ranked organically first, because anything you’re doing to alter your Google ranking, you kind of want to have like a starting point.

So open an incognito window, search for some of the keywords that your clients would be searching for. For me, that’s like San Diego family photographer, photographers in San Diego. And I just wanted to see where I was. I was buried so deep. I was on page like five or six or worse. And I was not getting inquiries from people finding me on Google.

So after you have a starting point, you, then you want to go on and set up a Google business profile. It used to be called Google, my business now it’s Google business profile. I’m not going to go into details of how to do that because it could change if somebody is listening to this in the future. So Google had to set it up.

You will find the right steps and set up your profile, get everything going so that you can start being found.

Sabrina: Yeah. And what that does is once you get that profile set up in your account, it literally gives you a link that’s like, get more reviews. And it’s a link that you can copy and paste and send people, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

So it makes it really, really easy to kind of build this into your process. I want to mention really quickly, not only are Google reviews super important in general, because basically Buyers want to know what they’re investing in, but also we spend so much time creating content, right? Like, Oh my gosh, who knew that photographers were going to sign up to be content creators, but like we are constantly creating content for social media, blogging, writing emails.

And I feel like Google reviews are a very, very underrated form of marketing. I would love to know from you what you think, like how can we use Google reviews to support our marketing efforts.

Christine: Yeah, totally. Google reviews actually helped boost your SEO, your search engine optimization. So Google wants to push your website higher if people are reviewing you on Google versus other sites where they can leave reviews.

So I stopped asking for other site reviews a long time ago. Some sites hide summary reviews if you’re not paying for ad space. So I just only stick to Google at this point. That’s my preference. And then I’ve even taken screenshots of great Google reviews and I can use that to market on social media, on my website.

And you can share specific blurbs from your reviews to promote different offers when you are trying to push different things to your audience.

Sabrina: Yeah. Another thing I think is really great and underrated as far as using reviews to support your marketing is especially when you get like a really quality review, which we’re going to talk about here momentarily.

Your clients are literally giving you the language that you can use to find other clients like them so you can pull out the same words and sentences and phrases they’re using and write emails about them or use them in advertising copy if you want to do that or use it in advertisement You know, your social media content and stuff.

There’s just so many ways that having these reviews, having these words from your clients can help support your marketing efforts, efforts. And like I say all the time, we need to work smarter, not harder. Like if somebody else is going to give us the language for marketing, like let’s use it. Right.

Totally. Yeah. So, okay. There’s probably two categories of listeners today. We’ve got the people who are very, very new in business, and then we’ve got people that have been in business a while. So let’s start with something for the beginners. If you’ve been in business, maybe just a year or under a year, or maybe you’re just starting your business.

The thought of having like a massive amount of reviews probably sounds overwhelming. Like, how am I ever going to get there? I’m starting at zero, right? What’s the biggest piece of advice that you have? to get started collecting them. If you’re a beginner and you’re starting at like zero,

Christine: totally understand that if you’re a beginner, do not feel overwhelmed.

Just take it one step at a time. Like you do with anything else, when you’re building your website or anything else, just one step at a time, I would start by adding a step into your workflow where after your session and everything is delivered, you ask the client for a review. Don’t feel bad about it.

About asking for a review. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re able to leave your review. And if they’re really happy, they’re going to want to leave you one. So especially we are all small business owners. Like we’re connecting with people. They want to help us. You’re not going to get one from all of your clients, but it is a great bonus when you do receive one, you can also.

Ask past clients for reviews. If you know, they loved working with you, you can send out an email to past clients, but I would start with just a handful at a time, it’s going to look strange to the Google gods. If you get a ton of reviews all at once and they could possibly flag them for being fake. So just having them trickle in as best, just a few at a time, ask for five this week, wait a couple of weeks, ask for five more.

Sabrina: Yeah. I love that. You know, we all would love to think, Oh, I’m just going to email all my past clients and I’m going to see hundreds of reviews come in. You will definitely get flagged for that. You don’t want to get banned by Google, so let’s not make them angry.

