If you already know you’re using self-hosted WordPress and just want those hosting recommendations, jump down to that information.

If you have no idea what I said in that previous sentence, read on and I’ll demystify it. We’ll start generic and then get photographer-specific.

Domain Names

A domain name is the readable URL that folks can use to find your website. My photo business can be found at hockleyphoto.com – perhaps yours will be yourname.com or snowflakephotos.com or some other name that makes sense based on you, your name, your business name, or your specialty.

You’ll want to have your own domain name. Domain names are an important topic. If you don’t already own a domain name, head over to understanding and registering a domain name to learn more about it.

Which Flavor of WordPress Web Hosting for Photographers?

Once you have a domain name it’s time to choose your WordPress hosting. Before you make a decision about a specific company, there are choices about what general category of hosting is the best fit for you. There’s not a “right” or “wrong” answer here… it all depends on your comfort level with the web, amount of time you want to spend managing your website, and your budget.

There are three categories for a WordPress website… first a brief description of each, and then a detailed comparison of what each does (and doesn’t) offer in the way of features.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com offers free[1] WordPress accounts that are managed entirely by Automattic (a company which, in addition to running WordPress.com, runs a variety of WordPress related services and funds a significant amount of WordPress development). In choosing to host your website with WordPress.com, you’re freeing yourself from any real decisions or management of the servers… they’ll take care of all of the setup, upgrades, and backups. The downside for the cheap price is that you give up a fair amount of control over configuration.

“Self-Hosted” WordPress (aka WordPress.org) on a non-managed host

Another option is to purchase web hosting from any number of companies that sell it on a monthly/yearly basis (recommendations below) and to install and configure your own installation of WordPress. Shared web hosts are fairly inexpensive. You’ll have the ability to install any sort of custom plugins, themes, or other customizations that you choose. The potential downside is that you’re responsible for making these choices, maintaining the site, and if you break it, you need to figure out how to fix it.

“Self-Hosted” on a managed host

A relatively recent trend in the web hosting space are “managed” hosting providers. This is a bit of a hybrid between the two options above. You choose from a managed host, which generally cost a bit more than the unmanaged hosts, but in exchange for that extra monthly fee they’ll manage various aspects of your WordPress website. These services often include backup (and restore) functionality, performance optimizations, and sometimes easily-configured staging areas for sites under development or maintenance. Personally, I run all my websites on a host that offers some management.

There’s no choice that’s perfect for everyone. Here’s a more detailed comparison of features/options.

WordPress Hosting for Photographers

There are lots of comparisons on the web between options, but let’s talk about photographers. My guess is that your website needs fall into one or more of these groupings because you want a website or blog that:

• shows off your photos, either single images or galleries
• has a pleasing design, perhaps one which is very photo-centric
• allows you to provide information about your photo services such that someone might contact and hire you
• allows visitors to purchase your photos, either as prints or digital downloads
• allows you to sell digital products (ebooks, presets, etc) to web visitors
• stays secure, reliable, fast, and is backed up such that you could recover in the event of a major problem

Let’s look at each of these options with the three web hosting categories discussed above.

Displaying Photos

The core WordPress software contains basic image display features, including a simple gallery, so that option is available regardless of web host choice. With WordPress.com, this is your only option for photo display.

There are many custom plugins that have been built around photography. A search in the WordPress plugin repository returns over 1,000 results. Some of these are for various gallery features, some are for easier integration with other photo sites such as Flickr or SmugMug, and some are for WordPress-based photo management.

To use any of these plugins, you’ll need to be using the self-hosted (WordPress.org) web hosting options (either managed or not).

A Pleasing Design, Perhaps Photo-Centric

WordPress.com offers nearly 300 themes too choose from, including several that are designed for a nice display of your photographic work.

With a self-hosted site (managed or non-managed) running code from WordPress.org, you can use any of those themes as well as any of the other thousands of WordPress themes that are in the wild. Some are free; some cost money. Quality ranges from excellent to horrible… but the main point is that you can use literally any WordPress theme of your choice.

Creating Blog Posts, Articles, or other Informational Pages

This functionality is built into WordPress and will be available regardless of which web hosting option you choose.

