Advertising advice

Thank you so much! I didn't even know about this site, will have a look at it.

Really appreciated.

xx

I can accross mine in photography parlour forum

We just happened to see an advert on Facebook and the picture really caught our eye and we booked him almost immediately as his website and pics look fabulous.

Still haven't booked a photographer, but we're going either through recommendations or random google searching. I'm not a fan of wedding fairs and magazines are a waste of money so we don't have any (not that there are any wedding magazines targeted at men!) but then i'm probably not your target audience so perhaps my opinions ren't worth much (you would be amazed at how many photographers have assumed that my fiancee is the sole decision maker, really bad decision on their part)

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Interesting thread

I suppose advertising on guumtree / ebay will really be aimed at one end of the market. We mainly book people via our website (but you need very good SEO to get the trafic), via wedding fayres and in the past from places like photographers.co.uk. We havent found a bridal publication that really delivers yet. Yellow pages is a disaster, and only gave us totally unrealistic calls like "I want you all day, and I want a story book, and my budget is £200 and Im seeing 14 other photographers"

The facebook thing is great if you do the whole blog / twitter / flicr / facebook linked up type site. In that way you can publish to your blog, and hit a wide range of places at once. I find facebook quite high maintanence in terms of time, and there is too much peripheral stuff going on. However many photographers susessfully use it> You can make a facebook business page that is essentially 1way.. thats probrably the best bet for facebook
We are finding a lot of venues have a "prefered photographer" thats in the package, and thats a tough one to break past. Its a shame because the B&G really want to choose a photographer rather than feeling one is foisted onto them

Of course most bookings are from referals. We get quite a lot of people book from the cards we leave (with permission) at weddings with the online wedding gallery details on. If people see you working, and then see your work, half the battle is won


The other thing to consider is where you live and where you are prepared to work, lucky for you, London is comparitivley local

How are other local photographers priced compared with you? Somtimes an adjustment in price (up or down) can wierdly make quite a lot of difference to enquiries

My fiancee is a wedding TOG and he gets recommended verbally a lot, and is booked for the whole of this year just by word of mouth, but he has done a few wedding fairs but has come home at the end of the day with only a couple of enquiries, so he doesnt seem to think they are worth the money.

he does advertise within the weddingpartners company he is in, but thats it.

i think a lot of work comes through facebook as mentioned and word of mouth to be honest!

A good ranking in bing, yahoo and google works best for me. that and google adwords, I get very little through facebook but having an onsite blog does wonders for search engine rankings.

Yellow pages, touch local, scoot etc... are next to useless. infact nearly all sites that are not direct customer contact dont tend to work... (directories)

I do get alot through word of mouth and recommendations.

The local registry office magazine which i was unsure about has worked a treat as i have had a few bookings out of that.

Good old word of mouth here I'm afraid! We firstly looked online for togs in our area and met a few...but then asked around locally and took a recommendation from friends, met the guy and he was fab so we booked him straight away. ?

I did all of my research for a TOG online. I spent loads of time looking at websites, I found the company blogs more useful than anything else. I found TOG websites which did not have lots of beautiful images did not keep my attention very long.

My advice would be a good website with lots of good images (obviously) and good blog and some SEO.

I work in marketing and am looking for a wedding photographer! I would say, for me anyway, successful search engine optimisation would be your first step. It's free and can really help your Google rankings. Just bear in mind it can sometimes take a few months to take effect. Think about who your audience is and what they would likely be searching for (i.e. Leeds wedding photographer, yorkshire wedding for example) and make sure all of these words are built into the body text of your website. Avoid a flash website as Google recognises these as one image rather than picking out the text.

Your next step would be to look at Google adwords if you have the budget - pretty much the same principle as above but your competing against less people and will appear at the top or down the right hand side if your chosen words match that persons search term.

Kate x

you are right - the issue for photographers is the competition. My husbands local competitors had something like 4000 inlinks from unique domains

Lucky for us, SEO is something we do, It took months to break page 1 and many more months to get a 1/2 position

I would definately sell at i wedding fayre if i was you! Local ones. People always pick up your info, its a great place for them to look through your portfolios with little effort, and if they like what they see they can see if they like you too! Thats how we met ours, their chat and their albums enticed us in, and so we arranged to meet them. We werent ready to book, as we hadnt chosen our venue yet, but they kept in touch every few months with an email asking us if we were still interested, which kept them at the front of our minds. They also helped with ideas for venues as well, all bonus points (good salesmanship!) :-)

Thank you all so much for your help, that is really greatly appreciated and useful! Lots of really interesting thoughts. Really excited about looking into all these new things. I have always worked from recommendations in the past which I still get and hitched has also brought lots of work my way but I now would like more work so want to boost my advertising. Brilliant, thank you all!

Evelyne x

With every avenue of advertising it's going to cost you, usually in money.

The best results come from those you invest time in.

Whilst you can take a magazine page out it's £550 and will possibly not get you any work at all. Google Adwords is expensive and close to useless for the cost involved.

Hitched costs me £180 a year but for that I can post in the forums and have a signature. I've had very few site referrals from my actual ad in the suppliers section but have got work as a result of general interaction and by helping forum members. Don't get sucked into affiliate linking for a discount, anywhere.

i.e. you take on a directory service that offers a discount if you link to their site. It's known as two way linking and removes any benefit of the the link from the directory.

Gumtree is close to useless and is priimarily for the cheap end of the market for those weekend warriors starting out. When I first started out I used it and was £200 for all day photography. I didn't get anything from it in three months.

Wedding fayres, I've done three and got two pieces of work. We were at the Brighton Metropole last weekend (I wasn't as I was at a wedding) and we've had nothing at all from it...but still early days...but that was another £400 flushed.

Good internet presence is king, the only thing it costs you is your time and if you think you can't get to the first couple of pages in google you're wrong. The people at the top get lazy. Take advantage of that.

Lastly:

You can't game the system or cheat Google, if anyone phones you up offering to get you on page one hang up, just hang up. They won't call back.

Something else, sorry.

You're keywords on the site are all over the place, across the title, description and body the word Gallery is repeated 10 times. Yet the thing that you do, wedding photography isn't even there as a keyword.

Have the tab, wedding gallery changed to wedding photography, change album gallery to wedding album and put the words wedding before photography in the text on the page.

Currently there aren't enough keywords there to be interesting. With the domain being 7 years old you could benefit a lot from simple keyword improvements.

As in page 1 of Google. There's aren't a lot of sites with that age attached to them, not for your area.

ENot knowing anyone to go by recommendations I googled the following:

'<venue> wedding photography' to bring up those photographers who had previously photographed weddings at my venue - great to look at wedding photos of your venue as it helps to picture the day even more etc. The photographer I actually booked was found this way

'wedding photographer <location>' to bring up those photographers in the areas near to my venue

When we then chose who to meet we obviously looked at price first to ensure they would be in budget. Then looked at pictures (esp the ones from our venue) loved the websites that had loads of pictures and where you could search by venue, or month of wedding. We also loved the photographers who had blogs, and the one that we eventually chose also had a good presence on facebook too.

When we met our photographer he asked how we had found him, when we said we had search for photographers who had photographed our venue he said he specifically engineers his site to feature in those searches and gets a lot of his work that way. So definitely something to do if possible.

Despite looking at many bridal magazines I have never looked up any the photographers advertising in them.