Starting a Photography Business: Part 35 – Read the Instructions!

This last week I’ve been working on a bit of promotion for the website, but not down what you might consider traditional advertising of clicking through.

Come close, make sure no-one else is listening, are we safe to carry on?  This is something that I read to do, but technically you don’t do it under your own name.  How about a Wikipedia listing?  This doesn’t unfortunately help with page rankings on search engines; it does though give you a bit more coverage if people search for your company name.

A word to the wise, when you create a Wiki account it has a manual of how to create a submission, do read it, don’t start to read it think, I use WordPress or other such sites I’ll be ok and stop reading it half way through to save you time.  Hmm, I tell you this as a top tip, as I was that person that half read the instructions, thought I’d be able to figure it out and got well and truly stuck on the coding.  I haven’t had time to go back and finish it yet, but I will try and get it figured out by the time you are reading this.

To make the page official and be listed by the site, you need to have a point of reference, a link people can click on that takes you to an independent website to validate your page.  I have put a link to my about page and used some of the text from it, and its here where I got stuck; adding in the reference point list.

Another thing that I’m starting to create is a channel on Youtube.  It was something that came up in our last mastermind call; a colleague is creating one for her travel business to promote her tours.   A light bulb went on and I suddenly saw how I could have a presence, even if not in the most traditional sense of a video.  It’s a site I’m eventually going to use when I do short promotional videos of my photography courses, yet I suddenly thought what is to stop me having a slide show of different styles of my photographs?

A Youtube channel is offered free and comes complete with tags so the search engines can find it, in fact it is linked to Google as it asked me sign out of Google as I was creating my account.  I used Windows Live Movie Maker, and stitched the images together; it made it a breeze to do.  It took me right back to my days of editing footage for television programmes; and I had great fun.  There are lots of different wipes you can use between frames, so have play.  One thing I would just say, don’t have an eye jerking wipe on after every frame; the brain and eye has to feel comfortable with it so people will want to stay and watch it to the end.  Remember to put your website details on at the end and a final tip; for speed in uploading to Youtube, reduced the pixels of your images to something like 700.  You don’t need it be high resolution for the internet, yet it will still look good.

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Comments

  1. I just wanted to add a footnote to my article. As yet I haven’t been able to complete my Wiki page, still struggling with the coding bits; however the youtube channel is up and running.