Photography Tools Archives - Page 2 of 6

Creating A Photography Experience They’ll Love

I’ve been there. Have you?

Client complains.

Stomach sinks.

“Obviously I didn’t make that detail very clear, did I?”

(I didn’t even think I had to.)

If you haven’t ever been in this situation, consider yourself eternally lucky. If you have, then you know the feeling. You would do anything to go back in time to tell them everything you meant to.

If you’ve ever found yourself in a situation where you’re getting bitten for not setting client expectations correctly, you want to take a trip with Michael J. Fox back to when you had the opportunity to set the client’s expectations correctly.

But sadly, your imaginary DeLorean is fresh out of a flux capacitor.

So rather than try to figure out time travel, let’s work together to come up with a few ways to better set photography client expectations from the onset. Ultimately, this is an effort toward creating a photography experience, and one they’ll love.

Here are 5 tips on creating a better photography experience for your clients so you can avoid these sticky situations.

[Click to read more]

Don’t Make These 5 Mistakes When Starting A Photography Business

I never intended to start a photography business.

Like many people, I became interested in photography and the business just sort of fell into my lap.

While we’ve come a long way since then and I was able to leave my day job to do photography full-time, I made several mistakes when starting out that I wish I could go back and do differently.

These mistakes are easy to avoid if you are aware of them, yet it seems like almost all new photographers make them.

Here’s 5 common mistakes to avoid when starting a photography business. [Click to read more]

Top 10 Photography Business Resources of 2012

Every year I put together my Top 10 Must-Read Photography Blogs to help you waste less time and know which blogs are worth following, and I thought it might be helpful to do the same thing with my favorite photography business resources out there.

Right now is a great time to pick up a few of these to take advantage of tax deductions for 2012 and reduce your tax bill. Then set aside some time after the holidays to learn from them and implement them to make as much as possible into your business for 2013.

Less taxes to pay in 2012 + more profit in 2013 = Pure Awesomeness!

So let’s dive in and look at the Top 10 Photography Business Resources of 2012!

[Click to read more]

How to Find Balance in Your Photography Business

Are you working too much?

I’m guessing the answer is “yes”.

You are not alone. It’s incredibly difficult to find balance while running a business.

Most new photography businesses are started by people also working another job or who are stay-at-home parents who have a full-time job (plus some!) raising children. Once you do get to the point of going full-time, you still don’t have enough time to do everything you want to do to sustain and grow your photography business in the way you want it to grow.

Personally, I’ve justified all the extra work by believing that “one day” it’ll get to the point I want it to be at and I won’t have to work as much.

It’s a lie. The more you grow, the more time it takes to sustain, and you can’t ever really just ignore it without negative consequences.

Yet at the same time, you need to find balance. Your kids are only young once, and life is too short to work all the time. Not to mention the fact that you are utterly exhausted from late-night editing sessions so aren’t the person you want to be during the day.

So what do you do? Do you fold? Do you cut back? Do you get an extra job so that you don’t have to do photography for the income and just do it for fun?

Let’s dive in and talk about how to find balance long-term in your photography business.

[Click to read more]

6 Effective Photography Marketing Areas to Focus On to Book More Clients

What are the best places to focus your photography marketing efforts to get the most new clients without wasting a ton of money?

Over the past few years I’ve done a lot of experimenting, wasted a lot of money, and come up with 6 places that I focus on every single year to keep our photography business getting the clients we need.

Let’s look at each of the 6 effective photography marketing areas and why they are important to focus on.

[Click to read more]

How to Raise Your Photography Prices Significantly Without Losing All Your Clients

Photography Pricing is one of the most difficult things to determine when running your business.

The market is saturated with people charging hardly anything and doing things irresponsibly. If you know your numbers it can be hard to believe how much more you need to be charging to make what you need to be making. It doesn’t seem possible.

Yet you’re awesome because you are committed to being profitable and are ready to make the leap into the higher prices you deserve. No more pretending you’re making more than you really are, no more excuses. You’re ready to put on your big girl panties and making the leap into running a successful and profitable photography business.

So you raise your prices a lot. And suddenly you hear crickets. Nothing, not even an inquiry. You start to doubt yourself, your work, your ability to stay in business, and you are tempted to either drop your prices back to where they were or quit altogether.

