I've been doing about $50 a month on Google and have gotten two leads from it, though neither panned out (one because they wanted a service I didn't have what I needed to provide and one because it was a wedding 3 days after my baby is due)
and that was from under a month of having a listing
I still haven't decided if I'm going to keep going after I use my promotional $100 credit that I got for spending $50
I'll have to see how it goes
having a good website with portfolio is also very helpful
but really, either you wait for word of mouth or you advertise. For an actual business, it isn't at all atypical to spend 1/3 of every dollar that comes in on advertising
especially on low consumable cost work like photography
I'm trying to keep it below that personally, but the big thing is getting your name and pitch in front of people in the market
and for initial impressions, presentation matters a lot
there are tons of options, so it really has to wow them right away
and adwords is nice because it tells me things like on average, people spend a minute on my site and read 2.37 pages
and I can check to see what pages they are viewing
so like, I can tell that people reading my philosophy page almost always continue on
I can also tell that more people have viewed my contact page than have actually contacted me, so I should probably try putting up more means of contact