Yell(p)!

A year ago I signed away over £700 to to Yell to market my website for me online.

The final outcome - 174 visits, about 5 enquiries, no clients.

That's about £4 per click, and a lot of money in the hands of someone else..

On Google Adwords I pay about £1.00 - £1.20 per click. I've spent about £800, got over 700 visitors and about 20 clients.

What's the difference?

Well on Adwords my photography services are presented in a tailored way, to businesses. So clicks start off as being of a high quality.

On Yell, it's all a bit general. So I imagine lots of the clicks are wasted. And the effective cost per click is far greater.

So I tried you Yell (in fact twice, because this was me giving you a second chance) - gone, but not forgotten.

Marketing update

I am plotting on this the blog the success or otherwise of various marketing tactics that I have employed.

Now, I do not consider myself to be an expert at marketing (and photographers should not read this in that light) but I can usefully report on the success or otherwise of some options that I have tried to sell my services as an assignment photographer (not my stock photography where of course I rely on Alamy and the pulling power of this site on the search engines).

I'm prompted to make this post by the latest monthly bill from yell.com.....

In December Yell sent me 20 visitors of which an astounding 35% became 'conversions' in the sense of getting to my contact page - but only one actually contacted me. It was one of those chummy approaches which make you think that the job is already sold but after I quoted came a deathly silence. So still no work from Yell.

I continue to get most of my work from the rather more cost effective Google Adwords adverts, and a free advert at the Creative Match website. I have since shelled out over £100 for an enhanced listing there - so far this has not brought an explosion of visitors but we shall see.

'Organic' visitors from the search engines to scottyh.net continue to grow, in particular for models looking for portfolios. I also gained an assignment in the City of London from that source. Evidently the fact that I charge puts most models off but there is something for me to work on there.

I also conducted a mailshot to about 300 publishers. This was conspicuously unsuccessful investment of about £150 in total and a fair bit of time. I am currently doing a similar but smaller exercise with design firms in London which is pulling in visitors to the site in rather greater numbers than the publishers that came but no contacts yet.

More next month........

Shock Horror! Yell works! Sort of....

Well it's not a new client but I did actually have someone contact me as a result of my Yell listing. And it was one of the UK's biggest advertising agencies to take pics ay their Xmas party.

I did not get the job (apparently they changed their mind on the actual coverage they wanted) but my name was passed to the Production Director re possible photography for their clients.....

The theory that I have heard is that if Yell do work then they get you important clients. We shall see, there's a long way to go yet.

Yell update

Well let's face it, nothing much is going to happen. Except of course I got called yesterday to try and sell me even more advertising.

The reason organisations like Yell have to charge what they do is that they have to employ so many people to spend such a long time chasing new custom. They would not have to do this if they provided something that was value for money because individuals like me would sign up again after our first year's 'service'.

Anyway, stats for November are 15 clicks with a 20% conversion rate, a conversion being someone looking at my contact page. The chap on the line yesterday said that Yell conversions would be much, much higher than Google Adwords.

For the record Google brought in 151 visitors costing £140 - conversion rate 19%. That's 90p per visitor.
And of course Yell brought in 15 visitors costing £60 - conversion rate 20%. £4 per visitor.

I gained one client from Google.

An encounter with Yell customer services

I raised the issue of London Commercial Photography very nice person at Yell Customer Services

"I am sorry that you feel like that" she said about 6 times (as a carefully worded alternative to "I am sorry we are crap") as I explained that three clicks a week would as likely as not get a nil return on my over £700 investment in Yell.com services. I explained that other photographers would like me jump ship at the end of the term and if this happened they would be left with one advertiser occupying all the positions.....

She had explained to me that as long as an advertiser had an arrangement with someone in the building, even just to collect mail, then it was a legitimate use of the premises from the point of view of Yell.

From the point of view of Yell, LCP's contribution to their coffers would be a lot more than mine so you might not be too surprised that they were not volunteering to do anything...

The Lavender Hill Mob

It's a Yell.com post again.

If you search on Yell for a commercial photographer in SW11 then you will find a listing for 'London Commercial Photography" at 168 Lavender Hill. Since I happened to be passing I thought I'd pop in to get a few photos done.

Funny thing is that 168 Lavender Hill is a branch of Foxtons Estate Agents. Must be upstairs I thought, so I went to the side entrance - nothing to do with photography on the nameplates there - so I went and asked the two nice receptionists. Who looked at me clueless.

What a shame, I could not get my photo taken beacause there does not appear to be a photographer st this address.

Just a quick update on where we are this month. Seven visitors so far, 1 November to today, the 14th.

Yell effectiveness update.....

I received the invoice from yell today (ouch!) so thought it worth checking out just how things are progressing on the campaign front.....

So far in November I have had one visitor. That adds to the seven in October (one of whom was me).

That's seven visitors to date, one of whom visited my contact page (a 'conversion for the statistics!') although I did not hear from them.

So in 15 days, seven clicks. Ongoing cost is £4.25 per click.

Since signing up a search on 'Commercial and Industrial Photographer - London' shows up at least 30 adverts for "One Shot Photography", "London Studio Photography" and "London Corporate Photography", all of which seem to operate from the same set of addresses.

What looked to be an equitable playing field with other photographers all of whom seemed to have single adverts seems to have been taken over by a single faceless entity.....

Probably a good explanation for only one click so far this month.

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.