While many will say, “Why not Marketing 101?†in the title of this post, I’ll say there are over 111 ways or more to market yourself today as a photographer, model, make-up artists, stylist, assistant, etc., especially with the power of the Internet, for FREE! Let’s look at some of those ways to market your talents:
1. Glamour1.com, formerly GarageGlamour.com, yep it’s changed and will get better, but more important it’s free and it’s got tons of traffic. Did I say free? It’s been online since March 1999 and has had millions of people visit the site over the years. Worth every penny and if you’re a model or photographer, before you contact me, you’d better be on this site.
2. Myspace.com, it’s not only free and you can practically upload unlimited amount of images, videos, but you can customize it like I did, www.myspace.com/glamourphotographer If you don’t have your Myspace account by now, chances are someone else does. There are some fake accounts, problems with spamming, but its gotten so good spammers don’t last five minutes on there any more. While the forums suck in user friendliness, the fact that 100’s of millions of people interact each day is worth being on this site. Many people have more than one Myspace account too, I do, I use one to play with my design before I copy and paste it to my public Myspace page. Please don’t ask me for my Myspace code, not going to happen.
3. ModelMayhem.com, a great site started by a male model that boasts the “Myspace†feel and look. While I personally like this site, it’s fallen second to Paidmodels.com. It holds the third spot here on this list because of the volume of traffic. It suffers from growing pains and often has server issues, like at the writing of this post, they were having image server problems. I feel their pain as I know what it’s like. If they ever get their premium capabilities back up, it could come back strong. I truly like this site and hope it improves.
4. Paidmodels.com. These are the new guys and they seem to have it right. They lack some traffic, but it’s building. Their programmer deserves a gold-star. I however would like to see the portfolio thumbs not only show how many views, but how many comments like MySpace and ModelMayhem. I did something I never thought I’d do for a model/photog site, I paid for their top premium account. Why not, they deserved it and I want to take advantage of this site in case they suspend their premium memberships to those “charter members†like ModelMayhem did?
5. Ujenatalent.com, now Bob has a great thing here. Hold an annual contest, make the contestants pay for everything and make money. My hat off to Bob. I love this site and you can see my port here: www.ujenatalent.com/masters/17637.html and did I say, it’s FREE! This is a great site and everyone should be on this site.
6. Onemodelplace.com (edited, 8/27/07) I finally spoke to the owner/CEO, and I see great changes and a brighter future for “OMP.” I now am confident that I can be a part of the OMP community. Look for more on this in my blog soon!
7. Americanmodel.com, cool site, but too blue in color. Too hard to navigate at times, and low traffic, but I have my portfolio on their too.
There are many other model and photographer free sites to post your portfolio—just do a “Google†and you’ll see it first-hand. The beauty of doing a search on Google, Google has already rated sites of interest based on popularity for you by the numbered results. I recommend you make a folder on your desktop with images you like to add to these type of sites. In addition, make a word document in your text program and save it so you can copy and paste your “about yourself, bio and credits†to place on these sites so you don’t have to do it from scratch each time.
Now let’s look at other avenues on the world wide web for marketing. You can write a tutorial and then place it on sites like Good-Tutorials.com ( www.good-tutorials.com/author/Glamour%20One ) and get thousands of hits. It’s FREE! There are other tutorial sites and even sites where you can contribute articles that other sites will utilize with attribution to you and your website. Here one, http://ezinearticles.com/ and there are many, many more, just do a Google.
Posting on photography and modeling forums is another way to market yourself. Besides my own personal favorite, Glamour1.com, there are others like DPReview.com, TexasPhotoForum.com and even many associated with photography magazines like http://www.popphoto.com and http://www.pdn-pix.com. While on sites like PDN, you can also pay for professional portfolio services like PhotoServe.
There are top link sites and sites to add your banners and links, like Photolinks.com, Prosphotos.com for FREE! Just do a Google! Not to mention sites like Photosig.com where you can use to get your images critique’d and posted for FREE! Again, just do a Google.
You can also start your own blog for FREE! My favorites are WordPress.com, which this blog is based on, for your own server or use theirs at WordPress.org, and Blogspot, now Blogger.com and owned by Google. These are FREE! There are paid one’s too like Typepad.com
As mentioned earlier, one of the biggest marketing vehicles is Myspace.com and there are social networks with similar features like Facebook.com, Friendster.com, Linkedin.com and others, for the complete list, check out the Wikipedia.com list, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites
Speaking of Wikipedia, wiki’s are another method of marketing, but don’t expect to get on Wikipedia.com just cause you think you can type away, you must be “notable†and they will delete you quickly if you do not meet their “notable†standards. Many people are irate that they can’t be listed on Wiki and there have been numerous media articles written about this topic and the importance on being listed in Wikipedia. To get an idea what a personal page on Wikipedia should look like, see mine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolando_Gomez
There are other marketing vehicles that are great for everyone, like PhotoBucket.com or Imageshack.com And if you’re into video, the best is Youtube.com, but there are tons of others, just do a Google! Most are FREE! These type of sites lead to what is called in the industry as viral marketing. It works!
Now one thing every photographer, model or person for that matter should have their own website. You can buy a domain and have it hosted with WordPress as your content management system (CMS) and even have an interactive photo gallery without being a webmaster. I did this entire site, www.rolandogomez.net, through Godaddy.com Sure, I know some HTML so I tweaked it, but Godaddy and their team installed and configured the software and I have the capability to serve tons of traffic—I paid in advance and it cost me about $100, that’s it! The software was FREE! I’m paying for the server and bandwidth.
Now I’ve given you only 27 potential avenues for your own guerilla marketing. I personally use most of these venues as any hit is better than no hit. Besides, if you have your own web site and use all the other resources mentioned, you’ll come up in the search engines like Google. I get customers off Google.com all the time and I don’t pay for this service. Google does have where you can purchase adds too, but hey, right now I like what I get for FREE! Wishing you the best, rg sends!
