In this economic climate when things are tough and very little money to splash out on advertising & marketing, how can small businesses like a home-based photography business get their brand / name out in front of potential clients with no money. Is it possible ? How can someone market themselves without spending a fortune ? I’ll be uploading a series of posts every few days to show you just how not to spend money on marketing & advertising.

One thing is for sure, being a good or a great photographer will not guarantee that you will get work or customers through your doors. You will have to go out and get them. You’ll need to take action otherwise things won’t improve just by themselves. To get started….

Get rid of your Flash website and Get A Blog…
If you have one of those Flash websites, ditch it today and get a blog. Indexing a website made in Flash is a lot harder and expensive then a HTML site. With a blog or a blog-site, you have constantly new &  fresh content on your site which Google loves and hence your site may get indexed more quickly than others. The advantages of blogging are tremendous. It may be time consuming but very cost effective and you can write as little or as much as you’d like as long as you keep updating the blog regularly. Blogs are content rich and this is exactly what search engines’ are looking for. I know Google loves blogs, they bought Blogger.com!!!!

Blogs are full of archived information, have good & relevant links (incoming & outgoing), mostly focused on the content and have the latest news when updated. Blogs are a rich source of timely content, which is exactly what the search engines’ customers are looking for. Blogs also make visitors to come back for more information, you may come back to this site for more information. Blogs are easy to updated, easy to use and do not require any technical know how whatsoever.

To prove my point, here is a great example, the last post on “Focus on Imaging” was put up this morning and within 20 minutes of the post going live, I Googled and here are the results:

I searched for ‘focus on imaging nec ‘ and I had one post on the first page. This was indexed within the 1st hour of the post going up.

Then I searched for ‘ focus on imaging seminars ‘, this time I had 2 posts on the 1st page! 2 from this website and 1 from my photography site SF Digital .

The post on SF Digital website was also put up this morning. This is just one example I’ve shown you here. I spend a fair amount of time tweaking, testing & researching keywords without knowing any html!!  There is a process to this, its not by luck or by chance that my sites appear on the 1st page. This requires some work which is so easy that anyone can learn it. If you wish to learn this and see how easy it is, then you’ve got to be at the various Foto SF Open Days I’m hosting at Calumet stores throughout the country. There is no charge to attend, its completely FREE . I’ll be showcasing my tips & tricks on how to save huge amounts of money on advertising and getting loads of traffic to your site for FREE . Places are limited and you are advised to book now to avoid disappointment. Plus I’ll show you how to get free PR, get your name in magazines & newspapers, email marketing, how to create competitions & readers offers and much much more….

Here are the forthcoming dates:

FREE FOTO SF OPEN DAYS AT CALUMET

23 Mar 10 – Calumet Glasgow
26 Mar 10 – Calumet Birmingham
01 Apr 10 – Calumet London
13 Apr 10 – Calumet Manchester
15 Apr 10 – Calumet Nottingham

Hope to see you soon.

Next Post: Marketing without Money: Press Release

Oz

Related posts:

1. Focus on Imaging 2010 – NEC, Birmingham
2. Business & Beyond : Advanced
3. Business of Photography: 3rd March 2010

Tags: blogs, Calumet, Focus on Imaging, Free Seminar, marketing