We HEART Amy & Angie of I Heart Faces!

We are both friends with Donna Boucher (a photography contributor for Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman) from visiting her blog daily for quite some time. We both love the friendliness of her blog and the beautiful photography she displays on her site. One day Donna posted a link to a free download Amy was offering on her blog and Angie decided to pop over there to check it out. That was basically the start of our friendship!

Angie left a comment on Amy’s blog. Amy responded with an email. Within a week we were emailing each other back-and-forth almost daily. We were both drawn to each other’s sense of humor, faith and interests.

One interesting facet of IHF is that we set up the site after only knowing each other for a few months and without ever having met each other in person. We had never even spoken on the phone together until one week before our launch date! IHF was completely dreamed up, planned and implemented through email. Now, of course, we talk almost daily (if not ten times a day!) on the phone.

2. When did you start I Heart Faces & what inspired you?

In late November of 2008, Angie was newer to photography and really enjoyed joining online photography linky’s through her blog. She noticed that there were quite a few options out there for themes like nature, the sky, animals, colors and other things… but not for her favorite type of photography – portraits of people. She wrote Amy an email saying she’d love to start a site just for photographers who want to share their photos of people. Then, from that one email, a slew of brainstorming started and the ideas began to flow between the two of us. A few days later Amy, a graphic designer, had come up with a name we both loved and a brand identity for I Heart Faces. The site was live just a month later…we can honestly say that we never quite expected it to take off so fast!

3. What is some of the best marketing that you’ve done to help get I Heart Faces off the ground?

Personal relationships:  About a month before IHF was to launch, we asked our personal blogging friends to help us spread the word.  These people were willing to help us because of the genuine friendships we had created with them before IHF was even a thought in our minds.

Brand: The overall design, colors and meaning were very important in leaving a lasting impression with people. We brainstormed a lot about what we wanted our site to represent. We achieved that successfully from the beginning with good branding.

Giveaway:  Two weeks before our launch date, we offered a free advertising giveaway (this was risky because we had NO live site at the time.) People could earn entries by tweeting about us, blogging about us, etc.  We then gave them two months of free advertising on our web site with a custom designed button by Amy.  This giveaway essentially cost us nothing except some time invested in creating the buttons, but gave us tremendous word-of-mouth advertising.

Twitter:  Twitter was probably our number one source that we used to spread the word about IHF.  We engaged and followed many photographers, then they followed us back, got involved in our giveaway and prepared themselves to join in the fun of our first photo challenge.

Focusing on our Fans:  We do everything we can to feature and put the focus on our fans any chance we can.  By displaying the Winning Photos, featuring a Fan of the Week, showcasing photos that are submitted to our Community Website, sharing good news they’ve had in their lives and much more.  Our fans are the lifeblood of our site and we like to honor them in special ways whenever possible.  In return, we’ve found that we have loyal participants, fans and friends who help us spread the word about IHF every time they enter one of our photo challenges.

4. What has been your favorite contest so far?

There are two challenges that were very emotional for us…  Self Portrait and Pink.

Our Self-Portrait challenge was one in which we stated that the person who entered a photo into that week’s challenge had to actually be in their photo entry.  This was very difficult for many…most of our participants are women and a lot of women just do not like to be photographed (including us!)  We literally cried as we read everyone’s posts where most of them talked about how much freedom this challenge had given them and how much it made them realize that they needed to put themselves into their photos more for their children. Many mother and child memories were made during that photo challenge. It was amazing to see!

Pink Week was when we honored Breast Cancer Awareness month.  We both have breast cancer survivors in our families (and Amy has lost a grandmother to this terrible disease.)  It was amazing to see the beautiful photos that people submitted to celebrate those who have fought this disease and won and also to remember those who had passed on from this dreadful disease.

5. How did you go about getting quality sponsors for your website?

Mainly, we haven’t done anything (we wish we had some magic formula we could share with you!)  Most of our sponsors have approached us and we have a detailed Media Kit that we can send them to that lists exactly what it costs to be a sponsor of IHF and exactly what we will do for them in return.  There are a few vendors whose products we just adore that we have sent emails to asking them if they would like to become a sponsor, and they usually do end up getting involved with our site.

