Advertising for the Wedding Photographer Part 5
Wedding Blog Advertising – does it work?
Chapter 1: Wedding Magazines and Print Advertising
Chapter 2: Directories, Google and Facebook cold calls
Chapter 2b: The Hitched Directory
Chapter 3: Google Adwords and Facebook Ads
Chapter 4: Social Media
Chapter 5: Wedding Blog Advertising (You are here)
Chapter 6: Facebook Groups and Wedding Forums
Chapter 7: Wedding Fairs and Bridal Shows
Chapter 8: What works for me
Advertising and Marketing using Wedding Blogs
Before I talk about wedding blog advertising and promotion I’m going to remind you of the caveats from Part 1:
- This is based on my experience and mine alone. Everyone is different, everyone has a niche. Any information given is from my own personal experience. I’ll quote actual real statistical figures publicly available.
- I’m not here to bitch. Seriously, I’m not. I’ve thought long and hard about mentioning names and companies involved and I’ve decided to do so when required. So if you’re reading this and your name is mentioned then sorry about that, please read point number 1.
- I’m a firm believer in paying it forward. This whole photographer section of my blog is because when I started out people fell over backwards to help and assist me. So here I am, telling you about my mistakes so you can get to where you want to be quicker or at least with less financial grief. That’s all. Nothing more, nothing less.
- This is something that nobody appears to talk about or more importantly….and I quite seriously believe…..are scared to. You don’t need to be and I want comments and interactions on this post (and you can do so anonymously if you choose to). I want to believe that what I’ve experienced isn’t the norm. Prove me wrong.
- These posts are subject to change. Young and old we’re always learning. I’m happy to be wrong and will adjust this post to suit.
I’m also going to add another: If you run a wedding blog this isn’t meant to offend you.
Unlike a lot of other sources of advertising, using wedding blogs is one of the easiest to monitor. In nearly all cases there are three types of promo.
A straightforward advertisement in the form of a box or banner ad:
A promotional blog post bigging you up to the masses. (Blogger endorsement):
Or via a supplier directory:
There’s others, but these are the main ones and the ones I’ll be talking about in this post.
On a slight tangent, some of the researched figures and methodology mentioned here can be applied to all types of advertising online. Not just wedding blogs.
Whenever you apply to advertise on a wedding blog you’ll be sent a press pack (here is one such example) and in there you’ll find an intro, a bit of flowering up of the blog, some traffic figures, a rate card and some glowing ‘Urmagurd, I like, made so much money’ comments – (A bit like how adverts for gambling on the TV never show anyone making a loss).
‘We love advertising on ****** – we had our first booking within a few weeks of our advert going live from Australia! It’s so nice for brides (and us!) to have such a great local wedding blog as it really helps them to relate the images to their own wedding.’
‘Since the post went up last week, I’ve had 32 enquiries, 10 firm bookings and 5 enquiries about weddings outside of the discount offer, requesting a quote!’
‘I had a couple of calls but mostly price shoppers who wanted the best deal, it was excellent value for money and a great return on investment’
Here’s some quoted traffic figures for a well known wedding blog:
The first blog I advertised with was Rock n Roll Bride. Out of all the wedding blogs I do consider it the best of the biggies. Punky attitude, good readership and best of all Kat is exceptionally fast at responding to emails. I mean like a lightening bolt so Kudos is definitely deserved in that respect. In fact I’d say on balance her site is the best. Ads aren’t overcrowded, good response times and a nice identity.
I singled out Rock n Roll Bride as my first blog for one reason only. Lisa Devlin had an ad. That swung it for me as when I first started out I looked around to see who was well known in my area and saw that this was the only place she appeared to advertise. I thought ‘There must be something to this’ and placed a large order for £2124’s worth of ads in combination with the sponsored post.
This BIG newbie mistake for me was that many bloggers have photographers with whom they are in a symbiotic relationship with. i.e. they’re friends. It never occurred to me they were and placed a big outlay on what I saw on the surface. Would I of still placed the ad? Probably, but maybe not for 8 months.
