Here is your Friday News Round Up, a group of useful blog posts that we have read and enjoyed throughout this week. We think they might be worth the read for you on this Friday afternoon or throughout the weekend. So take a second, get comfortable, get a cup of coffee, grab your favorite Apple product, and enjoy these articles from out in the photography community and beyond. Enjoy! Going Pro 2010- “Balancing Your Market: What’s the Best Mix?” Chris Brogan- “Your Blog is Not Your Job” Mashable- “Google Testing New Ad Format for Boosting Twitter Followers” ProBlogger- “The Win-Win Scenario: Holding Successful Blog Contests” Seth Godin- “16 Questions for Free Agents”
Archives
The Ugly Truth: It Takes Money to Make Money
Starting a business is a Catch-22. I’ve touched on the topic before in previous UGLY TRUTH post titled Red is Normal for the First Few Years in Business. Unlike some other photographers who teach it’s okay to take out a $60k loan to spend on advertising and equipment, you’ll find me teaching quite the opposite. SURE you will need to buckle down and spend some money in order to get your business up and running, but how do you do this without going deep into debt!?? Here’s what I would do if I was starting out from scratch opening a photography business: 1. Read Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover from cover to cover, twice. Listen to his show. Become a debt dominatrix like me. Get passionate first and foremost
How to Be Fascinating
The primary goal of your social media activities—whether for your personal brand or your organization’s brand—is to establish yourself as a fascinating subject-matter expert. The only exception to this is if you are a household name celebrity like Lance Armstrong, Oprah or Barack Obama. If you are this level of celebrity, then tweeting or updating, “I’m at Starbucks on the way to fly VirginAmerica to Vegas” is cool. For the rest of us, the challenge is to achieve a consistent level of fascinating information about your area of expertise. The answer is simple. First, it helps if you actually know what you’re talking about. If you don’t, it may be better to let people wonder if you’re clueless rather than participating in social media and removing all
9 Things Every Professional Photographer Should Know
120,000. Apparently, that’s the number of new photographers in the last year. 120,000! That’s a lot of new photographers. That’s a lot of new businesses. That’s a lot of new people working hard to build a business around this photography thing we do. So, for those of you who find yourself in that group – here’s a few thoughts that no one really tells you when you start your own business in your living room. For those of you who’ve been around for a while – I’d love for you to share some more thoughts at the end of this post! 1. Stop buying lenses. Hire an accountant instead. Yes, fast lenses are great. Yes, a great camera is sweet. The truth is, neither will
Tips From a Blogger: Avoiding Writer’s Block
I’m sitting in the new “creative room” here at the Pictage office, on a stool facing a new IKEA tall writing desk. My iPod is in one ear, silence in the other, with eraser dust everywhere, and I mean everywhere. This is the perfect scene for my mad scribbling on a large yellow legal pad of paper- writer’s block gone. For the past few weeks I have been struggling with one of my least favorite things in the whole world, writer’s block. Although I don’t write much on the blog here at Pictage, we are fortunate enough to have great photographer contributors, I do a lot of writing every day at work. For the past few weeks I have been in a creative dry spell,
Get Out of the Woods: Hire a Guide
Photographers are, nearly unilaterally, horrible business people. Most have grown organically without much thought or training. They are passionate about photography, and believe their passion equates to ability in all areas of business. They run illegally (“I don’t need a state sales-tax ID; I use my social security number.”). They do their own taxes (“I totally write off my car, it’s so sweet!”). They design albums without paying themselves. They cobble together contracts that would make most lawyers lose their lunch. They don’t plan for retirement. They don’t have adequate insurance. And, inevitably, they do their own marketing and branding. Too many forums begin, “Check out my new logo design—what do you think!?” For years, I tried telling people what I thought. Long, thoughtful posts
Mutual Networking for Boudoir Photography
Just like weddings, if you want to get in on the business of boudoir photography you are going to have to find a way get potential clients. When I first started boudoir photography I naturally just advertised to my brides. But with only an average of 30 brides a year I was barely able to get enough clients to make my venture worthwhile, especially when being a bride doesn’t automatically make you a candidate for a boudoir session. So I had to ask myself “if I was looking to get boudoir images done of myself, where would I look?” The answer came pretty easily…go to where a woman would go to prepare for her boudoir sessions! So my next stop was the local lingerie boutique.
How to Start Optimizing Your Website for Search Engines
The idea here is to explain a couple of the basic, though often overlooked, components of SEO, specifically keyword research and creating title tags, while also giving you specific tips on how to get started optimizing your own site. Keyword Research – Any good SEO strategy begins with keyword research. Keyword research allows you to find keywords and combinations that people are searching on. Although there are a plethora of keyword research tools out there, Google has made it easy for us by offering a great free tool you can access here: http://bit.ly/9u0oNP. We will be referencing this tool in the rest of this post so please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it. To begin, insert a few words that relate to what
The “D” Word: Selling High Res DVDs
Other than selective color and the dutch tilt, The “D” word (DVD) has to be one of the most polarizing topics for photographers in the last 5 years. In a world where we as photographers work so hard to balance and maintain a high level of quality control while maximizing effective business principles, you must be very strategic about the way in which you decide to deliver high resolution files to your clients. While you have the ability to increase your revenue per event by $400-800, one wrong move can put 30 by 40 inches of garbage on your client’s wall. To that end, I’d like to walk you through a few things our studio has succeeded in doing, maximizing client satisfaction, profit, and quality
The Business of Branding: Why We Use Letterpress
There are so many decisions for you to make when designing your business cards and other collateral. One of those decisions is the printing method you want used for that collateral. Below, Ellen Petty, of Identity Kitchen explains why her company recommends photographers who want to elevate their brand choose letterpress as their printing method. Join in the discussion by sharing your opinion and answering the questions at the end of the post. As the days of film photography have been replaced (for the most part) by better and better digital methods, photographers have had to work hard to create their signature style. Creating their photography autograph can take years to establish. So when a photographer comes to us with a request to create collateral