A lot of photographers relied on Instagram to bring in work, revenue and organic growth to their business. The industry has drastically changed since the birth of TikTok and the rise of the influencer.
I believe there is a massive opportunity for photographers and creatives to take advantage of the above change. After spending months trying to understand how to grow my Instagram account again, I realised something. Instagram is no longer the best platform for photographers, Websites and Youtube provide much better ways to monetize and display your content. This is why I wrote this article. Growing your website will result in more bookings, more sales and more money + happiness.
To put this into perspective. My 3-month-old website is starting to get more engagement than my Instagram account with 220k followers! It is also much easier to monetise, my content is evergreen, and a post I do now will still get views in 2 years if it's good.
Ironically growing a good photography website will grow your Instagram account. Seems backwards, but it works!
The key to knowing how to increase more organic visitors to your website lies in the fact that both website and business promotion have dramatically changed in the last 10 years.
Here are my 12 tools to grow your organic traffic.
1) SEO Content and Strategy to Grow Organic Traffic.
In the old days, a lot of what was spoken of in terms of SEO is now known as Technical SEO. While Technical SEO is still important, most website builders and platforms handle things like site speed pretty well. A very new trend in SEO is on-page and Content focused SEO. There are very powerful tools like AHrefs. AHrefs is a search tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research your competitors and dominate your niche. By Using a tool like AHrefs you can find out all the questions and keywords pertaining to your photography industry, as well as how difficult it is to rank for those terms and the search frequency of those google searches. But understanding this, and applying it to your brand, you can create very specific pieces of content that will be found on google. Target Keywords, Problems, Solutions, with good traffic and low competition.
2) Take a Data-Driven Approach when Forum Commenting.
You don't have to answer every public post in your photography niche on a Forum website like Quora. Rather use a keyword analysis tool like Ahrefs to Analyse, filter through data and find your specific posts to comment on that will act like a filter for your website. You will need to calculate the approximate monthly traffic a certain post has. Good responses to questions can have a click-through rate of 30% to 40%.
3) Use Pinterest to increase Organic Growth on your website.
Pinterest is one of the most understood platforms when it comes to certain niches if you feel your typical clients would be on Pinterest. It is a great place to market. Even paid advertising on Pinterest is cheap while still producing good results! Pinterest is great for creatives.
4) Guest Blogging- Increases Website Traffic and Authority.
Guest Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your photographic website. A good guest post can be a very powerful funnel into your website.
To Find Websites that use guest bloggers go to Google and type in "guest post by" intitle: Cape Town. Google will then give you a list of all guest posts that have the word "Cape Town" in the title.
Use tools like AHrefs to understand the Domain rating of the various websites you find. That ensures you guest blog on influential or website.
5) USE PR Tactics like Haro (Help a reporter out)
HARO is a link between journalists and industry experts and photographers. Journalists will post questions, asking for expect to advice for a section of their article. The request will be sent to anyone who has signed up as a subject expert. This will result in higher domain ranking and additional visitors to your site.
6) PR Tips Use Google Alerts
Use Google Alerts to get Alerts for potential partnerships and content, creation
Go to google alerts and type in (site: news24.co.za OR site: huffingtonpost.com ) intitle: Cape Town
This will send you an alert whenever one of those sites posts an article with your keyword in the title
When you get an alert, skim through the article and see you you are able to add more value to their article or can provide better pictures. From there you can contact the author and they will more than likely add your information if it makes their article better. What adds even more to this strategy is that you will build relationships with other authors in influential agencies. You can possibly become the go-to expert in your industry
7) Social Groups to Increase Organic Growth:
Besides Facebook groups that are great. Pinterest group boards are also a very powerful way to promote your business. Pinterest group boards are an area where people can share images, links and videos to a shared group board. The best part about these groups is it is encouraged to share links back to your blog.
Moderators can share pictures, and videos on Pinterest boards about a certain topic.
Check out www.pingroupie.com it is the best way to find Pinterest groups per category. Along with how many views and times a
8) Create a free resource or tool and promote it.
Tool or content Ideas could be a
LUTS
A Free Ebook
Travel Guides
Lightroom Presets
9) Create snippets of your blog posts for social media posts.
Use these little bites of data, combine them with good pictures, videos or graphics and post these to your social media. Each snippet should be optimised for the different platforms. You'll end up with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. Social shares 10) Host a Webinar with a Complimentary Business in your industry
Partner up with complementary businesses and host a joint webinar. This is a great way to share information and leverage both companies' databases of clients.
11) POD Casts
Much like Webinars POD casts have a lot of power. POD cast hosts are continuously looking for interesting guests to have on their show. If you can provide value in your niche it is a great way to organically grow your business. It goes without saying that you could potentially start your own POD cast too!
12) Repurpose Your Content.
People have different learning types and styles when it comes to absorbing content and information. Instead of posting the same content on all channels, take a concept, write an article, and use that article to create a youtube video. Summarise that article into slides that can be posted on Instagram and turn the video into a reel. This one concept is now optimised across all social channels. Let us know your thoughts in the Comments Cheers Craig Howes