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How I Made $4,513.43 in Passive Photography Income in 11 Months

I cannot tell you how often I’d been asked by a friend or client what camera I would suggest they buy.

Last year I had a TON of people asking me that question, and I got tired of writing out a specific response to each one of them.

So I wrote a blog post about What DSLR Camera To Buy and started simply sending people to that post.

That post made me $145.38 in 2 months simply by telling people to visit that post instead of writing it out each time to every person that asked. So easy. This was the start of my search for passive income to supplement our regular photography income.

You can do it too. It’s super-easy to set up, and it can add significant money to your yearly income if you put some time and effort into it. [Click to read more]

The Best of the Rest: Photography Business Resources You Can’t Afford to Miss

Back for the third time by popular demand, here are some of the best resources from around the web that I’ve seen in the past few months. Three blog posts and two ebooks that everyone should read, not to mention a birthday celebration event at the end! Enjoy!

1. Photographers Web Marketing E-Book – William Bay put together this awesome guide about how to market your business using the web. He shares how to put together a website, how to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and other super-important web marketing strategies (like email marketing, which is where the money is really at when done correctly) that make this a great place to start if you’re not sure if you’re really using the web well or not. Use coupon code TMT to get $5 off before October 21st.

2. It’s not sexy, but you need it. – Brand Camp Blog hits another one out of the park with this awesome tip for getting you more customers that’s shockingly simple.

3. How to deal with criticism – Brooke Snow tackles this straight on. Read it.

4. How to Photograph Your Friends (and Why it’s Super Important) – Photography Concentrate speaks to the elephant in the room about how to work with friends who you once shot for free but now you’re a professional. It’s not about pricing so much as how to enjoy the process and embrace working with friends.

5. Click: How to take Gorgeous Photos of your Kids – While this book is written for people who are either photography enthusiasts or newer pros, I thought it was an incredible resource anyways and picked up a number of good tips about how to get good photos of kids (both mine and other peoples’ kids).

It’s shockingly inexpensive for all its content, only $19.99 right now increasing to $29.99 on the 19th. Your purchase before the 19th also enters you to win a $1000 dslr camera, so that’s pretty sweet too! Totally worth checking out.

Happy Birthday to me = Awesome sale for you!

Today I turn 30 years old. Scary to move into a new decade!

In celebration, I’m offering a crazy 50% off sale on all my products, good until midnight tonight (October 14th) MST. The discount will be applied automatically in your shopping cart.

Check out the Photographer’s Pricing Guide Workbook and our awesome Photography Client Questionnaires!

If you found this post helpful to your business, please pin it on Pinterest or Like us on Facebook! Thanks!

4 Steps to Get Out of Your Blogging Slump

Blogging and creating new content is important for improving and maintaining your search ranking on Google and other search engines.

Fresh content keeps your website interesting to potential clients but is also much loved by the Google spiders which helps you to rank better in internet searches.

For these reasons, blogging has become crucial to the online efforts of many photographers and creative spirits.

But like most things that we know are good for us, sometimes we don’t do it as much as we should.

Or more likely, you blog like crazy for a while but then editing, practicing and general blog burn out sets in and your weekly posts turn to monthly and pretty soon you sound like a major cooperation with their quarterly or semi-annual reports.

If you are in this predicament, don’t fret. You are not alone.

Peruse any number of blogs and you’ll see that many people have dips in their output. In fact, look at my photography site and you’ll see a painfully long gap between posts during this past summer.

I’m writing this not because I’m perfect at regular blog posts but because I know what it’s like to fall off the blogging wagon and what it takes to get back going again.

Here are 4 steps to getting yourself out of your blogging slump: [Click to read more]

What Professional Photo Blog Theme is Best?

Pro Photo Blog Themes Comparison Review — Sneak Peek of our New Wedding Photography Website, Designed Using Headway (To be Released Soon!)

Your photography blog is your most important marketing tool.

With the flexibility that WordPress offers, it is by far the best option for creating both your site and blog that exists right now. The hard part is choosing what professional photo blog theme you want to use to to create your site.

I’ve used a number of the popular photo blogs out there over the past few years, so I thought I’d share a review of some of the main WordPress professional photo blog themes that you should consider.

I started out using a free WordPress.com blog (really bad idea for SEO/marketing reasons) before moving to a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. Much better idea, and you can get started for as low as $4.95 a month.

All the links in this post are affiliate links, but none of these companies have approached me about writing this. I will be brutally honest regardless because that’s what is most important and it’s how I roll.