If there’s one piece of advice I’ll give you is that people do copy others. If they think someone is a success they’ll try to emulate them in some hope it’ll brush off in their direction. I now see it, at the time I didn’t. DON’T MAKE THIS MISTAKE because if you copy someone you’ll also end up copying their mistakes too
What I should of done was question if the blog was right for me, was I in the right price bracket for her audience or if my face even fit in her demographic.
My results from this campaign were notable and interesting in that I was averaging 3-8 hits per day from my medium ad and the largest one Kat has on the top right of the blog netted me between 20 and 48 hits per day. The large ad being £500 per day at the time. Clicks were completely scalable based on the size of the ad. This shows good layout and positioning on a web page when things are linear like that.
Figures were impressive. No lie.
Campaign results: I broke even
- Â 5 enquiries in total.
- Three bookings as a result of the sponsored posts.
- Two enquiries from the ads but these fizzled out to nothing.
5 enquiries from an 8 month campaign and £2124 outlay is not a promising result. Even worse when the first 3 came from the sponsored post at the beginning of the campaign. It makes the ads themselves look really bad.
Looking for a cause there does appears to be a distinct issue over price.
Cost is one of the single most deciding factors in Wedding Photography. Here’s some related analysis from my own site:
Out of the three weddings I booked via Rock n Roll Bride:
- August wedding £849 all day
- December wedding £749 – Massive bartering on price for reduced hours
- January wedding £949 all day
As soon as I started charging over £1000 for all day cover and supply it went dead. Just POOF! gone. It seems price really is a limiting factor for many. Or at least, the majority don’t want to spend over 1k. Food for thought.
Blog advertising DOES work. Just that it has to be for the right people at the right price point, with the right look, with the right site. It’s easy to lose your shirt over it. With one person I know spending £600 on a sponsored post and nothing to show for it. That much buys you an all inclusive holiday to Egypt.
I also realised you shouldn’t believe the hype surrounding quoted figures.
Services love to quote figures but often they quote global fiqures. As someone who covers London and Sussex having 40,000 people in the US looking at my site really doesn’t have any value to me because, if you’re getting married you’ll exhaust the local talent before being desperate enough to search another countries suppliers. Like, duh.
Because of this I embarked on an experiment in number crunching as I don’t want to call a service junk if I can help it. I want to believe in advertising and wedding blogs in particular as my target market reads them.
The idea behind the number crunching was this. If I’m getting 35 hits a day from Rock n Roll Bride can I qualify them as they come in? Using Google Analytics can I nail down their rough location and decide if they are viable to me?
Turns out I could:
We’ve 6 things here going on in the above spreadsheet:
- The first column value has the total amount paid for the duration of the ad. The duration itself isn’t included but in all cases the advertising period was at least 6 months.
- Total number of clicks. Which is as it suggests the total number of clicks from the ad.
- Total UK clicks. Obvious I know but these are the total number of UK visitors via the ad.
- 3 Hour radius. These are the exceptionally important values. These are clicks to my site from areas I would actually travel to on a regular basis. No point counting a click from Scotland.
- Cost per (relevant) click. As you can see the least amount I paid for a click was 1.95 which was with Want that Wedding.
Other thoughts on the figures:
- This might not even be couples but marketers, SEO companies, other photographers and repeat visitors (making the numbers even worse).
- This is just my ad results and might not be a big enough sample, but similar results from 8 blogs is a good sample regardless.
- My 5 bookings were for sub £1000 weddings. All of them.
So what’s up with blog advertising?
I’ve participated in many discussions on this and have seen my experience isn’t isolated. Lots of people have had the same or worse experience as me with those having success being in the minority. Or at least they don’t let us know how amazing it was for them when the subject comes up.
When there have been successes they’ve often been via real wedding features. But this gets complicated further when those who say they’ve had results have had an ad as well as features. It seems that the number of people with successful campaigns are much fewer with just an ad alone. This takes us into free vs paid territory and raises the stakes. Again, cost appears a factor.
People are inclined to spend less, not more if it can be helped. The more you charge for your services the fewer relevant visitors you will get too.
Glancing at Rock my Wedding there’s around 30 wedding photographers on there. 30. All competing for the same space and the same market. There’s a one year waiting list for advertising and a mid placed ad will cost you roughly £175 a month.
Fancy your chances? Many do because they do what I did and just assume it’ll work.