Christine: Totally. I’ve had a review taken down. That was a legit review.

And I have no idea why it was taken down, but they will, they’ll just take them down for no reason if you’re not careful.

Sabrina: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve also heard, uh, just a hot tip that you are not allowed to do any kind of giveaway or promotion attached to Google reviews. I don’t know how they would track that or. I don’t know where that data is coming from, but I’ve heard that.

So maybe just keep that in mind if you’re, you know, creating a plan to get reviews. Um, but I love your advice on not expecting everyone to write one because I think mindset wise, if we’re like, Oh, I’m going to ask all my happy clients for a review. We just assume that they’re all going to give them to us.

And then when they don’t, people get frustrated, their feelings get hurt. Why won’t they write one? Just set the expectation from the beginning that you’re not going to get one ask anyways. Expect not to and let it be a happy surprise when you do because Yeah, and like you said your clients that are happy with you want to support you and While we’re talking about how much we love reading reviews, not everybody’s like that.

Not everybody’s first thought is, Oh, this was a fantastic experience. I’m going to go leave a review. Like a lot of people just don’t think that way. And so educating them. on the process of, Hey, this is important to my business. If you had a great experience, would you write a review? And then making it easy for them, building that step, like you said, into your workflow.

A lot of times, again, they don’t realize, Oh, I can take two minutes out and help my friend, Christine, who we loved working with her and they, and they will. So definitely. Now let’s flip the script for the people who have been in business for a while. They’ve already got their Google profile set up. They probably have a handful of reviews, but they’re struggling to get more.

I feel like we should address there. There’s a little underlying issue here that if you have been in business for a while, and maybe you already have it built into your workflow to ask for a review, but you’re not getting them. Your clients aren’t actually following through and writing them. Do you think there’s a reason that that’s happening?

Christine: I think you need to look at your whole client experience and see, are your clients leaving their session super happy? Are they gushing when they receive their images? Are they coming back and hiring you year after year? If not, What could the holdup be? Do you need to work on your client experience? Do you need to work on your pre or post session communication?

Are you going above and beyond for your clients or just meeting the minimum standards? I mean, I think we can all relate to hiring somebody and feeling like, Oh my gosh, like they surprised and delighted me or yeah, they did what they were supposed to do, but it’s fine. The other thing I was going to say is, are you making it easy for them to write a review?

If you’re just saying like, hey, if you had a great experience, please leave me a review. Are you including a link? Are you reminding them what they might have liked about the session? Like all of that can make it so much easier for them to be like, oh yeah, sure. I’ll pop in. I’ll leave a review. It’ll take two seconds.

Sabrina: Yeah. A hundred percent. You’ve got to make it easy for them. If somebody were to text me, even if I had a phenomenal experience, if somebody were to text me or email me and say, Hey, I know you had a great experience. I loved working with you. Would you write a review? But they didn’t tell me where to do it or send me a link or give me any kind of guidance.

That’s too much. That takes too much effort. As much as I loved them, like that is too much work. I, I, it’s so much easier for me to say, Oh, let me click this link that they included in their request. It’s like so much easier. But then also to your point, client experience, if you have been in business for years and you have been asking for Google reviews for years, and you have been including a link and making it easy for them to do that and they’re not, the real question is why are they not?

Because you’re right. It is totally a different experience for me to walk away from working with a service provider and being like, okay, I mean. I got what I paid for and like the job was done versus me walking away from a service provider and immediately going to my group chat with my friends and like telling them you have to hire this person.

It was unbelievable. Or immediately getting on my Instagram stories and being like, you guys, I found the best hidden gem in our area. Like, you know what I mean? You have

Christine: to

Sabrina: blow them away. And. I will say it, there’s a fine line between how, like in how you’re blowing them away. I don’t want people to think they’re not successful if they don’t have the best images, the best surprise gift, the best service, but like you’ve got to go above and beyond somewhere in there.

