We are all looking for the holy grail to help our work get noticed, so I thought I’d put together a list of ideas that might help you  bring your company to the next level. You may not be the next Chris Buck or Terry Richardson, but you’ll being doing what 95% of the other people are not doing. 

First, you need to sharpen your game. There is no better advertising than that of having stunning work that rocks the socks off of a potential client. When learning to photograph, we all go through a growth period to define who we are as a photographer. After shooting tens of thousands of photos, you’ll soon find out what works for you and what doesn’t. This is the early stages of developing a style that will start to define you as a photographer. The photos that you get excited about, will probably be the ones that start to define the little niche you are trying to build. So this is probably the first and most important thing you need to do decide, who you are and what you will shoot?

Develop a Web Presence

You have to have a website or images hosted somewhere that people can find them. Even if you use Flickr.com or some other free site, you need to get your work out there to prove your abilities.

If you are going to build a site on your own, there are a number of great options, probably the best being Wordpress with tons of plugins and both free and premium themes available. Wordpress is easy to optimize for Search Engine Optimization with plugins like the All in One SEO pack and the Google XML Sitemap Generator.

Of course you’ll need hosting for your site. Do not use a free hosting service, they are terrible and loaded with ads that just detract from a professional image. Also be wary of using shared hosting that may have thousands of other sites clogging up the datapath to your site. At one point Pixebian was on a shared hosting site with over 4,500 other websites sharing the same IP address . Look at this chart below from our crawl stats for the site, before we moved to Westhost.com. This is the time in milliseconds that it took for Google to crawl Pixebian.com. Now you know why we went to a reliable hosting company. As of this writing, we have not been crawled since we changed hosting, so I hope the slow speeds did not impact our SEO effort. 

Once you have your hosting service, then you need to decide on design options. From my personal experience, forget the fancy flash intros and music. You can still use flash as I do on TerryDivyak.com, but keep it to a minimum. Editors and clients only have so much time to browse your site and if it’s slow or kludgy, then they move onto the next photographer. A well designed, easily navigable website with a short easy to remember domain name will keep viewers  focused.

Continue Reading

Optimizing your website for Google can seem like a daunting task, but if you take your time to put your site together and always think of how Google is going to look at your new window to the world, you’ll soon be on your way to a high Page Rank. First and foremost, you want to determine what your theme is going to be for your website. Are you going to share with the world all there is on how to take photos of cats? Maybe you want to have broader appeal and include all animals. Just remember, the more focused you are, the better you are able to bring your website to the forefront of the search results. David Hobby and his Strobist.com website is a great example of focusing on one particular aspect of photography, lighting with small portable flash. As of this writing, Hobby now has 200,000 mostly amateur photographers as devoted readers. His site attracts 1.6 million page views a month. His reported income is close to six figures, after only a mere 8 months.

So in thinking about your theme, it should always express the particular niche you have chosen for your website. One example is to have your title description describe your site. An example would be if you live in Cleveland and are promoting stock photography, you might want your title to not only have your website name, but the the following, “Stock photographer in Cleveland, Ohio”. Now that’s just a simple example, but you get the idea

Continue Reading

So what does this headline have to do with spider web marketing? Not a lot really, other than to illustrate a point about how to drive traffic to your website. I am going to share a little bit a of a secret that many bloggers and web masters are not aware of.

First, having a blog or a website as a photographer is critical to getting your name out there. I have been on the web since 1999, with some type of website sharing my photos. Being that photographers have a narcissistic side to us, we want to drive traffic to view our photos and share what we love to do. Getting those web hits up becomes all consuming at times, so we do all that we can to bring everyone to our little window on the internet. For me personally, I love photography, I think I’m good at it and I want to share it and maybe others will learn or be inspired. If not, they have a tens of millions of other links for those that love photography.

But how does one know what to do to bring the traffic in? Well, there are a number of ways, but I think I found one little secret that Google quietly introduced that will really help in your quest for eyeballs. Google Insights Search.

It is such an amazing application, to learn what the trends are based on what people search for on Google. Its really quite simple to use, put in your search term and all the magic data pops up, including

Interest over time - Set your time frame for your search term and it will graph the popularity of the term.

Regional Interest - See what countries or even states are most interested in your term. Plug in the word marketing just for fun and see what the top countries are… hint, one is Nigeria.

Using the graph below, I plugged in wedding photographer as a search term and you can see the search starts spiking at the end of the year, right around the middle of December. So if you have a wedding Photography business, marketing in December probably makes a lot of sense. I would have thought it  more important to ramp up your marketing in April or May, but December?

Continue Reading