‘They must be great with so many togs advertising on there and a huge waiting list right?’
Well, who truly knows for real. Unless you have all the results from all the advertisers you’ll never confidently know. It could be mass hysteria or they’ve just got budgets to burn.
Or that it does actually work and I’m just an island.
Whenever I called time on a particular campaign I’ve let the bloggers know my results and many, many times I get told ‘That’s unusual because many of our advertisers have had great results with multiple bookings’ – But they always fall short of saying WHO. I can’t check the claim because of this but it does make me scratch my head and wonder why a campaign failed to live up to a bloggers claims.
Especially when conversations like below are more and more commonplace:
First thing I looked at was price. Most of my success with blogs has come at a time my pricing was sub £1000. Love My Dress netted me 2 bookings but after the first couple of months all enquiries ceased and this happened at a time when I upped my pricing.
The importance of price in the scheme of things is more crucial than your relevancy to a certain blogs niche. In fact I would say it’s 85% of the deal. Sounds a lot no?
When I look at my website analytics at least 30% of the people who land on my home page go to the pricing page. Then my blog, then the rest move around my portfolio.
Some might scoff at my estimate of 85% but look at it from a couples point of view. They aren’t photographers and a lot of the time they won’t spot the differences between £750, £1250 or £1850 photographers like we would.
When there are so many ambiguous signals out there determining quality, price is a dependable one that wins out most times. You can’t really inform couples about yourself fully via a click through ad. You really can’t.
So pricing is a big deal.
I’ve spent a lot of time soul searching as to why, I’ve done ad rotation, number crunching and an entire site redesign. I changed EVERYTHING except lowering my pricing and the results from blog advertising remain unchanged. I could of written this last year but I wanted to really be sure I’d ruled out every. single. variable I could before writing about it.
At my current pricing, I feel that the amount of people with that budget are in a much much smaller percentage, say, 5% of couples vs the rest of those with a budget of 1k or less or who don’t have a photographer at all.
This has an impact on the figures.
If I have 35 hits a day from a blog but only 10 are relevant for my location…. only one of those clicks will have the budget for me anyway.
That person has also got to like my style and have a partner who agrees before so much as sending the email…and depending on the blog you use to advertise I’ll be up against 20+ other photographers too.
The other problem with pricing is you have to factor in the ads worth. As mentioned earlier one blogger charges £600 for a sponsored post. I kid you not. SIX HUNDRED POUNDS. If you didn’t get anything from that is it something you would swallow? Because even if you charge 1k per wedding you’d need 6 bookings to make it pay.
In business, people charge what they can for something because people will pay it. Not always because something is worth it.
On the flipside, there are a lot of excellent smaller blogs who for £300 or less will give you a ad on every page of their site for a year. Harder to find, but much less of a risk if you’re in the mood to advertise.
A couple of other things often said:
- Â ‘Exposure is good for branding’. A small business isn’t a brand and sharing advertising space with 29 other advertisers, many of whom will be cheaper than you isn’t ‘good exposure’.
- ‘It’s good for SEO’. It’s not. The search engine of choice, Google, will in the mainstream only count one link and discount the rest. Google will not necessarily pick that link from the blog homepage, it could be from any page containing your ad and you’re sharing that space with loads of other advertisers. It’ll be almost worthless. Certainly not worth paying hundreds for. Even if it did help, once the ad is gone, so are you.
It could actually get you a penalty. If Google sees 2000 links to your homepage it might discount all of them. At one point I had 6 wedding blogs pointing to me with no perceivable benefit. And trust me, I know SEO. Google is focusing less and less on links and more on content. I get more work from my own blog than I do via advertising….and it’s my work for all eternity, all of it free.
That’s my experience with actual paid blog advertising . I didn’t mention the directories but they’re essentially the same in results and to be honest, are a recent thing all the blogs have jumped on as an additional revenue stream. My experience of those is limited.
Real wedding features
These are free ways to put your work out there which do have success providing you are on a popular blog.
Whoever you choose to promote your work via a sponsored post, choose wisely as some have no traffic whatsoever. Find a happy medium.