If you’re just landing in the mediocre zone for everything, your final product, How you serve them from start to finish your pricing, your, what you sell, like any of that, if it’s just mediocrity, of course you’re not getting reviews. You’re not giving them a reason to gush over the overworking with you.

You know, I want to interrupt this episode to share something I am super excited about for the first time ever. I am offering a pre black Friday sale and y’all, I can say that there is literally something for everyone in the sale during the week of November 18th. I will be highlighting a different offer every single day.

There is something for every level of photographer. So whether you are brand new in business or a seasoned veteran, and there’s something at every price point. And you guys, The discounts are massive. If you’re wondering what exactly is going to be on sale, I can’t share that with you just yet, but I can tell you that there are some old favorites and some brand new offers coming that I cannot wait to share with you soon.

So if you’re as excited as I am, let me know. I want you to go to SabrinaGabhart. com backslash holiday 24 and put your name on the wait list. Some of these offers have limited quantities and they will sell fast. And of course the wait list gets first dibs. I hope that you’re as excited as I am about this pre black Friday sale and my friend, I can’t wait to see you there.

Now back to the show. So I know that there are people listening, uh, that are nervous to ask for reviews. And I’m going to be totally honest. This was me for years. I literally never asked for a review for years because I was like, I’m not confident in my business or my, or my product. Like I don’t want to know what people think, which is silly because that’s a mindset issue because like we’ve all felt that way.

Yes. Like if people were coming back and hiring me, they’re obviously happy with me. But the question is always, what if someone leaves me a bad review? What happens then?

Christine: Right? Oh my gosh. I have seen people leave fake reviews. I’ve seen people leave a decent review with like a four or three star instead of five.

And it’s heartbreaking and worrisome. And honestly, it’s a huge motivator to give clients an amazing experience because you don’t want them to leave a bad review. But. It can happen. So if you find yourself in that situation, there are some things you can do. If the review is fake, you can respond to it and mention in the response that you’ve never actually worked with this person.

I’ve seen that. And I think as a customer seeing that I would be relieved and be like, Oh, this poor person got a fake review. Okay. I’m not going to read too much into what that one says. You can flag it. And you can try to get it removed. You can even take legal action. I don’t know what that entails, but I did see it online.

I don’t know how the flagging works, if they’ll remove it right away, or if they investigate. But you can definitely take that step. And if the review was from a client that you, from a real client, you should respond to it promptly. Google does look at you responding to the reviews, the good ones and the bad ones.

So when you get a review, you should respond to it, even if it’s just like, thanks, I had so much fun. But if it’s a bad review, you need to respond to it promptly. However, I do recommend taking time to cool off. If the review made you heated, you don’t want to respond in any kind of way that would make other clients not want to work with you.

You need to, uh, when you do respond to it, if it’s appropriate, you should apologize and take responsibility if needed. And then I would always try to resolve the situation with the client directly, but ultimately you have to do what feels right to you in your gut.

Sabrina: Yeah. And I think at the end of the day, We all understand and going back to the Amazon analogy, when something has a bunch of purchasers and everybody’s like, loved it.

Great. It’s my new favorite. And then there’s like the one negative person who you can tell, like a consumer can tell when there’s one bad seed in the middle of everybody else. And so if you can build up your bank of positive reviews, I don’t think you need to be worried about like, The one off random client who quite frankly probably isn’t happy with anyone in their life.

Right? Oh my gosh. Yep.

Christine: I have a story about that.

Sabrina: Yeah. Uh, you want to tell us?

Christine: Yeah. So I take such pride in client experience. I have a ton of great reviews, but you see a fake review or you see a bad review and it’s been like a big fear of mine. Like, Oh gosh, what if I get a fake review? Is it going to mess up my ranking?