6. How do you both balance your families, work, and I Heart Faces?

This is by far the most difficult part of IHF for us.  Most blogs involve the owner writing one post each day.  They can even schedule their posts well ahead of time if needed, effectively giving themselves whole weeks off if they wanted to.

IHF is not that type of site at all.  Our photo challenges start on Monday morning and we then spend Monday through Thursday going through every single entry narrowing them down to the top choices that are sent on to our weekly Guest Photographer Judge.  This process takes an enormous amount of time and isn’t something that we can do ahead of time.  We then have to wait to get the Judge’s choices back from them so that we can write the weekly Winners Post usually either the night before it should be posted or that morning.

There is also an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes work: Writing posts, setting up Guest Photographer Judges, communicating with our Contributors, scheduling Fix-It Fridays, responding to emails, promotions, communicating through Twitter and Facebook, communicating with sponsors, book keeping, approving new members and photos on our Community Website, working on new plans and events for IHF, etc.  We can each easily put 40 hours a week into IHF and we usually do just that. Plus, we also have our own personal blogs and businesses that we run in our spare time. Whew! You tired yet?  We are!  :)

All we can say is that we do our best to keep balance between work and family, but it’s not easy. We usually stay up very late after our kids have gone to bed to get things finished. It’s not unusual for us to be talking to each other at 3 am! We also try to stay offline as much as we can on the weekends only doing posts in the mornings. {On a sidenote…we have both gained a few pounds this past year because there is no time to workout anymore!}

We are extremely blessed to have each other and that we have so much fun together! We have many things in common, but we also are very different.  In our situation, this has been a very good thing.  Amy is an amazing graphic designer who has her own business, is good at marketing, communicates effectively with businesses and sponsors, loves to think big when it comes to new ideas, is very business minded and understands blogging know-how.  Angie is a former-teacher turned stay-at-home-mom who enjoys writing, is home during the day to fix things when needed, knows the photography blogging community very well, is down-to-earth and grounded while discussing new, big ideas and has strong interpersonal skills when it comes to communicating with our participants, judges and contributors.  We have divided our tasks so that the person who is strongest in that area is in charge of that part of IHF.  This, of course, involves constant communication back-and-forth, but we have found that it is the only way for us to handle all of our work and be able to have a personal life as well.

7. How effective has twitter and facebook been for you?

As discussed above, Twitter has been a tremendous way for us to spread the word about IHF to the online photography and blogging community.  It also gives us a quick and easy way to respond to our participants and to help us be more personal with our fans.  We honestly can’t imagine anyone with an online business not having a Twitter account and actively using it to enhance their business. We’ve met some amazing contacts through Twitter and have developed deep friendships through Twitter as well.

When we first started IHF, Facebook was not very effective for us at all…until they created Facebook Fan Pages.  We now have an active community of fans who interact with us through our FB Fan Page and we get a tremendous amount of hits from FB because of that.

8. What are your hopes for the future of i heart faces?

Our hope is that I Heart Faces would go more main stream in the photography industry. Right now, the online world of photography is very male oriented. Our readership is 97% women… wonderful women photographers!! We would love to be a big part of putting women on the map in more than just a blogger perspective… but a photographer perspective.  Women communicate differently and are natural encouragers. We have seen what great results that can produce in just a short year. We are both moms who blog, but also serious business women who are photographers. We hope to help women be seen in a more professional light while also helping each other become better at our craft.

We have big, huge, amazing, wonderful plans that we’ll be announcing soon! They are very secret right now but we hope to be able to reveal them through our blog within the next month or so and we are convinced that they will make IHF an even more amazing place to grow and learn together!

Thank you so much for inviting us to share our thoughts on your site…we hope that it helped you as you work to build your own strong and effective businesses!

-Angie & Amy
co-founders of I Heart Faces