Write down 3 to 10 of your absolute favorite past clients. The more clients you can study, the better! If you are just getting started in wedding photography and you don’t have very many past clients to work with or you’ve booked people you don’t enjoy working with, then write down friends, family, or acquaintances that you would love to photograph if you got the chance.
2: Mark next to their name
Write down symbols next to each client based on the criteria below. You can write down as many of these symbols that apply:
(💲) = Stands for the fact that they booked you at your rates, no questions asked.
(💜) = Did you enjoy working with them? Or did you love their inspiration, colors, wedding style? Were they fun?
(✔) = Did they refer you? Have they referred you to friends or family whether that person book you or not?
3: Analyze your list: Look at your list, and identify the clients that have two or more symbols next to their name. These are the people that are truly ideal for you as you enjoy working with them, are inspired by working with them, and/or don’t have to haggle over your rates (i.e. they thought you worth it).
4: Dig Deep: Their Likes, Interests, and Hobbies
Ask these questions of your list to understand who your ideal bride is. Keep in mind that you can utilize IG or FB to figure out some of the answers.
What do they like to do with their free time? What is their favorite date night?
What do they post on social media the most?
What is their personal style? What kind of clothes do they typically wear? If you know the brand, write it down.
What are they generally interested in? What are their favorite foods/meals/restaurants? Are they into beer, wine, champagne, tequila? What are their hobbies? Favorite sports? Coffee/Tea? Do they love adventures like hiking or traveling? Are they into cars or boats or motorcycles? Do they have pets? What types of things do they post the most about?
What do they do for a living? Are they lawyers? Doctors? Teachers? Artists? Etc. What college did they go to? Their degree or high school graduate?
Where did they grow up? Are they close to their families? Did they live in mom and dad’s home until they got married or did they live with their spouse before they were married?
Are they religious?
Once you’ve written these down:
Circle any common traits that occur between your favorite couples. Star the traits that you like the most about them.
Underline traits that you also happen to enjoy.
5: Boil down the information to find their Values
This is hard to do, but after working with them and “stalking” their social media, you can start to draw conclusions as to their values. When you can dig down and figure out values, it goes a long way to really understanding who your ideal bride is and what makes her tick. This helps you to know how to speak to your ideal bride on social media.
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Even though Instagram is so important to wedding photographers and how they find brides, it’s super important that you blog, anyway. Why?
Here are some reasons: What if IG closed tomorrow? What would you do? Many brides still go to google to check reviews, My research via polls to my brides and google search show that brides still Google search to find wedding vendors. Additionally, brides often confirm their potential hire by looking at all these sites, social media and websites as well as Google and Pinterest.
Remember that social media comes and goes (think MySpace) and remember how easy it was for people to find your business on Facebook? Now…… maybe 2% of the people that actually like your page will see your posts.
Your website can either do nothing OR you can utilize the single best way to get found FOR FREE! If you want to do this, you need to optimize your website for search and understand SEO.
What is SEO??
So I went to my favorite SEO expert Neil Patel. Here’s what he said:
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Let me break that down even further:
When it comes to SEO, there’s you, the search engine, and the searcher. If you have an article about how to make vegan lasagna, you want the search engine (which, in 90% of all cases, is Google) to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase “vegan lasagna.”
SEO is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword.”
What does this mean for your wedding photography website? I’m betting you can guess — A LOT!!! If you’re Jen Vazquez, Bay Area Wedding Photographer and you only have a few blog posts referring to “Jen Vazquez, Bay Area wedding photographer,” you will miss out on booking brides.
Soooooooo, let’s get to the tips!
You Need Words, not just images!
Do you have beautiful blog posts filled with phenomenal photography but no words to describe what’s happening in your images? From my research, you should have at least 200 words to every blog post you publish. Within those 200 words, be sure to include keywords like “wedding in San Jose, California” and “San Jose wedding photographer” This way Google knows what your blog post is about and serves it up to brides in your area.
