First, you need a good display gallery of the cards. Of course, we have cards.smugmug.com, but that won’t have your branding. Great in a pinch, but here’s another way, I’ve set up galleries on my site to show off our 5×7 cards and our 4×8 cards.

How to do this? It takes only a couple minutes, and I’ve made step-by-step instructions here on Dgrin.

Next, let your clients choose their holiday photo and then pick a card template, and some text to put on the card. You then make the card, when logged in, go to the photo in the client gallery and choose “Buy” then “create a card” – or, again, logged in, visit cards.smugmug.com and find the card you want, and click the ‘make this card’ link under the card, it will bring you right to the card maker Make the card, and on the ‘Create’ tab in the card maker, choose ‘just window shopping’ – the card will then be placed into your “My SmugMug Creations” gallery when finished. Go to that gallery, and use the tools menu to choose ‘Move to Gallery’ – and place it in a new gallery just for your client – e.g., ‘The Smith Family Holiday Card’.

Last step – you’ll want to price this card at your pro pricing – so, choose tools, set prices, and first apply $0 to all products, then type in your prices for the cards. Click save and voila, your done!

Check out the itinerary and book your tickets here.

With SmugMug’s cropping tool and proof delay, Steve’s customers get exactly what they want.

We’re really excited about these, we’ve got dozens and dozens of designs, and more being added all the time. Holidays, of course, but don’t forget baby announcements, thank yous, invitations, and more. We’ll be adding Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthday cards, too.

Pros, we don’t have ‘em available for ordering by your customers at your pro prices yet, sorry. Here’s how I sell ‘em to my clients. More info, and help.

Poke around the catalog, you’ll see that we also added new 3:2 ratio and also square ratio, canvas sizes! And a few cool gift items, as well. Don’t forget, you’ll need to set prices for all of these items.

We’ll also be announcing this via release notes, and QuickNews.

The Pop Photo Contest: Show us your Skills – Enter Now! Here is your chance to gain recognition in The 15th Annual Popular Photography Photo Contest and have the opportunity to have your work shown in the January 2009 issue of Popular Photography, the largest photo magazine in the world, as well as on PopPhoto.com.

The American Photo Contest: Don’t Miss your chance to enter The American PHOTO Annual images of the Year Event! This International Competition has become the definitive showcase of the very best in contemporary photography.

Now many of you are gonna be worried about feeds and “right click protection” – I say, watermark your images, block the largest display sizes if you need to but get your name out there!

Feeds are also a great way for your customers, fans, and family to keep up on your work.

C’mon now, everyone: “Feeds are our friends!” As always, I’d love to hear from you if you have questions about this. Holler for me at our help desk and I or our team of Support Heroes will be there for you!

Right click protection is a mild deterrent, and it’s one part of your overall image security on SmugMug. It should not be the only security that you use. It can be foiled by modern browsers. Another thing to be aware of, is that when you are sending an image over the web to a browser, that image is in the viewer’s computer, in the browser’s temporary internet files. Savvy folks can find this. Also, SmugMug’s right click protection won’t carry through to images displayed in forums, emails or other websites, or to the thumbnails of your images on SmugMug.

What can you do? Use all the image protection available. Right click protect, add a watermark, and block the largest display copies. And add disabling of external links (they won’t be able to link to their myspace).

As always, holler to our Support Heroes if you have any questions at all.

Thanks!