A Comprehensive Internet Marketing Guide for Coaches

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So, you’ve decided that it’s high time that you promote your coaching programs in the online arena. Well, I must say that this is a very good strategy in growing your business as this will definitely help you reach out to millions of people worldwide. Let me help you jumpstart your internet marketing campaign. Here are the things that you need to do:

  1. The first and one of the most important steps is to get your own website which will act as your virtual store. This is where you can send interested parties to in order for them to know your business and your coaching programs better. Start by getting a very descriptive domain name. People who hear it must have an idea as to what you exactly offer. Then, get your website professionally-designed. It’s important that it looks very professional and visually-appealing. You don’t want to give your visitors a reason to doubt you, right? Then, fill it up with amazing information that will speak volumes about your expertise in your chosen field. People who visit your website and read its content must be convinced that you have what it takes to help them reach their goals or that you have the best solutions to the things that they’re going through.
  2. Next step is to make your articles search engine-friendly. You need to make sure that it will show up on relevant listings. Ideally, you would want it to appear on the top 10 search page results so your target audience will not have trouble finding it. There are so many things that you need to do in order to secure better page ranking. These include building hundreds and thousands of links for your website, doing on-page optimization, promoting your site using search engine marketing, etc.
  3. Once you’re done optimizing your website, the next step to take is to promote it in the online arena. Instead of just waiting for your prospects to find you in the World Wide Web, take the first step and reach out to them. Promote your site using PPC advertising, forum posting, and social media marketing. Don’t forget to use content-based marketing solutions like article marketing and blogging as these will help you easily capture your target audience who are mostly using the internet looking for useful information.
  4. Launch list building campaign. Convince people who visit your website to sign up to your email marketing campaign. You need to get a hold of their contact information so you can easily contact them at anytime. This will definitely make the process of making follow-ups a lot easier. Make use of squeeze pages and make the process of signing up easier for these people. Then, send them newsletters every week. Don’t stop doing the whole process until you can get them to say yes to what you offer.

Microstock Photographers Introduction to Marketing

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If you are reading this article then you probably already have a more than passing interest in promoting yourself online as a photographer. You likely already have a personal website (or at least dabbled with some online presence), social services or posted your photos/portfolio on a flickr like service. Many microstock photographers operate on a part-time basis, some with the intention of turning that into full-time work in the future.

There are two ways to look at earning more money from a microstock viewpoint:

1 – Concentrate on taking more great photos and they will sell themselves.

2 – Market your work everywhere which way you can to earn more.

A few years back it was easy to think the margins in microstock did not allow any scope to spend money/time on self-promotion other than a basic webpage or blog. As microstock becomes the ‘norm’ and more photographers work at microstock as a full-time job I’ve started to see countless photographers marketing themselves in all kinds of novel ways.

Marketing online is so easily scaled; you can spend as little or as much time as you like taking different approaches, the keys to it all are the iterative cycle of planning, implementation, measurement and refinement/analysis. You probably think your biggest hurdle at the moment is “how can I build a website” “how can I get 1000 followers” “how can I build a mailing list” – that’s the easy bit. Creating a plan that works is much harder to do, measurement and interpretation of results can be really quite challenging. Refinements to your plan often include simply accepting a failure and learning from it.

We are going to look at marketing only in the online space, for photographers or illustrators who are selling ‘images’ as their products, i.e. stock photographers. Photographers working in other fields may be able to take away some useful information.

To start with I really must highlight that with the diversity of images photographers take it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all marketing guide. With 10 years experience in running photography sites is say that most marketing activity online boils down to the following 4 options:

> The traditional independent stock photographer – create a contact base of buyers and sell direct to them. I don’t recommend for microstock, but it’s not something to rule out, consider it depending on the price point people are willing to buy your images at. Some of the tools used in this style of marketing (CRM) email lists etc. are still useful.

> Turn into a social network guru building networks of buyers who you have a relatively hands-off relationship. Posting your images sprinkled with your affiliate links at any opportunity – you match the images to an audience who wants them making your ‘network’. A network that buyers want to be a part because you make it useful for them; hopefully they will also be taking part suggesting useful material themselves.

> Build a website or blog and create regular written content that in time will hopefully attract visitors, some of who will be buyers. Such written content might also be on an article syndication network, press releases and guest posts. Making use of forums by helping answer questions too, just make sure you are answering buyers questions, not photographers’.

> As above but with your images make the main part of the content. Create a gallery of images, sit back and prey. To promote this perhaps give some of the images away as free samples with a creative commons license to attract image users, then try to convert visitors to your stock archive into buyers.

Which is best? Only you can work that out, and often it’s a mix of some if not ALL of them as your audience demands.