business

Growing Your Creative Niche

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You want better clients. I know you do… but you know the game, this won’t happen magically. You have to earn it and sometimes it’s your earnings that you feel will suffer if you limit your portfolio, your networking, or your business model. Your bank account probably tells you to take any gig you can get, and though you may simply be striving to pay the next bill, know this: desperate acts won’t help you build a better business. Your future success, as well as your creative legacy, demands so much more from you. Or dare I say… less. A …

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Finding New Clients

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No matter one’s geographic market, genre, or niche, the cliché saying, “It’s not how good you are but who you know,” is a lot more true than most emerging creatives would like to admit. I’ve heard a lot of whining over the years about how some guy got some gig just because he knew some dude. Well of course he did! The buyer felt that they could trust that relationship enough to move forward. Welcome to the ‘land of the real’ my friend (yep, that’s a Matrix movie reference 🙂 Creative freelancers gain more quality leads and better client engagements …

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Numbering Your Fine Art Print Editions

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I’ve never really featured print sales as a part of my business model up to this point in my career. For a long time, the type of photography I was doing editorially and commercially just didn’t lend itself to print sales. The kind of image I might sell to a large company like Nike or Red Bull was great for a eye-catching advert, but rarely was it something most people would hang on their wall for an extended period of time. Though many posters have adorned the walls of teenager’s bedrooms, these are far from “Fine Art” sales. Recently I’ve really …

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Managing Your Photography Business E-Mail

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This might seem like a bit of a dry subject but by now I hope you guys have figured out that I like to write from experience and I have an experience (and new-found knowledge) to share on this subject. I promise it will help you to run a more efficient photography business so please read on……

Those who have read my free eBook “10 Incredible Tools For Professional Photographers” will remember that I’m always looking for ways to streamline the business side of being a photographer, to get the camera back in my hand, where my value is greatest.

E-Mail is a necessary evil in the modern age and we’re probably all guilty of using it in unproductive ways.

Recently I was inspired by a post on Pat Flynn’s blog to re-think my e-mail strategy entirely. I’ve always had a number of issues with my system and never really stopped to take the time to solve them.

Let me run you though a few of my old problems and see if some of them sound familiar……

  1. I had too many different accounts to keep an eye on. One for prints sales, a personal one, an admin one, one for incoming questions from my blog and one for correspondence with my newsletter subscribers. That’s all for only one of my two businesses.
  2. My accounts were set up as POP accounts on my office computer. I forwarded all my mail to a GMail address which I used to check mail out of the office on my cell phone, tablet and laptop computer. The problem is that if I read or deleted an email outside of the office, the one in office doesn’t know about it. For short periods this is fine, but if I go away for a few days then I have hundreds of confusing unread e-mails.
  3. If I sent an email when I was out of the office it was routed through GMail. This meant this sent mail was never on my computer so when I’m back in the office I can’t search for that sent mail at all without opening up GMail.
  4. I was addicted to answering my emails as quickly as possible.
  5. I had a totally disjointed folder organization system that didn’t sync to my GMail account and was therefore not available to me outside of the office
  6. After running my business for some time I had nearly 9GB of e-mails on my server!

Does any of this sound familiar to you? Hopefully you are nodding your head, but even if you are not, I urge you to read on because there’s some amazing resources and time-saving tips to be shared here. Remember the one goal: get that camera back in your hand, ASAP! This is going to help you.

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10 Essential Audio Books For Photography Business Owners

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Free Audio books to help creative businesses

I find myself on a pretty continuous quest for knowledge, it’s just who I am and how I work. The problem is that I lead a busy lifestyle, not just with work, but also ‘play’. Striking a balance is an important part of a healthy lifestyle but I struggle to find the time to read as much as I would like to. Audio books are a great way to solve this problem because I can listen on the plane while I’m traveling, or while I’m out walking the dog or riding my bike. Audible is the worlds largest provider of digital audio books so it makes sense to take a look at the best resources that they can offer to help photographers. Now obviously audio books don’t lend themselves to showing images so these books are more aimed at the business side of things. Realization that you are in fact, (or about to embark on becoming) a self-employed entrepreneur when you are a photographer, is the first step to a successful business. You’ll have to manage your marketing, communications, accounting and business development on top of your shooting schedule. That’s a lot of balls to juggle and you really can’t afford to drop any one of them. This list of audio books is a collection of the best books for creative business owners or simply people who want to make their work stand out from the crowd. The first two in the list, The War of Art and The 4-Hour Workweek are absolute MUST READS (or must listens!). I know the title of Tim Ferriss’ book is a little bit spammy sounding but trust me and 1.5 million other people that have purchased this book, it will change the way you allocate your time and run your business.

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