Calling all wedding photographers
Discussion
I own a web design company, and have the ability to get a phrase like "wedding photographer london" into the top few places in google. I would be very surprised if I couldnt achieve a position in the top two or three places.
Lets say I created a collection of links to london based wedding photographers. And drove traffic to their websites.
Lets suppose that every photographer who advertised on my site got about 10 weddings from the traffic I sent to their website per year.
Whats that worth, to you?
I mean, if I were giving you 10 weddings a year, would you be happy to pay a grand for the advertising, it if delivered consistently? Thats less than £100 a month, including vat.
On average, a wedding pays a photographer about a grand or so, sometimes as much as £2k although that kind of a spend is not common, often as little as £500 I think, based on the comments of my own wedding photographer clients. Right? Can I have some feedback please, as to whether or not you would potentially be interested in a business model like this, if it really did deliver 10 websites per year.
>> Edited by UKBob on Monday 23 January 20:46
Lets say I created a collection of links to london based wedding photographers. And drove traffic to their websites.
Lets suppose that every photographer who advertised on my site got about 10 weddings from the traffic I sent to their website per year.
Whats that worth, to you?
I mean, if I were giving you 10 weddings a year, would you be happy to pay a grand for the advertising, it if delivered consistently? Thats less than £100 a month, including vat.
On average, a wedding pays a photographer about a grand or so, sometimes as much as £2k although that kind of a spend is not common, often as little as £500 I think, based on the comments of my own wedding photographer clients. Right? Can I have some feedback please, as to whether or not you would potentially be interested in a business model like this, if it really did deliver 10 websites per year.
>> Edited by UKBob on Monday 23 January 20:46
This forum is mainly for wedding photographer, could be a good place to ask...
www.wedding-photography.org/forum/index.php
www.wedding-photography.org/forum/index.php
Bee_Jay said:Pay per click doesnt interest people. They want actual real sales. I was speaking to a wedding photographer yesterday who wants to get right to the top of google with certain phrases, she mentioned her partner being absolutely gutted when a website (which referred him over a dozen sites a year) went down. Im not sure what website, but based on the old 10% comission arrangement, if someone was putting a minimum of £10k your way, wouldnt £1k sound like a deal.
Hmm...
Would maybe be worth £50/wedding max, and would rather pay on a per-click basis.
I get people calling me all the time offering this service, and to be honest at £1000 I would definitely put the phone down...
Im not too fussed re: the actual price. Perhaps I'd whittle it down to £250. So long as the photographers are getting more business then they can deal with and are happy, Im just after some long term customers, because I know I can send the wedding photography customers to them.
Bee_Jay said:I wouldnt market the idea, certainly not on the phone on a "trust me, you'll get the business" basis.
Hmm...
Would maybe be worth £50/wedding max, and would rather pay on a per-click basis.
I get people calling me all the time offering this service, and to be honest at £1000 I would definitely put the phone down...
Id create a portal which was renowed for generating a lot of business for anyone who advertises on it for free. I could only consider charging, once I knew the people who were on the directory were getting 10 or more weddings per year, limiting the number of people in the directory to perhaps 5, per area.
Cilents are often scared of spening money, but as with all advertising... 90% of it doesnt work, the 10% of advertising which does work well, consistently... its worth its weight in gold. The actual figure isnt important, so long as it does what it says on the tin for them.
I know not much about this sort of subject, but having been to a few wedding fairs, even for short periods, I know that as a photog anything that saved me the wedding fair hell would be worth a bit of cash.
Maybe you could just take a cut - eg like Bee_Jay says, £50 or £75 per wedding?
Maybe you could just take a cut - eg like Bee_Jay says, £50 or £75 per wedding?
£1000 - absolutely no way unless I was positive it was working
we are members of quite a few web directories that we get maybe 15 links a week from. A lot of those are junk leads, but we do get a decent number of bookings from them. they cost us in the order of £30-£50 a year.
i would be interested in hearing what you can do, but I would want to see the results before laying down the cash
>> Edited by dcw@pr on Tuesday 24th January 16:52
we are members of quite a few web directories that we get maybe 15 links a week from. A lot of those are junk leads, but we do get a decent number of bookings from them. they cost us in the order of £30-£50 a year.
i would be interested in hearing what you can do, but I would want to see the results before laying down the cash
>> Edited by dcw@pr on Tuesday 24th January 16:52
dcw@pr said:
i would be interested in hearing what you can do, but I would want to see the results before laying down the cash
_dobbo_ said:Ideally, the business would involve no admin, no checking whether commissions were due, and would not require money chasing.
