Create a Photography Website That Gets You Bookings

Have you ever wondered how to get more photography bookings directly from your website?

What if I told you that getting more bookings from your website doesn’t even have to involve paying for ads to get more visitors.

Many photographers are focused on getting more visitors to their website by using FB or Google Ads. However, most of them don’t know if they got a good return on their investment.

Luckily there is some simple knowledge that will inform you exactly if you are spending your attention (and money) on the right parts of your business. Your website…. or somewhere else entirely!

In this blog post, I will teach you this simple knowledge so you can make educated decisions on where to focus to get more bookings in the door!

The funnel of a website: from lead to booked client

When you only focus on using ads to get traffic to your site in the hope to get bookings, you could be in for some trouble.

Before you know it you have spent $1000 in AdWords only to realize that it brought you exactly 1 booking (worth $1000 in revenue maybe, profit a lot less).

The simple knowledge I told you about earlier, is understanding the funnel of a website.

The funnel is the road that a website visitor travels when he visits your website for the very first time until he becomes a paying client.

Not all visitors will become your client so the funnel is very wide at the top and small at the bottom.

I have put it in a nice diagram for you to make it more visual.

We have traffic going to your website; we have inquiries coming to your inbox and eventually, you have booked clients. Simple right?

We call this a funnel, even better we call this the sales funnel.

Client phases in the funnel

As you can see, a website visitor can visit your website, do an inquiry and eventually book you. When they do an inquiry we call your website visitor a ‘lead’.

There are steps in the funnel where people drop off. A website visitor that doesn’t fill out your inquiry form for example. Or a lead that doesn’t book you.

Now the goal is to get more bookings. But as you can see, pouring more traffic into the top of the funnel is not the only step in the process.

You might need to work on the effectiveness of your website, or maybe improve your sales skills after they inquired with you.

How do you know where to focus? By knowing your funnel numbers!

Improving your conversions by knowing your numbers

We call it a conversion when a visitor becomes a lead, or when a lead becomes a client.

So the goal is to improve conversions for every step in the funnel.

[thrive_highlight highlight=’#ffcc00′ text=’dark’]What are typical conversion numbers? It really depends but a 30-60% booking conversion is quite normal. So for example, if you book 4 out of 12 inquiries consistently, you have a conversion of 4/12 = 33%[/thrive_highlight]

The following diagram shows that if you can improve the conversion percentage on your website you’ll get more inquiries as well.

And if your booking percentage is very low, maybe you are better off investing your time in training yourself to do better sales consultations. If you can improve your 33% to a nice 66%, then you have just as many bookings as in the previous example.

Now you know that getting more bookings doesn’t have to involve paying for FB ads or blogging more. If your booking rate is terribly low you better invest your attention there first. And if you have lots of traffic but you hardly receive inquiries, invest your time in optimizing your website for conversions!

Related blog post: 10 Useful Tips To Book More Photography Clients

Get your Funnel Metrics

Do you want to get your hands on your funnel numbers as soon as possible now?

I got you covered!

I created an example spreadsheet where you can enter your traffic numbers, the inquiries that you receive every week or month (we are going to work on that!!) and how many you convert into bookings.

This week you can start by getting this information up and running. We use Google Analytics to get those numbers. If you don’t have that code installed, you will find information in the ebook to get started with that as well.

Let me know in the comments if you find this useful.