I attended a 4 hour event on Saturday with my daughter and her Girl Scout troop. It was at the Young American’s Bank, and it was on starting up your own business.

We started by going over the profile of an entrepreneur - what it takes to be successful at running your own business. Each girl had to fill out a profile to find out if they had what it takes to run their own business. There were dozens of questions like:

• I enjoy making presentations and know how to give a professional presentation
• I like selling an idea or product to people I don’t know
• I regularly meet the goals I set for myself
• I manage my time well
• I have a high energy level
• I want to be able to determine when and where I work

They also gave us a number of chances to brainstorm ideas for businesses, how to build a brand and a logo for these businesses, and even a four page fill-in-the-blank business plan to help them get their business ideas in place.

They made it so easy that even 12-14 year old girls had no trouble putting together some pretty amazing ideas.

I also realized during these four hours that the key to everything they were talking about is planning and goal setting. In four hours, they taught exactly how to plan for success. The problem with most small business owners is they never plan for success. You have to spend the time to write down what you hope to achieve and how you will achieve it.

Make your plan today. Start with these ideas:

• Make a list of 3 to 5 services/products you could sell
• Define your potential customers
• Why do people need to buy your product?
• What price will people be willing to pay for your products/services?
• How much will it cost to produce your products/services?
• How much profit do you choose to make?
• Do you need employees?
• How will you gain customers?
• Where will you get funding to get this idea started?
• Who is your competition?
• How much time do you anticipate running your business at the beginning?

You’ll soon be on the road to success.

Found a great site for adding a story to your photography - Tell your Story Comeeko lets you take your photos and put them into nice photo strips. Create your own photo strips and share them online. Photo strips are your photos made into comic strips. Photography into comic strips

Are you overwhelmed and  lost with what digital photography is or what digital photography can do, we found a really cool resource that can help. I know that not everyone knows what “firmware” is or how “lag time” affects your image but you can find out lots of valuable information with this digital photography resource

Here are just  a few items that the site offers:

• Over 4,000 full-color interactive pages organized into 153 topics.
• Highly illustrative with thousands of images and animations.
• Easy to follow step-by-step animated image editing tutorials.
• Easy to understand basic and advanced practical theory.
• Selectable learning levels:
  Beginner, Advanced Amateur, Professional.

I was amazed to see and learn more than I thought possible from a digital photography resource.

I love writing. I’ve written a ton of articles, am a columnist for the Denver Business Journal, and have a couple of books written and published. I guess I just love sharing what I do with as many people as I can.

Thanks to the Internet, there are more options than ever for getting your information out there.

If you know Mark Victor Hansen (yep, the Chicken Soup for the Soul author) you’ll want to know about his latest creation. Head on over to his newest site YouPublish  and find out how you can quickly get your stories, poetry and even photographs published quickly. In fact, you can publish books, music, photos, study courses, audio, video and presentation files with just a few clicks of your mouse.

If you’ve always wanted to get your photographs into a published work, now is your time. Get on at the start, and see how far you can take a new way at making money with your photography.

His site is still in beta, scheduled to open up sometime here in May, but it may be time to jumpstart your publishing career by signing up now. With Chicken Soup fame behind him, I’m sure this site will become golden in just a few months - why not go along for the ride?

One of my favorite album companies just announced a new album line. If you like the matted albums but hate filling out all of the forms, your day is here. With the new design system, you can enjoy all of the above and none of the hassle. Visit Zookbinders.com and see what an amazing album company can do for your digital photography studio. This is not a paid submission but an honest testament of a quality company that is the backbone of my studio.

For those of you that follow Twitter.com, I found a fun new application that allows you to watch live twitts as they are posted from around the world. TwittEarth Thought it was a fun way to celebrate Earth Day today.

