If you advertise your biz, what have you found the most successful form of advertising? If your adverstising consists of a website, how else do you get the word out about your service?

Grace and Peace,

Crystal

this is my 3rd season comming up...and ive chnaged my advertising every year to see what works best. Ive done 3 different websites, 2 different magazines and 2 different tradeshows/expos.

By FAR the best exposure was the expos. I recieved so many enquiries and a dozen or so bookings. I love the way you get to MEET people and discuss their day and they get to meet you and see your a nice chick

2nd best was the websites, altough some are better than others. I started off with themain on here in WA and was lost in a sea of other studios. They literally have HUNDEREDS on their listing and i was a teeny tiny fish in a huge ocean. the 2nd one i left because of major politics and not liking the way they ran their website, and 3rd ive stuck with because its innexpensive, i get lots of enquiries and quite a few bookings.

the worst was the magazine ones. Ive had bugger all enquiries, and only 1 booking, and when your paying $2K plus to advertise you expect a little more out of it than 1 booking!! I wont be advertsing in magazines again i dont think.

Poll is flawed because if you choose "no" you still have to answer "if so, where" and there isn't an "I don't advertise" option there.

I have no need to advertise -- word of mouth is working out pretty darn good.

Thanks a bunch for sharing your experience! That is very interesting.I hadn't thought of that, thanks for pointing it out.

I advertise in magazines from time to time so that I can get my name in front of other vendors and get editorial assignments from those magazines.

Nothing beats word of mouth though...

We have our website and a facebook fan page (and a myspace)

We get 90% of our business from our marketing on facebook. It's amazing.

The other 10% we get from just meeting people and telling them what we do.

Becka,

Care to give us some more details on how you are using facebook? I created a fan page but don't really know where to go from there. Would love some ideas/input!

I promote my website mostly with google organic search rank. I've been trying a little direct mail with limited success.

Printed ads (IE newspapers have been a total waste for me)

In the end most of what I get come from word of mouth or my website

+1. I'm curious about Facebook too. How do you market yourself on it? Or better yet, how do people find you on it? I'm not that familiar with the site. As I understand it, people can only view you if they add you as a friend?

So far, word of mouth has been our best advertising.

Awesome input man, thanks!Maybe you are so successful because you are so cute! Seriously though, I am curious as well.Thanks Gavin and Lori for you input too.

You guys are sweet. I was already on facebook before I started my photography business so I already had a bunch of friends from college and high school which I'm sure helped me.

What I did was create a fan page and send an invitation to all of my friends to join it.When they join it, it shows up on their personal page. Then friends of theirs see it and end up looking at my fan page and a lot of them have joined. I don't know a lot of the people that are friends on my fan page now. I then have my website and a little info listed under the work info on my personal page and I try to only add photos that are edited to keep my image up (HAHA)

Also, I only post a few photos from each event on my personal page (because then the mini-feed tells everyone in my network that I've added photos) and then I post a link to my fan page and I have an image that I add that says something like, "Want more? Check out our fan page and blog". Then I add the images to my fan page with a little note about the session. In the note I link to our blog and say something like, "For more images and to read more about...go to our blog". It's working really well so far.

I also try to keep my face in other people's faces. I keep up with my friends lives and try to leave messages on their walls. I update my status with exciting business news so they can know what I'm up to. I congratulate everyone I see that changes their status to "engaged". I tag everyone I know in my images. Every image on my fan page and on my personal page has our website stamped on it so it's always free advertising.

and...last and most importantly...We tell everyone they can take ANY of the photos we have on facebook that they want and use them for their avatar or photo albums (we don't mind since our images are stamped). Then everyone they know sees the great photos and ends up going to our page. Most of our clients tell us they found us by seeing a friends picture that we took or a friend of a friend, etc., and then typed in our website address that was stamped on the image.

I also try to keep it fun and try not to send out too many blasts. I don't want to annoy my friends. I try to find a balance so they don't feel like they are being bombarded with business stuff. Hope that helps.

If you need help, let me know!

Ps...you can set your profile to allow people who are not your friends to see it. You can also give your fan page address to people just like any other link. You do have to be a little careful though, facebook has rules about how you publicize your fan page so make sure you read through them.

Awesome info., thanks so much for sharing! It is amazing how quickly things can spread with the marvels of places such as facebook and myspace.

That is interesting about facebook. I have a personal one, but not a photography one. I have a photography myspace, but it doesn't seem to have done much good yet. (And I hate Myspace).

I chose website because I am listed on a whole bunch of the internet portals, like wedj.com, weddingwire, etc. I know I've booked a few wedding here and there from these places but like most people referrals and WOM are the top ways I get bookings. But I also think just plain google searches are up there too.

Thanks for the Facebook info. That's great that it's working so well for you. Gotta love the internet! Another thing I need to get on

I use facebook a lot and run special photo sessions to draw in new people. I did do facebook ads, but found they weren't that helpful. I tend to tag my clients in a few photos so their friends can see them and then add clients as friends to build a bigger network and it seems to be doing a pretty good job so far! I find myspace to be useless, so facebook is definitely the better way to go for me. I have a photo group, a fan page and my own personal profile and I find a combination of all three works best!

How do you create a fan page on facebook?

What about myspace? Has anyone had luck with myspace?

Add the "ads and pages" option and create a new page and that makes a fan page

I have gotten quite a few hits on my website from facebook...but no bookings yet.

I've had several inquiries from MySpace...but again, no bookings yet.