Like you, when approaching educational offerings we don’t tend to take things at face value. Why? Well, we’ve watched a lot of videos, read a ton of books, and attended our fair share of workshops. We’ve also attended US colleges, US universities, and a university in Canada. That all adds up to a heck of a lot of cash dropped on our education, and while we’ve gained a lot of useable information over the years, we don’t want you to waste your money any more than we want to waste our own.

So, we’ll get right to the point with this one. Is purchasing More Brides, by Mark Condon of Shotkit, a good idea? Yes, it is. You will be very hard-pressed to find a better all-in-one book that will tell you exactly what to do to increase your bookings. And that’s what we all want, right?

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Not a wedding photographer? No worries. More Brides is packed with actionable information, meaning you can take what it says and put it to use immediately to book all types of clients: brides, grooms, commercial, portrait, etc.

Who is Mark Condon & What’s Shotkit?

Long ago, we learned not to judge a book by the cover, but, rather, by who wrote it and what’s in it. So who’s Mark Condon? He’s the man behind Shotkit, a website that he started in 2014 that shows you what’s in the kits of some of the world’s best photographers, from automobile and fashion photographers, to sports, wedding, and wildlife photographers. Shotkit has grown leaps and bounds since 2014 and also helps photographers build photography websites, learn about quality camera gear, sell photos online, etc.

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(Rewind: Shotkit: See What Essential Gear the Pros Use)

Mark, is a British wedding photographer who lives in Sydney, Australia. He’s super humble and will be the first to tell you that he’s just like you, a photographer competing in the market. After you check out Shotkit, however, you’ll quickly find that he’s very knowledgeable about the business of photography. He just wrote an article for SLR Lounge, detailing how you can book a destination wedding in 10 days, which you can check out here. And he’s also really, really good at taking pictures of people getting married; you can check out his portfolio at Gold Hat Photography.

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More Brides: The Content

More Brides, in brief, tells you exactly what to do to book clients. There’s no fluff and no wasted pages. It’s a PDF-viewable ebook that you can read on any device, whether you’re on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or your phone. It’s 15 chapters and 191 pages, and it includes topics such as keyword research, SEO, social media, referrals, personal appearance, existing clients, what Condon calls “the ten day turnaround,” and engagement sessions. Condon pretty much covers it all. He teaches you how to make more money and how to book more of the clients you want to shoot.

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In particular, the section on SEO is phenomenal. More Brides gives solid, actionable SEO tips: what plugins to use, how to properly tag and describe your blogs, and how to optimize your loading speed and the images you use.

Do you waste too much time on social media? More Brides will help with that too. You’ll learn how to maximize your social media impact with instruction on both organic and paid techniques: how to effectively direct message, how to reuse content, and how to do paid Facebook advertising correctly. We personally learned a lot about reusing content from reading More Brides. It kinda blew our minds.

(Related: The Importance of Making Your Clients Your Biggest Fans)

Another gem contained in the pages of More Brides is the content surrounding a discussion of making every client and every vendor your own personal salesperson. You’ll learn how to make an impression. And that, in turn, will bring you more business because your clients and the vendors that you work with will become lifetime fans of you and your business.

More Brides: The Cost

More Brides costs $48 (USD), and you can buy it direct from Shotkit.  It’s a decent price in our opinion, and a solid value, considering you get 191 pages of useable information. Very useable information. Information that you can put into practice right away to immediately impact your business in a very positive manner.

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 And you can also bundle and save a bit of your very hard earned cash. The Shotkit Bundle (More Brides, Lightroom Power User, and The Shotkit Book) is availble for $79 (USD).

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Conclusion

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This is simply a must have. And Condon goes a step above and beyond with this ebook. He backs up More Brides by offering to give you your money back if you don’t double your bookings after putting what you read into practice: “In fact, I’m so confident that you can at least double your wedding booking requests in under 6 months that I’m willing to offer a money back guarantee.”

We’d love for you to weigh in on your experiences with any of Shotkit’s publications. What are your best tips for getting more wedding clients? Leave a comment below! And, as always, feel free to continue the conversation over at Facebook on our every-growing SLR Lounge Photography Community page.

 

All images are copyright Shotkit (2016) and have been used with permission for SLR Lounge. Do not copy, modify, or re-post this article or images without express permission from SLR Lounge and Shotkit.