"Recently I have sought work as a photo restorer. My problem is that
clients are worried about damaging their priceless photos and refuse to
mail them because I am unknown and they do not trust me. I'm not a well-known
company like Kodak. I know I have the skills to do it, with over
seven years of commercial retouching for customers including Ford. I am
working on a website for this service, but do not have much money to start
with." -- Simon P. Cooper, UK
You can't compete head-to-head with companies that spend millions to
build their brand name. But in the area of photo retouching, the online
market doesn't seem dominated by huge firms. Your problems seem threefold.
Getting the photos to you. The photo-retouchers I saw online
allow two ways to get photos to them -- by mail or by uploading scanned
photos directly. Give full shipping instructions, encourage customers
to insure their photos, and state that you'll insure their photos for
£1,000 when you return them. But also provide instructions for scanning
their photos (300 dpi) and a way to upload them to your site. The CGI
Resource Index shows 33 Perl programs in the "File
Management: File Uploading" category. Allowing both methods should
engender confidence.
Building confidence in your firm. Small business people have
a unique opportunity to tell their story online and, in the process,
build strong credibility. Don't just recite experience and diplomas.
Rather, work those into a narrative that tells how you got into this
field and why you enjoy photo restoration so much. Show a photo of yourself
so people can begin to think of you as a real person. Display several
before-and-after examples on your site.
Getting traffic to your site. Once you've built your website,
you'll need to drive traffic. Make each webpage search engine friendly,
following the initial steps in my article "The
Web Marketing Checklist,"Web Marketing Today, 6/4/2003 (www.wilsonweb.com/articles/checklist.htm).
But also consider Pay Per Click (PPC) search engine advertising to get
visitors within days. Current PPC costs for the keyphrase "photo restoration"
in the top four positions range from 58¢ to $1.20 in the US for Overture,
and 23¢ to $1.55 for Google. If you land a sale from 5% (1/20th) of
those who click-through, your cost per sale would be US $4.60 to $31.
Prices for UK PPC firms may be less. Google allows you to restrict your
ad to those in the UK. To keep costs down, try for the fourth position
at the beginning.
Ultimately, the key to building your business is to serve your customers
so well that you get repeat business and word-of-mouth referrals from
your existing customers.
