AboutJohn Wilson Expertise Over 25 years specializing exclusively in professional wedding photography. I can answer most questions relating directly to wedding photography concerning the business, film, digital, traditional & digital labs, marketing, effects, pricing & packaging, shooting outdoors and in-studio with multiple flash, color management and creating magazine style wedding albums. I can't answer questions regarding other fields of photography. I am a full-time self-employed pro wedding photographer.
Experience About 25 years experience photographing weddings professionally. Past 3 years shooting digital exclusively.
Education/Credentials Going to photography seminars and reading all the wedding photography books I can find then applying the techniques and new styles I've learned with each wedding. You always need to grow and learn to keep up in this field. With each new wedding you photograph, you must challenge yourself to do better work than your previous wedding. You must always have the goal of making the wedding photographs for a bride & groom be the best photographs they have seen of any wedding.
Expert: John Wilson Date: 12/8/2007 Subject: Internet Marketing
Question Hi John,
I'm a photographer in Kentucky with a studio in my home. I've been in business about 2 years. Just wondering if you can provide me with tips to make my website and general marketing more effective?
Answer Hi Mark,
Thanks for your photography questions. I don't know what your specific marketing efforts currently consist of, but this is what works for me.
As far as the website is concerned, I have made my website at www.weddingphotographics.net very search engine friendly by my use of meta tags and through the development of effective key words. If you go to my website and click, "Source Code" in your web browser you will be able to view the meta tags, keywords and more. This has been custom fit for every page of my website.
This is the reason I have so many Galleries on my website featuring my work. When internet surfers type certain words in search engines, they will find some of my galleries in the top search engine results! It's funny to me that so many other photographers think I'm crazy for having so many galleries, but I do it for high search engine positioning - and it's working. For example, a bride wants information about a popular local wedding venue called, "Fillauer Lake House Cleveland TN". She types that into almost any search engine and my Gallery 26 pop ups in the top 3 results. There she can find a lot of useful information PLUS she finds out about me and my wedding photography services! Considering that many people trying to find that location are brides-to-be, this makes my hits very TARGETED.
A few website owners and/or blog owners sometimes brag on their sites and/or blogs about receiving some "large" numbers of hits. But getting a lot of hits which are USELESS doesn't accomplish anything. In fact, it can cost you money out of your own pocket in terms of certain hosting packages and certain premium online site statistic services which charge more after a certain number of hits.
I personally enjoy SiteMeter at www.sitemeter.com for the great balance of price and features. To keep competitors from benefiting from my SiteMeter reports, I keep the sitemeter invisible in my webpages and reports private. (The sitemeter code can be viewed in the source code making it possible for internet savvy surfers to try to view my sitemeter reports).
In order to make hits to your site more targeted and useful to wedding photographers, it is my opinion to simply make your website search engine friendly. If you have money to spend on advertising, then pay for advertising on large bridal websites like www.theknot.com and others which also publish national or regional hard print magazines and promote their websites effectively. This can result in very targeted hits to your site as well as possibly hits from higher end brides. Of course, you won't benefit from visits by higher end brides unless those brides perceive you as a high end photographer.
As far as networking with other wedding vendors in your area. It has been my experience over 25 years that this works very little. I don't know how many times I've had florists, caterers and others ask me for FREE photographs. They will promise to put your pictures on display with a credit line and send brides your way. NOT! Now when another professional vendor offers to pay some reasonable fee for your services, then that is probably someone worth talking with! First, its simply professional courtesy. That's the kind of people I like to be around anyway. Second, they know it is a business tax right-off. With other professionals like this, I LOVE to develop cross-promotions. I know they are serious about business, they know I'm serious about business, together we can offer cross-promotions to get us new business that each of us could not have acquired alone. One last point about networking with other vendors - if you are a really good photographer - other wedding vendors need you more than you need them! Many brides spend the largest percentage of their wedding budget on their photographers!
Well, hope there is some useful information here. Thanks again for your photography questions. Let me know if any ideas here worked for you. Best regards,
John Wilson
Wedding Photographer
www.weddingphotographics.net
