I love photography. If it was a profitable enough field, it might even be tempting to focus the remaining years of my life solely on that. However, I equally enjoy being an efficiency consultant and helping businesses and nonprofits streamline their operations in order to operate more efficiently. Photography appeals more to my creative desires while the efficiency consulting aspect appeals to the “brainier” side of me. Ever since I was a kid, my creativity went hand in hand with my burning desire to fix things and solve problems. Today, I keep very busy advising businesses on efficient practices while distracting myself from the computer with some wonderful moments in my photo studio – or, better yet, outside the office/studio on a shoot in the great outdoors.
Over the past couple of days, the Sozo Creative web design team sketched up a plan to more cohesively market the Sozo Photography Studio. Phase one was completed today with the launch of what currently are five micro websites:
- Sozo Photo Studio: this will be the main site; this site was originally launched in December of 2009 but the current design is just a couple days old. Most of the old content (i.e. photographs) were removed though there are zillions of outdated, picture-less blog posts which we’ll gradually weed out. This site also is connected with our client portal so it will be the site we strive to drive the bulk of the traffic to and focus our branding campaigns on.
- Andrew Jensen, Photographer: just a micro site using my name to retain branding for that as well as capture those specific searches
- Teen Photographer: I enjoy taking photos of young people and decided to “experiment” with domains using those related phrases
- Childrens Photographer: Same methodology as #3
- Child Photographer: Same methodology as #3
If you visit a couple of the above links, you’ll notice that all five of the sites use the same template. Photography websites #2-#5 are basically just landing pages with almost every link pointing to the relevant pages on the main SozoPhotoStudio.com site. We have left the blog potential open on all the secondary micro sites, and I’ll get to that now.
Phase two with our photography marketing campaign will be to activate the blogs on websites #2-#5. Google tends to give better treatment to sites with more than one page. Now, admittedly, since websites #2-#5 all have a zillion links pointing back to SozoPhotoStudio.com, that’s not the greatest from an SEO perspective. But, we’ve got a plan, and we’ll get to that phase down the road. There are only so many resources (people & manhours) which can be diverted from working on client projects to working on in-house projects, keep in mind.
Phase three will be to develop the “static” pages on websites #2-#5 (i.e. the About page, Contact page, etc). This will remove the bulk of the outbound links to the main Sozo Photo Studio website, though we’ll still have plenty of links going to the main site since that is where the bulk of the photography galleries will be.
Phase four will be to develop individual galleries for the main SozoPhotoStudio.com website. The template design permits those galleries to be linked from the very top of the pages on the site throughout. We’re still finalizing the details on this one and we may jump around the phases a bit. We could run mini blogs for each category of photographic services or just hard link to a set gallery page for each category.
Phase five will be to crank up the action on the main SozoPhotoStudio.com blog. We’ll feature several articles (or excerpts) on the main front page. This will help significantly from an SEO perspective, though the template is still quite “SEO weak.”
Phase six – now that content is flowing on all 5 sites – will be to tweak the template on all five photographer websites to strengthen the home page by adding some additional homepage only static copy without hurting the visual appeal. That’s always the fine line with any kind of photographer website – you need lots of copy, typically, to rank well organically, yet a good photographer website is going to capture his/her potential client through the visual appeal aspect.
So, there you have it. And, the way that ideas have been flowing around here lately, please don’t try to force us to hold our word on exactly what we plan to do. And (I like that word today), yes, as always, we haven’t spelled out all the guts and bolts and strawberry seeds. If we told you exactly how we structured a semi aggressive web marketing campaign like this one, then why would you need to hire us to do the same for you?
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