Many of us dream of being professional photographer and you may have already taken steps to advance your career within this field. However, you may have also noticed that you’re a little stagnant and you’re not getting as noticed as you would like to be.

You look at some of the most famous and popular photographers and wonder to yourself, how do you get to such exposure? How do you get noticed as a photographer?

Well, we’ve got 5 amazing ways that you can get noticed as a photographer with this very handy guide. From making a unique product to being incredibly active online, we’ve got all the answers you need right here.

Read on to learn more.

[1] Make A Unique Product 

First and foremost, we must understand that photography without a unique product or gimmick is going to be difficult to stand out. If you have got essentially the same product as every other photographer around – what makes your product better?

Uniqueness can drive your product and service to becoming much more noticeable out there. Think about it like every other art form in the world, including Hollywood movies. When a genre consistently breeds sequels, you likely stop noticing or caring about the product.

This is where other artists need to branch out and remove themselves from the “copycat” style. To do this though, you’ll need to consider what is going to make your photography unique, and the consideration for this will largely depend on your photography.

In other words, if you are a wedding photographer, you’ll need to do some research to understand, first – what makes their photography successful? And second – how can I make mine different from the rest?

Once you have discovered your niche within this industry, you simply need to add your spin on things and you’ll find your exposure increasing. 

[2] Understand The Importance Of Your Blog 

If you haven’t already done this, then you absolutely need to do this to improve any chance of increasing your reach and getting noticed in this industry. 

Your blog allows you to showcase your art. On top of this, if you are able to wisely utilize SEO strategies and other ways to increase traffic to your blog, then you will notice a much larger number of potential clients.

Remember, your blog not only allows you to showcase your work in a preview format, but the professionalism and your identity is shared to the world. This blog can give you the springboard to move from this and generate sales. 

Blogs can allow you to provide your contact information and link your online store (if you have one) which will once again, allow you to develop your exposure – but also improve your potential revenue stream. 

[3] Become Noticed Locally 

What many budding photographers often overlook is how much using local media can benefit your photography business. All you need to do is look at the circulation figures of things like your local newspaper, and you will understand the untapped potential here. 

Let’s assume that your local newspaper has a reach of 100,000 readers – well, this is 100,000 potential clients. You can potentially tap into this by performing such freelance work for the local newspaper. 

They will credit you in the caption of the photograph, and if you then advertise your services in the same newspaper – you have the potential to significantly improve your exposure and get noticed in the community. 

Over time, you should be able to evolve into national newspapers and digital media. Remember, your photographs might be used in both print and digital media, so you can essentially double, if not triple your potential reach. 

[4] Use Social Media To Its Potential 

You should already be aware of how much power social media has for pretty much any industry. With so many users of things like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you have all of these audience members that could be looking at your work. 

But how do you use social media to the best of your ability?

Well, the first step is to create your own professional social media pages. Remember to link all of these up together and within the bio sections, always include links to the rest of your sites. 

This includes the blog we mentioned earlier. This gives you significant potential for extra eyes on your work and therefore a huge potential increase in sales and revenue. 

Once you have your social media pages, it’s not going to be enough to simply spam posts out there and hope for the best. You’ll need to tap into the potential that the platform has by using savvy tactics.

One such tactic is using hashtags. Hashtags become UGC (user generated content) and this streams in areas like “trending now” on places like Twitter. It is here that you can get your work noticed.

All you need to do is examine what is trending and create a post that works with both your product and service, but also to the hashtag. For example, let’s say it is the fourth of July and there’s a trending hashtag of #July4 

If this is the case, you could photograph something like a July 4th BBQ or fireworks and then post this to your socials with the hashtag #July4 whilst also remembering to link your blog within the post. 

On top of all this, if you really want to significantly improve your reach here, you might consider paying for advertising services through social media, and by using these tactics on top of this – your exposure and reach should go through the roof. 

[5] Don’t Forget Photo Hosting Sites

Many people often conflate social media sites and photo-hosting sites, but it’s important to remember that these are two very different things. Photo hosting sites include things like Pinterest, Flickr and SmugMug. 

These hosting sites can be an excellent way to essentially do what your main blog aims to do, but tapping into even more potential customers and viewers of your work. This is especially true if you tag things the right way. 

It’s critical to point out here though that, depending on the hosting site, you might be in somewhat danger of copyright, as it is much more difficult to control other user behavior. Therefore, you may wish to include watermarks. 

Also, if you want to significantly increase your exposure on these sorts of sites, get to know how metadata works and when you tag your photographs, they might even end up on top Google ranks through Google Images. 

This of course has the potential to increase traffic to your hosting page, but also to your main blog – and all of this together has the ability to generate more views, more customers and above all else, more sales.

But the most important of all is having a website that you own, hosted under your own URL, and a site that you have total control over. (Read: Art Storefronts Is Not a Marketplace, We’re Something Better)

Final Thoughts

It might seem like a daunting and impossible task to try to get yourself noticed as a photographer, but these steps that we’ve listed above can help you get there!