Hi I’m Colin and as some of you will be aware I have been helping Cory out as his design intern, jazzing up the look of the site recently, and in return Cory has been helping me in evaluating how I can better market myself as an artist online and has very kindly invited me to share a bit of that process here on the blog.
I was always into art as a child. In high school I excelled at drawing, painting and design and when I went away to university I ultimately decided to study graphic design and alongside that line of study I became an avid photographer and a dab hand with Photoshop.
Cut to 10 years out from graduating and I am realising that the only reason I am trying to live off a career in graphic design is because that’s what I trained to do, not because it’s my passion. I’m good at it but it doesn’t thrill me the way something needs to if you’re going to be successful at it. The things I really love doing are things I’ve been doing all along in my spare time – photography and digital painting. This subliminal assumption that your job is what you trained for always kept me from seriously considering either as anything more than a pastime…until now.
If you asked anyone that knows me, and a whole bunch who hardly know me in fact, what I’m known for it would be photography. I had assiduously refused to shoot weddings for anyone primarily because I knew I needed a half decent DSLR to do it so when I finally purchased a Canon 7D last year that provided the facility for shooting the quality of pictures and HD video I had been longing to work with I started saying yes.
By the start of this year I had three weddings behind me and others planned and I was aware of the need to upgrade my purely recreational online photography persona with a more commercially focused approach. I made a revision to my personal website to describe the photo and video services I was now providing but I didn’t have any broader social networking or online advertising strategy beyond a Facebook page which I found an amazingly effective tool for attracting attention to my work and seeing how the interaction of current fans of my work spawned interaction from new fans etc.
It was around this point I came across Cory’s guest post on IWTYTBR and that theme of ‘The Starving Artist is a Myth’ chimed with everything I had been discovering in my own realisations about my creative life and everything I had been learning from various entrepreneurial experts and resources online. The Abundant Artist aim of helping artists become better at marketing their art in the online environment was exactly what I was looking for and I was really excited to get the opportunity to perform a marketing diagnostic with Cory and then focus and be accountable for hashing out a way forward to market the creative talents I love to employ.
Being a graphic designer you are necessarily something of a jack of all trades. The items you become expert at designing are hugely varied; from logos to product packaging, catalogues to billboards, keychains to vehicle livery. And as a self-employed designer you are usually a generalist with multiple specialisms, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Being such a ‘renaissance man’ I found it hard to constrain myself to focusing on one or two core abilities or niches. I had this crazy flowchart representing all the various pies I had a finger in online and how they interrelated and thankfully by the time Cory had to take it all in, I had a fair idea what my prime loves were, creatively speaking: photography and digital painting. Related areas but requiring distinct commercial approaches.
I had some stuff in place online already in terms of the photography side of things thanks to years of sharing that on Flickr but the digital painting I hadn’t even acknowledged as a thing. It just seemed like a byproduct of the convergence of working with graphic design and photography.
I mapped out steps required to establish these two separate commercial streams and with Cory’s advice broke it down to the components needed. As the photography business was the hot topic at that moment thanks to the wedding buzz we started with that stream and Cory set me the task of setting up the following:
1. A new Facebook Page solely for the wedding photography work
2. A Facebook ad to promote this page
3. An ongoing program of special offers to fans of the page
4. A new website & blog for the photography business fully optimised for SEO, social network sharing etc.
5. An email list sign up on the website
6. A dedicated Twitter account integrated with the website/blog/Facebook pages
7. Google Adwords campaigns to target specific photo services/localities
After a couple of weeks of intensive research and planning and designing and uploading I have reached #6 thus far.
Last week I got the new Facebook page up and running and settled on an ad type that worked best.
I looked at various photographer websites, analysed what worked for the ones I was inspired by and took note and also looked at competitors in my region and niche areas etc. From this research I finally decided where to pitch my prices and what specific services and products I would offer at present.
My unforced, natural light style of photography is (in Scotland at any rate) quite unusual and people come to me primarily because they have seen and loved this look. So I am not pitching myself as a bargain basement solution to service as wide a market as possible. My ideal customer is someone who loves the kind of photos I shoot and is motivated more by that aesthetic love than any other factor. If they aren’t passionate about the images then I don’t want them as clients. I realise in the US this style of candid lifestyle photography is very popular now but in Scotland I face a difficult task in creating a demand for lifestyle type sessions as not only is it unusual for people to hire a photographer for anything other than weddings and the rare family portrait but Scottish people are peculiarly resistant to spending money (despite what the recent credit crisis might suggest).
After looking at various website and blog solutions I signed up for a WordPress site through Prophoto Blogs and began styling and populating it with content. Being very particular about graphic style this probably took longer than it needed to but hey, that’s my thing. I set up a mailing list with MailChimp and a Twitter account for Colin J. Campbell Photography and I was ready to let people know about it. (Side note: I decided a while back to make a point of including the J for branding purposes in order to gain a degree of differentiation from the gazillions of other Colin Campbells in Google Land.)
The new site and all these linkety doodas can be found at http://www.colinjcampbell.com. I will be populating it with more blog posts over time but there’s enough to cover the bases there just now. Obviously there’s more work to be done, once this is all set up I need to move on to the steps required for the digital painting stream. Marketing is hard work (and we’ll have to wait to see exactly how much it’s worth) but right now I think I need to get outdoors and decompress after an intensive few weeks in front of the computer screen. Thanks a million to Cory for taking the time to look at my situation and give me the focused accountability required to action this undertaking in bite-size steps.
Hopefully I have explained the process clearly but I may have omitted some bits and pieces. If anyone has any questions please fire away.
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