Congratulations on setting up your Zenfolio Website! The next step is to drive visitors to your site. Just like opening a new business, you'll need to let your potential clients know about your new website. Zenfolio provides tools that can help you to increase awareness of your new website. The use of those tools, in addition to performing some additional marketing legwork outside of your Zenfolio site, help to build the foundation for a great marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy.
Click on these links to jump ahead to the desired section:
- Let the World know about your new Website
- Your Blog is your Number One Tool
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You may also be interested in our comprehensive guide to creating a marketing plan for your photography business. Click HERE to download the guide.
Let the World know about your new Website
Share on Social Media
Sharing new galleries, photos and blog posts from your Zenfolio site to your social media pages help drive visitors from your social media circles to your Zenfolio site.
This lets your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ followers know about new content in your site. It also helps to serve as a reminder that you are available to offer your photography services. This also allows them to easily share your Facebooks posts, Twitter tweets and Google+ posts with their friends and followers, helping you to reach out to even more potential clients.
Zenfolio provides built in tools that you can use to regularly share new galleries and photos to your Social Media pages.
See this link for how to share your groups and galleries.
This guide covers how to share photos in your Zenfolio account to your social media pages.
Send Emails to your Clients
Email your clients periodically to let them know about new galleries in your site. Unlike sharing on social media, emails are sent directly to your clients allowing you to give the email a personal touch. You can use the email to ask the client about how they are doing while also reminding them that you are available to offer more photography services. For example, you can email a previous wedding client to let them know that you are also available to take maternity or newborn photos.
Through your Zenfolio account, you can send emails to your clients. A Contact List is also provided for storing the email addresses of previous and potential clients.
See this link for how to send emails from your Zenfolio account.
If you have their email address, you can also send emails to any new and potential clients.
In your Zenfolio account, you can enable Visitor Sign in select galleries so you can collect names and email addresses from those visiting that specific gallery. Their information can be stored in your Contacts List allowing you to email them from our Zenfolio account.
See this link for how to enable Visitor Sign in.
Share links on other relevant Websites
Post information and links to your site on other websites that are related to your photography business. For example, if you're a wedding photographer, post regularly in wedding forums or post regularly in the bulletin board or forum for your neighborhood or city. Make sure to add the link to your site in your signature so that the link to your site is displayed often in that forum. Post comments containing links to your site in the bulletin boards, forums or website of local halls in your area that are rented out often for weddings and wedding receptions.
Please see this video tutorial on how to use the built in sharing tools:
Your Blog is your Number One Tool
Your blog is your most important tool in your website when it comes to marketing your site.
Your Blog is great for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
As the section of your site that can contains the most amount of both text and images, it is one of the best indexed sections of your site that search engines used to determine what your site is all about. Each new blog post adds a new search engine indexable page that provides another opportunity for your site to be displayed in search results.
Also search engines like websites that are constantly being updated with new content. When they see that a site is always adding new content, they are more likely to return more often to re-index the site and add the new pages to search results. They also tend to prefer webpages with fresh relevant content and display those pages higher up in search results.
Your Blog drives traffic to your Site
Regularly posting new and relevant blog posts helps drive traffic to your website due to the increased SEO that it provides. Because they rate highly for SEO purposes, your blog and your new blog posts are the most likely pages to be displayed in search results, making that section of your site the mostly likely to receive unsolicited visits from potential clients searching for topics relevant to the contents of your site.
When they see that your site is a place where they can go for information that they are interested in, they are more likely to return to your site and refer others to your site.
Also because you're always adding new, relevant and interesting articles to your site, it gives your previous and current clients a reason to regularly return to your site.
Blog as a Brand Tool
Posting new and relevant information in your blog also increases brand awareness and identity. When you're constantly posting new, relevant and interesting blog post articles, it helps identify you as an authority on your photography style. It helps place your photographer brand as the foremost brand they should go to when they have questions about your style of photography- as well as placing you in the forefront of their mind when they (or their friends and family) are in need of some photography services.
See this guide for more information on setting up your blog and creating blog posts.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process through which a website's chances of being displayed in search results and their ranking within those results are increased. The better your site's SEO the better chance of the site being displayed to those searching for relevant content.
The topics covered above help with increasing your site's SEO but other SEO tools are provided that can also help with increasing your site's search rankings.
At minimum, it is recommended that these actions be performed for SEO purposes:
- Use a Display Name that instantly communicates what your photography is all about. For example, a display name like San Francisco Wedding Photography would be better than a display name like Frisco Photos.
- Create a Site Description that succinctly communicates what you and your site are all about. Your site's description is displayed under your site's Display Name in search results.
- Add a Welcome Message and About Message that goes into more detail about you, your site and your photography. Make sure that your Welcome Message is displayed on your homepage by setting it to Show in your Options panel.
- Make sure to edit the titles and descriptions of your galleries, groups and photos. Make sure to add detailed descriptions in the captions of your galleries and photos and make sure those captions are displayed on your site. Also add relevant keywords and Alt Text to your images. Make sure to only use relevant words (avoid keyword stuffing). Again this helps search engines to index your site.
- Make sure that you've allowed your Portfolio galleries and publicly accessible galleries to be searchable and indexable by search engines.
- Make sure to regularly post new content. Search engines like pages that always have new content and it gives them a reason to return to your site to re-index its contents. Weekly or even daily posts in your blog will allow you to constantly update your site with new content.
- Lastly, we highly recommend signing up for a free Google Webmaster/Search Console account and linking it with your Zenfolio site. With this account, you can submit your site to Google anytime for indexing. You can also use your account to submit your site's Sitemap allowing the search engine to find all searchable pages in your site.
See our SEO guide for more on our SEO recommendations.
Other Resources
You may also be able to find useful information in our video tutorials page.