Photography is a business that I find rather interesting and love due to the amount of creativity that is possible in the field. As such I have decided to write this guide to help those people in the photography niche on how to lure clients to their photography site.
You will agree with me that photography makes the internet as interesting as it is today for without photography, a lot of business will not be adequately branded today. From the loads of free stock photos to the leading photography platforms, it is easy to notice and probably underrate the effect of photography in the internet.
We have therefore decided to help our various photography experts on how to channel their creative and better connect with their audience and hence drive engagement to their site and turn the site visitors to lifetime clients.
Chances are you already have one or more social media accounts most likely on Google+, Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest. Chances are you already have a website or you are considering having a website. For those that have a website, chances still is that you are using a drag and drop site builder.
Let’s break the concepts down
Social Media Presence
If you already have social media presence (which is most likely how you found this post) then you are already doing one thing right. If not, then you definitely should have a social media account and then make sure you are good on the following checklist.
- Have a logo
- Put your logo on the profile picture (this is an integral part of online branding)
- Regularly post content on your social media account
- Use high quality hashtags (hashtags that have between 25,000 and 250,000 posts) because you don’t want to get lost in the crowd
- Connect with other people who use the hashtags you use the most (chances are you share the same interest)
- Have your website added to your social media profiles
- Connect with your established clients talking about how you enjoyed working with them
- Post pictures showing your preparing for work
- Post pictures of you doing your job
- Post pictures of you meeting up with clients
- Repost pictures that you find particularly interesting (fans of the picture are likely to check who reposted the picture)
The aim of these is to let people know that you are real and are easily relatable. People also want to know that things you find interesting and might connect once they realize that you share some interests.
Having a link to your site is the real deal as you want all of the interest that you are building to drive people somewhere and in this case your website.
Website
For your website, you want to ensure that you are not using an entirely drag and drop site builder as this has the capability to limit a whole lot of things for your site or make you pay more for some critical necessities like SEO.
For your website you want to ensure the following:
- You have a website that is easy to manage and adapt
- Your website is highly customizable
- Your website is responsive
- Your home page has the following
- A slider of your best work (four to five pictures and a 5 second video is great)
- An overview of the services your render
- Testimonials from your clients
- Call to action
- Sample work that will drive them to a portfolio page
- Your Achievements and/or awards
- A quick contact page
- A free gift (could be stock photos that are exclusive to your website visitors) that is exchanged for an email address.
- Your email address and phone number is visible in all pages of the site
- You have a blog section where you post periodically (whatever is comfortable for you to run consistently)
- Do SEO for your website
Marketing
- Connect with local bloggers so that they could mention about your work on their blog and probably drive some traffic to your site
- See if you can get shout outs from other social media accounts so that their fans might attempt to connect with you
- Host and promote a live social media event to increase your brand awareness (this could be training for beginners or fans something like “how to capture the best picture with your phone”)
If you are thinking about how to get started with all these, I suggest you have a look at our WordPress hosting options for Shared hosting here. If you are a big photography business, you would most likely need our cloud hosting or you could better still contact us for a customized hosting set-up here.
This is very helpful!