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10 Internet Marketing Tips for Photographers

Posted on 21. Jul, 2009 by combimish in E-Marketing

The fol­low­ing post comes from Allon Bloch, the CEO of Wix.com, which is a web pub­lish­ing plat­form with free and pre­mium offer­ings. While some of Allon’s are a pitch for Wix.com’s ser­vice, I think that they can still apply to many ser­vices and plat­forms beyond Wix. Learn more about Allon and Wix, as well as some addi­tional thoughts on these tips from me at the end of this post.

We live in a dig­i­tal age, so pho­tog­ra­phers need to locate and inter­act with cus­tomers wher­ever they live within the dig­i­tal space.

Indus­try mar­ket­ing terms like “search engine opti­miza­tion,” “web design” and “social media” tend to be over­whelm­ing, but a new wave of tech­nol­ogy and ser­vices is specif­i­cally designed to help users cut through the web tape and achieve mea­sur­able results.

Here is a quick check­list to get you started.
1. Cre­ate a Web­site for Free and Make It Look Good!
Wix.com offers a host of free tools that allow artists to dis­play and sell pho­tos in the most engag­ing and dynamic light. Wix uses Flash as opposed to html, which means you can put dynamic images, videos, ani­ma­tion and music on your site to bet­ter con­vey the essence of your pho­tog­ra­phy. Best of all no cod­ing or design expe­ri­ence is needed so any­one can do it! (See my com­ments at the bot­tom of this post regard­ing alter­na­tives to Wix as well. –Ed.)

2. Tai­lor Your Site to Your Cus­tomers
Line your web­site with “key words” that match what poten­tial con­sumers will type into search engines when they are look­ing for great pho­tog­ra­phy. Put your­self in the mind of your cus­tomer, what search terms would they use when they begin their online search?

3. Cash In
Make it easy for your audi­ence to pur­chase your pho­tographs directly from your site. Some web pub­lish­ing plat­forms like Wix let your cus­tomers pur­chase items directly from your site using Pay­Pal. When it comes to online pur­chas­ing, keep­ing it sim­ple and safe is key.

4. Join an Online Gallery
Just because the econ­omy is slow doesn’t mean that should affect your art shows. There are many highly pro­fes­sional online photo gal­leries where you can dis­play your work and be inspired by the work of other artists. Join­ing an online gallery makes it easy to col­lab­o­rate with other pho­tog­ra­phers whom you may not have met with­out being online and take your cre­ativ­ity and pho­tog­ra­phy to the next level.

5. Cost Ben­e­fit Analy­sis
For every $1 spent towards online mar­ket­ing, the aver­age return is $10-$15 on your invest­ment. Com­pare this to a $3-$4 return on tra­di­tional advertising.

6. Social Media
The preva­lence of social media net­works like Face­book and Twit­ter have changed the way peo­ple inter­act online and how brands can com­mu­ni­cate with their cus­tomers. Get active on any and all social media net­works and start talk­ing to pho­tog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts directly. You’ll learn their inter­ests, gain an under­stand­ing of their tastes, build valu­able rela­tion­ships and make a name for your­self in the pho­tog­ra­phy space.

7. Tap into your net­work
By link­ing your web­site to other rel­e­vant sites like local art asso­ci­a­tions, char­i­ties or other pho­tog­ra­phy sites you will in turn get them to link to your web­site and ben­e­fit from all the eye­balls they attract.

8. Start a Blog
Start­ing a blog will help you become a thought leader within the pho­tog­ra­phy space. It gives your cus­tomers incite into what you are think­ing, where you work is headed and what your core val­ues are.

9. Media Buy­ing
The foun­da­tion of the Internet’s cur­rent struc­ture revolves around search engines, pri­mar­ily Google. Google adwords allows you to ensure your web site tops the search results for rel­e­vant top­ics. You can buy key­words and will pay google every time some­one clicks your link as a result. Don’t worry about pay­ing for 10,000 clicks in a week, adwords allows you to set limits.

10. Post It
Don’t be afraid to post all your work on your web­site, online gal­leries and social media sites. It won’t dimin­ish the value of your pho­tos it will enhance them! Get­ting your work out there will increase your vis­i­bil­ity and any­one that pur­chases good pho­tog­ra­phy won’t set­tle for low res­o­lu­tion print outs from the web.

Related Posts:

• Ever won­der what Inter­net Mar­ket­ing is or how it can help your business?
• The Seven Secret Skills Of SEO Work
• The Truth About SEO
• Does SEO Still Exist?
• Under­stand­ing Search Engine Optimization

Tags: digital-photography, easy-way, from-other, got-something, nikon, olympus, potential-customers, press-release, SEO, service-line, ten-years, the-web, through-online, web-entities