Networking with other Wedding Professionals

The greatest people to create bonds with in your career as a wedding photographer are other wedding professionals. 

Wedding Professionals such as wedding planners, makeup artists, caterers, florists, DJs, videographers, wedding venues, officiants, dressmakers, etc. share something in common with you:  you have the SAME target market!  What you can do is pool your target markets together and eventually share some of your client base.

Everytime you meet a wedding professional during a wedding (wait for a quiet time, not when either of you are busy), introduce yourself and give them some business cards.

(When giving out business cards, always give at least 3 so that they can give it away to other people if they need to and still have one left for themselves.)

After the wedding, you can email or mail them prints and/or digital files of the wedding that might help them.  Like if it’s the caterer, give them some nice photos of the food.  If it’s the florist, give them some nice photos of the flowers.  Make sure you put your logo and website and contact information at the bottom of the photo. 

Tell them that they can use the photos for any advertising as long as they credit the photos to you.  When they do need a photo for advertising, they will most likely choose yours because you have made it convenient for them.

If you have a wedding couple that needs certain services, make sure you refer them to your network and make sure that they know who referred the couple.  In return, you can ask for referrals as well. 

These are people that will help you out throughout your career so cultivate these relationships.

Increasing your PageRank in Google

Google ranks websites through its relevance via Pagerank. 

Knowing your Pagerank is important because it helps you keep track of your search engine optimization efforts as well as it helps you rank higher in the google index.

LINKS

Pagerank measures how many websites link to your site.  More important than the quantity of the websites is the QUALITY of the websites that link to you.  This means, the higher their pagerank is, the better your rank is. 

You can submit to a lot of directories such as the search engines (google, yahoo, msn, aol, etc) and directories (dmoz.org) but don’t forget about portals specific to your website (ie, if you have a wedding photography website, submit to wedplan.net, wedj.com, etc.) as well as regional websites (specific to your country, state and city).  Some website will call you on the phone trying to sell you higher placement, but in my experience, it really is not necessary.  Just tell them, no thank you and just hang up.  But expect a LOT of phone calls especially from the wedding industry.

Also, links to your website without a reciprocal link from your website to theirs are measured higher than if you link back as well. 

A great way to increase your inbound links without having to reciprocate is by participating in message boards, classified ads and forums.  Some forums allow you to create a footer so you can include your website in all your posts.  Trying to mess with the pagerank by spamming and other similar ways is frowned upon and your website might get penalized because of this, so make sure that what you post is relevant to the topic.

CONTENT

PageRank is also judged by how relevant your website is with regards to specific keywords. 

Make sure that you have a lot of text in your website.  If you have a flash website, make sure you have a HTML site that is text-rich with your important keywords.

Create articles and tips that you can place in your website.  It does not have to be complicated, just a simple guide for beginners will usually do. 

BLOG

Funnily enough, the single thing I did that increased my google pagerank 2-3 points higher is getting a blog.  Not just getting an ordinary blog, but getting a blog here at wordpress that is hosted on THEIR server.  I’ve had blogs on blogger and blog.com before but they didn’t really affect my rank.  I switched to wordpress because they allow bigger photos.  Less than a week after I created my wordpress blog, my pagerank jumped for my 2 websites.  I don’t have any proof that it’s due to wordpress, but I’ve been submitting my websites everywhere and only when I got a blog did it jump higher.

FIND OUT WHAT YOUR PAGE RANK IS

You can find out what your page rank is by going to this site and typing your url in their form.  http://www.mypagerank.net/service_pagerankbutton_index

You can also install a pagerank button on your website by copying the code from mypagerank.net to your footer.

Photography Packaging and Marketing

Image is everything.  That is why branding yourself and your work is so important.

Branding and packaging increases the perceived value of a product.  Compare a stack of 4×6’s to a beautiful album of 4×6’s.  Compare an 8×10 print to the same 8×10 print, matted and framed. 

Your brand has to be consistent across all your products and packaging for it to be effective.  This means everything from your business cards, your letterheads, your photo folders, photo boxes, mailing postcards, brochures, envelopes, etc. have to have your branding.  Use a consistent font and color scheme to reinforce your brand to your clients.

Branding also reinforces to the client your professionalism and your commitment to your work as opposed to some fly-by-night operation.

Check out this great blog about how to market and package the photographs that you give out to clients.

Photo Packaging Blog

You can also view a PDF file about photo packaging.

Presentation Brochure

Photography Marketing advice

I am subscribed to the following FREE newsletters and have found them useful.   They all try to sell you their ebooks and softwares but I have never tried them so I can’t really comment on them.

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It depends on what type of photography you want to do.  The biggest thing really that has helped me a lot in photography and which actually got me my first gig (my first gig on my own, that is, cause I was a photographer for a portrait company before) is posting on Craigslist. 
 
If you need a bit of practice, offer some free photo sessions in Craigslist.  I have tried offering Free Engagement Sessions and got a good response.  I just give them the prints for free (at first I thought about giving a CD since it’s cheaper on my side but you lose out on reprint orders) and one of them actually bought the CD.  One of the couples that I did is actually booking us for their wedding. Also, it helps build the portfolio.
 
When you feel that you are ready, you can post ads on craigslist for pay.  If you go to Charleston, South Carolina craigslist (as well as other cities in SC and sometimes in NC and GA as well), you will see that I have 3 different ads running all the time.  One is for Weddings, which is what I focus on anyway and is my biggest earner, another is for Portraits and Events, which recently I just did my first birthday party (and it was a big one too, about 200 guests) and the other one is for Boudoir (which I have a separate website for now). 
 
Sometimes if I’m not busy, I look for people looking for photographers in craigslist and answer their ads.  I’ve managed to get some stock photography commission work on these.
 
A lot of my clients do come from craigslist and I know some people say this is the bottom of the market but for now, I’m still starting out, it’s really good.  And it helps my website get a higher ranking in google too.
 
I had my business cards printed in Vistaprint $3.99 for 250 pieces and I leave it at bridal shops and give it out to friends, other wedding vendors and to people I do events for.
 
What you can also do is you can go to bike events or any event and take pictures of people, then just give them your business card and tell them that they can order prints from your website.  Check out my client galleries at  http://SilvasPhoto.com/album/ which I made with http://jalbum.net (you have to install the software on your website).  Before I used jalbum, I used backprint.com (see http://backprint.com/silvasphoto ) cause you just upload your photos to them and they handle everything from credit card transaction to printing the photo and delivering to client.  It’s free, but they charge you 15% of the transaction if you sell something which is not too bad since they handle everything anyway.  It’s better than Pictage.com or smugmug wherein you pay a monthly fee whether you sell something or not.