Become Better Photographer: Things You MUST HAVE on Your Website with Vanessa Joy

December 6, 2019

*For more information visit AdoramaTV YT page, and of course you can keep up with Vanessa on Instagram @VanessaJoy

How should your website look like to attract a significant number of customers? Today we are learning from Vanessa Joy with AdoramaTV and her quick marketing tips of what things you must have on your website!

Vanessa shares: “I want to be clear about real estate on your website, the top right corner of your website that’s like the good real estate… that’s where everybody’s eye just goes to. So some kind of call to action… should be there – something like contact us or here’s where you get your free quote, or free download or whatever it is. I think if you look at my website it says “check your date” . Make sure that upper right hand corner that has your call to action.”

“Number 2 is you have to talk about what the heck you do. A really good book about this is a story brand by Donald Miller, and he talks about creating a brand message, which is just you communicating to whoever’s on your website, about what it is that you do”

“And the way that you think about it is that you want to be able to repeat your brand message like a Neanderthal… so think of it this way… I’m a wedding photographer I need a Neanderthal to be able to look at it and go oh…” she shoots weddings”, ” she take wedding photos.” You need a super clear brand message.”

“Number 3.. you want to have an About section but don’t make it this long blubbery novel. Today most people just want bullet points, so make your About section bullet points about you: things that seem relevant.”

Number 4. Building a website. Photographer Mark Wallace has a great advice on it: “here are a few places you can go to build a website – Squarespace, Live Books and then WordPress. So if you’re a little bit tech savvy and you want to own the look and feel, and be able to change it anytime you want – you want to put your good stuff. Nothing shouts amateur like one model posted in different poses over and over and over again. Instagram is a good place to build your portfolio but I don’t think it necessarily replaces an actual photo website. The reason for that is on Instagram you can’t easily put contact information information about yourself. It’s just so limited just in that little couple sentences in your portfolio. You can’t really customize it, you can’t add a blog posting videos longer than a minute right now, that’s not something you can do, so there’s just a lot of things that you probably want to do on your own website. So use Instagram to feed people to your normal website, and vice versa – keep people engaged but those two things should work as a team.”

“Number 5… you want to make it easy to contact you. So have a contact button on every page, top right – because that is your most valued Real Estate’s… where people kind of automatically go if you have a contact form on your website, give them the option of just emailing you because maybe they like that better calling you. Don’t ask too many questions – you need the barrier of entry to be as low as possible to get them to contact you. Some of them will see your long form, too many things to fill out on the contact form, and they just won’t contact you.”

“The last thing we have to talk about are the images on your website. Your portfolio should have a couple of different galleries, if you do different styles of photography, or if you’re just an event photographer, maybe you break up engagement sessions detail photos, and wedding moments of the couple, you probably need to cut down the number of images by half. No one’s looking through them all. And you want to have these 10 to 15 hero images that you know they’re gonna see. So that you end up creating a brand around it, and they recognize those images really, really important that they recognize your photography.”

Check out our WORKSHOPS in Los Angeles that teach you hands-on how to make great photos!

Watch the full episode with Vanessa Joy and Adorama TV:

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