Free tools to promote your photography business online

Do you run your own photography business? Good for you. Being a business owner is a huge privilege, and can be a major part of your life for years to come. However, building a strong photography business needs promotion and content.

As we all know, most photography businesses aren’t the only show in town. No doubt you have numerous competitors hanging around the local area, making it hard for you to get the volume of business that you would like. Instead of putting up with that, you can use various tools to promote your business.

Promotion is vital. Without proper promotion you will always be behind your competition – it’s a face. They aren’t going to sit on their hands; they will be out there promoting and promoting some more. You need to be ready to meet them in the middle.

You likely have noticed, though, that promoting your photography business offline is nowhere near as effective as promoting it online. Your reach and your word is far more powerful on the web, and you need to get used to using tools online to successfully promote your photography business successfully.

However, that is not as easy as it might sound. In a bid to help you make the right choice, we have found some of the best free tools you can use to promote your photography business. You’ve already invested in a website; so how can you promote yourself without even more expenditure being needed?

Let’s take a look at the top free tools to promote your photography business online. Each one offers you all the help that you could need to make a clear and obvious benefit to your clients. It will also make sure you are more visible than ever!

Use your photography business website

Your website is, for all intents and purposes, your new ‘home’. It will be the perfect way to advertise your business and the ideal way to put it across in a friendly light. That being said, a website has to be used in the right manner.

Most people see their website as an extension of their marketing. It’s a lot more than that, though. A good website is a shop, a store, a biography, a blog and a business card all at once. In essence, you can build up your website by adding more content and more details.

It will not help you to market it, per se, but it will play an absolutely crucial role in taking things an extra step further. When you use the other tools below that we have suggested, you will be far more likely to see progress.

Why? Because your website will be doing all of the selling for you. We suggest you check out our Artigo WordPress theme. The rest of the tools sprinkle some excitement onto the minds of your customers; you then need to fill people in when they get to the website using those extra details discussed above.

SEO content

While not everyone ‘gets’ SEO, the aim is simple: write appealing content that is going to be using keywords naturally. Use the Google Keyword Planning tool that they provide and you can very easily build up a demonstrable list of keywords to target. Then, write appealing content to go along with that.

A high-quality of content will do wonders for making sure you can get people finding your website and wanting to come and look at it. Create long read blog pieces about the topics that people tend to ask you about most; use that as a means of promotion.

You will know yourself what kind of queries people will make. To get around that issue, you need to be able to give them an easier way to find an answer without having to ask you. By having website pages that naturally use one-two keywords will make sure you are left with an easy way to get people interested and coming back for more.

It might not always work right away, but we can more or less assure you that with properly written and optimized content you will slowly but surely see yourself creep up the rankings for that particular keyword.

Just make sure that you take the time to look closely at how you choose your keywords. Always look to find a keyword that has a good volume of searches relevant to where you live. Avoid the most regularly searched words, though, as it can be very hard for you to find a solution to that if the competition is too much.

Instead, we recommend that you take the time to better understand that medium-tier keywords, alongside using the keywords on the alt-text for all images (of which your website should have many) to improve visibility.

Social media

A must for any photographer today is to get on social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. The first and last options especially as they are mostly image driven. Be smart with use of hashtags and you can begin to get a huge following on social media in no time at all.

You’ll be able to build content on social media that allows you to use your images that you have taken and then caption them. Just be sure to include a company logo/watermark; never give people the chance to “borrow” your work for themselves.

At this point, though, you will be far more likely to be able to boost your reputation using social media. We recommend a posting of once-twice per day, but never with long posts. You are a photographer, and a picture tells a thousand words; so make the most of that.

Use the power of your unique imagery and your talent to sell people an example of the kind of shots that you capture. If you have one, get a drone up in the sky and get some amazing long-view shots to use as headers for your social media accounts; it’s another nice touch that shows off your talent.

Online directories

Another choice we suggest is to make profiles on all local and national business directories. You can find great free directories for your city/region/country with ease, and use them to make a directory listing that allows you to be seen in more places than one.

It’s also good for your site’s reputation as an online directory makes it easier for you to boost SEO thanks to all the positive linking back to your website from websites with lots of traffic and interaction.

We recommend that you look for a photography directory, too, as many people looking for a photographer will choose to go here first. Doing this, you are far more likely to get a positive response from people looking to hire you. This is a simple one, but one of the most effective tools that you can use for promotion for sure.

Also, be sure to set up one with Google My Business. it’s one of the most powerful directories and is sure to make a huge difference to how your business comes across. Each page will only do a small amount to boost promo, but collectively? It’s incredibly powerful.

Guest blogging

Another brilliant way to bring in some new interested parties and promotions is to guest blog. When you are running a photography business, you are someone who holds authority. We recommend, then, that you take the time that you need to start writing up guest posts for photography blogs that indirectly advertise you.

Why? Because guest blogs get you onto other sites. It gets your name, company name and website link on other sites. Never charge for this and never expect to be paid; use the time that you spend on the articles to write up something that would be a fitting read for the industry.

It’s vital to start guest blogging as the more links back to your site from elsewhere, the better. It can make a crucial difference to how your website works, and is more than likely going to make a significant change to the way that you work.

Now, an extra bit of linking back to you does the SEO value of your site the world of good but also gets your name out there. Most photography blogs will love to have you, too. Free content from a pro photographer is definitely the way for blogs to make themselves more popular, as well!

Start a newsletter

A great way to help build up a better rapport with people is a newsletter. Get a system like aWeber and have the little capture form included on your site (or hire someone to make a more appealing capture form for you) and then include that as part of the site.

This will go some way to making sure you can give people regular updates and keep you in their thoughts. If someone uses your service they may forget to pass your name on; but if you have a newsletter, its’ harder to forget.

They then might pass on your details to someone else or get them to sign up. Just make sure that your newsletter covers photography news, industry news and local news with everything tying back to your business in some way.

Don’t make everything a sales pitch, though. A newsletter can be used for promotion rather than profits and still be a wildly useful tool for your business. When used correctly, it can easily be one of the most powerful marketing tools that you can utilize. It helps to show that you are always busy educating and informing, too.

Online contests

The final option we suggest that you look at is the wonderful idea of online contests. Most of the time these are free to enter and as a photographer, you can usually position yourself quite well. It’s a great way to get a bit of extra spotlight on your services and also to make sure that you are always edging closer to genuine success and progress.

It’s a good one for showing that you don’t mind being involved with the public, which is actually a lot more important than it might sound. While you might not win, if you can get yourself into the top positions in a competition you can get a nice social media boost from doing so.

Either way, these work as fine solutions to really boost how your photography firm comes across. When done right, this can make it much easier for you to see genuine improvement in how your business if found online. Social media management can be hard alone, but by getting involved with this kind of competition it can become far more likely that you are a genuine success. Photo contests happen on social media, in magazines and on websites; look around and enter as many as you can!

Let’s make your photography business even more visible

Taking all of this into account, you should now be ready to pick up some wonderful add-ons to help boost your marketing appeal. For anyone serious about being in photography business for the long-term, this is absolutely essential to you.

At the same time, you need to be ready to do more. You have to be ready to use the tools and to appreciate the challenges that each of them present. With a learning curve to each, it might take some time to master how each one operates.

However, that being said, each one is well worth learning how to use. They all offer you a very powerful and effective way to manage your business and to put things in place accordingly. It takes a lot of work and no small amount of effort, but success can easily be obtained at this point.

Using the ideas above, you can easily begin to plan and prepare the perfect way for you to enjoy a much more progressive and simplistic solution to marketing your photography business. Happy snapping; each of these tools will be sure to bring you lots more potential business!