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Get Creative With Your Marketing: How Others Are Using Pinterest

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Pinterest is definitely looking like it will be the social media darling of 2012 if the first month of the year is any indication. Not only has it found its way into the top 10 websites in the social media category, its also scoring over 40 times the number of total visits in had just six months ago.

Dig Deeper: How To Boost Your Photography Business With Pinterest

The site is perfect for photographers because its target market user group is women between the ages of 25 and 44, and it’s a visual media form. Early users of this site were brides to be, as they could develop numerous pinboards for every aspect of their wedding, from planning the decorations to choosing wedding attire. Now we’re seeing a wide variety of visual businesses use Pinterest on a regular basis, from photographers to graphic designers and other artisans. If you are in a visual field, Pinterest is the place to be.

Pinterest is all about eye candy. Its about creating things in such a way that people are attracted to it and like or pin it themselves – over and over again. The more likes or pins, the more traffic.

The first step is creating your Pin Boards. Be creatively descriptive when designing your boards:

Think visual – how do you want to showcase different ideas within your business?

Tell the story – as a photographer, you can share ideas from beginning to end. Tell stories all the time and let your followers discover more depth to what you have to offer.

Stretch to show your expertise – its not all about you. When you discover other sites, resources, images that convey your ideas, don’t be afraid to share them.

Consistency is the key – just like every other social site you ever used, you have to be consistent both in your posting schedule and with what you are posting.

The second step is pinning to your boards: [Read more...]

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Spending Millions To Promote A Dying Industry

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Last night we were watching a little TV and a commercial came on I couldn’t help but notice.

It was for a major yellow pages business. They were advertising their services, stating they could help a variety of buisnesses in many manners. They could provide you with a host of advertising methods, including the hard copy phone book and online resources. What really caught my eye was the industries they were targeting: weddings. They were speaking directly to people within the wedding industry, venues, planners, photographers, etc, stating they could help you reach out to your potential customers and give you top results with the people who are looking for you.

Really?

I’m sure a ton of people buy into this. I know they do; I meet them all the time.

Yet if you take the time to think about it, you can quickly see why this is a complete waste of money and time.

Lets start with a target market. If you are targeting weddings, predominately you are targeting people 20-ish to 40-ish. 20 somethings grew up with computers and utilize technology every day. Even 40 somethings have spent most of their adult lives using technology and probably have a good understanding of how to capture information.

I seriously doubt if most of this audience has a phone book in their homes. And I also doubt if they head online, and go to the yellow pages directory to find what they are looking for. They Google what they want and rely on natural search results.

Which brings me to my next point. The yellow pages company offers online services in the form of pay per clicks. They will offer you a great package deal in which you get a listing in the phone book, a custom site they control, and lots of traffic they buy using pay per click technology. If you pay, you get the traffic. If you don’t, its gone immediately. And even if you do pay, its in the form of sponsored ads – yep, those great little ads you see on the side of your search results. Do people click on them? Yes. But in a lot less frequency then they do a great position on the natural placement.

So are you better off spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on advertising with old, traditional methods that don’t have much weight in your target community?

Or are you better off spending time learning how to capture natural placement, spending a small amount of money increasing your understanding of online marketing?

Before you jump into any type of advertising, think first. Make sure your clientele uses whatever you are thinking about investing in. Make sure they rely on it as a resource. If you’re not sure, ask.

Then make a smart, informed decision. Go to where your audience is. Never expect them to come to you.

The more you give them what they want, the more business you will attract.

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Why You Should Not Be SEOing Your Website

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If you have an active blog for your photography business, chances are you’ve read all you can about SEO. If you’re going to write day after day to try and attract new clientele, you might as well make sure the search engines love it, right?

And while I agree SEO may still have a place in your overall business marketing model, if you’re doing it the “old school” way, you’re probably not having much success. Here’s why.

[If you’re just getting started with SEO, here’s a great place to start: Best SEO Practices and Tips For Your Photography Business.]

Traditional SEO

People that follow the “old school” method of SEO love to use keywords. They fill up their titles, meta tags, descriptions and content with as many keywords as they possibly can.

If you look at the title of their blog posts, they look something like this:

Wedding Photography California: Jim and Kelley – Engagement Photos at Laguna Beach

Or something along this line of thinking. Then if you hover over the photographs they’ve included in the post to see the meta tags, you’ll find something like this:

Jim and Kelley Engagement Photos in Laguna Beach California Wedding Photography Wedding Photographer John Smith with Smith Photography Inc Image 1

And of course as you read through the post, you’ll find those same keywords listed again and again. And again.

Its enough to make you back out as fast as you can. And its enough to make Google back away as well.

While this “old school” method of SEOing may have worked in the past, Google has been watching these sites for years. And they’ve decided that they have less value than a site that speaks directly to their audience. So they weight them differently, don’t give them top value, and throw the ranking down below those that are concentrating on quality rather than keyword stuffing.

What To Do Instead

Whether you’ve been doing this type of SEOing for months, or have recently read about it and were thinking of adopting this strategy this year, think again.

Instead, focus in on what you can do to make your content that much richer; that much more valuable to the people that want to read it.

Start with your domain name. If the word “photography” is already in your domain name, it will be a part of every page you create. And while you can use it as a keyword, its not necessary to over use it.

Create motivating titles. People like stories. So start the story with a great title.

A Fun Day At Laguna Beach Celebrating The Engagement of Jim and Kelley

Regulars to your blog will be instantly attracted to a title like that because it concentrates on what it is “engagement” and where “Laguna Beach”.

From there, you can really play it up.

How To Get Romantic: Jason and Crystal Showed Us How Its Done

and

Fun In The Sand: Did You Ever Think An Engagement Shoot Could Be Like This?

That’s where the interaction comes in. That’s where people come back to your blog again and again because they love what you have to say AND what you produce.

Tag your photos the right way. Then tag your photographs with an appropriate tag for the post. You don’t have to tag the photo with your name, the business name, unless it’s a photo of you. Instead, focus in on what it’s a photo of: [Read more...]

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How To Run A Successful Pay Per Click Campaign

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Want access to instant potential clients? Nothing can be easier than working with Google Adwords, or Pay Per Click (PPC).

Google has offered its PPC service for many years. And because its been around for a long time, small time business owners think it may not be the place to start, or its too expensive for them to accomplish anything with it. That’s simply not true. PPC is still the best way to test out your offer, the easiest place to get instant results, and one of the least expensive way to advertise.

Dig Deeper: Is Google AdWords Your Solution To More Clients Dropping By Your Photography Business?

With PPC, you place money down for your ad at the time you create it. But the money you put into your account isn’t for the ad creation like it is with magazines. Instead its held in an account and will be deducted as people see your ad in Google and click on it. You have complete control over your funding – start with something low like $10 per day. When the $10 fee is reached, your ad won’t appear again until the next day.

You also have total control over what keywords you will be listed under. Appearing under a generic term such as “wedding photography” would be a big hit to your budget. But if you really niche it down, you can do pretty well. You will only be advertising to people that have thought hard about what they are looking for, and type in what they want.

So – if you know your customer and have been wanting to try PPC, lets walk through the steps necessary to create a dynamic campaign.

Identify the keywords you are selling to

Let’s say you are trying to increase your boudoir photography business, and decide to use PPC to find new customers. Start by finding out who your competition is. Head over to Google and type in your keywords and look at the ads. Head over to their sites to see what they offer, what the sites look like, and how they are approaching their customers. You can learn a lot with just a small amount of research. For example, below you can see the difference just by switching from the keyword “boudoir photography” to “boudoir photographer”.

Keyword research

When you’re writing up content for your site and SEOing your site, you are mainly concerned with keywords people would type in to find you. With PPC, you have more flexibility and have different match types – broad, phrase and exact. Broad matches are a great place to start, as this will help you figure out what people are searching for and how they are finding you. Once you are sure of what they are typing in and what is helping you find paying customers, switch to an exact match. You can also use them in combination to help eliminate phrases that provide no results at all. For example, boudoir can have a lot of connotations. By doing a broad match with “boudoir photography” you may also pull the keywords “boudoir pictures” and discover that line of thinking isn’t right for your business. So you simply add that as a negative keyword, and your ad will no longer show with that phrase. [Read more...]

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Best SEO Practices and Tips For Your Photography Business

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Search engine optimization, or SEO, has been around for a long time. As new techniques are developed and new strategies are put into place, people question the effectiveness of SEO. Is it still something you should work for, or are there better ways to spend your time and energy?

