Thanks for your input. I had my doubts when approached by wedding portals to advertise my service. Though they claim the traffic is very good but the cost of one year advertising is a lot too (around SGD 3k).
How many weddings can you shoot per year?
100 weddings? so let say the advertising cost is $3000 per year, and if you get 50 weddings from this portal, $30 from each assignments will go to advertising at the wedding portal, regardless whether where the lead is from.
if you can only take 50 weddings a year, the cost will go up to $60 for each assignment.
there are so many photographers advertise in the same portal, so my estimating, you will receive at least 20 enquiries just to get one face to face presentation, and to get confirm bookings from face to face presentation, depends on your personality, how good is your salesmanship and of course, your price.
Lets face it, those who usually shop online, pricing is always the key factor. For a $50 different, they may just go and sign up with another photographer.
but if you rely on word of month, the rate of confirm booking is almost 80%, you meet up with 5 couples, 4 couples will sign up with you, because some of them saw you working at weddings of someone they know, or they take recommendation from their friends and also saw their friend's wedding photos. even your price has raised, they are more likely to accept that.
you need to understand this, we are not selling a product, we are selling our service, and can only have serve certain amount of customers per year, so need to make every enquiry and meeting counts. there is no point getting 50000 view counts and 10 enquiry emails per day if the sign up rate for bookings is so low. But if you take it as a branding, don't expect much business from there, than that is another story.