Is it going to mess up my SEO? So my, so anyway. I did get a bad review and it was heartbreaking. I feel like my heart racing now just thinking about it because that’s what happened. I got the email that I got a one star review and I was like, what? But when I opened it, it wasn’t one of my family’s thank God, because like, I really take time with my family as I connect to them.

This was from a client from one of the preschools I photograph and I feel nervous even just talking about it. It’s just made me feel so horrible, but this person wasn’t giving me a bad review to anything I had really done. They were upset that I didn’t use props in my preschool photos and I didn’t have a beach scene or sunflowers.

They gave me a bad review because I didn’t offer the same products they had at their last preschool. Like I just don’t do those things. And that’s what I get praised for, for my school. It’s like, they’re so happy that I do things the way I do them. They never emailed me directly to complain. They went straight to the internet and left me a bad review.

And I was like, crushed by it. But also, like you said, I, you look at the person who left the review. So I opened up all the reviews and they left a ton of one star reviews for all over the place. And I was like, man, like Jack in the box can recover from this. But like Christine Damon photography, I’m a small business.

Like, thanks a lot, man. But. I also just want to make sure my clients are happy. And since they didn’t email me directly, I went to the director of the school and I asked if they had gotten any feedback from parents and they told me all the great things parents had been saying, which was lovely. And I was so relieved, but I did mention this bad review to them.

And they were not surprised. They said this family complains a lot, but they never complained directly to the directors. They only complained to corporate and it’s just who this person is. So there are just angry people out there who. don’t care about. Who they are affecting and as long as you’re serving your clients and you know, you’re serving your clients That’s all you can do.

But the best thing about this story. I was so nervous. I’m like great. I’m gonna be 4. 9 star. No you guys I Have a five star rating still because I had enough reviews enough five star reviews that it didn’t affect me My rating. I was so relieved. So relieved. Oh my gosh. So now people may not even know I have a one star review because it doesn’t show up really.

I mean, they can go look for it, but it still says Christine Damon five five stars.

Sabrina: Yeah, which is amazing. And I went and looked yesterday preparing for this interview. You have over 150 reviews. And so when somebody sees you on Google for the first time, um, Whether or not they’re clicking in and reading the reviews, for most people, probably just seeing the text that says over 150 five star reviews, they’re going to be like, Oh, dang, okay, like, I don’t even need to read anything.

And that’s the importance, right? That’s the importance of beefing up those reviews so that when you do get negative Nancy, uh, coming in hot with a review, because They leave negative reviews everywhere. It literally is not going to affect you at all. And even for somebody new who does want to peruse all of them and read them all.

Again, it’s going to be super obvious that like everybody else is gushing about you. And then there’s this one guy, so.

Christine: I have had clients say that they hired me because they saw I had so many great reviews. I’m like, Oh, well, good. They’re working, you know?

Sabrina: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So before we wrap up, just to really hammer home the importance of Google reviews, I would love for you to share another story about your business.

I love hearing the honesty about the bad Google review. And I honestly think it’s just so refreshing that you can have such a successful business, be ranked so high on Google, be such an authority in your area and literally like a one star review. Yes. It made you frustrated. But also like, it’s not affecting your business going forward, you know, but I’d love to hear a story.

Do you have anything about from like before you really started prioritizing reviews, maybe like, was it hard to market your business then? Was it hard to get seen on Google? Did you not have repeat clients? Like, is there kind of a before and an after with what it’s been like? Before you started prioritizing getting reviews versus now that you have so many and they’re working for you.

Christine: Yeah, years ago marketing felt really hard for me and I didn’t know what to do. You know when you’re starting out and you are all on your own before you realize you need to hire a really great coach and be in masterminds. You’re just kind of winging it. I was getting referrals. I was not getting any random inquiries from Google at the time.

So I was looking for ways to get new clients so I could build my business and go full time. And that’s when I started learning about search engine optimization, SEO. And I started to really geek out over all the little things I could do to boost my SEO. I started researching different SEO techniques and getting client reviews is actually one of them.