Create Valuable Content
Create content that brides want to read or are searching for. An easy way to do this is to write a blog for every question that your brides ask you. It’s a way to build up a ton of great content for your brides and a great way for new brides to find you. If one bride has the question, you can bet multiple brides wonder the same thing.
Optimize your Images
Be sure to optimize your images. What does optimizing your images mean? There are three places to put a name (i.e. search terms). Alt Text, Title, and Description. All three places can have the same name OR a variation of the name, if you have the time. Here is an example of a great optimized image name: “bay-area-santa-clara-catholic-wedding-at-five-wounds-with-pale-pink-and-Burgandy-jen-vazquez-photography“
Use these SEO Keywords in every blog
Use The Name of your company somewhere on your blog. I typically put it in the title.
Use location-specific keywords like your city, state, town, area
Use your three brand words in every blog post. Mine are adventurous, playful and fun. So I say those three words everywhere in each blog, when possible.
Use “Wedding Photographer” or “Wedding Photography” in each blog
Don’t Be Silly — SHARE IT!
Share your blogs by newsletter, social media, Pinterest, on business and personal page. Sharing the information tells Google that you are popular and trustworthy.
Wedding Photographers have an easier time with this because we have gorgeous images!
Ensure that you have share buttons on your website for social media – this makes it easy and today, doing something easy online ensures they may click. If someone has to copy and paste, etc to share the information – it oftentimes is one too many clicks for people to have to do.
My favorite tools to Share:
Mailchimp: Get your content to your couples and to industry friends by creating a newsletter. While MailChimp may seem like an odd tool to list, I decided to include it because Mailchimp pushes people (especially your clients) to share your content directly from an email you send out. I also think Mailchimp is more reliable in getting your content to your followers than Facebook.
Tailwind – this is my all-time favorite tool for Pinterest, FB, and Instagram! By clicking the Tailwind link, you’ll get a free trial and they will give me a tiny stipend for sharing.
NO 404 Errors: Make sure your links are Working
There literally nothing worse than having 404 Page Error put up when you are looking for something. Guess what? It’s irritating to Google too. It makes Google feel like you are untrustworthy and it really messes up the algorithm.
Google doesn’t like slow sites. Photographs are most important, for us photographers, but we also need to ensure that they don’t slow down our page.
Making images look good
Making images load quickly
Making images easy for search engines to index.
Photographs should be saved and uploaded as JPGs. This file type can handle all of the colors in a photograph in a relatively small, efficient file size. By using JPEGs, you won’t end up with the enormous file you might get if you saved a photograph as a PNG.
The average speed for a website to load in 5 seconds. You can fix your site load time by cutting down on the size of a page. The biggest way to add to the size of your page? Slapping on tons of huge images. So, how can you fix this?
I love to take my favorite hi-resolution images and I throw them in BlogStomp. It’s a paid tool, but you can use the trial to try it out. I automatically optimize my images so they look their best but are web sized. It’s a lifesaver.
This is often overlooked. What are backlinks? Backlinks are another website links to your website.
So as an example, if you are listed (even a free listing) on WeddingWire, Zola, or The Knot. That’s a backlink. When you get your images published somewhere, that’s a backlink.
The bigger the website, the more powerful that backlink is because Google believes that you are more trustworthy. Especially if you are a wedding photographer and you have a link on a wedding site because it is a wedding-related.
Here are some ways to get started with backlinks (all free):
If you are looking for a coach to help with knowing who your ideal bride, how to attract them and book them, then I’d love to work with you! I have a private FB group that you may enjoy learning in or you can work with me 1:1. I’d love to cheer you on and give you concrete step by step ways to bring in those brides!
Below we’ll be discussing 5 tips on how I make blogging my weddings easy and effective — now don’t click away! Hear me out and I may just change your mind if you (like me) HATE writing blogs!
Tip One: WHY?
