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.

DSLR sensor cleaning - the Scotch tape moment

I'd tried with Sensor Swabs, Pec Pads and Eclipse and despite success sometimes, on other occasions my DSLR has suffered from dust which was never picked off but simply moved around by the cleaning process. Since I was up against a different quality of dust, I was going to have to try something new to defeat it.

I regarded the Scotch tape cleaning idea it as a joke at first - a mischief wished upon DSLRs in the same way that viruses wreak havoc with PCs. The very suggestion that Scotch tape be used to clean this most delicate of devices seemed absurd. But there it was, being used not only by photographers on discussion boards that were unknown to me but now by respected photographers on the Alamy Pro forum.

I found this link:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1034&message=16542910

What I needed was apparently Scotch Magic Tape, 19mm wide (which apparently matches the width of the APS sensor) product code 810. The tricky bit is getting it gently to lay across the sensor while trying to avoid it sticking to other bits of the cameras innards.

Here is someone who suggests that the tape leaves a residue:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1020&message=13423020

But if there is any then the residue is apparently easily removed by Eclipse.

Warning! Here's a test which says 'no don't do it...'

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1036&message=20529061

As does:

http://www.cleaningdigitalcameras.com/methods.html

But my sensor is fine. It's as clean as it's ever been and no discernable Scotch tape gunk. I am happy.