Online Marketing

[W.Y.Photo]

I'm trying to figure out how to balance my online marketing so that I'm not spending too much time updating multiple websites and social media outlets but still promoting myself to the best of my ability.

What are some practices in online marketing that you have all found to be successful and worthwhile? Anything outside of the ordinary social media outlets that make your online presence greater?

 

[KmH]

How much time is to much time?
What metrics do you use now to track the efficacy of the time you currently spend?

Online marketing is a crap shoot, because you can't target your marketing to the people most likely to use your service.

Google has provided data that indicates 55% of online advertising never gets seen by anyone, let alone the multiple hundred/thousand hits a day you would need to make spending any time doing online marketing.

 

[tirediron]

^^ Yep ^^ Out of curiosity, I recently invest a few hundred in Google Adwords, Facebook ads, etc, and while the facebook ad attracted the most interest, I didn't come close to making back my investment.

 

[W.Y.Photo]

How much time is to much time?
What metrics do you use now to track the efficacy of the time you currently spend?

Online marketing is a crap shoot, because you can't target your marketing to the people most likely to use your service.

Google has provided data that indicates 55% of online advertising never gets seen by anyone, let alone the multiple hundred/thousand hits a day you would need to make spending any time doing online marketing.

Too much time is basically any time spent on it that becomes wasted time..

Thanks for confirming what I already felt to be true though. It's far more productive for me to be spending my time meeting people away from the computer rather than worrying about gaining some massive internet following. That's not to say I'll stop having an online presence, just that I'll be putting less emphasis on it as a way of meeting new clients.

 

[ryanestes]

IMO the best online marketing comes from when people organically share about you and your work -- that is, the kind of marketing you can't pay for, you have to earn. When I shot weddings, bridal forums were a big source of referrals for me. I tried paying for ads in some of those same forums... no results. But the forums themselves, when brides would spend a lot of time talking about their upcoming weddings with other brides, trading tips on where to get invitations printed or what photographers to check out... those were fantastic.

I used Adwords for about a year. When I stopped, I didn't really see any decline in traffic or in inquiries. So I've never gone back.

Blogging on the other hand is a great way to spend my time -- leveraging SEO to bring people who are searching for photographers in my area, creating long tail keywords, etc. -- and then sharing those posts on Facebook and Twitter. When I blog a lot, I tend to book clients.