Photography Website Archives

The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Pro Photography Website

Beginner's Guide to Creating a Professional Photography Website and Portfolio

Updated October 19, 2017

One of the first things you need to do when starting your business is to set up a photography website that shows off your work and gives your prospective clients the information they need to hire you.Your website is your virtual storefront. Not only is it a great way to get more clients, but it’s a really cheap photography marketing tool that you can control completely and find clients outside of the people you already know.

With all the options and technical language out there, it can be frustrating to know what kind of website you should create. Not only that, but prices vary significantly between the options, so in this post I’m going to make everything clear. I’ll discuss what kind of website you should create, what all those technical terms mean, and tell you exactly what I’d do if I was just starting out and needed a website (including sharing what my blogging strategy would be). Let’s dive right in!

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Are You Making These 3 Common SEO Mistakes When Blogging?

The number one struggle that photographers have when starting their photography business is getting the word out about their business and finding more new clients.

Blogging is one of the best ways to get new clients that haven’t heard of you before.

If you can show up when people search for a photographer in a search engine like Google, then you’ll have a better chance of finding new clients. In fact, we get the majority of our new clients this way.

While this can take a lot of time and be overwhelming, there’s three mistakes that I see almost all new photographers making that are easy to fix that will help you rank higher almost immediately. I’ll be showing you how to change these things quickly in WordPress, since it has all the tools you need in it to help you rank higher (so I think everyone should be using it!)

Are you making these three common SEO mistakes?

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The Ultimate Photography Website Guide

A Photography Website is vital to all modern photography businesses as it’s often the first impression people have of our business. It’s one of the least-expensive and most effective tools we have in marketing our photography business and getting new clients.

Yet unless you’ve studied about what converts visitors into paying clients, it’s likely that your website is not nearly as effective as it could be, and you’re losing out on many potential clients.

So I thought I’d put this guide together with all sorts of resources for creating the best possible photography website out there.

It’ll talk about everything from setting up your site, how to get more traffic to your site, and then how to convert that traffic into paying customers.

Let’s jump right in. [Click to read more]

How to Get More Ideal Clients Using Your Website

Unless you own a studio, your website is your virtual storefront where people come to decide if they want to hire you as their photographer.

This is one of the most important aspects of your business, yet many of us simply put something together when we create our first website and don’t put a lot of time or thought into anything except what images we want to show and maybe the colors of our branding. Not only that, but it looks a lot like all the other photography websites out there.

While I think having beautiful images is a very important part of getting clients to hire you, it’s not even close to the most important part. Everyone shows photos. It’s REALLY hard to stand apart from your competition on image quality alone, especially considering most people don’t know a good photo from a great photo.

So how do you stand out and attract your ideal clients like crazy?

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What to Blog About When Your Photography Business Is Slow

If you want to attract new clients online, it’s absolutely essential that you blog regularly.

Search engines like Google will lower your rankings in their results if your website isn’t being updated regularly.

But what do you blog about when you’ve already blogged all your client work and don’t have anything to blog about.

Please don’t blog post after post of your own kids. People notice. And certainly do NOT try to make it look like they aren’t your kids or that it was for some paying client. A post here and there is fine, but when you’re doing it to “pad” your blog, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

So what do you write about?

Here’s a list of several topics you can blog about when your photography business is slow. [Click to read more]

4 Steps to Get Out of Your Blogging Slump

Blogging and creating new content is important for improving and maintaining your search ranking on Google and other search engines.

Fresh content keeps your website interesting to potential clients but is also much loved by the Google spiders which helps you to rank better in internet searches.

For these reasons, blogging has become crucial to the online efforts of many photographers and creative spirits.

But like most things that we know are good for us, sometimes we don’t do it as much as we should.

Or more likely, you blog like crazy for a while but then editing, practicing and general blog burn out sets in and your weekly posts turn to monthly and pretty soon you sound like a major cooperation with their quarterly or semi-annual reports.

If you are in this predicament, don’t fret. You are not alone.

Peruse any number of blogs and you’ll see that many people have dips in their output. In fact, look at my photography site and you’ll see a painfully long gap between posts during this past summer.