For the record, I have learned some CSS coding but have to google almost everything I need to do, but I’m definitely not one who could design a site from the ground up. I know enough to be dangerous, but I am not someone who wants to code at all if I can get away from it. I imagine this is similar to most photographers.

So let’s start with what I have chosen to use with our new site re-design and then move through some of the other themes we’ve used as well for our professional photo blog. [Click to read more]

What Wedding Photography Pricing Model Should You Use For Maximum Profit?

Wedding Couple in a Field — Credit: Madison Wedding Photographers

There’s so many different wedding photography pricing models that sometimes it’s hard to know what will be most profitable for you and your business.

Should you have packages? Or go completely A la Carte? Which one books you more clients and gets you higher sales?

There’s an easy way to tell, and the answer will be different for each person.

So first we’ll look at 3 wedding pricing and packaging models, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and then you’ll learn how to determine which one you should use to maximize your profits.

[Click to read more]

3 Ways to Make Your Photography Business Remarkable

Baum's Mercantile Pittsville WI — Baum's Mercantile

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There always seems to be at least one thing that gets forgotten when we go on vacation.

We just went camping as a family, and sure enough, we forgot to pack our new bottle of sunscreen, and our old one was just about empty and wasn’t going to be enough for the entire trip.

So we decided to go on a family adventure to find ourselves some sunscreen. Going without sunscreen was not an option for us.

We saw a gas station about 5 miles away from the campground, so that was our first stop. No luck. It’s the end of summer here, so they didn’t have any left. They suggested we check the local grocery store.

And that’s where our real adventure began.

This was no typical grocery store. This was Baum’s Mercantile, a truly a one-of-a-kind experience, and ended up being the highlight of our camping trip for me.

Most small town grocery stores are simply over-priced places to get the bare essentials. Not Baum’s Mercantile. They have taken a relatively boring business and made it truly remarkable.

Here’s 3 things I learned from Baum’s Mercantile about how to make your business remarkable. [Click to read more]

Welcome Digital Photography School Readers!

Hello there Digital Photography School readers! Thanks for coming on over from my guest post titled “When to Ditch the Day Job and Follow Your Dreams“.

My name is Jamie, and I’m a Madison, WI Wedding Photographer and am here to help equip you to have a successful photography business. There’s a lot of good stuff to learn here, so take some time to look around and learn something valuable for growing your business.

Curious who I am? You can read more about me and The Modern Tog here.

If you’re really observant, you can also find me juggling somewhere on this site as well. Yes, I juggle. Kind of. It’s amusing. I can also unicycle, but that’s not on the site (yet).

Here are some of my favorite posts on the site: [Click to read more]

Don’t Miss the Good Stuff

PackYourKid — My son "packing" for our camping trip.

It is so easy to spend every extra moment you have working on growing your business.

If you’re not careful, it will end up taking over your entire life, sucking away the moments that are truly worth living.

We’ve all been there – the late night editing session, the tax-season craziness, working over lunch breaks.

But if we’re not careful, we’ll end up making this business more important than the things that really matter in our lives. [Click to read more]

Don’t Let Your Photography Blog Suck

coyhaique niche photography blog — Photo by Kyle Hepp

Let me start by saying this: Your blog is not that great. Your blog doesn’t stand out from the rest. Your blog is sometimes (maybe even often) boring.

I’m sorry. But somebody had to break the bad news.

The wedding photography world is filled with full timers looking for more clients, part timers wanting to book enough to go full time and people who picked up a camera yesterday. I’m going to throw out a guess here, but I’d say at least 75% of those people have blogs. I’m being conservative. That number is probably higher.

Of those 75%, at least 65% of those blogs are virtually indistinguishable from one another in terms of content.

[Click to read more]

5 Reasons Why ProDPI Should Be Your Professional Photography Lab of Choice

It was one of those phone calls you never want to get.

Some of our best friends called us late at night because they lost their young daughter unexpectedly to SIDS.

One of the things they eventually asked us to help with was to get some photos printed for the funeral that was just a few days away.

I put in the order with ProDPI late at night, with a little note explaining what they were for and when we needed them, and offered to pay whatever extra I might need to in order to make sure the photos made it there in time.
[Click to read more]

How Bobby Pins and Band-Aids Get Me Business

I’m going to tell you a valuable business secret.

It’s one of the best ways to get new clients and referrals from current clients, and it’s super easy.

People will love you even before they see your photos, and clients won’t be able to stop raving about you.

It’s also one of the best ways to set you apart from your competition. I promise.

[Click to read more]

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