Selling Prints or Digital Downloads of Your Images

WordPress.com does not offer any options designed for selling photo prints or digital downloads[2].

With a self-hosted site (managed or not), you can use any available WordPress ecommerce system or plugin to sell photos or products. It might be as (relatively) simple as using Easy Digital Downloads to sell electronic images or as complicated as using plugin to create self-fulfilled print orders.

If you’re interested in selling a ebooks or other such digital products on your WordPress site[3], again this can be done only with the self-hosted WordPress options.

Security, Speed, Reliability, and Backups

None of these four topics is particular exciting to a photographer, but if you’re building a website for your photo business (or your serious photo hobby), you want a site that isn’t going to cause you frustration or lost revenue from potential problems.

With WordPress.com, all of these server management functions are performed by their staff, and you don’t need to worry about any of it. Your site should remain secure[4], will respond quickly, and will be otherwise managed for these concerns with zero work on your part.

With a non-managed web host running the WordPress.org software, things are all over the board. Some web hosting companies will be more secure than others, so we recommend using a service such as Sucuri to enhance and harden the security of your WordPress site on a non-managed host. Some will take care of backing up your site, but with most hosts you’re on your own. When it comes to performance and reliability, again things will vary but generally these fall into the “you get what you pay for” bucket. If you’re on a hosting plan that’s only $1.99 per month, it shouldn’t surprise you if the quality isn’t that great.

WordPress lead developer Mark Jaquith refers to his “shrimp dinner test” for web hosting. It postulates that if you’d be uneasy eating a shrimp dinner for the price you pay (monthly) for web hosting, you ought to consider upgrading your hosting.

With a managed web host, these server management functions are often where where they really add value. Many managed web hosts have enhanced security features and they often have made performance optimizations designed specifically for WordPress sites. Most managed web hosts include site backup functionality as part of their core offering. When you’re paying a premium for managed hosting, well, this is the management they’re talking about.

For a photographer who doesn’t want to worry or spend time on these “overhead” type activities, it’s usually a great option.

You should also see if a web host offers a staging site, which is basically a test environment where you can make changes to your website without risk of “breaking” your main site that’s visible to the public.

Recommendations

So which is best? Which is right? As you may have deduced, there’s not a single “correct” solution for everyone, but let me tell you what I’d recommend for someone who is serious about having a great internet presence for their photography (either as a business or as a serious hobbyist).

If you’re completely new to web publishing and have never blogged or maintained your own website in any form, I recommend you sign up for a WordPress.com blog to get started. You won’t have to worry about installing or configuring anything, and you can get a feel for how to publish with WordPress.

I do recommend that you buy your own domain name and use that for your WordPress.com site. Down the road once you’re comfortable with things and want to branch out or customize and extend your website, you’ll be able to move your site’s content from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress site elsewhere, and keep using your domain name so that your web address won’t change and all incoming links will still work.

If you’ve had a website before, are already familiar with WordPress, or want to do some of the plugin/theme customizations discussed above then you ought to go with a self-hosted site running the WordPress.org software.

If you’re willing to spend $290 per year on your website (which really ought to be a no-brainer for anyone doing photography as a business), I recommend managed WordPress hosting through WP Engine. I’ve used their service for a few years now; they offer a great product with plenty of advanced management features, reliable and secure systems, and excellent customer support.

If you’re unable (or unwilling) to make that financial commitment at this point, I have used and can recommend the more modest services of SiteGround (look at the “GrowBig” plan). Their services are good, but I found that the user interfaces for managing your site or interacting with their support folks aren’t quite as polished as WP Engine.

There are lots of web hosts and lots of web hosting opinions… while I can’t say that my recommendations are the only good options, I can say that I’m recommending options I have all used and paid for myself and that my recommendations are based on first-hand experiences with these companies.

The post WordPress Web Hosting for Photographers appeared first on Tech Photo Guy Aaron Hockley.

As an important part of online marketing efforts, how to set up an email list for a photographer is a key skill. Your website is important to share about yourself and your work, and social media efforts can help build relationships and share your story. Some folks will visit your website; different groups use different forms of social media, but one thing is true about the internet: everyone uses email.

