Guide Them in for a Landing

[by Rosh Sillars]

Create special landing pages for your marketing activities. A landing page is designed to receive incoming advertising traffic and is generally not linked directly to the rest of your Web site.

Make sure you install Google Analytics to help track landing page activity.

Use these special Web pages for all your promotions. If you advertise in a magazine, at a trade show, by e-mail or use social media, make sure the landing page relates to your marketing effort. For example, if you advertise in a construction trade magazine, create a URL that looks like this: www.yoursite.com/construction.html

Make sure the Web page relates to the prospects you are driving to it. In other words, the example page described above should talk about construction and display construction-related images.

Make sure your landing page has a call to action and a request for e-mail or contact information.

Test and tweak your pages until you earn the performance and goals desired.

Rosh Sillars is a veteran photographer, digital marketing consultant, host of www.newmediaphotographer.com and co-author of the book Linked Photographer.

Good Data Supports Good Choices

[by Rosh Sillars]

Your opinion can cost you money.  The colors you choose for your Web site, the words you use, and the images you select all pay a role in the success of your site.  It is important to use good data to help you construct a Web site that attracts and retains your target market.

One of the most common methods of creating and tracking data is to install Google Analytics. Use Analytics to follow traffic sources to and bounce rates from your Web site. If you have not yet installed this, you are doing yourself a disservice.

There are additional services available on the Web that may answer questions you have not even thought to ask, such as:

How are your competitors doing? You can find the answer at www.compete.com.

What are the demographics of the people visiting your Web site? Are you attracting your target market? www.quantcast.com can help answer these questions.

If you are interested in one of the most current Internet analytic applications that offers a rich user interface and real-time data, you can sign up as a beta tester for www.woopra.com.

Be careful; don’t overwhelm yourself with useless data. Ask yourself questions first, then use the best tools available to gather quality data to help you make good decisions.

Web Design Essentials

[by Carolyn Potts]

What’s the business objective of my web site? As visual artists we’re primarily drawn to the play of
light, shadow, color and contrast as they often serve as the basis of our sheer delight. We’re also easily distracted by bright, shiny, and pretty things.

A marketing trap that one can fall into is to simply emulate the web design of a photographer whose photos and web site we admire. Award-winning web sites with lots of stunning visuals suck us right in and lead us to ‘be inspired” (i.e., copy them) when creating our own site; often there’s  little if no attention paid to asking if the design is resonant with our own branding and the needs of the people we want to attract.

An ironic liability of a too-over-the-top web design, is that it risks alienating a market segment who you could have served; they can end up thinking “they can no longer afford you.” (Yes, that’s actually happened).

Your best site design strategy is one that reflects both YOUR brand and what YOUR target audience needs. The photographer you admire may be serving a completely different market.

You must define who your “ideal client” is before you can build a site that will appeal to them.
Here are some questions to help you define your “ideal client.”

What do I know about my target customer’s needs when they first arrive on my site?
E.g. If you’re targeting ad agencies, your site must have features that serve the needs of the time-pressed and collaborative work environment. Some way of displaying thumbnails are a must.

The timeline in wedding photography is usually a lot less deadline-driven (shotgun weddings not withstanding..;-) and therefore the wedding market visitor arrives at a more leisurely pace often looking for an experience (usually romantic) from your imagery E.g. they might respond favorably to interactive and experiential features (e.g. music)–ironically the same ones which usually alienate business clients.

The corporate market customer may require more copy to about your services to gain purchasing approval from colleagues outside of the creative department. Some features (e.g. light-boxes) also might require more instructional copy in one market than another.

But what if either by geography or economic necessity you’re trying to reach several markets with one site?
You can. Just don’t try to be all things to all people all the time.
Develop a targeted web strategy to drive different market segments to specific areas of your site or to sub-domains.

You are essentially a service business. So are your insurance company and your bank; they have different marketing plans–and related web pages– to reach both the sports car driver and the soccer mom. Their marketing strategies are different based on the different needs of each market. You can do that too. Unless your target market is other photographers, design your web strategy accordingly.

Gaining the admiration of your fellow photographers–while it sure feels nice–might not be the best business goal for your bottom line.

Flash Site? Use Off-Page Optimization

For me, the search engines (primarily Google) bring me about 60-percent of my new clients each year.  I work hard to keep my site high in the rankings.

You should optimize your site for the keyword phrase that you think clients needing your type of photography will enter into the search engine.  But what if you have a Flash site?  That probably means you have minimal control over your page’s text content, or body copy, and that is exactly what search engines need to index your site.  See my related Strictly Business Blog post, “Content is King.”

I know, Google and Adobe recently announced a partnering effort to help the search engine index Flash content, but it relies on true text in the Flash element, not bitmapped text created in an image editing program such as Photoshop; not a perfect solution.  And yes, they’re now reading the data contained in .xml files that sometimes accompany Flash elements, but it’s still a bit clumsy at this point.

So what to do if your site relies heavily on Flash?  Consider utilizing what’s generally referred to as off-page optimization.  One method of off-page optimization involves getting links to your site from other websites.  Ideally, they’ll need to be from “relevant” websites, or more specifically, from other photographers or sites that are about photography.

Here are two things you can do to get incoming links that don’t require a lot of effort.  First, when you produce images that will be used on your client’s website, request not just a credit, but a credit that is a link back to your site.  These end up being one-way links, and from an SEO standpoint, they’re very valuable indeed.

Second, exchange links with other photographers.  These links to your competitors should of course be somewhat discreet, but note I didn’t say invisible, that will get you penalized by Google.  My site has three pages of these reciprocal links to other photographer’s sites and all of us are benefiting from the exchange. Be sure to build your incoming links slowly over time, and ideally exchange links with photographers who already rank highly in the search engines.

Good luck!

Website Solutions You Can Plug Into Quickly

If you don’t have a website yet and need one, or want to get a portfolio or body of work onto the web quickly, you might consider using a template kind of web hosting service. These providers generally offer some kind of predesigned model that you can plug your work into quickly that will give an attractive, well organized presentation to showcase your work.

There are a number of such hosting services out there, one of which is Sitewelder. My own site is hosted by Sitewelder, and my experience with them has been very positive (I am not affiliated with them in any way, I am just a happy customer). Sitewelder offers a variety of templates, decent customer service, and reasonable monthly fees. You can tinker with your site directly, making changes or add/swapimages at any time and from any location, without having to go through a designer and waiting for them to update it. If you want or need design help, it is available.

Sitewelder hosts many photographers across a variety of specialties, and has a number of options for presenting web galleries of work. When I transferred my site to Sitewelder several years ago, I worked with their staff to slightly modify one of their templates to keep continuity with the look and feel of my previous site. This worked well for me, and my site has been there ever since.

The down side of using providers like these is that some people complain they are too “cookie cutter” and similar to each other. But if you want your site to look unique, its not too hard to make modifications that give your site its own distinct look and feel.

With services like these available that are both a good showcase and fairly economical, there is no excuse not to have your work up on the web.

Some examples of photographers’ sites powered by Sitewelder:
Brian Smith
Chip Simons
David Burnett
Paula Lerner
William Coupon

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