Social Media is the buzz word in marketing nowadays, and services like Twitter have gone mainstream. But should photographers use Twitter as a marketing tool?

Let's start by acknowledging that social media services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are real phenomena when it comes to business marketing. Everyone from accountants to plumbers are finding new audiences and paying customers by leveraging social media. As far as photography goes, I've picked up paying jobs by simply having a presence on Facebook and posting new photos on a semi-regular basis. The easy flow of information (text, pictures, video) through these networks acts as connective tissue for new businesses.

Twitter claims to have 25 million active users, and like any social network, you have to explicitly "follow/friend" users -- this "opt-in" makes this inbound marketing so much more powerful than the unsolicited e-mail or postcard of yesteryear.

But even given the size of the "addressable population" and the strong connectedness, should photographers use Twitter?

There are two key components to determine to answer this question:
1. What are your goals?
2. What do your analytics say?

GOOOOOOOOOOAL!
Goals are a funny thing. When we think of Twitter or Facebook, it's too easy to be seduced by the number of followers or friends. What are you -- in junior high school? This isn't a popularity contest. Numbers are meaningless if we don't have a goal. It's like saying you have 10 best friends, but none of them will meet you for a drink.

A lot of photographers will tweet with no business goal in mind. If you're trying to sell photos or photographic services, what is the value in regurgitating links to other websites? Or trying to be the wittiest person online?

I fully understand that you don't want to come across as a schill or schmuck, so there needs to be a balance of self-promotion. But when you are in self-promotion mode, why the heck are you sending people to a blog post or gallery of images with no discernible "point of conversion?"

• If you want to get hired, then you need to 1) make it clear that you're available for hire, and 2) make it easy to contact you.
• If you're looking to sell images, then your website needs to have e-commerce.
• If you're looking to audience build, then don't "dead end" your content. Point people to other content on your site, or allow them to sign up for newsletters and RSS feeds.

You need a goal because with out it, we can't answer the "return on investment" question which is central to understanding whether it's worth it to tweet.

THE ANALYTICS TIE-IN
You'd be hard pressed to be a Twitter pro without knowing of the URL-shortening service bit.ly. Although services like tinyurl preceded it, bit.ly's success is due in part to it's ability to provide tracking statistics like how many people clicked on that link.

At a bare minimum, you'll want to know this because you can never tell how many people actually see your tweet. There's no "pageview" equivalent in Twitter.

But once again, knowing a click-through rate (CTR) isn't really that helpful if we can't tie in a goal. Let's say you publish your favorite images as prints for the holidays on your website. Then you post the link on Twitter, Facebook, and your blog. Even if you know that Twitter sent you 100 visits and Facebook sent you 60 visits, I'd argue that it's not enough information to say that Twitter is a better marketing tool.

Why? Because you might get 100 visits from Twitter but only 1 sale. Whereas Facebook might send you 60 visits with 4 sales. Quality of traffic is much more important than quantity of traffic, and you can't make this determination without tying in analytics.

GO CAMPAIGNING
Google Analytics has a concept of "campaigns." It's an easy way to add tracking variables to any link to your website that you post online. When people click on the link, your Google Analytics will use cookies to track their activity. If you have a "goal" set up in Google Analytics (e.g. an e-commerce sales funnel), you can now determine:

• the number of visitors that came to your website from Twitter
• how that traffic compared by various site usage metrics (e.g. time on site, page views, etc)
• what percentage of those visitors completed a sale

At PhotoShelter, we use this all the time. When we have a discount code for example, we'll use the Google URL Builder to add campaign codes. Then we'll use bit.ly to shorten the URL and then post it on Twitter.

Now we can see specifically how our general and specific Twitter activity ties into our bottom line.

THE FINAL WORD
Participating in social networks can be fun, so if you're having fun, tweet to your heart's content. But for a lot of you, time and resources are probably always squeezed and that's why I'm advocating an analytical way to determine whether tweeting is worth it.

By the way, follow us on Twitter @photoshelter.

Nice website, buddy.

Every week I see various message boards filled with critique requests from photographer who have recently launched a website. I always like to check them out, and I'm always disappointed to see that photographers still don't get it.

Yes, the photos are nice.
Yes, the layout is clean.

But many photographers can't answer basic questions about their website.

• Who is your intended audience?
• How are you going to get people to it?
• What do you expect them to do when they get there?
• How are you going to tell if your website is helping you?

Instead, these critiques are filled with high fives and terrorist fist jabs. "Nice photos, but it takes a long time to load," or "I couldn't see it on Firefox 3.1," which only goes to reinforce why your photography website is a big fat stinking black hole of time and money.