If you have an active twitter account and blog a fair bit you may find that there are some wedding bloggers scraping for content. One such blogger was asking to use a wedding I’d blogged within 24 hours of each submission to twitter. Which is always complimentary but not always a good thing for you to accept the first offer. Other bloggers might want it. Spread the love. Build bridges.
I have had work via real wedding features but often a duty of care is missing and I’m not the only one to mention it on Facebook groups and forums.
One big problem is the submission ‘ordeal’ that couples and the photographers have. You’ll submit a wedding and not hear back at all, ever.
Now I am admittedly miffed with this because guys, if you’re reading this. WE ARE YOUR CONTENT – I’ve had several emails from couples who submitted their wedding to blogs and have not heard anything back.
These are couples who chose your blog over all the others, who followed and supported you, recommended you and yet after sending their work in you didn’t bother to even acknowledge it. Rock my Wedding is very well known for this. Come on guys. It’s rude.
*UPDATE* Rock My Wedding has now ‘moved and improved’ their submission process to an online system for wedding submissions. Best of all there are continuous status updates to let you know when something has been accepted, is under review or declined. Great stufff team RMW.
- The other is the time it takes to go public: I’ve a blog that had the info and photos sent over, at their request three months ago which still hasn’t been published.
- Exclusivity periods: Commonly there is an exclusivity period. If you submit a wedding to a blog they’ll go ‘Hey lovely you can’t let any other blogs show this for at least a year’. Then a lot of the time if you do use it somewhere else they’ll expect the next blog to credit the original blog with an ‘as seen first on xxx’ tag.
I mean, the last bit sounds absurd? I submitted a blog, supplied them with the couples details, my images too yet they want a credit on another blog that could potentially stop the other blog using it.
That’s some kind of crazy right?
The common sense approach for me, and hear me out, is that I get the exclusivity thing. I totally understand that. But make it more like 3-4 months and give clear signals when it will appear so we can line up other blogs to promote it when the time has passed.
Give us a timeline. Consider us. And we’ll support and supply you. Promise, with bells on xoxoxo
There are so many blogs and so so much content out there people will most likely not remember it anyway and if it’s a great piece of wedding copy the audience will appreciate seeing it again anyhow.
- Watermarking: A big bone of contention with photographers is that most bloggers won’t let you watermark the images and this is where it goes wrong in quite a spectacular fashion.
The privacy of the couple is not protected. I’m sure nobody wants to their images used to promote other sites of various means.
There are also content farms who will rip a blog post and host it on another site. We don’t want that either.
Pinterest – expanded: Bloggers are happy to stick a Pinterest button on the images as an overlay essentially granting permission for readers to use the images outside the blog it’s featured….but many visitors to blogs are commercial entities looking for content to use themselves as well. Couples give the blog permission to use the images. Not everyone else.
It’s fuzzy logic when bloggers don’t want to mess up their blogs chi with a small watermark but they’ll have a pinterest button over every image. this doesn’t make sense. The no watermark for cosmetic reasons argument dies there.
Two years ago where were we in regards to Pinterest? Nowhere. Yet a wedding blog now has not just legacy posts but plugins that allow Pinterest pinning on those old posts. Who knows where we’ll be in a few more years. Our work must be protected and so must our client privacy as once it’s out there, it’s gone.
Jeff Ascough famously had a mini spat with a blogger over their refusal to his images being watermarked. Yet Jeff is one of the UK’s leading wedding photographers, well known and followed by photographers worldwide.
How many other high end photographers out there would submit work if watermarking was allowed? How many high end weddings might appear as a result?
In conclusion, blogs do work, but research them thoroughly first before putting your money down. Take on board what I said about price being a big factor and ask difficult questions. Remember this is a business transaction not a buddy system.
Comments are open. Let me and others know your experiences in the world of blogging as these are just my observations. I want to hear your voice too.
Thanks for being so open and frank about a topic which baffles a lot of newbie wedding photographers. When my friends and I were first looking into advertising it felt like we were playing a lottery with no unbiased information out there (beyond the sponsor/ad packs). Three of my friends advertised on various blogs with no enquiries. I have had better experiences, I took one month with a blog that got me about 6 enquiries but sadly a lot of them seemed very budget, wanting me to shoot for £600ish which is about half my fee so there’s no way I could do it.