If you chat with nearly anyone with a successful business on the internet, they’ll tell you they wished they started building their email list sooner. To adapt an old Chinese proverb: the best time to start your email list was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. Let’s take a look at email marketing for photographers.

As a photographer, your email list can help you stay in touch with former clients, deliver information to those curious about your services, or send periodic updates so people know what you’ve been up to.

How an Email List Works

With an email list hosted by an email service provider, folks can sign up for your list via your website (or you can otherwise add them to your list with their permission) and you can then send broadcast messages to the list. More advanced use might segment the list (for example, folks who have requested information versus folks who have been paying clients).

Choosing an Email Service Provider

Often when folks are just starting, they might be tempted to simply send an email from Outlook, or Gmail, or their regular email program to all of their clients or leads. This becomes problematic for a few reasons quickly.

• Using an email service provider means that people can sign up, or unsubscribe, by using a form on your website or a link in your email messages. That can’t happen if you’re trying to send your newsletter via your regular email.
• If you collect names, an email service provider lets you merge that into your messages so that you can address each person by name.
• Most normal email providers (such as Gmail or your cable company) place a limit on the number of receipients for a message. You simply won’t be able to send to several hundred people
• Email service providers take care to ensure a high deliverability rate for your messages. They have reliable servers and ensure those servers aren’t used by spammers, which increases the chance that all of your messages will reliably be delivered to all of your subscribers.

Which email service provider is right for you? There are several companies in this field. A lot of folks start with MailChimp because it’s free (and I was someone who did just that). After using it for a while and running into a lot of frustrating experiences to do what seemed like they should be fairly simple things, I signed up for ConvertKit and haven’t looked back. Yes, there’s a monetary investment, but the tools to manage your list(s) are fantastic.

Once you sign up for an email provider, the next step is creating your list and getting your first subscribers.

I Have a List, Now What?

ConvertKit (or whomever you chose as a provider) will have help pages that can walk you through setting up your email list, but how can you get folks onto it? And who do you want on your list?

That’s right, who is on your list matters. Because you’re probably not trying to sell or market your photography to everyone in the entire world.

If you’re offering wedding photography services, you want potential brides, probably in a specific geographic area, on your list. If you do corporate or commercial photography, you’d like to be connected with business leaders and decision-makers. Fine art photographers want, you guessed it, fine art collectors on their list.

I’d rather have a list of 100 of the right folks than 1,000 of the general public.

Give Them An Incentive to Sign Up

The most common way to get folks to sign up for an email list is to give them an incentive; they’re giving you their contact information and the ability to market to them, and in exchange you give them something of value. While you might offer specials offers to your list in the future, that’s generally not going to be an incentive that gets people to hand over their email address. You may hear this incentive referred to as a “lead magnet.”

Consider creating a short resource guide that’s relevant to your genre of photography. Your incentive should be something that’s helpful to a potential client. A few ideas for a few different types of photographers might be:

• For the wedding photographer: a tip sheet for how to manage guests with cell phone cameras
• For the corporate or headshot photographer: wardrobe tips to look great in business photos
• For the children’s / family portrait photographer: tips on how to prepare the little ones for a photoshoot
• For the fine art photographer: tips on how to choose the right size and type of artwork for particular types of rooms

You can mention that you’ll be providing additional value to your list members in the future, but up front you want to give them something quick and valuable that help with their immediate photography needs. For example, I’d like to offer you a free report with eight things you can do today to improve your website.

Subscribers Beyond Your Website

While the most common way to get new email subscribers is from a form on your website (and OptinMonster makes the best email registration forms for websites), don’t forget you can also get new email subscribers from other sources:

• Have a booth at a bridal show or other event? Gather email addresses from attendees who leave their info at your booth. An iPad or other tablet works great for this.
• As you get new clients, add them to your list (either ask permission or include this as part of your contract)
• Have a Facebook page? Add a form to capture subscribers (an email subscriber is worth far more than a Facebook fan)

What to Know About Email Laws

Various countries have laws around the sending of commmercial email. I’m not a lawyer, so take this purely as recommendations from another photographer. If in doubt about the laws of your country, check with a legal professional.