If you’ve never been to Twitter before, you can check out my profile:

Twitter LoriOsterberg

And  you can also follow Andrew

Twitter PhotoshopTips

The next major storm that visits your location, grab your digital photography gear and head out to capture the effects of mother nature. A major storm - blizzard, hurricane, tornado, flood, wind or ice storm can alter the landscape around you. An ice storm can show its damaging effects on trees and other objects but can also be a wonderful modifier for common objects. I have seen amazing images of tables, benches and cars that reside next to a lake that were covered in 4-6 inches of ice. A transformation that is truly beautiful. - Get Inspired!

Have you ever visited a web site and found an image next to the web site address? This little graphic is called a favorite icon and is very easy to add to any web site. All you need is a graphic that represents your studio and then visit this site to create your favicon. Square graphics work best for this type of application.

I hear people time and again saying they are so motivated to build up their photography business, and yet there always seems to be a let down because profits don’t keep up with that motivation level. As a start up company, you wear many hats because you have to. Lack of capital and resources hold you back, but you still manage to grow because of the deep commitment level you have, and the long hours you are willing to put in. Then as time goes by, and you continue to grow, you become the controller. The person who has a hand into everything because you are the ultimate caretaker. You started this company; you grew this company, and you’re going to control this company!

The key to focusing your energy is to invest your time at what you’re good at, and let others handle the other stuff. In simple language, that is the key of focusing your energy. As your photography business grows, you can afford to put more of your capital resources into growing your company with people. Hire employees to take over the office and administrative tasks. Hire a bookkeeper to control the data entry. Hire an accountant to control your accounting and your tax information. Hire production people to do day to day production tasks. This will give you the time to do what you need to do - and what you do best!

Jumpstart your photography to the next level

What is it that you like to do best? Chances are its what brought you to self-employment in the first place. You like to do web design. You enjoy photographing families. You love creating images that are appreciated by people throughout your community. This is where you need to focus your energy. You need to continue to think of marketing ideas that will grow the business, to give all of those you have hired more responsibilities to keep them happy! It is truly a circle of life, one that continues to feed off of the next idea. As you grow, so does your business, and your lifestyle!

Too many people today are designing websites without any good reason. Without the reason, or designing one just because everyone else is, you are subjecting yourself to failure. When you create a web site, you have to really focus on what you want that site to do for you. Do you want to sell a product? Do you want people to contact you for more information? Whatever the reason, the underlying goal should be to drive up your profits. You wouldn’t send out a postcard without trying to create a sale. Neither should you produce a web site without trying to create a sale. And because your site will reach people from all over the world, really focus on what you can do for these people, not just your current clientele within a few miles of your business.

When we began designing our website for our photography studio, we focused solely on reaching the people in the Denver area. As people came in to our studio to visit us, we would provide them with our URL, and put a few images up to build our portfolio. But as the months went on, we discovered our site was being viewed from people throughout the world. As our online portfolio grew, we began receiving calls from brides around the world. We made our portfolio available to anyone, 24/7, and they responded because we gave them what they wanted - information on wedding photography, and most importantly, the images. People were willing to fly us in from all over because they liked what they saw and we gave them ease. We changed our business to incorporate a larger target market. And it worked! We opened up our minds to new opportunities, and we succeeded by changing to follow what would bring us in the business - and the money!

You job is to discover how you can make the most out of your photography website. What can you put into it that will get the attention of people throughout the world? How can you make sales from people you don’t know, and aren’t even in a location that you could sell to? Service businesses are usually the hardest to develop, because you can’t imagine working with a client half way around the world - how do you work with them if you never see them? In this global economy, you have to move beyond the thought process of “sitting down at a desk” with your client. Phones and email are more than ample to conduct business. With FedEx, teleconferencing, videoconferencing and computers, there are so many ways to conduct business with anyone in the world. Just yesterday we were chatting online with a gentleman from India! It’s truly amazing the directions we can head in the next few years. Don’t be afraid to try new things, new ideas, and build a business that reaches beyond your hometown!