I currently advertise with Kat and I have to say I’ve been pretty happy with the response. The ad is one of the most expensive around but I have had over 15 enquiries and about 6 bookings from her in the last 2.5 months. The other enquiries I was already booked, and sometimes I got a “ah that’s a shame” email back so I do believe they were also viable enquiries. Personally I will probably stick with her all year round and consider off beat bride as well.
I have the feeling that I have had an exceptionally rare and good experience, and that this isn’t necessarily the same with everyone. I think that the suitability of your work and ethos with the blog readership is a huge factor in whether you’ll get work from it. I know that I would get zilch from other more classic or traditional blogs, not because of them but because the fit isn’t right.
This has been an interesting read this morning. A well reasoned and well written set of posts.
Chris, this has been a great read! thanks for being so candid and humourous. As a niche product, yet ‘all-seasons’ and not just ‘wedding-related’, advertising doesn’t work for us as such which I’ve learnt through experience (or mistakes) + common business sense. You’ve been very generous here with your experience and it’s refreshing to see this and remind myself what works for others is not what will necessarily work for me.
ps: I find it rather flattering when ‘competition’ copies me. and even more delighted when they copy my ‘mistakes’.
Chris, I would like to thank you so much for this series of posts. They have been truly informative.
I share your view on paid advertising at magazines. However, Facebook seems to be working a bit better than your experience in my case. However, I follow a more-long term approach there, building relationships with real people, showing that I am a real human being (with varying posts, photo-related or not) etc. That is, I don’t just do promotions or showcase photography work. Referrals and queries/ bookings come more easily after that.
Thank you so much for taking the time and the effort to document your experience in full. I really appreciate it.
Chris, thank you so much for an informative and helpful series of articles. You should be a speaker at wedding show and translate this series into a talk.
I’m wondering if you have any experience of paying to be a “recommended vendor” on on one of the top, top style blogs. In these cases, you must submit a portfolio and about $1800 to be considered to be on their premier list. Have you ever done this or know anyone that has? I’d be interested in knowing if there’s been any confirmed bookings through this. In my own experience the top paying weddings have always been through referrals and vendor referrals in my same niche market.
Thanks for the kind words!
I’ve not tried the big recommended vendor lists. If for only one reason in that the option hasn’t been available to me. However in a similar vein there are the ‘Love Lust Lists’ and supplier directories of which I’ve not had anything from and anyone who advertises usually receives an ‘approved vendor’ or ‘recommended supplier’ button. It seems these are more USA than UK in their presence but as this is a global post if anyone has personal experience I’d love to hear from them.
Hi Chris!
A brilliant post, you, I think have said what a lot of photographers think! Our past experience with some of the most popular UK blogs has been one of dismay, they think by addressing you as lovely, or sweetie they can make you jump through hoops and then change there mind. It is bad buisness practice! The one I love the best though is when they encourage you to comment on their blog so they get to know who you are?! But never ever say anything on your blog or mention you by name. Then just ask if they can feature your work, err NO! Being told they will feature it but then not saying when, is massively frustrating!
In my humble opinion banner ads equals waste of money! Being in a directory is okay but don’t expect huge amounts of traffic!
Thanks for your post
I’m not a photographer but I have advertised with wedding blogs. I have to say it’s true that people are scared to openly discuss whether blog ads are worth it, whether the traffic/following numbers are genuine, and whether it’s a fair playing field. My experience was such that I feel I made a very expensive mistake, but I felt I had to try, as I got absolutely nothing from magazine ads. In my opinion, just a little box on a blog is not worth the hundreds of pounds we have to pay, I think a combination of the ad box, featured work from the sponsor, and a degree of exclusivity would be far better, and worth paying for, but then you end up trying to elbow your way into a circle of cliquey hell and that’s a whole other story 🙂
Thanks for this post, very informative, thorough and honest.
Chris, I really enjoyed reading this post – very informative, well researched, very honest, brave, insightful and above all clear and concise on some important points for all of us to consider.
I’ve not yet dabbled with blog advertising and even submitting to blogs is something I need to do more of (only done it a couple of times). I have advertised in wedding magazines though and have seen that as a big waste of money.
