This past weekend my husband and I went to Phoenix, AZ to visit my father who is renting a place their for the month. Actually, it was Mesa. My father is 80 and a golfer and he has friends and a sister who live in the neighborhood, so this is a good place for him to be. While we were there, we went to an OSU/Michigan football game party. A husband and wife set of friends of my father threw it and while we were there, one of them said to the crowd “That’s what Leslie does–photography. She takes pictures!”
As you all should know by now, I most definitely am not a photographer. I used to get frustrated that my father couldn’t quite understand what I do and that his friends didn’t get it either. Then one day it dawned on me–it doesn’t matter: these people are not my market. They’re not even close to my market. They are now retired, but even when they did work, they weren’t in a demographic that would ever have any use for what I do, so it didn’t serve any purpose to get frustrated. In this case, I just said, “No, I’m not a photographer. I work with photographers to help them make money with their photography–y’know, marketing and the like.” That evoked the polite nods I expected. By playing it light, they could let the topic drop gracefully and I could get back to the veggie dip.
Sure, I could have explained in greater detail what I do and made sure they all understood, but it would have done no good for my business (or for me personally even). The chances that one person in that group would have taken the info I provided them and shared it with someone who might buy from me was, probably, well less than 1% and that’s a lousy ROI (return on investment).
The point of sharing this with you is that many creatives waste their efforts on the wrong people. Photographers who do not sell directly to consumers or to local small companies waste a lot of effort (and money) trying to make their websites generally search engine-friendly, for example. They want to be #1 on Google if someone searches for, say, “product photographer Louisville, KY” but this is probably not targeting the right people. The very people who use Google to find photographers are most often the same people who used the Yellow Pages for the same function in the past–namely cheap corporate clients and/or people who want family portraits done (and mostly cheaply there too). So all that effort on the SEO for the website is wasted.
Instead, if a photographer spent the time and money getting listed on sites like workbook.com and altpick.com (and others) and keyworded those listings correctly, s/he would be getting site hits from the right demographic groups–art buyers, editorial clients who meed a local shooter in a specific place, etc. These are the clients any non-consumer-direct photographer should want to get. Corporate-direct clients also use these search engines over general ones like Google, so you’ll be getting in front of them too.
Yes, you will get fewer hits if you don’t pop highly on Google, but you will convert more of the hits you do get into clients. That’s getting a good ROI, and that should be your goal.