The Journey Begins...
The first stage in creating an online presence has to be to create a website. This website will provide a place for people to find out more about you and the services that you offer. Think of this as your shop window. But having a website is different from having a physical shop.
In the past having a nice studio or shop positioned in a prime spot on the high street, with a window to show off your skills, used to enable you to get business from passers by. In the good old days potential customers would have used local directories (remember Yellow Pages?) to find potential photographers. And photographers would have used direct marketing to reach their customers. But the Internet has changed the way people learn about products and services, and it has ultimately changed their buying habits.
In the new Internet based world there is no passing traffic and advertising is expensive with very limited ROI. So how do you get people to notice your virtual shop front? Rely on Google?
To see how difficult that is just run a search for 'photographers' in your local area. I live in Winnersh a small town in Berkshire, England. Asking Google for 'photographer winnersh' returns 4030 results in 0.29 of a second - and this does not include the 'paid for' links.
So we need to do more…
To test my theory I have created a very, very simple web site. It has:
- One page
- One image
- One link (to this blog)
- And a couple of lines of text
I want to use this as a development platform so that over time we can improve it, making it easier to find and more relevant to customers.
Website Grade
To test this starting page I used an online service to test the marketing effectiveness of my simple page. Website Grader will score your site, incorporating things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. But what is really cool is that they provide you with a report (free of charge!) that provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved. So how did I get on…
I ran a comparison between my site and a number of other Photographers sites. You can see the results in the table below: Site Photographer Score John Cassidy 60/100 Martin Sandford 41/100 Steve Davis 26/100 Rose Armes 25/100 Emma Pollard 14/100 Paul Hampton 13/100 Karen and Stuart 7/100
As can be seen there is a range of scores. What surprised me was that my simple site was not the lowest! But still lots of work to do, but we will look at that in future articles.
So the journey has begun. We have a starting point and something to build on. Why not test your online presence and let me know how you compare.
-Paul