QUICK TIPS

1. 🧑‍💻 Why Photographers Need a CRM

Being a photographer is not just shooting & editing.

It's also: branding, marketing, SEO, writing, web-design, social media, budgeting, invoices, contracts, copyright law, networking, sales.

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can transform how you operate, making your business more efficient and your client interactions more professional.

A lot of good ones to choose from:

• https://adventureweddingacademy.com/the-best-crm-for-photographers/

• https://aftershoot.com/blog/crm-for-photographers/

• https://flothemes.com/best-studio-management-software-for-photographers/

Using a CRM keeps everything organized in one place. No more scattered Google Docs or lost emails—your contracts, invoices, and client communications are all stored and managed seamlessly. This not only saves you time but also ensures that every client receives a consistent and high-quality experience.

You can also automate routine tasks (sending follow-up emails, scheduling photo sessions, tracking payments, etc.) and stay compliant with legal regulations.

In short, it's about working smarter, not harder.

When reaching a website, people instantly recognize familiar menu items.

Your site should, therefore, avoid using uncommon words in the navigation because they slow down users in taking a decision, and can hurt the site’s usability.

One of the most frequent mistakes is calling your Contact page something like “How to reach me/us”. Or linking to a Services page using “What we do”.

Inventing menu items just for the sake of “creativity” can backfire. Using simple words always works best.

Examples of menu item word choices:

Good: About, About Us, Bio

Bad: Info, Learn more, Experience, Skills, History, Company Info

Good: Contact, Contact Us

Bad: How to reach me/us, Get in touch, Send a message, How to contact, Email, Message, Give us a shout

Good: Blog, Articles, Journal

Bad: Latest, Recent, Posts

Good: Galleries, Photography, Portfolio

It depends: Images, Archive

Bad: Photos, Pictures, Pics, Snaps, Collections, Check us out, Showcase

There surely are exceptions to every rule, so take everything with a grain of salt. Whenever you deviate from the norm, make sure you have a good reason for doing so.

Keep clarity in mind: visitors should easily understand what they can expect from every menu item.

Successful photographers have understood the value of simplicity, of focusing on the essentials and removing the superfluous. So even if you have a lot of content on your site, you should try to organize it in a simple way, to not confuse people and tempt them to leave the site.

Attaining a good level of simplicity (without sacrificing usability) is really tough!

Your website is like a storefront; you can’t afford to have it messy and overcrowded.

A clean and inviting design is the “unknown” that makes people want to learn more about your images and services. A beautiful design will speak volumes about your photography brand.

On the other hand, a messy and cluttered layout will surely turn people away in this day and age.

DEEP DIVE

Typography and readability 101

Improving your site’s fonts is one of the best ways in which you can create a better browsing experience.

Usually, it’s a 3-part process to make the text comfortable to read:

• Setting a larger font size (16px or more)

• Setting an appropriate line height (at least 1.5)

• Choosing the right font face (that matches your logo and the general look of your site). Most website platforms (or themes) will allow you to choose custom fonts for your site, usually from the Google Fonts library.

Extra tips to improve readability:

• Make sure that the text color is contrasting well enough with the page background color.

• Add proper spacing around text areas, to avoid page layouts being too busy.

• People don’t have the patience these days to read long boring blocks of text. Instead, they skim through pages, quickly looking for content they’re interested in. So help them by properly breaking your text up using headings and paragraphs, and using text formatting (bold, italics) to highlight what’s important.

• Also, use bulleted lists instead of long enumerations.

Making these changes will transform this…

… into this:

You can see it’s night-and-day now, and it’s a much better user-experience. The readability is much improved.

FOREGROUNDWEB

Don’t know how to optimize the images on your site?

This video guide will teach you everything you need to know about image optimization for the web: how to size your images, how to export and compress them, what tools to use and how to configure performance plugins, how to test your site's speed and understand the performance reports, and much more!

Choose to get:

• 📺 just the video guide

• 📺 video guide + 📞 30' consulting call + ✉️ 2 weeks of email support

• 📺 video guide + 📞 30' consulting call + ✉️ 1 month of email support + 🔎 complete site review

TESTIMONIAL

SEO TIP

Is it worth ranking in Google Image search?

Let’s deconstruct this: the main concern is whether showing up in Google Image search results actually drives traffic to your site.

When you click on a thumbnail, Google first opens up a full size version of that image, with a button to access the actual web page it’s coming from:

(Google also notoriously removed the “view image” button from image search results, which used to link directly to the image files, to make photos harder to download/steal)

It’s true that many people never actually visit the websites, they just do a bunch of search and access the images from there. And that’s not useful to you as a website owner, you get absolutely no data on that.

That being said, image search SEO is still incredibly useful if…

• you sell image licenses (RM or RF, stock photography)

• you sell photo-based products (calendars, photo books, agendas, etc.)

• you do event photography

In all of these cases, many people will indeed click to visit the website for the images they like in Google image search results.

And most importantly, all the Image SEO actions will help you rank higher in Google web searches as well! They are not restricted to Google Images, they will help your site altogether.

Without image SEO, Google will have a harder time understanding your site

WEBSITE EXAMPLE

A hybrid WordPress + PhotoShelter website for fine art & travel photographer Mark Chamberlain.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK