Are you stuck in your photography business? Are clients just not coming through your door as fast as you wish? Or maybe the right clients aren’t coming through the door – they want the world for $1. What should you do next?

It isn’t your prospects and clients that have a problem; it’s you. If your business isn’t where you want it to be, it’s because you aren’t marketing it in the correct manner.  And if that’s the case, you’re probably making one of these mistakes.

Mistake #1 – Expecting online tools to effortlessly generate traffic

“Put up a website and they will come.”

“Open a Facebook account and I’ll have all the clients I need.”

There’s something about the online world that has people believing in miracles. So they build a free site on a web builder program and sit back and wait. Then they hear about the billions on Facebook and decide that’s the solution. So they set up a page there too.

Then they sit back and wait. And wait. And wait.

The problem is in thinking the web is a magical place where all your dreams come true. It’s not. And it won’t.

The Internet is simply a marketing tool. You have to work at it each day, just like you have to with non-web based marketing as well.

If you send out postcards, you can’t send out 1,000 cards one day and expect your business to be around 25 years from now. You would have to send out 1,000 cards day after day, month after month, year after year, in order to keep bringing in the right customers at the right time.

And if you’re going to market online, you have to do something every day until the end of your business. You must write blog posts day after day. You must be active on Facebook week after week. You must strive to gain followers month after month, and keep them happy year after year. [Read more…]