The short answer to this is, of course, yes. SEO will always be in place in some manner, though the strategies and the way we approach it may change over time. But SEO ultimately is about creating the best content to attract the right people when they perform a search. And not matter how you do that, the ultimate goal is traffic. Its about getting people to find you, click through, and connect up with you for the possibility of becoming a client at some point in the future.

Dig Deeper: SEO – A Primer For Photographers

Dig Deeper: 3 Ways To Make Sure Your Blog Posts Are Perfect For Search Engine Placement

Essentially, SEO is about ranking well in the search engines. The higher you rank under specific search terms, the more likely you will connect up with people that want to do business with you. And the way you rank well is to provide quality and optimized content. While different search engines and directories have different ways of ranking, there are key strategies that work well across the board.

On Page SEO

On page SEO is the items we can control. It’s the content we use to develop a new page on our site, and the way we use key strategies within that page. It’s the factors we control ourselves, such as keywords, tags and links.

Keywords – When you are writing and creating a new page of content, it will invariably be about one topic. That is the keyword you are trying to rank well for. It can be one word such as “photography” or a phrase such as “wedding photography in Colorado”.

As you write your content, remember you are writing for two – the search engines and for your readers. If you fill your page with keywords, your reader will get bored and tune you out. Strike a balance between the two, and as you write over time, you’ll come out a winner.

You should also use other SEO strategies with your keywords. Use your keyword in your title, your title tags, within the first 100 words of your starting paragraph, anchor text, image tags, and even in comment tags. [Read more...]

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5 Steps To Creating A Successful QR Code Campaign

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Do you have a Smart Phone? Are you using QR codes in your marketing campaigns? If not, it may be time to add this to your toolbox, and reach out to customers in a whole new way.

While they are still new a novelty here in the US, they’ve actually been used around the world for quite awhile now. Yet more often than not, when I do see people using them, they are making costly mistakes. Use these steps to guide you into using QR codes the right way.

Step 1: Create Your QR Code Strategy

Have you ever created a postcard on a whim, and sent it to a random list? Of course not. If you’re going to invest time and money in a postcard campaign, you’re going to strategize the best opportunities, hand select the mailing list to send to, and create a postcard that speaks directly to those people.

The same applies to your QR code plan. You need to understand your target audience, and direct them to an offer made exclusively for them.

Start by understanding your target audience. Do they know what a QR code is? Do you need to explain how to use it, or direct them to a code reader?  Where will they be scanning the code and what do you want them to do from there?

Next, decide how and why you are using a QR code. Are you putting it on your existing marketing materials? QR codes are easy to use, create and print. You can put them on your business cards, place them on your storefront window, or include it on your blog or Facebook account. Where they find your QR code depends on how they will use it.

A QR code on your storefront window may be a great way to target walk-by traffic, give them a coupon to try you out, or even provide initial information on your services. If they are already sitting at a computer and find it on your Facebook account, its easier to send them to pages where they can watch videos, or even get a free ebook to provide more information.

Without directing people to a specific place with a specific task in mind, there isn’t much difference providing a URL. What makes QR technology so effective is you can provide the best information possible right when your customers need it the most.

Step 2: Create Your Codes

There are numerous ways of creating QR codes, both for free and pay. You can create free QR codes quickly with Google’s URL shortener. Simply type in the URL you want the QR code directed to, and hit shorten. It will appear in the list below. When you click on the details, you can open up and review stats for that URL, and it will also provide you with a QR code you can use on just about anything. Keep in mind it’s a small code, so you won’t be able to blow it up to large format – but its great for using on your sites, Facebook, etc.

Dig Deeper: 10 Sites That May Inspire Your Photography

You can also use the Microsoft Tag system. Tags are completely customizable, so you can move beyond the “black square” technology, and incorporate colors, graphics and even text into your tag, making it more personable and brandable.

While both of these systems are free, there are many other companies that offer QR or Tag technology that allows you to enhance the user experience. Do a quick search and you’ll find a wealth of information on this new and growing technology. [Read more...]

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Are You Taking Care Of Your Online Persona?

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You probably do it a hundred times a day.

You head over to Google and type in a quick search to find something. It could be the definition of a word. It could be a product you have been searching for. Or it could be a search to find the solution to a problem you’ve been having.

Search has now become a standard in our vocabulary. If you need something, you Google it.

