Marketing Campaigns for Photographers – Writing a Flattery Article

This might sound like a strange idea for a marketing campaign as it’s unlikely to bring you hundreds of bookings overnight. What it will do however is get you (and your site) noticed by people you admire. The marketing campaign is really more about building relationships and raising your public profile.

What is a flattery article?

At PhotoCreative365 I produce these type if articles from time to time. Sometimes they are more of a ‘thank you’ to photographers or websites that have helped me – 100 awesome photography blogs is a good example of this.

A couple of weeks ago I put together a post titled Newborn photographers. Newborn and baby photography is something that recently accounts for about 80% of my work. As a result I’ve been researching lots of different photographers from all over the world to gain a little inspiration.

Creating the Flattery Article

Rather than leave these photographers I’ve discovered as a bookmark on my computer I thought it would be a nice idea to create a post listing some of my favourites.

Obviously a post like this needs images so rather than filling it with a few of my own random shots I emailed everyone I was going to include in the article and asked if they could send me a couple of images.

This worked wonderfully as not only did I introduce many of these photographers to my site but it also provided some great content.

After the article was published

In the couple of hours after I published the article I began to promote it.
As normal the post was tweeted but I also added a tweet which included @ mentions.

What was most effective was adding links to the post on the different photographer’s fan pages. This action alone accounted for about 20% of my site’s traffic that day.

During the day (after the US woke up) I kept an eye on both Twitter and Facebook and added the occasional reply, like and follow.

Since the article has been published I continued to cement those new relationships that I’ve formed and by doing so introduced countless others to my site.

THAT as they say is what social networking is all about and it begins with a little bit of flattery.

This is the nineteenth in our series looking at different marketing campaigns for photographers.

Also in this series:

• Win a Car!
• Gift Vouchers
• The Facebook Group Tag
• #archiveday
• Refer a Friend
• The Exhibition
• The Humble Keyring
• Getting Press
• Baby Passport Pictures
• The Wedding venue blog page
• The Wedding Venue Video
• 45 mins of daily social media marketing
• The Behind the Scenes video
• Get Your Social Media 5 A Day
• Blog Everything
• Publish a book
• Build your referral network
• Start your own podcast