So over time, I started building those things into my workflow, like asking for reviews, updating my website, you know, making sure your images are named a certain way and size a certain way and all that stuff over time. And through consistency of doing a little bit at a time, I got to page one on Google and I get so much business from Google inquiries now, just from people searching for San Diego family photographer, seeing that I come up high.

I mean, it fluctuates. I keep doing the things and I keep checking my ranking to make sure that I’m still on page one for a lot of my keywords. It’s, it’s an ongoing process. You can’t just stop because you will dip. But now, like I mentioned before, a lot of people have told me they did hire me because I saw I had so many reviews and I was ranked high.

Sabrina: It’s kind of taking like SEO a step further instead of just relying on keywords and blogging, like why not help it even more? Um, and so I think that’s really important. And plus, again, just circling back around to the marketing thing, not only is it helping you with SEO, which is marketing that works when you sleep, but it is also, there’s so many other.

fun and unique ways to use these Google reviews to help you in the other parts of marketing. Like why would we not encourage this? So, um, I have something really exciting to share. Christine has an incredible resource, um, that she’s going to share with everyone. It’s called get glowing reviews. And it is.

So good. I have seen it. You are going to want this. So listen up. I’m going to link it in the show notes. Y’all it’s literally her email template that prompts her clients to leave reviews that are more than just the basic vanilla. We loved our experience or worse five star with no texts. It was great.

Yeah, exactly. You want the reviews that are gushing. Okay. So So if you want to aspire to be the Google review queen like Christine, grab her template. You literally swipe it, you copy paste it, you make a few updates so that it applies to your business, your area and start sending it in your workflow today.

So you can see those Google reviews start flowing in. I love to end every interview episode with some fun rapid fire questions just to, you know, let the audience know a little bit more about you. Current favorite guilty pleasure. Normally, if we hadn’t met before, maybe you’d be like, I’m obsessed with plants or I’m obsessed with my new puppy birdie.

But like, we know those things about you now. So give me something that I don’t know. What’s your current favorite guilty pleasure?

Christine: I consider my dog implants not to be a guilty pleasure. That was just a pleasure. But the things that I might be embarrassed to tell people if they don’t agree with these are like, I love Bravo TV shows.

Sabrina: Yes.

Christine: I get made so much fun of by my husband. I can’t watch them with him because he’s like, how can you? I’m like, you’re ruining it. Be quiet. Like trying to watch the housewives. But yes, you know, I’ve been watching it so long. I feel like I’m invested in these. Stupid people’s lives. Now.

Sabrina: Yes. Yes. And it’s

Christine: nice to have something mindless on when you’re editing.

Sabrina: Yes, it’s fun a lot when I ask this question, a lot of people say something related to Celebrities media something like that, right? Sure. Yeah, it’s pop culture. My you know, my pop culture guilty pleasure I am NOT a TV watcher. I am NOT like a magazine reader But you better believe I’m spending my spare time in the depths of TikTok and Taylor Swift lore.

Okay. Yeah. Christine knows this because she’s in a text thread with me and we discuss it often, but I’m also 50,

Christine: but I rely on you to give me all the Easter egg updates

Sabrina: because you don’t have the time to go through the TikTok depths, um, and get sucked in. Uh, that’s literally when I

Christine: feel like I found something new, I send it to you’re like, Oh, yeah, yeah.

That’s all this. Bye.

Sabrina: It’s ridiculous. Um, I, that’s literally the only reason I’m on TikTok. I don’t do anything else over there except go for my Taylor Swift stuff. Um, okay. My friend, what’s the next vacation you have planned?

Christine: Oh, I wish I could say I had one planned. I don’t know yet, but my birthday is coming up.

So in January, so I’m kind of thinking maybe I need to say I want to go back to Hawaii or something. I don’t know.