Much of my audience is in the United States, so here’s what US folks should know about sending email to a list. These apply to any sort of email that’s advertising or promoting any commercial product or service (such as your photography products or services):

• you cannot use deceptive email headers, from lines, or domain names
• you must include a valid postal address in each email message
• each message must include a valid method to unsubscribe

Here’s more information from the US Small Business Administration. Note the key points above, and read a bit more here. While email marketing is a powerful tool, you won’t want to risk running into legal trouble for violating the law. If you’re not in the United States, be sure to check into the laws in your area.

On a related note: never purchase an email list – it’s a quick trip to a bad place. You’ll end up spending money to send to a list that probably doesn’t want to hear from you, and depending on your email service provider if you get enough complaints you may find your email account suspended.

[bctt tweet=”Generate your email leads organically; never purchase an email list.” nofollow=”yes”]

On the flip side: never sell or rent your list. Your subscribers have trusted you with their contact information; opening them up to email from third parties is a breach of that trust.

How Often Should You Email Your List?

There’s no single right answer, but it’s more important to be consistent than to follow a particular freqency. For most photographers doing a general newsletter, I’d recommended email either monthly or quarterly depending on your niche. You could send mail more frequently if you have things to say, but I wouldn’t go any longer than three months between messages. One of the main reasons to have an email list is to keep your name and brand in the minds of your clients and leads, and if you’re not sending messages, you’re not keeping your name familiar. If you’re selling services or products beyond the typical photography services, it might be more appropriate to email more often if you have something to say.

What time of day is best to send your messages? Like many things… it depends. General consumer email is read most often first thing in the morning and on weekends. Business email is read most often early in the day. Are those the right times for your list? Maybe. Experiment and find out. ConvertKit (or any decent email provider) should provide statistics on open and click rates and you can see how things fare based on time of day, day of week, and so on.

What Should You Send To Your List?

Most folks get a ton of email… and I suspect you understand the frustration of receiving email that seems irrelevant or overly spammy. If you’re going to start sending email to a list for your photography business, how can you ensure you send them something they’ll find helpful? Consider the following ideas as email marketing for photographers:

• Recaps of your recent work, but in a fashion that makes it relevant for your list. “Amy’s portraits” isn’t necessarily interesting.
• Information about upcoming offers or promotions you’ll be running
• Information about changes in your business offerings
• Tips on how your clients can better use photography (teach them about why they need photography, then they can hire you for the services)

The theme is to keep your name, and your services, top of mind for your email subscribers. If they’re past clients, you want to ensure they keep remembering about the good experience they had with your business in the past. If they’re leads, you want to keep reminding them about how awesome it would be to hire you!

Subject Lines That Don’t Suck

Folks won’t know what great stuff is inside your email unless they open it, and a good subject line is probably the most important thing to get that message opened. Consider these not-so-great subject lines:

• Beautiful Moments[2] Newsletter
• Photography Newsletter
• Email from Julie

Contrast that with these examples that give folks an idea why they want to look at your message:

• Ideas for Alternative Senior Portraits
• How I Can Help Lower Wedding-Day Stress
• Freshen Up Your Corporate Imagery
• Why Now is the Time to Update Your Headshot

You’ll use a new subject line with each newsletter, teasing as to what’s inside.

A Couple Thoughts on Design

Email providers usually offer a gallery of email templates, some featuring fairly involved design work. As a photographer, you know that visuals are important, and including your imagery with your message makes sense. That said, realize that the message is more important than the medium, and it’s probably not worth your time to spend hours obsessing over making your email template pixel-perfect and a work of art.

A mostly-text email, with a couple examples of your work, can be quite effective at selling your services.

Related to your design: your email messages must look good on small screens. Folks are increasingly reading (or at least scanning) their email from their smartphones, and if your messages aren’t readable or look bad on a mobile device, you’re going to find yourself ignored.

Random Last Thoughts on Email Marketing for Photographers

In no particular order:

• Proofread your messages. Nothing will turn off your prospects quite like an email full of spelling errors or typos.
• Look at, but don’t obsess over, your numbers. ConvertKit lets you see things like a message’s open rate or click-through rate. Check on these numbers, but don’t get too hung up on a couple percentage points. Trends are more important than specific figures.
• Set up your reply-to email address with ConvertKit, and make sure it goes to an address you monitor. Lots of folks will respond to your messages, and you want to make sure to be responsive to their inquiry.
• Don’t get mad when someone unsubscribes. If they don’t want your messages, why would you want to send to them?

