Before we reach out to bloggers directly, what we want to do is make your social media presence work for you. And because we're talking about photography, here, we are, of course, going to focus on Instagram. That's where most of your potential clients will be. You need to make your Instagram discoverable. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the influencer. So if you are the influencer and you're looking for a photographer, how are you going to go about it?

Well, you're very likely to open up Instagram and look there first, you're likely to go to the search bar and search for photographers in your area. So you might put in London photographer, if you're in London, or if you're traveling there. So look at that when you search for London and the word photographer. Loads of photographers are popping up for you. How they appearing here? Well, it's really simple.

All they've done is changed their screen name. London and the word photographer. How easy is that? It's super simple, but it does work because the way that Instagram searches, when you go to the search bar, it brings up accounts based on the screen name, not on the bio. So while it's important for your BIOS, be clear and show that you're a photographer. The trick is to say that you're a photographer in your screen name too, because that's the way people are going to find you.

So as you can see, from the London photographers search term, there are loads of instagramers coming up here, and perhaps you might not be one of the top instagramers if this is your area, but it's still good to use this trick, especially if you live somewhere that's not as big as London. It's actually an advantage in this case to be a rural photographer or a small town photographer, because you're more likely to come up near the top of the search results as there's much less competition. Let's look at an example. This is my account. If I put in dairy and Donegal photographer I'm based in Derry and based in Donegal. And these aren't big cities in Ireland, and in fact, Donegal is quite rural.

So that's why I'm coming up high in the search results when you search for either Donegal, photographer, or dairy photographer. So if you often travel to a nearby city or area, you could potentially add two locations to your name, like I have here. Also, if you're traveling somewhere to shoot, you might as well change your name for a while to appear as a photographer in that area. For example, if you're traveling to Paris, and you'd like to book some shoots there, change the screen name to Paris chalk for all these things will help. So using this trick is really simple. But it's a great way to make your Instagram more discoverable to increase your chances of an influencer finding you and reaching out to shoot when they're in your area.

So on to the next lesson, where we're going to look at what Instagram is known for hashtags.