NASA Images

If you're asking photographers what they think about your website, you've already lost the battle. Photographers aren't your audience.

If you didn't consider Search Engine Optimization in the design phase, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time and money with direct marketing efforts to drive people to it. (And why the heck are you trying to build a website in the first place? Take pictures, outsource the other stuff)

If you only have a few galleries of images and nothing else, then what's the point? You hid your e-mail address and phone number so effectively, that no one can find it. And you don't have any e-commerce capabilities, so if I found an image that I like, there's no opportunity to purchase it. You spent time and money to bring me to your website, and all I can do is view 30 pictures, and read a bio you wrote in the 3rd person? Why on earth would you drive traffic to your website, then have a link that reads "to license my photos, go to Getty where they will take 70% of the sale from me"?

And finally, you have no idea what people are doing on your website because you didn't install an analytics package like Google Analytics. You have no idea what your most popular content is. You have no idea if people are navigating the site the way you intended. You have no idea if all that time you're spending on Twitter is actually increasing visitors, and nor do you understand if Twitter traffic is better than an e-mail newsletter.

If you can't measure what you're doing, how the heck can you determine whether your website is losing you money or not? It's like joining Jenny Craig but not weighing yourself, ever.

You're smarter than that.

Get our free 43-page guide that we've created called "Google Analytics for Photographers." The kit also contains a quick start guide and 5 basic marketing questions that Google Analytics can help you answer. Make marketing decisions based on facts, not hunches.

» Get it for free.

What are the important elements of a photographer's website? What should each website contain, and what do your customers want? These are important questions to answer before you settle on any website design.

This article outlines the most important elements of what makes an individual photographer's website effective, much of which we heard straight from top photo buyers in our 2009 What Buyers Want survey. You should be sure that your website can accommodate as many of the items from the below list as possible.

An ideal photographer website possesses the following traits:

1. Contains HTML that search engines can index.

This may be the most important element of all. Search engines are such a significant traffic source that you can't really succeed without them. The foundation of HTML is text, and search engines love text. Give search engines what they love, and they'll return the love in the form of a nice steady stream of traffic.

Putting your entire website in Flash, or including captions and keywords in the image itself instead of as text below the image, is not advised if you expect search engine traffic.

2. Is simple and clean. It showcases the photography, not the design of the site.

When a visitor comes to your website, the first thing thought across his or her mind should be about your images, not about your website itself. If a visitor is distracted by the design, annoyed because it is busy or slow, or consumed with navigation that may seem cool but is confusing to newcomers --that's attention away from your images.

Your website should be as simple as possible. The reason art museums have simple white walls is to showcase the art.

3. Has contact information available on every page.

Contact information that is difficult to find is the single biggest pet peeve of photo editors. Make sure your website contains your contact information - or at least a link to it - on every single page. A good practice is to include your phone, and email address on the bottom of every single page of the site.

Yes, that's right... every single page. If you want your phone to ring, then don't make it difficult for people to find your contact information.

We talk a lot about Search Engine Optimization and how it can benefit photographer websites by bringing unsolicited visitors and expanding your marketing reach. There's not a photographer in the world who couldn't benefit by having more eyeballs on their work.

Many photographers have downloaded our SEO Cookbook, and made all the suggested on-page changes like unique page titles, meta descriptions, captions and keywords, etc, but still can't figure out why they aren't showing up on page 1 of a particular search.

According to most SEO experts, on-page factors only account for about 10-15% of your SEO juice. The real meat comes through building links to your photos and other content. But how the heck do you build links to your website?

Build it yourself
There are a number of easy ways to build links to your photos.

1. Blog: A blog is an SEO machine. You pick the topic, you pick the keywords, you build the links. Even if no one is reading your blog, you're still gaining some SEO benefit.
2. Join Trade Organizations: Many of the photo trade organizations maintain websites with member pages. And in many cases, these pages allow you to list website information. It's a perfect way to link back to yourself.
3. Social Networks and Online Communities: Been resisting the social networks? You might want to rethink that strategy. Having a public presence on Social Media sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn can benefit your SEO juice. And of course, community sites like SportsShooter give you great ways to showcase your photography at the same time.
4. Google Local Business: Make sure to create an entry with Google Local Business. This not only provides you with some SEO juice, it also gives you the potential of showing up on Google maps when people search for photo services.

Create Compelling Content Regularly
I see a lot of photographers shooting the same old crap in the same style every day. You know what I'm talking about. A rose in a vase on white seamless. Raindrops on the window. More "street photography." And you wonder why people don't link to your content.