Sabrina: Yeah. I feel like that should be good. Although you will be in Palm Springs in January. Exactly. I was like, is that a vacation? Not really, but you do get to see me. I consider it a vacation because I’m seeing my friends, but yeah.

Christine: I did think about that. That will be really fun.

Sabrina: Yes, she’s going to be at our Roots Rise Alumni Retreat in January, our second one. It’s in Palm Springs next year. We’re super excited. So fun. And technically, it’s like a business retreat and a write off, but it’s also like so fun because all of our friends will be there and yeah, it’s totally just going to fill your soul and feel so good.

I would love to know something that you have up your sleeve for either later this year or 2025.

Christine: Okay. Well this year I’ve launched in person mentoring, but I’m also working on something fun that will launch around Black Friday. So I can’t give any details yet, but If anybody is looking for mentoring or wants to come to San Diego and shoot with me, it might be something like that.

Sabrina: Yes. You get, you guys definitely, again, linked in the show notes will be her website and her Instagram. So you can either DM her or go send her an email because she at Christine, you led a session at a root to rise mastermind retreats, uh, last, was it spring of 23? Yeah. I think it was spring of 23. She was our guest educator.

She left, led a session out there and it was amazing. And you know, what makes me so happy about that session is I still see women from that retreat share photos from that session that you led, which makes me so happy because that’s the kind of quality portfolio images that like the guest educators.

give us at the retreats. That was so fun. I loved that session. Yeah, that was amazing. Um, okay, last question. What is a business tool or hack that you’re currently loving right now?

Christine: Oh, okay. Um, I have to say I am loving Imagine AI for editing. This is not an ad. I’m not sponsored or anything. I mean, I wish I was imagined.

Sponsor me. But I started toying with it. I told you when I started playing with it and I was sort of on the fence and I have since built different profiles for my outdoor in home and schools and they just get better. The more you use them, they start refining because you upload after you edit everything.

So you, if you don’t know how it works, you send them your Lightroom catalog with a profile. They, You get it back. You download it. You make any. retouches or edits or whatever. And then you upload it again and it can use all that information to update your profile. And I have been loving it. It’s saving me a ton of time.

And oh, if anyone wants to check it out, you can get 1500 images for free. Um, I have a link on my For Photographers page if you guys want to check it out. Like I said, they are not sponsoring me. I just like it.

Sabrina: I will get, uh, you guys, I will get that link and I’ll put it in the show notes as well. Um, I’ll get Christine’s link so you can get started and try it out for free.

I love that you finally did that. Cause how many years did we talk about you outsourcing your editing? And it took you a minute to like really be okay with it and to stick with it until it works. But how much time do you have back now? Like giving it back?

Christine: I’ve tried different, Editors and companies and the later latest one I was using was fine, but you know, I hate waiting for, I hate waiting to get the thing back from the other company where this is like.

You get it back in minutes and, and it’s really consistent and it uses all the way I would edit and you can apply them to different scenarios and it saves a ton of time. I really love it.

Sabrina: Yeah, that’s amazing. I’m so glad that you finally did it and committed to sticking with it to getting it right.

That’s awesome. Okay, my friend, I knew this was going to be such a great chat. I hope that if you’re listening to this, you are inspired to up your Google review game, or if you haven’t started yet, To commit to starting it and getting those reviews. Don’t let it feel daunting. Even if you’re starting at zero, every single review helps.

And so I would love to see you grab a Christine’s freebie. I promise you it’s going to be like the freebie that does not die in your inbox because it’s so easy to grab, to copy and to implement. So I want you guys to do that as soon as you finish this episode. But thank you for being here, my friend. I appreciate your time and that’s it for today.

We will. See you guys next week. Thanks so much for listening to the Shoot at Straight podcast. You can find all the full show notes and details from today’s episode@sabrinagehart.com slash podcast. Come find me and connect over on the gram at Sabrina Gehart Photography. If you’re loving the podcast, I’d be honored if you hit that subscribe button and leave me a review.

Until next time, my friends shoot it straight.