An interesting article in the Times and a new idea

Last week, I had an interesting discussion with another photographer in California about how he has grown his business simply by making sure his website was easy to find by people searching for images on the web. He explained that I was missing the boat by not making a bigger effort to commercialize my website and make my presence known in search engines by practicing something called SEO. Six months ago, I thought just having a website was enough to promote my work. As well, I've paid good money to build the site I have now and then paid even more good money to have a number of experts tell me everything from "it's perfect" to "it looks very low rent". I'm not kidding.

When it come to consultants, I've concluded that if you are going to pay them for an opinion, they'll give it to you whether they actually have one or not.

Now, this guy's website was really low rent, and he was the first to tell me it was a jumbled mess that was five years over due for a rebuild. So I asked the obvious question, why not up date it? and his response was that since he made $100,000 a year in print and license sales, rebuilding his site was low on the list.

This got me thinking that, even though I thought I was a pretty savvy internet user, I might actually be one of those guys that's so far behind, he thinks he's ahead. So last week while I was away, I took a couple of hours and headed over to Borders to browse the computer section and was shocked to see how many titles were dedicated to the subject of search engine marketing which, frankly, was a term I had never heard of until talking to this guy. I bought a couple of titles, and while reading them, I have concluded that I am missing some real opportunities here so, I've also added yet another website re-work to my to do list.

This morning, I'm going through the NY Times Sunday Magazine and came across a really interesting article that relates to all this. You can see it here http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/magazine/13audience-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin


Basically, the article is all about how a musician quit his day job and started a music career on his own using the internet, viral marketing and all the other things I've been reading about and originally heard about from another photographer a week ago.

So what's the point? Well, for me and my new business, I guess the point is that I've really missed a giant elephant standing in the room. We all know how "awesome" the power of the internet is but do we really understand it and what the potential is for our business? I know in my case, I've really been focusing on more traditional ways of marketing that, on second thought, may not be all that relevant any more. I think I keep up with current thinking by reading a few magazines and newspapers but the reality is that today, there is almost too much information out there an finding relevant sources and staying current is a full time job in itself. I think the people who really get ahead in any business are the ones who seek out new and unusual sources of information and ways of doing things all the time.