This marketing campaign isn’t for the faint hearted and requires a considerable amount of commitment but it’s fruit can ultimately be plentiful and delicious (financially speaking).
Over the past few months and completely down to PhotoCreative365 I gained a reputation within my small community as ‘the WordPress guy’. I’m certainly no expert on coding or anything like that but I’ve tested many a plugin and checked out hundreds of different templates. This puts me in an adventitious position in terms of knowing and finding suitable tools that a site might need. A few months ago I offered to give a mum’s community and support group’s website a complete overhaul. As baby and child portraits have kind of become my thing in 2011 this was the perfect type of group for me to align myself with.
As I mentioned before….. this was not a small project and I certainly learnt a lot in the process but now I’m part of a site and a community that fits perfectly into my target market.
Building your site
The first few things you’ll need
- A knowledge of building websites is a good place to start. Your best options are open source CMS’s like WordPress or Joomla.
- A niche area to focus on. Rather than start from scratch I got involved with an already established community.
- Try and think local before you go global. If you’re a wedding photographer why not concentrate on giving advice about services and venues in your area. As photographers we have the advantage of already having the imagery sorted. All you need to worry about is the copy.
Create a community – ask other business owners if they’d like to become contributors to the site.
If you’re writing an article about a certain business then make sure you let the owners know of you intend to recommend them….. they may never know otherwise!
This is the twenty first article 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
- Writing a flattery article
- The appointment card
*The Current Photographer website contains links to our affiliate partners. Purchasing products and services through these links helps support our efforts to bring you the quality information you love and there’s no additional cost to you.
Michael has been working as a photographer for the last ten years. In that time he has shot over 100,000 peoples’ portraits and worked in four different continents. In 2001 Michael graduated with a degree in photography from Manchester Metropolitan University.