I too get a lot of business from my own blog. It gets liked and shared a lot and my enquiries and bookings as a result are fairly healthy. This of course is driven via several social media platforms where obviously you have the opportunity to have real conversations and therefore drive real time engagement rather than a standalone advert.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, I’m sure a lot of photographers will learn from what you’ve said.
Great post. I too, have had blogs take my images & never publish despite repeated emails saying they would. One was a high profile one that was requested by a number of blogs, as a result I will never approach that blog again.
i have often thought about the recommended lists, now I can happily stick with my initial instinct that they probably don’t work. I know one excellent photographer who gets lots of enquiries via the RMW one, having said that.
I have had a number of bookings from LMD, but only as a result of featured real weddings – and they have always been polite & communicative to boot so they are pretty much my go-to blog.
But thanks for this – very informative.
Excellent post, well researched and a most interesting read. Definitely echoes my own experience with advertising on a blog. I’ve always said how on earth are you supposed to stand out with a tiny little square – impossible!
Very well assessed.
I have never advertised on these blogs (well not paid).
Everything feeds everything else in this industry.
….and that is fine…..because connections make business work…..
…but the biggest problem is somewhere along the line…..photography….the technique, the craft, the art……took a back seat…..and the “formula”, on how take a picture/edit/blog/best album/best camera just got copied over and over and over again…..
Chris – what you’ve written is clear.
It’s saturated. Everyone looks the same. Pricing is the differentiator.
…which implies one must compete on price…..because it’s easier to do that then produce something different for the market….as either a photographer and/or a business…..and the reason those who succeed without resorting to price drops…..is simply because they are different….or have been successful enough to be friends at the top end of the food chain (nowt wrong with that)….it’s just that the price for admission is getting higher and higher, the more and more people want to be part of this industry…..and look at these success stories (or a perception of one) as to how easy it all is…..
….indeed our US third cousins removed…..those gurus of marketing…..have photographers like that with more sophisticated means of being pals via Internet live training, magazine inclusions and WPPI (everything is just bigger & better no?)……and it has gotten to such a point of wanting to be part of the elite….that some of those overnight successes have turned out to be false idols…..
….blogs…..blogs……blogs……just one part of a bigger machine…..
I am slowly coming to the conclusion is that the industry is not about the brides or grooms…..but the photographers themselves……because that’s where the true money lies…..in training, in advertising off the back of their work, in selling you more gear you probably will only use twice….
Once you see it that way….things…..like photography & business……are a little different.
Hi Chris, thanks for writing such a humorous and concise blog series, very informative and thanks for the mention :))
As one of the mentioned wedding blogs I would like to comment on whether advertising in blogs is worth it. It can be hard to measure the true success of banner advertising. I have genuinely been shocked when a banner has lots of clicks, yet no enquiries or bookings.
You’ve brought up some interesting points about aligning yourself with the right blog for your style / brand and making sure you have the right price point.
Personally, I’d like to think that I charge a very reasonable amount for a wedding business to align themselves with my brand 🙂 after all, as a growing blog my overheads grow too… month on month. And if I don’t earn… Well you get the point.
Sonia XxX
Hi Sonia!
I certainly think there is something to using the more reasonably priced blogs. It’s the blogs that are charging many times more than the realistically priced ones. (Want that Wedding being one such reasonably priced one).
If only more blogs were like you with decent pricing and an uncrowded ad space x
Thanks Chris for sharing your experience. As a newbie wedding photographer, I quickly got tired of all the marketing gurus out there – especially the ones you see everywhere.
Best post I’ve read in a long time! Cheers!
Brilliant
An excellent analysis Chris. We’ve had a similar experience with advertising on a niche vintage blog, which in hindsight wasn’t a good fit for us. We’ve also found that Ad Words was a big waste of money too- it’s ok if you are sub £500, but if you charge £1K plus, it’s a waste of time and money. If you don’t mind me asking, do you get most of your business from referrals?
Hi Matt,
Most of my work is through referrals. In reflection there’s a line between being cheap and using advertising and where the referrals from the past wedding means you can leave advertising behind.
People do still find me through Google search though, I don’t know what keywords they use to find me but 25-30% of all enquiries come from there.