I’m writing this not because I’m perfect at regular blog posts but because I know what it’s like to fall off the blogging wagon and what it takes to get back going again.

Here are 4 steps to getting yourself out of your blogging slump: [Click to read more]

What Professional Photo Blog Theme is Best?

Pro Photo Blog Themes Comparison Review — Sneak Peek of our New Wedding Photography Website, Designed Using Headway (To be Released Soon!)

Your photography blog is your most important marketing tool.

With the flexibility that WordPress offers, it is by far the best option for creating both your site and blog that exists right now. The hard part is choosing what professional photo blog theme you want to use to to create your site.

I’ve used a number of the popular photo blogs out there over the past few years, so I thought I’d share a review of some of the main WordPress professional photo blog themes that you should consider.

I started out using a free WordPress.com blog (really bad idea for SEO/marketing reasons) before moving to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. Much better idea, and you can get started for as low as $4.95 a month.

All the links in this post are affiliate links, but none of these companies have approached me about writing this. I will be brutally honest regardless because that’s what is most important and it’s how I roll.

For the record, I have learned some CSS coding but have to google almost everything I need to do, but I’m definitely not one who could design a site from the ground up. I know enough to be dangerous, but I am not someone who wants to code at all if I can get away from it. I imagine this is similar to most photographers.

So let’s start with what I have chosen to use with our new site re-design and then move through some of the other themes we’ve used as well for our professional photo blog. [Click to read more]

Don’t Let Your Photography Blog Suck

coyhaique niche photography blog — Photo by Kyle Hepp

Let me start by saying this: Your blog is not that great. Your blog doesn’t stand out from the rest. Your blog is sometimes (maybe even often) boring.

I’m sorry. But somebody had to break the bad news.

The wedding photography world is filled with full timers looking for more clients, part timers wanting to book enough to go full time and people who picked up a camera yesterday. I’m going to throw out a guess here, but I’d say at least 75% of those people have blogs. I’m being conservative. That number is probably higher.

Of those 75%, at least 65% of those blogs are virtually indistinguishable from one another in terms of content.

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The Photographer’s Guide to Building Links (And Why They Are Necessary)

No matter how optimized your website is, around 60% of the ranking factors for search engines involve links from other sites to your site called backlinks.

There are important aspects to each link which may make one more valuable than another.

So lets see if we can break all of this down and tell you how to get these valuable links without getting too technical (like I promised in my last post).

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How To Have Happier Clients and Better Leads Using Photography Questionnaires

I think I’m in love.

My friend Andy recently told me about something called Gravity Forms that he uses for his client questionnaires and contracts.

I’ve been doing an informal questionnaire with my wedding clients before each wedding, but Andy and I photographed two weddings together this past month, and we used his questionnaire. It was so awesome to have all that information in one place and I loved how easy his form was to use. So I finally bit the bullet and purchased it this past weekend.

Oh. My. Word.

This little WordPress plugin rocks my world.

It’s the most easy to create form I’ve ever seen, and being able to use conditional logic (that’s a fancy way of saying that you only show certain questions based upon answers to other questions before it) is just rad.

Yeah, I just used the word “rad”. I like to pretend I’m cool. 😉

So after figuring it out and getting it all set up, I immediately decided that I had to tell you all about it and why I think you should buy it, too.

Not only that, but I created a free contact page for you to use on your photography site, just because I love you and want to save you some time. [Click to read more]

Get More Business by Treating Your Potential Clients Like Sheep

Confession: I never really put much thought into my website design. I considered what template I wanted and customized how it looked, but that was about it.

It pretty much looks the same as all the other photographers’ websites out there who use the same template that I do.

I don’t even want to know how many people I may have lost because I never thought about it. In fact, I didn’t start thinking about it until we started planning out our re-branding process, which still isn’t finished (insert sad panda face here).

But then I had one of those “ah-ha!” moments. I don’t even remember what caused it, but everything I’ve been reading lately all came together and it just made sense.

Basically, you have to treat your visitors like sheep. [Click to read more]