How to market yourself.

With my background in marketing I often get the question how do you market yourself when you don't have a product but a service to offer?

- Well simply put I do have a product the service ends up in a product!

But anyway I thought I would try to give you a few tips here anyway. I have just written down something that you can start out with, the list can otherwise be very long regarding marketing strategies and activities that you can do for yourself or your company.

When it comes to marketing yourself / your company there are not really any right or wrong answers. It most of the time comes down to how much time and money you have to spend on your own marketing. You can get a long way on a budget longer than I think a lot of people realize.

It is very much up to you and your imagination to come up with ideas that are suitable for you. The ideas do not need to be unique you can very easily check other companies that are working in your particular area of expertise/service or have a similar product and see what are they doing and does it seam to work for them? If they are doing something that is not working then you don't have to try to fail at the same thing it will be a total waist of time.

A few tricks that I have up my sleeve is the following:

+ Write Press-releases! This is the most effective way of getting published in an objective way in magazines/newspapers that are relevant to your market and your potential target clients. Remember do not write them as an advert with slogans and other catchy sales talk it will not work because the journalists working for the magazine will through your letter straight into the rubbish bin. Once you have mastered writing a good press-release (or hired a ghost writer) and gotten a good relationship with the editors at the magazines that you have picked out are

your target then its just to keep sending them regular news about what you are up to that are of interest to them. There is no point sending a press-release to a magazine that will not have any interest in you or your product it's a waist of your time and theirs. Always remember to leave your contact details so that they can contact you for more information and pictures that they want to use together with their article that they are creating out of your press-release.

+ There are also several websites on the Internet where you can submit your press-release where journalists go and look for new material to write about or just to get something newsworthy for their magazine. So submit your press-release to as many as you can as well.

+ You can also make videos and add them to different Internet websites such as youTube and other similar sites. You have then a good coverage of potential clients viewing your video. Make sure to write relevant tags and a good description of your video so that people can easily find it when they are searching for videos.

Below are two examples of my videos that I have uploaded to youTube just to give you an idea of what you can do. These videos are actually a collection of photographs that I have made a video of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bhuzXCfHI0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q36ujhoJcws

These are just two simple activities out of several marketing activities that you can do to help yourself get more noticed.

If you have any questions or thoughts regarding this do not hesitate to contact me.

Good luck. H

This is not a press-release that I have posted but a poster that you can put up in areas where your clientele mingle about, notice boards etc.

Getting supplies in Egypt...

One of my frustrations of living in Egypt and the remote place of Taba Heights is finding good places to print, frame and get good office supplies and in my case being a photographer I need DVD casings and such things to make the packaging look nice for clients. All these small things that I need I am having a hard time finding and if I do find something its not really up to the standard I am expecting and that my clients are expecting things that you in other parts of the world easily get at your local department store. These small annoying things also slows you down because you are always in need of someone else to source /find it for you and it all takes way too long for my patience sometimes. If I could do everything myself I bet that I would finish in half the time... ;-)

Just the fact that you never get your mail by post here on time or at all is another thing that for obvious reason makes you not being able to purchase online and get orders delivered to your door step. How convenient wouldn't that have been?

It's a good thing that Egypt has a few things that are great about the place to try to make up for the frustrating days that come along. The fact that the sun is always shining makes it easier to get out of bed... I'm sure there are more reasons than that but I will leave it for another discussion another time.

Right now one of my dilemmas are that I have an exhibition due to start, I have the pictures printed (I did them in Sweden while I was there on holiday) but it was too much weight to also buy frames for all the photographs and bring them over, I did bring two but more than that was not really feasible. Now I cant start the exhibition without the pictures in frames now can I. I am asking around for somewhere to get them made, so far all I have gotten are diffuse directions into the heart of Cairo I place where you cant really drive around randomly without knowing where you are going... The saga continues, we'll see what happens and when.

Landscape pictures

Yesterday I was busy working on pictures that are part of a project that have continuously been going on for almost a year now, the reason for this to go on for such a long time is to get landscape pictures of the  during different seasons.  Since I am doing this project in Egypt the changes are not as drastic as it would have been in lets say Sweden for instance but they do also have changes in which flowers that bloom and how many of them etc more subtle changes but still changes. You can play with weather changes such as cloud formation and wind, but you always need to remember what the client wants and what they will use the pictures for. Since a picture with lots of dark clouds might not attract too many tourists to the area because they might think it will be bad weather. But as a photographer it is more fun to take a more dramatic picture than one where the sky is blue and the sun is shining.

Never forget why you are taking the picture if it is for your own amusement or if it is for a client. If you can get those two factors to coincide that is always great, but it does not always work out that way.

All the pictures below are from the same area but obviously at different days.

Portraits

Here are two portraits that I took of a mother and her two sons while I was in Sweden. I had scouted the location prior to the photo shoot we had to wait almost two weeks to do the portraits because the weather conditions were not great for portraits outside. It was raining everyday then finally there was a dry morning and we hurried outside to do the shoot it was still not very warm it was an early morning shoot with the sun on its way up. One of the sons, not the one on the picture above kept on complaining that the grass was making his feet cold and I agree it was nto the warmest of days even if it was summer. But the little guy above didn't complain much at all as long mommy was near by. He did start sticking his tung out on lots of pictures and it wasn't much I could do about it lucky for him he is so little and cute and can therefore get away with it on a picture. His parents will still hang the picture on the wall and think its adorable. I have done a soft focus filter retouching in photoshop on both these pictures.

A leisurely business trip is there such a thing?

Wow, so much have happened since I wrote to you last... I hardly know where to start.

Ok here I go, by the end of May I went on a long trip to Sweden that included both some leisure time and some hard work. I promise that as soon as I am finished with polishing the pictures I will post a few for you to take a peak at. To give you a preview of what is to come I can tell you that I went to a horse-race the kind of horse-race when the horses trot not gallop. It was great fun and I got some cool pictures form it as well. It was my fist time to this kind of horse-race I have previously only been to horse-racing where the jockey is sitting on the horse not in a wagon behind the horse, you know like they do at The Ascot Horse Race when all the ladies dress up very posh and wear large fancy hats well this was totally different I can tell you that. I was for one thing not wearing a fancy hat! I did bring my umbrella though that I needed to use. I also got a peek behind the scenes in the stables which was very educating and interesting. I also saw lots of famous Swedish Jockeys but I would not have known this unless they were pointed out to me since their names alone did not ring any bells in my head at all. So as you can understand I was a very novice first timer to this kind of horse-race but that did not stop me from gambling a bit.... All and all I had a great time.

I also had time to take quite a few nature shots, pictures of old houses (I just can't resist its something with things that look old that appeals to me...), family portraits, weddings, family reunions, landscape views of Stockholm and probably lots more that I cant remember right now. But I promise I will show you some of it later on. The thing with having been away either its on business or for leisure you always have lots to catch up on once you are back again. I have today written a To Do list for myself and it is rather long so I guess I better get cracking on it.

Over and out for now and I will chat with you some more soon.