It’s part of the reason why expensive blogs tend to be a Paradox. If price is a factor to most, and you need the work then it’s unlikely you can afford the rates the bigger blogs charge.
Then when you are busy enough to afford the rates most of the time you’re booked anyway through referrals.
I stick by the cheaper lower risk blogs though. Ones like Want that Wedding, English Wedding Blog, So You’re getting married and others. They have very low rates and are worth a go. Plus you won’t lose your shirt over them.
Thanks Chris- I think the lower price blogs may be worth a look. The thing I find with Google is that even a top page ranking isn’t sufficient, and that you really need a top 3 or 4 rank to bring in bookings 🙂
You’re right about Google Matt. I’ve given up competing over simple key terms like wedding photography or wedding photographer or even with a location designation now.
It’s still fairly easy to rank though if you write quality content and don’t spam a single keyword but instead cover several aspect of a wedding such as the locations and dress, giving equal weighting to each word.
Keep in touch!
This series of your blog has been invaluable to me. Just wish I’d have read it before wasting money on advertising on one popular website but there you go.
I think what you have said is spot on and i’ve had similar experiences to you so far.
Very Interesting read Chris and bravo for doing your homework and analysing your hits. Puts some of the pie in the sky bloggers claims into perspective.
Thank you 🙂
Excellent article Chris, extremely well put together with analytical data to back it up.
Wow a lot of work and stats in this blog.. Cheers for the heads up
Thank you for writing this Chris, very timely for me. I think I was slowly falling into the blog trap of thinking I ‘should’ advertise on the big blogs because some of my mates do (with varied success), but moreover because within this cool-club industry of ours it’s the ultimate sign of acceptance/accomplishment. I’d written RMW off because of the poor manners, but I was seriously considering dropping some wonga on the other bigger blogs. This post has answered the nagging voice in the back of my mind, I’ll save my money and Pinterest the hell out of my own ‘watermarked’ images instead. Also nail on the head with the bloggers continually bigging up their mates. Sometimes we can become a bit blinkered with how good our best pals’ work really is…..
All very good points, Chris. The sad part is that all of us started wedding photography because we love photography. But so much more time has to be spent on advertising, blogging, twittering, facebooking, Pinteresting etc. Seems like there would be a market out there for someone who wanted a job doing all this other stuff for photographers!
Very insightful, thanks for sharing.
Hi Chris
That was an excellent article. Looks like you said it all. And I appreciate the candidness.
Just one question though. Your closing line reads, “In conclusion, blogs do work, but research them thoroughly first before putting your money down.” But all the preceding evidence in your article (and indeed, in my own experience too) is that you’re lucky if you break with blog advertisements alone. So how exactly can you make them work?
Your point about SEO was spot on as well.
Hi Nasser, I think Blog advertising does work if you fit the blog like a glove. Most people don’t.
Some of the newer, cheaper to advertise and more specific blogs are the ones to try because if you lose out you don’t lose your shirt.
But the problem is as the smaller blogs get more advertisers in the can bump their prices and shoot themselves in the foot.
I don’t mind spending £30 a month to get a bit of familiar exposure (Not that I think it really works anyway) but one blog has tripled their prices so I have to step away from advertising with them now.
Anyhoo, I’m rambling. Put it this way, since publishing this set of posts very very few photographers have jumped in to say they’ve had results from Blog advertising. I think this is really telling.
Chris, this has been a great series of articles. I spent too many thousands of pounds on full page and half page spreads in wedding mags in my initial years. Vanity money. It felt wonderful seeing a lovely picture in a glossy mag. No bookings ever came in. Not one. I kept trying, over and over again, thinking it must be working for the others, it’ll work for me. It never did. This was in the days when we had little competition. Remember Chris? Before everyone lost their job and decided a plumbers van was more expensive than a camera and anyway the training to be a plumber was way more difficult than using the ‘A’ button on a DSLR… Better become a wedding photographer.
Now in an overcrowded market, I imagine magazine advertising is even less likely to succeed.
Your comments on pricing are spot on. Only a few short years ago you couldn’t find a wedding photographer under a thousand pounds. Now, as you point out, it’s harder to find a client willing to spend even that much!