But while you are searching for other things, someone could very well be Googling you.

It doesn’t matter if you write something, have a site, or use a social media platform. Even if you’ve completely stayed away from the Internet, with the tools available today, anybody that knows you could be writing about you.

  • They could write up a review of your business.
  • They could write about a party you recently attended.
  • They could post photos from Friday night’s big game.

It doesn’t matter if its true or not, or even if its you, you can be labeled within a few minutes time.

Yes, some names get lost in the masses. And if you have a common name, it may actually be harder to track what is being said about you.

But if you have a fairly unusual name, tracking can be as easy as Googling yourself once in awhile.

Start By Avoiding

The easiest way to avoid having problems with your online persona is to avoid making the wrong impression through your writing and posting. [Read more...]

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Is Google AdWords Your Solution To More Clients Dropping By Your Photography Business?

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Google is doing some pretty serious promoting at the moment. This week alone I’ve received two letters in the mail, an email offer, and a variety of online offers for $100 in free advertising.

What could be better than that?

Have you ever tried Google AdWords? With AdWords, you can set up an account, put in your credit card, and choose the keywords you would like to advertise under. Then any time a potential client heads to Google and types in your keywords, your ad will come up in the sponsored section of Google. The more you are willing to pay, the higher you’ll be placed.

In theory, it’s a great form of advertising. You can be up and running, and have the top listing in under 15 minutes.

But is it the right way to advertise your business? That depends.

1. Are people searching for your specialty online on a regular basis?

While it may seem like people search online for everything, the truth is you have to know before you assume. [Read more...]

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The Pros and Cons of Using Groupon

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Daily deal sites are all the rage in today’s economy. Groupon may appear to be the leader, but many other companies are right in line, offering their own versions:

Groupon
Google Offers – beta version
Living Social
Woot!
Eversave
BuyWithMe

You can even find a variety of niche deal of the day sites

Wozofoto
Photo Deal of the Day

While deal sites are definitely the rage from the consumer side, what about the business side? Does it make sense for you as a business owner to jump on board and make your own offer?

Before you think of running your own ad, it’s worth a moment or two to put together your plan, and understand what you hope to accomplish first.

The way most deal sites work is they offer a different deal on each day, and promote it in a variety of ways, including the site itself, emails and social sites like Twitter and Facebook. If they are big enough, they know how to get the word out.

When you put together your offer, you must give a discount off your service – typically a 50 to 90 percent off deal. The promotion is only valid if a certain number of people buy into the deal within the set period of time, usually 24 hours. Then the daily deal site will keep 50 percent of the revenues made from the deal.

While there have been many stories circulating online about the value of using a daily deal site for your business, as with any marketing tool you use, you have to understand the nuances of the tool before you make your offer. Sites like Groupon have pros and cons, just like any other marketing tool. You just have to understand how to use it effectively.

Pros

Daily deals attract a lot of customers.
If you make the right offer, it’s not uncommon to gain hundreds of new customers during the 24 hour selling process. The beauty of daily deals sites is the quickness of the decision. A person will view the offer in their preferred manner, and make a buying decision within seconds. If they proceed, with just a couple of clicks the deal has been purchased. While it’s a great way to gain new customers that may have thought about trying you in the past, its also a great way of gaining repeat business from people that haven’t used your services in a while. [Read more...]

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Why The Only Thing That Matters To Your Photography Business Is Traffic

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We have a building down the street from us that has housed five different restaurants in the past two years. The first had been around for years, and the owners were a part of the community. But they decided to retire, and sold the business. That owner “forgot” to pay taxes, and was shut down in a matter of months. And so the cycle began. Restaurant number two opened and shut down. Same with number three, four and five. Right now there is another large dumpster out front, so I’m sure number six will be open in just a few more weeks.

Why did each of these businesses fail so quickly? Ultimately it came down to traffic. If there aren’t enough people coming through the doors to make ends meet, you can’t survive as a business.

In order to get new business through your doors, you have to generate the traffic. Whether its recommendations from friends, coupons mailed to nearby homes, or networking with local businesses, you have to do something to generate the traffic.

That same thought process carries through to the online world as well.

In order to make connections online, you have to be “talking” in the right places. Its great if you blog, but if you are the only one reading it, it won’t do you any good. Same goes for Twitter, Facebook and more. [Read more...]

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