If you are a professional photographer with a staff of one person, it can be quite overwhelming to handle all of the marketing tasks in addition to your photography work.  More often than not, this leads to no marketing happening at all.  One solution to this problem is to purchase photography marketing templates rather than attempt to make them yourself.  It is too easy to believe that just because you have Photoshop you have to do all of your design materials. This is not true. There is a wealth of marketing materials out there that are available for use.  Some of it is even available for free.

If you are a baby photographer, then I highly suggest that you look at the free “Bella Baby Marketing System” created by Sandy Schurz.  She has graciously made this complete marketing system available to anyone for no cost.  It includes over 2 gigabytes of files with business cards, gift certificates, ads, promotional materials, punch cards, stickers and more.

Bella Marketing System

The complete system is available for download at brand-ography.com.

In addition to the “Bella Baby Marketing System” there are also available complete branding packages.  These branding packages contain everything you need to establish a distinct look for you business.  Each branding package contains full PSD files for logos, banners, business cars, thank you cards, flyers, brochures and more.  There are a variety of colors and styles.  Each package can also be easily modified to fit your particular style.

There is also another free item at Brand-ography.com.  It is a complete Portrait Experience that you can offer to your clients to help prepare them for their sessions.  I highly suggest you take a look at this download.  Again it is offered with all of the high resolution PSD files that can easily be modified.

One other item available at Brand-ography.com (albeit for a nominal fee) is a complete marketing system called the “Fabulous Ten”.  This product shows you step by step how to establish you own marketing network among fellow small business owners in your town.  This network will provide discounts and specials to their clients for your business.   This is a great way to tap into the clientele of targeted business that match your target demographic. If all this sounds difficult to you, don’t worry as it is all spelled out completely in the “Fabulous Ten” guide.  As with all the products on this site, the full resolution PSD files are included to provide easy customization and modification.

So if you are looking for marketing templates for your photography business, I highly suggest that you checkout Brand-ography.com.  The free items are well worth the visit!

Let’s take a look at what categories are used for. Essentially they are a means to file your blog posts into separate “drawers” if you will. That way if someone wants to view all your posts on wedding photography, they could click the “Wedding” category and see those related posts.

Now the way they are displayed is dependent on the theme you are using. Themes will display categories in different ways, but typically categories will show up as some kind of link list in a sidebar widget or as menu items in your navigation bar. So while it would be great to have a category named…

“Memphis Senior Photographer”

that would look funny in a menu. So the alternative is to have a category called “Seniors” but to have the slug for that category to be “Memphis Senior Photographer”. The slug is what is used in the URL if you have the category displayed in your permalinks.

I set my permalinks to:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%

This will then include the year, date, category slug and postname in the URL for that particular blog post.

If I made a keyword specific slug for that category, then that keyword will appear in the URL which will help that blog post in the search engines.

Okay, that was a lot of background. So what you really want to know is what to do. Well here is what I recommend.

1-Determine what keywords you want to rank for. You should include what people will search when looking for your services. This means most likely your city + type of photography + photographer. Example would be “Memphis Senior Photographer”. Would you like to rank #1 in google for that term? Then that should be a keyword of yours. Don’t try for a single word such as senior because it is highly unlikely you will rank high for that term in google due to competition and the traffic searching for that term is not likely looking for your services.

2-Create categories based on the types of photography you offer. (Weddings, Seniors, Families, etc). When you blog about a session, choose the category that it would fall under.

3-When creating the categories, don’t use the default slug which would be a lower case version of your category title. Add your city before and photographer after the category name. That will create a keyword based slug such as: “memphis-wedding-

4-Set your permalinks to /%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%. That will include the category slug and your post in the URL. The year and month are optional but if you post a lot it provides efficiencies for Wordpress itself.