Photography Marketing Guru Reveals His Secret Formula for Converting Visitors into Customers

"Do you have lots of visitors to your website but get frustrated because very few of them contact you?"

Dear fellow photographers

I believe more people now use the internet to search for a plumber than they do Yellow Pages or Thomson Local, and this is certainly true for wedding photographers. Even if a bride sees your ad elsewhere, such as a bridal magazine or if she picks up your business card at a hotel, chances are she will go to your website rather than just call you.

Traffic Is Not Everything

Getting traffic (or visitors if you prefer) to your website is very important; what use is a website if nobody sees it? But if all that people do when they land on your site is browse, and not make contact, your site is nothing more than another lame advertisement.

The Online High Street

Do you remember when the internet was first explained to us on the TV news? I'm not certain of the year but it was around the early '90s. We were told that the internet was going to be like a high street shopping centre. But this is not the case. Occasionally people will go online purely to shop, but on the whole, most people surf the net to look for information. Is that not what you do?

Your average surfer intends to check out a few websites & collect the information they need so they can go away and consider their options, or discuss it with their partner. That's why it's called surfing. We go from page to page & from site to site, occasionally adding something to our favourites or bookmarking it, and occasionally getting stopped by something out of the ordinary.

When something grabs our attention we are more likely to linger a while, view more pages, perhaps read reviews and testimonials. But how often have you searched for something online, found a good site and thought "ok, we can always come back to this one, lets see what else is out there". And how often do you go back?

No matter how great your site is,
once they are gone they are gone for good!

In most cases the answer is seldom, if ever. So even if you have a great website that stands head and shoulders above your competitors, most surfers will still leave and never come back.

• The average conversion rate from visitor to contact is 1-2%
• The average conversion from contact to meeting is 1 in 5
• The average conversion of meeting to booking is 35%

Based on these figures a website needs to attract over 1000 visitors to secure one wedding booking.

What if you could get a 10-fold increase in the number of contacts you get via your website?

If you could achieve that you would only need 100 visitors to book a wedding, or to put it another way, your original 1000 visitors could convert into 10 wedding bookings.

So what is the secret?

The Secret is two-fold, reciprocity and baby steps

I'm sure you know what baby steps are, but what have they got to do with online marketing and what is reciprocity?

If you walked up to a woman in a supermarket who was pushing a pram with a small baby, and asked her if she would like some photographs of her baby, what response are you likely to get? Most likely a dirty look and being reported to the store security staff.

Try the same situation again but this time the woman lives a few houses up the street from you and has seen you numerous times even though you don't know her. You are much more likely to get a positive response because the trust level is higher & the trust level is higher because there is an existing relationship. Ask a personal friend and the success rate should be 100%

So to be successful at online marketing you need to be successful at relationship building

Imagine the relationship is like a bank account. You can use this metaphor in your personal relationships too. You start with an account balance of zero when a visitor comes to your website. Most website owners think they can make a withdrawal on the account straight away, just because someone has visited their site. But how much is in the account?

Some nice pictures and well written text will get you a small deposit, guarantees and testimonials will get you a little more, but is there enough in the account for you to make the "email me" withdrawal that you want to make?

The answer is clearly no for most people, & that is why they don't make contact. I want you to embrace a new way of thinking; start giving before you expect to receive. Pay something into the account that your prospective client can withdraw, and it will be repaid with trust.

Reciprocity

You've no doubt at some point received an unexpected Christmas card from someone, and you'd not sent them one? Did you immediately feel the urge to send them one?

What about a Christmas gift from a family member you've not spoken to for ages? If you've not bought them a gift you'll feel bad. You'll feel like you "owe them". That is reciprocity. And the only way to dispel that feeling is to get them a gift. Once you do so, everything comes back into balance.

This is human nature; it is hard wired into our subconscious minds. If your neighbour lends you his lawnmower and a week later asks to borrow your power drill, you feel obliged to lend it to him, even if you don't really want to. The bigger the original gift the more obliged we feel to repay it.

In a supermarket, even a gesture as small as a free sample of fruit juice, or new brand of sausage, or a chunk of a new flavour of cheese triggers the feeling. You are only given a tiny amount, but if you like it you feel a small obligation to buy a pack.

Tying It All Together

Getting a bride to take a "baby step" on your website is much easier and has a far higher success rate than asking them to take a big step. If taking that baby step can induce a feeling of reciprocity then you are on to a winner. I'm about to show you how you can:

• Give surfers the free information they want
• Collect the contact details of your sites visitors
• Get potential clients to "feel like they owe you"
• Build the feeling of reciprocity to a high level
• Build the level of trust
• And its all wrapped up in one baby step

Relationship Building

You start building the relationship with your potential customer by giving them something for free. This could be a variety of things but if it can be downloaded from your website, it will fulfil the "instant gratification" need that people have on the net.

All you want in return for this free gift is their name and email address. This is the visitors "baby step". This is known as "permission marketing", they are giving you permission to send them emails.

What to send and how to send it

You could initially keep track of which potential customer has received what information, manually. But as this strategy takes off and you get more and more email addresses, eventually you will lose track and be pulling your hair out. What you need is a piece of software called an autoresponder.

An autoresponder is a sophisticated form of mailing list software that can store a preset sequence of emails and send those emails out on any given schedule you like. You can set it so a bride receives your free gift straight after confirming her email address, then receive another email the next day, a second email 5 days later, a third a week after that, a forth the following day and so on. When the next visitor requests your free gift, they start at email sequence number one. The autoresponder will keep sending them emails in the order you programmed, until there are no more "follow-ups" to send.

There are 2 types of autoresponder, one that you install on your own webserver and another that runs on a third party server. Installing the software on your own webserver and getting it working can be a tricky task, and decent software is not cheap. If you are on shared hosting you will also have hourly email sending limits. Using a third party provider is much easier and you can pay monthly too. Click here for a link to a good one

Which ever route you chose, you then have to come up with your "give away" and write your emails. Or do you?

What if you could not only get a great value autoresponder service, but the autoresponder came pre loaded with 30 targeted emails and free gifts, written and designed for brides shopping for a wedding photographer?

Save hours of research

Save days of writing and re writing

Be ready to go within hours not weeks

And all for less than the cost of most popular services

Yes, for a limited number of photographers, you will be able to send your website visitors the same valuable info that I send to mine, and use the same technique to capture email addresses that grabs the attention of over 20% of my site visitors*.

Act Now

There are no extra bonuses to tempt you, no clever sales closes & no threat of an imminent price increase; hey I've even given you a link to a competitors website, I can't be more open than that.

But the limited availability is real. I have no wish to put any undue load on my webserver, so once my hosting limit is reached, this offer will be gone forever.

Aweber price from $19 per month

Get Response price $17.95 per month

Omnistar £257 one off fee

With all of the above companies you will have to do all the initial research and write all your own email follow-ups, I am offering you everything for the low monthly investment of £9.95

Click the Paypal button to register now!

and start converting your unknown visitors into leads

No Annual Contract

You can cancel anytime

Would you like to know how you can get this for free?
Click here

A pdf version of your brochure is an ideal ingredient to add to your list of follow-ups. If you do not have a pdf version, I would be happy to create one for you from a Word document.

*The actual increase you will experience will depend on many factors and as such can not be guaranteed.