FIND MORE CLIENTS for Your Photography Business

this aspect of your business kind of sucks but it's also the most important [Music] that is building your email list it's a long process it's a slog but doing it yourself will produce the best results when I was starting out it was recommended that I join agency access or bikini lists or or something like that and I did for a year it was a very expensive year that produced zero results so in order to ensure the best results for myself and for my business I go the DIY approach takes a lot longer a lot longer but the results that I've had are dramatic the comparison to when I was using a list service my emails got opened at a rate of about four percent now my emails get opened at a rate of about 50 just dramatic dramatic difference the amount of people who open my emails now is significantly higher than people who opened them in the past which was next to none and the people that I know are getting my emails are the people that I have personally selected and I know they are currently in those positions in the advertising industry people change jobs and move companies uh fairly frequently so you have to stay on top of that every month and the only way to stay on top of that is by maintaining your email database and your email marketing list so I'm going to show you how I manage my database and how I find my contacts first thing you're going to need is you're going to need an air table account I use airtable religiously in my business to manage all of my information and in my personal life I've created a copy of my contacts database for you and I've set it up as a template and once you have an airtable account which you can get in the link below you can find this database in the link below and when you get to it you should just be able to copy it into your airtable account everything set up in the structure that I haven't I'm going to get into the structure of the database in a little bit but first thing we're going to do is we're going to jump over to LinkedIn I know LinkedIn is the least creative site but it is the most important site for your business next to your own website so this is my profile here on LinkedIn what you're going to do is you can go up to the search bar and you're going to type advertising services and you can say Los Angeles as an example so what will happen is I will get a number of people contacts but I can go over here to companies click on that pill and then I have a big list of advertising agencies that are in LA and then I can start to assemble a list in in my database I have a page here for companies you can go over to the companies table here in the database and just in the grid view you have a field you can enter the name the address the city I have Province because I'm in Canada you can change that to State the postal code website LinkedIn page etc etc so I don't already have a page open for a company that I like in Los Angeles called Bond first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to copy that URL then I'm going to go here enter it into the LinkedIn Page Field first thing I'm going to do is always copy that LinkedIn link so that I can if I need to get more information I can just easily find it again I don't have to go through a search process through Linkedin because LinkedIn will count how many searches you do and if you've hit a limit then you won't be able to do any more searches until the month rolls over having a direct link to go back to a company page or to go back to a person's page instead of having to search for them and look them up again is a real bet so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to enter their name Bond City Los Angeles and this is California for the website I click this contact us it opens their website and I can find their website copy that enter that in their website so now I have the company information set I'm going to go back to the LinkedIn page and I'm going to click on people now there are 256 employees here so you could come down here and start taking a look at who is who the people that you're most interested in are art producers art buyers art directors creative directors our producers primarily and art buyers primarily an integrated producer or senior integrated producer senior art buyer art buyer art buyer slash producer it's all the same type of thing they're the ones who hire the creatives for the projects that they are working on so anyone with those titles those are the people that we want to know about and include in our database so if I click here on Paul I'm going to go up here I'm going to grab that LinkedIn link first thing I'm going to do go back to my database click on people click that LinkedIn link put it in then I'm going to enter the name enter his last name what I can do now if I click on the photo copy image address then I can go back here in the photo click the plus sign and go to the link URL paste the link and it will grab the photo and then I can hit upload and then it's going to attach the person's photo to my database it's going to actually import that photo into the database one of the reasons I wanted to do this is because I have different types of views set up and if I go down here to contacts with images then I get more of a card view of all the people that I have in the database and I like being able to look at things in this way if I want to contact someone pick up the phone and call them if I'm on the phone with them I want to be able to quickly look them up and see who I'm talking to so I'll go back to the grid view we have Paul his title go back to LinkedIn his title is senior art director I'm going to copy that then I'm going to come up back to title and paste it in it's in here as a pill because of the way this field is set up and this field has all these different positions if you put a position in there that isn't already in there then it will add it to the bottom of the list that way when you want to be able to sort your database later on you will have all these different titles that you can sort it by so you can have your database fill it out and then you can say I want to see a list of everyone who is just an art buyer everyone who's just a senior art director you can filter it in a number of different ways you can start to filter it by city by company and and all those different things next thing we're going to do is because we know Paul works at Bond we're going to go over to the company field we start typing the word and the only company that's in that table because this is a linked record this is why I don't use spreadsheets I use a database and this is why I use airtable is that it is already there I can just click Bond and Paul is attached to the company and you can see these fields the city and the state have already failed if we go back to the companies table when I scroll over you can see the people field now has Paul listed in the database so this is the process you're going to want to go through for every single contact there are a lot of other fields in this table that you can fill out address for the company do your research in the people's table I have a field here that will verify that if that this contact is correct and then you can enter their company email and speaking of emails in the companies table there is a section here for email format at Bond their website is we are bond.com but what you can do if you don't know the email format is you can go to Google and you can say email format we are bond.com and then you'll get examples here right in the Snippets it's first name and then the URL so we can assume that email is Paul we are bond.com now that's it just keep going through that process and build out your database for your contacts it's going to take a while so get started today thanks for watching