Marketing a photography business online - Yell?

This site, photoconnect.net, is about selling images. It makes me some money, but not a lot. More and more I am looking to assignments to earn money from photography. Not as a wedding photographer, or as a high street studio photographer but as a general commercail photographer willing to go out to clients to get the images.

I market myself as a photographer through my separate website, ScottyH.net. That site does not do as well in the search engines as photoconnect (at least right now) so I need to consider other ways of getting potential customers to view what I can offer.

Let us ignore offline marketing for a moment. For marketing on the internet I take four approaches:

• 'Organic' referals, directly as a result of searches
• 'Pay per click' using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and the new MSN offering
• The local online directory, Yell.com
• Advertising on specialist sites aimed at marketing professionals - the main one for me being MarketingTool.com

Per pound spent (well dollar actually) MarketingTool.com has been the most successful. It has probably pulled in three clients for me earning over £2000 for a spend of less than £100. It may not suit everyone but has done well for me.

Right now, pay per click seems to pull in one client for about every £80 spent. I'd like it to be less, but not too bad.

The big money (relatively) I have just pushed in the direction of Yell.com. I spent a lot of time thinking about it and I was nervous of how it might perform. And so far it seems justifiably so:

• in ten days, Yell.com has brought in 5 clicks
• on the pay per click services those clicks would have cost about £4 or 80p per click
• on Yell.com the cost is approximately £4 per click (or five times as expensive as pay per click).

The argument is that when someone looks at Yell.com they are at least pretty intent on buying something. Maybe - but they could also be pretty intent on selling something too. If I was looking for a handy list of photographers with contact information in order to sell them insurance (say) then Yell.com might be one of the first places I would look.

Anyway, the court is out on Yell.com and it will be a while before the statistics are in to say how successful they might be - but to compare them with Google Adwords and other pay per click options is something that I will be doing over the next few months and I will be posting the results here.