As an extreme example, think for a moment about the stupidest YouTube video you've ever seen. Was it David After Dentist? Chocolate Rain? Dog Dreaming? Star Wars Kid? Humiliating or not, these viral videos make for compelling content. And besides the millions of "views," they each have thousands of links to them (I just created four more).

What's compelling photographic content? Tomas van Houtryve posed as a Belgian chocolate maker to gain access and shoot phenomenal photos in North Korea. On Location News shot the first on-set photos of Iron Man 2 with Robert Downey Jr.


Photo by Tomas Van Houtryve

Ok, maybe you're not ready to risk life and limb to enter a country controlled by a brutal dictatorship, but you certainly are creative enough to shoot something compelling and distinct. Shawn Rocco's cellphone photos have been featured in numerous sites like PDN and the New York Times Lens blog.He didn't risk life and limb, he just followed a project which other people found interesting.

You need to understand that the average joe on the Internet doesn't build links. Links are built by a very small population of users who we call the "linkerati" (the linkerati aren't a mystical group of people, by the way. They are just people who take the time to link to content they like). They are the power users of the Internet, and they aren't interested in pictures of flowers. That isn't to say that there isn't a market or interest in flower pictures, but the linkerati are much more interested in things like these crazy underwater/overwater photos by Dustin Humphrey.


Photo by Dustin Humphrey

And while there are many cases of one-hit wonders on the Internet, you need a much more constant production of content for SEO purposes. Google will look more favorably upon you if content on your website is updated frequently (Google has a concept called Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) that is factored into their search algorithms). And think about it. Doesn't it suck when you go to your dentist and they have a copy of Women's Home Journal from 1997? Wait, George Clooney is the Sexiest Man Alive again? No, no, no, my friend. That's the November 2006 issue of People. Doesn't it make you think that your dentist is out of touch with the times?

Think about how a visitor to your website feels when your last update was two years ago. Maybe you have pictures of Borat, when you should really have pictures of Bruno. I think you get my drift.

So keep in mind that link building is the most important factor in your quest for SEO domination, and don't get frustrated if your on-page work hasn't yielded you the best results. Building links takes time and effort, but creating compelling content can dramatically help your linking strategy.

There's smart, then there's METAsmart. The Stock Artist Alliance received a grant from the Library of Congress to extol the merits of meta data and its relationship to photography. So they've created a series of seminars to talk about how meta data can be used to protect copyright, smooth workflow, track image usage, and much more. If you're serious about photography and want to learn about extending the power of your images through meta data,  you're going to want to attend one of these free seminars around the country.



PhotoShelter will be attending in several cities on both coasts to talk about SEO and how meta data can be used to bolster your visibility to search engines, which gets you more eyeballs to your photographs. Here's the schedule. There's even one this Thursday in Seattle which Grover is attending.

Seattle / June 11
San Francisco / June 17
Los Angeles / June 18
New York / June 22
Washington / June 25
Atlanta / July 21


The seminars are free, but you have to register. Hope to see you!

In April, we released a SEO Cookbook for Photographers so that the average photographer could understand how to plan and execute changes to his/her website that would lead to better Search Engine Optimization. The step-by-step guide was chock full of practical information and help "do this, not this" examples.

Then a few weeks later, we started to hear success stories about how people were starting to see the pages and images in their websites start to creep up in the search engine rankings. The photographers who had installed Google Analytics started to see an increase in search-engine based traffic -- so the goal of generating essentially free marketing from an entirely new audience was starting to be met.

SEO is a fluid discipline because search engines change all the time. Microsoft even released a new beta search engine called Bing this week, which underscores how search is still in its infancy. Smart photographers recognize how important search engines can be in promoting their products and services, and want to stay on top of new trends.

With that in mind, we have just released a 14-page supplement to our SEO Cookbook. If you're already a PhotoShelter member, you can download it here from the Photographer Area. Otherwise, you can download it from our SEO for Photographers and Photography Websites resource page.

Among the various topics, my personal favorite is how to use Google Analytics to measure whether your SEO efforts are actually working. With limited time and money, we're all interested in getting the best return-on-investment of our marketing activities.

Get optimized!

A few months ago, PhotoShelter simplified the ability to insert Google Analytics into our photographer websites. At that time, I asked a number of our users to share their analytics with me for the purposes of creating some aggregated intelligence as a general baseline for all photographers. Twenty-four photographers shared their information with me.



I present this survey of the findings knowing full well that the sample is too small to be statistically significant, but still, it represents a range of photographers, and gives us the first published set of data regarding photographer websites. If you've heard me talk before, then you know how passionate I am about analytics and getting photographers to think about their websites as marketing tools, not just a display of photos.

