Are You a Photographer or a Marketer? You Have to Be Both!

Marketing is messaging. It’s that’s simple. Don’t overcomplicate it, which is easy for us to do. Yes, it’s social media, it’s bridal shows, it’s magazines, it’s networking, but all these things can be described in a single word: messaging. You must communicate the benefit of your product or service to potential customers. I am sure you are sitting there right now thinking, well, duh, Sal, the benefit is obvious, it’s our great images.

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Email Marketing for Photographers: Email Sequences That Increase Portrait Profits

Can emails really drive print sales and increase your bottom line? If so, are you confused why your sales emails seem to go unanswered? Most photographers, especially shoot-and-burners, already use email to deliver online photo galleries to clients. For them, email is simply the easiest way to deliver final image downloads and essentially close the photographer-client transaction. Email delivery today is what burning photos onto CD’s used to be, hence the burn in shoot-and-burn. It feels clean and done. But is it smart?

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Shoot for Success with Self-Promotion

Many photographers act as if they’ve got a top-notch publicist on their payroll, and do nothing to promote their business or brand. They act as if self-promotion is a dirty word and not something worthy of their time, when in reality it’s one of the most important aspects of building any business. So, let’s get proactive and put you and your skillset in the spotlight.

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Light Up Your Business: Building Brand Awareness With Marketing

So many of you have taken the approach of simply kicking back and waiting to see what happens to your business “naturally.” Guess what? Virtually nothing happens naturally in this business, which is why God created marketing. And just like building your skill set, marketing never stops. Let’s come up with a game plan or at least a check-off list for you to work with the rest of the year.

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Creating Behind-the-Scenes Content That Sells

As photographers and business owners, we need to be celebrities of a sort—potential clients need to know and trust us so they feel confident enough to hire us (and rave about us to others). It’s time to start creating your fame through behind-the-scenes content. Here’s where to start.

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The Key Steps to Starting Your Business

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Yes, now you’ve heard it one more time: It starts with a plan. It astonishes me that we will plan a party, a trip, lunch with a friend, but we don’t plan for a profitable business. Which is more important?” There it is, the foundation for this month’s article on developing a business plan.

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Lessons I’ve Learned in the First 5 Years of My Career

I’m happy to say that 2017 marks five years since I’ve received a W-2. While there are many other photographers who can say they’ve been shooting for decades, I can say I was able to build a business when everyone was doing it for free. I want to provide both aspiring photographers and struggling professionals with the real-world lessons I’ve learned the past five years.

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