Marketing and Advertising

SabrinaO · Mar 14, 2011

What are some good and affective ways to market and advertise yourself and your photography? I have a facebook fanpage, I have a website, and I post ads on craigslist for my services. What do you all do? I just opened my studio so Im trying to find more ways to get my name out.

tirediron · Mar 14, 2011

Look for advertising opporunities on local websites and related pages, newspaper ads, flyers campaigns and cold-calling (which I'm not a fan of, but can be effective and costs nothing but time).

Edited to remove "proper" website suggestion as apparently I couldn't read this morning!

mwcfarms · Mar 14, 2011

How big of a center do you live in? Leave your business card/ad at any places local moms meet. You can pay for adds in the paper as well. Escpecially during wedding season and grad season.

KmH · Mar 14, 2011

SabrinaO said:
What are some good and affective ways to market and advertise yourself and your photography? I have a facebook fanpage, I have a website, and I post ads on craigslist for my services. What do you all do? I just opened my studio so Im trying to find more ways to get my name out.

It depends what market you are in (not indicated in your profile) and what demographic you want to reach (also not mentioned).

Apparently before opening your studio you did no market research, and have no business/marketing plan?

Regardless all that, word-of-mouth (WOM) is the best advertising, with next best advertising being direct mail.

What is your monthly advertising budget?

You may want to take advantage of free business advice from www.sba.com and www.score.org.

PhotoWrangler · Mar 14, 2011

KmH said:
Apparently before opening your studio you did no market research, and have no business/marketing plan?

You don't have to have a plan, you just need to buy a camera that takes good pictures.

HikinMike · Mar 14, 2011

SabrinaO said:
What are some good and affective ways to market and advertise yourself and your photography? I have a facebook fanpage, I have a website, and I post ads on craigslist for my services. What do you all do? I just opened my studio so Im trying to find more ways to get my name out.

Do you have a link to your site?

skieur · Mar 14, 2011

It depends on your skills in other related areas. I get well-paid for doing presentations and the presentations indirectly generate business from those who come up to talk to me and ask questions after the talk. Even presentations on how to do multi-media business presentations generate one heck of a lot of business.

skieur

SabrinaO · Mar 15, 2011

lose the sarcasm

SabrinaO · Mar 15, 2011

www.wix.com/sabrinacameron/photography

SabrinaO · Mar 15, 2011

maternity, newborns, children, family and events

SabrinaO · Mar 15, 2011

Thanks to everyone who helped and had great advice! Yes... maybe i should of planned better before opening a studio... but you cant beat 320 sq ft. all utilities included for only $375 a month.

HikinMike · Mar 15, 2011

The reason I asked about your website is that most photographers don't know how to optimize the website so people can find you via the search engines. It's free advertising. In your case it looks like your using a free Wix.com site? IMO, using one of those free (cheap) sites screams, "I'm not taking this business seriously." I would buy a domain, get it built and then read my SEO for the Photographer link in my sig. Of course, if you read it now, you can implement them on your site now.

FWIW, Your site loads way too slow. If I were a potential customer, I would have left. I did give up looking at your main site.

Hope this helps in some way.

KmH · Mar 15, 2011

SabrinaO said:
lose the sarcasm

Don't post poorly stated, and ill-informed questions in public forums then if you can't handle a little sarcasm.

KmH · Mar 15, 2011

I didn't venture past your splash page. It needs some basic grammar and punctuation changes so it is all in the 3rd person and appears to have been proofed properly.

How can you specialize in 6 types of subject (or more - events)?

It's not a good idea to slap your prospective customers up the side of the head on Page 1.
"Please do not copy......"