Do you know your ROI—Return On Investment?  While often we can use this to measure a financial purchase for your work—like a new camera or lens you need to also look at your time.

Let me talk about four things I do to connect with customers and potential customers.

First of all this is one of my first things I used to get my images into people’s hands outside of sitting down and showing my portfolio.  My friend Tony Messano helped me with a template to use.  Tony also gave me some great insight into using postcards.

“Everyone has one good photo in them,” Tony would say, “so put some other photos on the backside of the same shoot to show how much variety you deliver—it will help set you apart.”

I have purchased and created a database of names that at one point was close to 6,500 names.  With the poor economy this has shrunk to 4,700 names.  I need to work on this as well.

I mail the postcards quarterly and sometime have gotten behind.  The advantage of these verses using email is the person has to touch the card before it goes into the wastebasket.

My hope is that it gets pinned on the wall with other examples the art directors keep.

I have been sending this out for many years now on a monthly basis.  Sometimes I was excited about a new topic and sent out more than one a month.  This has proven very helpful.  I give away photography advice and tips I am picking up.  I am no longer just a photographer but considered an expert, because of my sharing of my knowledge.

This does pretty good and I can track it to see who looked at the email, whereas the postcard I just put out there.

This to me is my online portfolio and more.  The main reason I have it is for those folks looking for a photographer can maybe find me and see my work and based on what they see hire me.

This is a very static way to market.  I use my postcards, emails, Facebook, Find a Photographer links on National Press Photographers Association and American Society of Media Photographers to drive people to my website.

Besides the photos it also has all my e.Newsletters, videos, bio and links to make it more of a resource tool for folks that visit.

I can track the number of visitors to the website using Google Analytics.  Here is a sample of the last month of visitors.

The largest traffic I get daily is my blog.  I am posting 3 or more times a week similar things that I used to only send as an e.Newsletter.  Blogs are not like spam in the people chooses to revisit and often will subscribe to get emails so they know when I have posted new material.

The number of folks coming to my blog each day and month are 10 to 20 times that of any other thing I do.

Here you can see the analytics showing the past month.

You cannot pick just one of these to do.  All of them help each other and build my brand.  I ask folks when they call to book me where they found me and believe it or not all of them are getting me jobs.  But the one thing I hear the most often is after they discover me and go to my website they are impressed with the depth of material there that can help them.

Use Google Analytics or something similar to track visitors to your website, blog and e.Newsletters and you will know your ROI score.