How many people see your photos? Here’s the second in our series of articles on progressing as a photographer, it’s all about being seen.
Being successful in most things can be more about who you know rather than how good you are. No matter how great the work you are producing is, you need to get it in front of the right people.
Obviously you will have a website. You’ll need to learn the dark art of SEO (here are a few tips) or pay someone to do it so that people find your site in Google. This is a tough thing to do as there is so much competition, but if you’re specialised you should be able to show up relatively highly in Google for some specific terms related to your area of photography.
Another reason to specialise is that it’s much easier to rank highly for terms like ‘classical musician photographer’ than it is for ‘London photographer’.
You need to set up social media sites for your photography, including a Facebook page, Twitter, Linkedin and Google +. Instagram, Pinterest and others may also be useful. It’s time consuming to keep them all updated though, so pick 2 or 3 to work with.
Attend events, enter competitions, group exhibitions and talk to people about what you do. Send your your photos to magazines and websites, give out business cards.
Building a following takes a long time. You have to start somewhere so set targets for yourself, such as writing one blog post with an amazing image every week, or posting something great to your Facebook page every 2 days. The photos you publish obviously need to be amazing for people to be interested enough to come back, so not only do you have to promote yourself regularly, you also have to produce great work all the time. If you can do that, then you’re definitely on the path to success!
You have to constantly push your work out there to be seen, it’s rare that fame happens overnight, but with a consistent output of great work, and an ongoing plan to push it out there, you give yourself the best chance of your work being seen.
We’re running a Going Pro Workshop with lots of info on this type of stuff, click for more details.
by Andrew Mason.