Utilizing the Internet to Market Yourself as a Professional Photographer

With the advent of internet, especially social media, the photography world has really gone to another level.

The moment someone buys a DSLR, you are sooner or later, bound to see their Facebook page come up.

The trouble is that the photographer soon enough loses the enthusiasm and the initial surge of energy and that page fades away as quickly as it arrived.

Websites suffer similar fate.

What goes wrong here?

Well it’s a basic principle you have to understand.

The easier something is to create, the more the number of people who will create it.

Facebook pages and websites fall under that category.

The result is that the competition to stand out is so fierce that only the most well connected or outstandingly good photographers stand the test of the social media time.

So does that mean that average/above average/good photographers should simply give up?

The answer is NO.

What they should do instead is LEARN how internet marketing actually works.

Internet and social media marketing isn’t simply about creating a page or website and then posting your photos.

As mentioned earlier, if it was that easy, everyone would turn professional or become famous within a matter of time.

To get ahead of the queue, you have the understand the whole internet marketing system.

It’s no different from learning another skill, just like photography itself.

Great and renowned photographers are of two types:

• Those who are outstandingly good and are well connected.
• Those who are good at photography and marketing both.

If you belong to the first category, congratulations!

But the truth is that the average person won’t.

The average person will either have to wait for a LONG time to get outstandingly good or learn marketing tactics to push themselves forward.

To explain the whole internet marketing system in one article is impossible.

But here are some pointers I can give you:

1. Buy books and courses that teach you how to market a business online. There are plenty of them at websites like Udemy.com . The reason you need to go for a course that teaches you online marketing is because nowadays it’s the cheapest way to market a business. You can even search for courses that teach you how to market a photography business specifically.
2. Learn PPC advertising. PPC refers to the pay-per-click model of advertising. It’s very important to learn this because PPC ads allow you to immediately reach your target customer in a cost-effective manner. The two most popular types of PPC advertising platforms are offered by Facebook and Google. I would suggest you start off with Facebook as it’s easier to understand and execute. You’ll have to create a Facebook page first and then you’ll be able to create ads. There are plenty of tutorials, both paid and free, on YouTube and other websites, that teach you Facebook advertising.
3. Learn to get complete control over your website. If you rely on some developer to create a website for you, you’ll soon find yourself having to constantly contact them for small issues. These days, a website simply isn’t a tool to showcase your work and your contact number. It’s much more than that because a good website has the capability to bring in a lot of organic traffic from sources like the Google search engine. For instance, most photographers don’t maintain a blog on their website. And they lose out on a lot of traffic. Having a blog that you regularly update on your website is not only great for branding, but can slowly start to bring in organic traffic to your website, thereby exposing your business to a larger number of people who are landing on your website on their own.

When you start going deeper into marketing, you’ll realize that just like photography, marketing itself is like an art that has to be mastered. And with the endless possibilities that the internet and social media have offered, the time has never been better and more exciting to learn about it than now.