A number of months ago I had the opportunity to interview Author and Photographer Dan Heller from his bay area home.

Dan has been instrumental in championing copyright laws and education the public on how to run a profitable photography business. His books have been instrumental in helping those who may be accomplished amateurs to improve their travel photography though his book, “Digital Travel Photography”.

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

“For someone that is just starting out, who really wants to be a pro and focus on doing what you do as far as making money representing themselves. Would the best approach be going all web or sending out Zed or comp cards to agents? Whats the best approach for someone that wants to get started? “

Dan’s Response

“What happened to me was just a hobby and I just did it for fun and I just participated in the internet, writing and I started taking more pictures. I understood the web and just three or four years of doing that, is the germination period at which point I started getting enough traffic and purchases that I could say “hey, this really is an income”.

So I don’t think anybody can just say “OK, I want to be a Photographer” and you just start with some expectation that in six months or a year that you will be making a living. It just doesn’t work that way. I think photography in today’s cultural environment and what I mean by cultural, is not the photographer culture. Just the culture of the internet and where content is acquired and prices and so forth, how you get seen, what makes visibility. You, to make money in photography, you have to go for local traffic. That is, you are a local service photographer. You shoot weddings, portraits, stuff in your local community or you do an international thing. And that’s the web, where you build a website that sells your product. Whatever your focus, whatever your bent, whatever your orientation, you have to approach the web very very seriously.

I think in each of those cases wherever you are starting from, depending on how much photography skills and knowledge you have and other kinds of skills and interests that you have … marketing, business, pricing, economics. Depending on where you are starting from, you are going to take two to four or five years before you are making any serious money at it. ……….”

The audio portion of this is available in two parts:

Part one is over 30 minutes, but has some great info and is worth listening to.

Part One

Part Two

Optimizing your website for Google can seem like a daunting task, but if you take your time to put your site together and always think of how Google is going to look at your new window to the world, you’ll soon be on your way to a high Page Rank. First and foremost, you want to determine what your theme is going to be for your website. Are you going to share with the world all there is on how to take photos of cats? Maybe you want to have broader appeal and include all animals. Just remember, the more focused you are, the better you are able to bring your website to the forefront of the search results. David Hobby and his Strobist.com website is a great example of focusing on one particular aspect of photography, lighting with small portable flash. As of this writing, Hobby now has 200,000 mostly amateur photographers as devoted readers. His site attracts 1.6 million page views a month. In 1999 his reported income is close to six figures, after only a mere 8 months.

So in thinking about your theme, it should always express the particular niche you have chosen for your website. One example is to have your title description describe your site. An example would be if you live in Cleveland and are promoting stock photography, you might want your title to not only have your website name, but the the following, “Stock photographer in Cleveland, Ohio”. Now that’s just a simple example, but you get the idea

Read more

We are all looking for the holy grail to help our work get noticed, so I thought I’d put together a list of ideas that might help you  bring your company to the next level. You may not be the next Chris Buck or Terry Richardson, but you’ll being doing what 95% of the other people are not doing.

First, you need to sharpen your game. There is no better advertising than that of having stunning work that rocks the socks off of a potential client. When learning to photograph, we all go through a growth period to define who we are as a photographer. After shooting tens of thousands of photos, you’ll soon find out what works for you and what doesn’t. This is the early stages of developing a style that will start to define you as a photographer. The photos that you get excited about, will probably be the ones that start to define the little niche you are trying to build. So this is probably the first and most important thing you need to do decide, who you are and what you will shoot?

Develop a Web Presence

You have to have a website or images hosted somewhere that people can find them. Even if you use Flickr.com or some other free site, you need to get your work out there to prove your abilities.

If you are going to build a site on your own, there are a number of great options, probably the best being WordPress with tons of plugins and both free and premium themes available. WordPress is easy to optimize for Search Engine Optimization with plugins like the All in One SEO pack and the Google XML Sitemap Generator.

Of course you’ll need hosting for your site. Do not use a free hosting service, they are terrible and loaded with ads that just detract from a professional image. Also be wary of using shared hosting that may have thousands of other sites clogging up the datapath to your site. At one point we were hosted on a shared hosting site with over 4,500 other websites sharing the same IP address . Look at this chart below from our crawl stats for the site, before we moved to Westhost.com. This is the time in milliseconds that it took for Google to crawl us.

Once you have your hosting service, then you need to decide on design options. From my personal experience, forget the fancy flash intros and music. You can still use flash as I do on TerryDivyak.com, but keep it to a minimum. Editors and clients only have so much time to browse your site and if it’s slow or kludgy, then they move onto the next photographer. A well designed, easily navigable website with a short easy to remember domain name will keep viewers  focused.

Read more