If you are like me and HATE writing blogs, here’s WHY you HAVE to write them:
Consistently posting boosts your SEO. That’s a No brainer.
It’s 100% FREE marketing. Who doesn’t love free?
Your clients will LOVE being features and share it with family and friends and those people will refer YOU when asked if they know a wedding photographer.
An inactive blog can make it appear to a future client that you’re out of business. YIKES
Right about now, many of you are thinking, UGGHHHH – I know I should BUT:
“I am terrible at writing.”
“No one reads my blog!”
“Uhh one more thing to add to my ever-growing list of things to do!”
Stay tuned, and I should overcome each of those things you may think!
How I help my wedding photography clients is I’m all about creating systems to make this crazy wedding business easier and more effective.
TIP TWO: Pre-Wedding Questionnaire
One way I do that is with my pre-wedding questionnaire for my clients: This enables me to easily and quickly write a blog to post within 72 hours after the wedding (YES I know, roll your eyes – I’ll explain more in a sec)
TIP THREE: Include four basic things in each blog post
These are four things I put in every single blog post as a minimum:
What is the name of the venue, where is it located (city name and area), and the couple’s first name. TIP: make sure all of that is in the FIRST PARAGRAPH as this is what will spike your SEO and get you found.
How did the couple meet?
How did the groom propose?
Describe their first date?
TIP FOUR: Include 35-50 images
Then after writing the blog, I take my favorite images typically 50-75 (yes I know that’s a lot but this is my sneak peek for my brides 48-72 hours after the wedding) and it boosts your SEO. It’s part of my process so I can photograph my wedding, deliver the sneak peek in 72 hours and enjoy all of the traffic to my website and social media accounts because the bride and groom are sharing it with all their friends and family. I get the work done, and my clients and their friends and family are blown away because RARELY does that happen.
Naming/Sizing your images: I use Blogstomp (but there is other software out there) and it resizes and names them so incredibly fast (and who has time?). Things to think about. Why? Well images names are also SEO searchable and when your title, your blog details, and your images have keywords, your website/blog will start rising in google algorithm and you’ll rise higher on the search page for your location or venue:
You must resize them as you don’t want your blog loading slowly or people will click away
Name them important searchable words like venue, city, state, your name, wedding. EX. SanJoseCAWeddingatXYZbyJenVazquezPhotography1
TIP FIVE Including Branding words:
Lastly, make sure that you include your branding words (three words that describe your ideal bride and brand – for me is adventurous, playful and fun party brides). You can use these words somewhere in each blog post and an unconscious pattern will develop for your brides to be about your brand and it helps google show your content to your ideal brides.
Want more info?
If you found this helpful – I will have more of this in my upcoming course, Identify Attract Book: A course helping Wedding Photographers identify their ideal brides and book them with a simple but effective system. You can sign up on the waitlist to hear when it opens HERE.
How to add an image onto another image to create a unique image for your brand. This works when you have a desktop image and you add your website image into the computer of the image you will use on social media or your website.
This is helpful also to add your logo to an image (think watermark) or to add another image and create a collage.
I use Canva for this! It’s simple and easy to use and the best part is it’s free. Yes I said it – FREE! Here is my profile for Canva and you can use those templates if you want https://www.canva.com/jenvazquezphotography. You can signup for Canva here http://www.canva.com
Below is a video that shows you step by step how to do it. It’s really easy and you’ll be creating unique images for your business in no time at all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhvF0spsPH8&t=2s
Thank you so much for stopping by! I’d love for you to join our private Facebook Group of female entrepreneurs who want to plan, prioritize, and execute to take their businesses to the next level. This group has great advice, tips, and help. Most importantly, it’s a community of supportive and like-minded individuals all there to learn and grow in their business. Come hang out with us!
Creating an ideal client can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Click the button below to get your workbook to start talking and marketing to your ideal client below.
In a few steps (although they aren’t simple), you can arrive at YOUR ideal client. Click the ideal client workbook button below to download the workbook.