Sound familiar? It doesn’t have to be this way.

So let’s talk this through, let’s do this the smart way, and let’s start making more money and avoiding some common pitfalls.

[Click to read more]

Happy Birthday To Me Sale!

FYI, Sale was extended one extra day through Thursday 10/25/12!

On Sunday I turned 31, AND the day before that we reached our 10,000th email subscriber, so I thought it was a fitting time for a celebration! WOOT WOOT!

Use the coupon code above when checking out on any of the following 3 products. Click on the image to learn more about each one, and enter the coupon in the cart to apply.

These products will help you with pricing, with client management and expectations, and with exactly how to respond to all sorts of difficult situations. Check them out now!

Happy shopping!

Free Pricing Gudie for Photographers from The Modern Tog

Why You Should Start a Boudoir Photography Business and Exactly How To Do It!

For most photographers, there’s a “busy season” where you get the most of your business and a “slow season” when clients are few and far between.

As full-time wedding photographers in Wisconsin, we do almost all of our weddings between the months of May and October. We may occasionally get a wedding in the off months, but it’s very rare. So we not only have to be good at photography, we have to be good at budgeting our income so that we can still feed our kids and pay our bills during the 6 quiet months of the year.

Even if you have a studio and just do portraits, you’ll likely be busier during the nicest times of the year and before holidays, but there will still be slow times when you could be making more money if only you could get more clients.

Adding boudoir sessions to your photography business is one of the best ways to get extra income during the slow times, and it fits in well with both portrait and wedding photographers because it relates to both and it is easy to market all year long.

Boudoir is unique, however, and needs to be marketed differently than your existing business. So this post is going to give you a step-by-step blueprint for things you need to consider and do to start a profitable boudoir photography business and add boudoir sessions to your business to book yourself solid year-round. I’ll also discuss how to market boudoir in a very conservative area, and share exactly how to start a boudoir business step-by-step to make it as easy as possible for you. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy. [Click to read more]

The Most Simple Way to Get More Photography Clients

It’s the scenario I dread as a mother because it always ends in tears and yelling.

My daughter wanted a toy that my son was playing with. She’s still young enough that when she wants something, she does anything she can to get it.

But this time, instead of ripping it out of his hands with brute force, she tried a different tactic.

Not only did she get the toy she wanted, but she did it without any fighting. He willingly handed it over. There was no arguing, screaming, and I didn’t have to stop working to dole out the consequences.

I was in shock (and thankful not to have to intervene!), but it reminded me that this is exactly the same thing we need to do to get more clients.

So let’s dive in and break it down, step-by-step, so you can get more photography clients for your business as well. [Click to read more]

The Ultimate Photography Website Guide

A Photography Website is vital to all modern photography businesses as it’s often the first impression people have of our business. It’s one of the least-expensive and most effective tools we have in marketing our photography business and getting new clients.

Yet unless you’ve studied about what converts visitors into paying clients, it’s likely that your website is not nearly as effective as it could be, and you’re losing out on many potential clients.

So I thought I’d put this guide together with all sorts of resources for creating the best possible photography website out there.

It’ll talk about everything from setting up your site, how to get more traffic to your site, and then how to convert that traffic into paying customers.

Let’s jump right in. [Click to read more]

The Most Common Portrait Sales Mistake That Almost All Photographers Make

When I was first starting out in photography, I had no idea what I was doing.

I think I charged something insanely low like $50 for a session plus a disc of all the digital negatives. I put the images in an online gallery, but I didn’t really sell many prints. I got lots of compliments about how people loved that they got the disc and could do what they wanted with it.

I told myself this was simply a case of meeting my clients’ needs and giving them what they wanted, so it was a good business practice.

The problem was, my ideal clients, the ones who valued photography and really wanted to preserve their memories didn’t just want the disc. They wanted someone to walk them through the photos, help them decide which ones would look best on their walls, and suggest products that would truly help them preserve this time in their lives as best as possible. I just didn’t believe that.

Not only that, but sometimes life gets busy and sometimes people simply don’t do what they intend to do. Eventually I stopped just giving the disc away and started charging for it to help encourage print sales, but then I’d get clients who raved about their image but never actually bought anything. Life just got busy and they never got to it.

That made me a Sad Panda. See? [Click to read more]

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