There is this awesome website called Design A Glow, that has all these awesome design ideas for photographers. It’s truly a wonderful website. Last week I received an email from Zach Prez who does some work for their site. Long story short – I found out about his awesome new ebook and offered to review it for him on my site. So today I’ll be sharing some of the wonderful things I learned from Zach’s new book.

Honestly Zach’s book couldn’t come at a more perfect time for me. I’m currently working on cleaning up my website, making it more streamlined, and easily navigable (is that a word?). As someone who studied graphic design in college – I learned about marketing, design, and websites a bit in school, but a refresher course is always a good thing.

One of the most important things I think Zach touches on is thinking from your potential consumer’s point of view. When you go to a website, what are you looking for? Of course a visually appealing site is nice, but most likely you’re going to want easy information – you’re not going to want to have to search for it or wait for things to load or have to sift through pages and pages of information. It’s good to stop and take a step back and think about what’s most important for your clients to know and how you can easily set it up for them to find.

A super, super important section of Zach’s book covers Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Okay – so what is that? Well SEO is how you set up your website so that it will be found on google or other search engines. It doesn’t matter how awesome your website is – if you don’t set it up to for SEO you’re going to have a hard time getting new people to your website. There is so much helpful information in this one section! I’ve already started implementing some of Zach’s advice into my new website design. For example, one way you can increase your chance for pulling people to your website is to find the best keywords for your potential clients by including: Location, Adjective, Niche, Noun. A good example would be: Central IL Creative Lifestyle Photography or Decatur IL Unique Wedding Photography.

Probably one of the biggest areas of web marketing right now is social media, and Zach hasn’t overlooked this venue in his e-book. Having a facebook or flicker page is a free way to get your name out there. It’s the best way for your clients to share with their friends what they think about you, so it’s really important to be connected in the social media web. I’ll save the specifics Zach shares for you to read in his book – but he covers how to best utilize facebook, twitter, flicker, and YouTube – all of which are free sites to help further market your business and get your name out there. But the best bit of information Zach supplies in the social media section is his workflow for using these social media sites. We photographers are always trying to find more hours in our days to get everything done, and with Zach’s helpful tips it makes it so much easier to do just that!

The last section Zach covers is email marketing, an area I definitely need to work on. Zach offers up advice on how to make sure your clients will read your emails and not just deleted them without a glance. He also offers tips on how to drive traffic from your email back to your website and bring clients back to your studio. He also offers tips on getting people to subscribe to your newsletters – something I’m desperately in need of.

Overall I found Zach’s ebook to be stellar! It’s not terribly long and is jammed pack full of great information to help photographers market themselves better on the web. If you don’t really know what you’re doing or feel overwhelmed by everything you think you need to be doing – Zach’s ebook “Photography Web Marketing Guide” is definitely a worthwhile read! Thanks to Zach Prez for letting me read his new book and post my thoughts here on the blog.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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