Maybe you could just take a cut - eg like Bee_Jay says, £50 or £75 per wedding?
There is no telling whether it will work for photographers until I achieve the top positions in google, and actually hear from the photographers (who can advertise in it for free) that its working very well.
The bottom line is that the photographers must value the service, and agree by the number of sales they are actually able to close that its a bargain. There are far too many advertising opportunities which realise little or nothing for the poor sods who decided to try them out. What photographers need is a link on a page which in reality does send them heaps of traffic, which in the real world IS turned into a lot of sales!
I dont want to rip anyone off, I would like anyone who has a spot to value it, and to make sure the yearly payments arnt late so they can keep their spot. Im willing to put in the hours getting it right to the top of google for the most competitative and lucrative phrases and do all the hard work - the last thing I want is an unhappy customer who doesnt want to renew.
Bob if you can pull this off then clearly either you or one of your staff is a google guru...
It seems to me that "wedding photographer london" is a being contested by a number of well designed and highly optimised sites, so if you can come in and hit a top 5 position in less than 3 months I'll be astonished, impressed and will have you firmly on my list of people to talk to and pay money to improve search engine placement.
It seems to me that "wedding photographer london" is a being contested by a number of well designed and highly optimised sites, so if you can come in and hit a top 5 position in less than 3 months I'll be astonished, impressed and will have you firmly on my list of people to talk to and pay money to improve search engine placement.
dcw@pr said:The trouble is finding the time. I have to put my clients first. In 4 years we've not found the time to redesign our own site, and our portfolio has never ever been updated
sounds good to me. so how long does it take you to get up there?
_dobbo_ said:
Bob if you can pull this off then clearly either you or one of your staff is a google guru...
I'll do it myself. Google isnt hard. To win a race, you dont need to run twice as hard or twice as fast, you just need to be
a) running 1% more efficiently than the other chaps
b) pointed in the right direction
90% of optimisation companies are pointing more than 40 degrees in the wrong direction when they do their "optimisation stuff" meaning they never quite reach the finish line, however hard they run.
_dobbo_ said:Check this out: ('approx' number of UK searches monthly)
It seems to me that "wedding photographer london" is a being contested by a number of well designed and highly optimised sites, so if you can come in and hit a top 5 position in less than 3 months I'll be astonished, impressed and will have you firmly on my list of people to talk to and pay money to improve search engine placement.
557 wedding photographer london
469 wedding photographer swansea
407 wedding photographer dorset
397 wedding photographer kent
321 wedding photographer essex
307 wedding photographer hampshire
246 wedding photographer surrey
245 wedding photographer devon
London may have the most searches monthly, but I can guarantee you the amount of work needed to secure a top 3 position will be far more than Swansea, or dorset. Again, its about sensible investment of time and energies, the same applies to all things in life. I might go for london and london only, or... maybe choose a big county, aim high, and make sure all the city name searches as well as county searches for that county rank well. If 10 out of 250 or 500 searches turned into sales each month, I could have 5 very happy clients. Averaging 2 weddings each a month, depending how good their sales skills/portfolios are.
What I would be interested in hearing, is comments about "the directory" ...
What info of your own would you typically to include?
Web address
Phone
mobile
Any more details, or should it be kept simple?
The same people wont be using the directory every month. It will be pretty much new visitors monthly, who stumble upon it. Do they want to see portfolio pics, or just click on links to the sites of my cilents/advertisers? Im not sure yet.
for your model i would have 10 boxes on the screen, about 1000x150 pixels in dimension. Each advertiser would have one photo, the name of their company, a small blurb, then contact details - phone, email and web address. Have the boxes on the page randomly shuffle around so they are in a different order each time someone looks at the page.
A friend of mine was contacted by a company - name beginning with K and sounds Irish - offering this type of service for JCB spares and services in Peterborough. They wanted just over £1000 +VAT for a year. I modified the search string on his site and now he is No2 on Yahoo. His mate who took the service is No4 and gutted that he never asked me to do it for him. It's not difficult as Bob says, just the right words in the right place - OK maybe there is a bit more to it than that, but you get my drift.
Dave
406TM
Dave
406TM
dcw@pr said:I'll go with the random order in which ads load for sure
10 boxes
Have the boxes on the page randomly shuffle around so they are in a different order each time someone looks at the page.
I want to avoid boxes (banners?) though, and keep the writeup squeaky clean, looking as little like advertising as possible. One idea is to create a photo-album like website. Whatever appeals to the bride, as she will surely be looking?
I wonder if 10 is too many. Id want the 5 or so ads to be swamped with business
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