The industry has changed so much and we have to adapt fast to survive. It’s not enough to shoot great pictures. Clients often don’t know the difference. They don’t know the rule of thirds. They know nothing about negative space, colour temperature, mixing ambient light with flash and tungsten. They have little idea of the amount of post production that goes into subbing down 2000 images while they’re enjoying a honeymoon. Why should they? They’re only experience of photography is a pretty nice I-phone image they instagrammed the other day and everyone loved it. Photography… Anyone can do it right?
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve mentioned that I have an amazing monkey wrench…. but my plumbing sucks. A decent camera does not a decent photographer make.
Yep, things have really changed.
We’ve worked really hard at keeping relationships going with direct emails to past clients. Facebook works well for us. It keeps us in the minds of many of our local friends and fans. We are constantly surprised that relationships which have amounted to zip for a number of years and we’d almost given up on them, suddenly turn into bookings. Word of mouth is the number one factor for us. But let’s not kid ourselves it’s free. ‘Word of mouth’ can take a lot of nurturing. Social Networking, blog posting, emailing… All of this takes up considerable time and this is what keeps us in front of our clients minds. Enough that they’d remember to recommend us to their friends. (Often many years after their own wedding and during that time they’ll have been exposed to many other photographers)
All this nurturing, stoking, keeping a relationship going… all this takes time and time is money. I’d say, the referral route is also pretty expensive. That said, the advantage is that a referral from a ‘friend/client’ is far better than a client from an Ad. Because the referred client knows what you’re all about.
Worst mistake ever?
2 actually. Giving away a FREE wedding photography package to two different magazines. Imagine how soul destroying it is to shoot an entire wedding day, process the images, build a book, more than a year after the Ad had finished with no return in revenue. That’s slavery!
For the last month or so I’ve been thinking about paid advertising but as I’m very sceptical I always need to analyse everything and like to find some proof (beyond the one on the media package) so this article was perfect for me. I may still give it a go, as you say different people may see different results, and as I’m not a photographer it may be “easier” on my niche. But will certainly approach ads even more carefully!
One of the most enjoyable and openly honest posts I’ve read to date from another photographer. Loved reading the comments too… Have to agree with most of the conclusions regarding the blogs and all advertising channels in general… waste of money!
A bit of early hours googling about advertising this morning and I came across these posts… Great series Chris, thanks for writing so openly and honestly. It’s so refreshing and reassuring. I’ve not dabbled too much with paid advertising and the bits I have done have had mixed results. Someone above was talking about recommended vendors and that’s one thing I have had a go at and found to be a complete waste of time sadly. Only one isolated experience but not a fruitful one, very little traffic and fewer enquiries. I guess the audience was comparatively small and I should have clocked that before committing, I think I was caught on an off day!
I have found chatting on forums like Hitched.co.uk to be pretty fruitful on lots of levels though, where time allows. I think I’ve seen you on there too? I think my winter campaign will be focussing on Google rankings with some fresh content as this seems to be the next best thing after word of mouth for me.
Thank again.
Hi Sarah, yes I use Hitched sometimes too. Less so now though as more and more work is referrals from previous weddings. It kinda builds up over time.
I think it’s a key thing for people to network and selflessly to help others. It gets noticed and in time, acknowledged. 🙂
I am so pleased to find this post! It’s so sad when a supplier spends all their hard earned profit on an advert which literally gives back nothing. We’re all in this together! Maybe you could write a post on things you have done that have worked? Lisa x
Thanks Chris. Very informative.
Chris
I’m not a photographer and yet still appreciated your article as face similar decisions about how to get to market. Thanks for sharing
Thanks for sharing this info. Marketing is a mind field, perhaps better to master marketing before photography 🙂
Thank you
This kind of honesty is exactly what we needed. There is so much smoke and mirrors at times from some in the wedding industry. Thanks Chris. – David and Joanna
Excellent info!! Thanks for sharing it to us!
Hello Chris,
Thanks for putting together all these articles on marketing. I have found them very helpful. : )
Good article making some useful points.
Thank you
came across this whilst browsing the web i sat down all morning and just took it all in ive been going about a year now and im finding it very slow at the moment lots of good advice here and reading the comments helps . . . . food for thought
regards
MIke