There’s nothing wrong with trying new social networks, but don’t forget about email. Already have a list? Wondering about how it might work? Leave a comment below and let’s discuss!

The post Email Marketing for Photographers: Start Your List appeared first on Tech Photo Guy Aaron Hockley.

If you’re going to have a serious website for your photography on the internet, you ought to have a photography domain name. Computers on the internet communicate and locate things by IP addresses… a series of numbers such as 128.56.108.6 or 146.185.144.135. Not real intuitive, is it? Imagine if you had to know all those numbers each time you wanted to visit a website…

Enter the world of domain names. A domain name is a friendly name that references a particular location on the internet. My photography business can be found at hockleyphoto.com and there’s a good chance you got to this website by typing techphotoguy.com into your web browser software. hockleyphoto.com and techphotoguy.com are domain names, and you should have your own domain name for your web site.

The Unhappy Alternative to Your Own Domain Name

You can have a website without having your own domain name… you can end up with a site like yourname.wordpress.com or weebly.com/yourcompanyname – but it’s kind of like if you ran your photo studio in the back corner of someone else’s office. You have to abide by their rules, their restrictions, and if they move, go out of business, or decide to change their policies, you’re screwed.

Given that a domain name should cost about the same as a decent lunch, it’s a valuable investment in your online presence. In addition to your website, your domain name can be used for email so instead of being bobphotographer99@comcast.net, you could be bob@photosbybob.com or something similar.

Photography Domain Names: the Registration Overview

As I mentioned above, a domain name is simply a pointer to a place on the internet. Regardless of where you choose to host your website, you should register your own domain name. It goes something like this:

1. Dream up some potential domain names for your website.
2. Go to a domain name registrar’s website and see if your preferred name is available.
3. Register the domain name for one or more years[1].
4. Configure that domain name to point to your website.

Once you’ve purchased a domain name and configured it to point to your website, internet users will be able to go to whatevernameyouchose.com and get to your website!

Registering a Domain Name: the Details and Recommendations

Let’s take a more in-depth look at choosing and registering your domain name.

What makes a good domain name?

A good domain name:

• is related to your name, business, or slogan
• will be as short as possible (for when you type it, put it on a business card, etc)
• can be easily spelled (for when folks hear it out loud)
• doesn’t use the .info or .biz domain endings, as those have traditionally been used frequently by spammers and scams

Brainstorm a variety of ideas. Since domain names have been available for decades, there’s a good chance your first couple of choices have already been registered… but get creative. You’ll see how to check availability in the next section as we look at registration. If you get completely stuck on domain names, drop me a note and I can help you out with some ideas. Let me know your name, your company name, your photography/locale/slogans or anything else of relevance.

How do you get that name?

Regardless of where you’re going to have your website hosted, I recommend that you register your domain name on your own. Most web hosts will let you register a domain name at the time you register for web hosting, but I prefer having my domain registration and web hosting separate since it makes it easier if you ever change web hosting companies. In addition, some less-than-scrupulous web hosts will actually register the domain in their name rather than yours, again making it painful if you choose to work with another company.

Lots of companies offer domain name registration. I’ve had good experiences with some and terrible experiences with others.

I currently recommend Namecheap for domain registration – they house most of my domains. They’re affordable, straightforward, and honest.

Registering a domain with Namecheap is pretty straightforward… just head over to their site and put in the domain name you’d like to use. They’ll tell you if it’s already registered or not… and if it is, they’ll offer some alternatives. Play around a bit and find a name that works.

Go ahead and make the purchase… you shouldn’t need to know any real technical details. You’ll create an account with Namecheap and then make payment via a credit card. Once you’ve made the transaction… congratulations! Now you have a domain name and you’re going to start looking more legitimate on the internet.

Now that you have a domain, it’s time to link that domain name up to your web hosting service that will house your website. Hit that link to find out more…

The post Photography Domain Names appeared first on Tech Photo Guy Aaron Hockley.