I've chosen to report on the default set of "dashboard" information rather than diving too deeply into the other statistics. Because the data from any individual's website is so specific, it would be foolish to create decisions based on this survey. Analytics gives us a way to measure a baseline of activity, and then work to improve our own metrics over time through our marketing efforts.

In order to compare apples to apples, I have selected the defaults date range of one month in Google Analytics spanning April 20, 2009 - May 20, 2009. For purposes of comparison, you might want to set your dates to the same.

Visits
Google defines a visit as any contiguous activity within a 30 minute time frame by a web browser.
 
Low: 75
High: 2692
Average: 702

I feel that 1000 visits in a month is a minimum amount of traffic that photographers should be driving to their websites in order to expect any 1) reliable data on which to base marketing decisions, and 2) create a funnel of potential customers that is wide enough to produce monetary results (either through e-commerce on the site, or interactions via phone/email).

Photographers who aren't hitting this threshold should examine whether they are doing any marketing activity at all. If not, potential areas to investigate include:

- Mailers: postcards, calendars, etc
- E-mail
- SEO

Page views
Each time a user hits a page, a page view is counted. Traversing back and forth between two pages will still increment the number of page views. A high page view count is an indication that you have sticky content for your demographic.

Low: 283
High: 21,943
Average: 4824

Google Webmaster is free tool that can help photographers ensure their website is crawled and indexed properly. When you perform a search on Google, three main components go into serving up the results:

-    Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Does it know where the content is?
-    Indexing: Can Google process your web pages and parse the content on each page?
-    Serving: Are relevant results displayed to the user to match their expectation?

The Webmaster tool gives you a way to register your domain with Google, and then provides you with additional features to enhance and monitor the searchability of your website.

Add your site:
After you create an account, you can add your domain to the "dashboard" by simply typing in the URL. You can then click the domain.

Overview
The Overview page indicates some basic information:

• Has your site been crawled?
• How many pages are indexed?
• Were there any errors with the crawling?

On a small website (i.e. < 100 pages), you should do your best to minimize the errors. On larger sites with lots of dynamic content (and perhaps a number of legacy pages), it isn't unusual to have a few errors. Obviously, an error-free site is ideal, but often impractical.

Determining how many pages are indexed:
There is no guarantee that Google will index 100% of your website. However, you can easily determine how many and which pages have been indexed without even using Google Webmaster. From the Google homepage, you can type in:

site:yourdomain.com

Note, there should be no spaces. For example:

site:photoshelter.com

Similarly, you can see how many pages link to your homepage by typing:

link:yourdomain.com

Both queries can give you a way to monitor any sudden increases or drops that might affect your SEO.

You probably don't add images to your portfolio everyday. You probably don't shoot a wedding every day. And you probably don't add stock images to your archive every day. In that respect, the "main" part of a photographer website can be fairly static.

Blogs, on the other hand, are a great way to talk about the photos you take, the projects you're working on, the photo workshops you're attending (or running), etc. I fret when people conceive of blogs as an online journal because I've always believed that the real benefit of a blog is as an SEO machine.

We get to choose the topics, the copy and the links in our blog, and all of those things can add up to some pretty good SEO juice.



I was on the phone with Robert Seale today, who is a fantastic portrait photographer in Houston, and we were talking shop about his website and his blog. Turns out that he registered robertsealeblog.com for his blog because someone had told him that having a different domain pointing to his website proper, robertseale.com, was good for link buildling.

While I would generically agree that building links is important, I disagree in this particular case for a few reasons.

Registration Data
All the information about domain registration is public. Setting up two domains that are registered by the same person and then pointing traffic to one another is a technique that Google is aware of. In extreme cases, this behavior can get you penalized. In less extreme cases, you're probably not getting a whole lot of benefit from a single website that has a majority of outbound links going to one website.

Robert told me that someone else had registered the blog domain for him. So maybe Google doesn't know, or maybe they have really smart engineers who figured out that robertseale.com and robertsealeblog.com were the same person. I honestly don't know.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a technique that helps your website rank higher in searches on Google and the other major search engines. But what searches are you aspiring to rank higher for in the first place? What's the practical application?

When users are looking for something, they type in a word or phrase that they believe is likely to lead them to the best results. For example, a couple might be looking for a wedding photographer, so they search for:

wedding photographer

Upon seeing the search results, they realize that the search was too broad, so they narrow the scope by adding some geographical component.

chicago wedding photographer

Another couple might type in the following:

wedding photographer in Chicago

How do you know which term to optimize for? And once you have that information, what do you do with it?