How To Mark Up And Price Your Photographs

Photography Website Success Secrets Reveled

Is your photography website in need of updates? You have a website online, do you wonder why sales are slow? We have put together a video critique of a photography website that may point out items to help your site grow. Photography website critique

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Filed Under: Blog, Website Marketing

Are you ready for the coming wedding season?

by Virtual Photography Leave a Comment

With the wedding season in full swing in just a few months it’s important to ensure that you guarantee future growth for your studio.Â

Wedding photography is a very lucrative and fun business to be involved in. While providing a fantastic service for the bride and groom it’s also a way to showcase your artistic abilities.

Always be marketing through your photography!

One of the most important items when you photograph in a wedding is to provide samples for your vendors. Samples are a very inexpensive way to show off your work. We found one of the best ways to enhance our relationship with vendors such as wedding coordinators, florists or caterers was to provide sample albums and loose prints of weddings that we completed together. This allowed the wedding coordinator to share with potential couples a sampling of past work. Many times the couples would ask the wedding coordinators what studio provided photography for this particular wedding.Â Our name would come up and the contact would be made for very easy booking of the event.

As with wedding coordinators, other vendors within the wedding industry are equally important in sending new clients your way. Caterers are one of the largest expenses in the wedding budget so providing quality photographs of the presentation at the reception becomes equally rewarding.Â One of the reasons that I bring this up is with the wedding season approaching it is important to think about what you’re going to photograph so you can provide samples to these vendors at every reception.

I would actually go into the reception site and capture the polished way the reception was displayed before anyone had entered the room. Capturing items like tables, floral arrangements and overall room appearance.Â Photographing theÂ food from the couples first mealÂ when it was presented to the bride and groom showcases the caterers efforts.Â All of these can be used as sample items for the vendors to use when they talk to future clients. Take a little extra time and think about a list of items that you would like to photograph that you asked of it.Â

Once you download your files, select special images and move them into aÂ samples folder thatÂ will provide additional images to each vendor.Â With a simple process you’re guaranteed to get attention from these select wedding vendors.

Filed Under: Blog, Wedding Photography

7 Items Every Photographer’s Website Should Have

by Virtual Photography Leave a Comment

A Gallery of ImagesPeople visit a photographer’s website to see images. Don’t disappoint. Your gallery should show more than a dozen images. Flash Image Gallery Let them spend hours on your site! At our high point, we had over 20,000 images online. And many people would spend hours going through every single one of them.

Contact Information

I spend a lot of time on other peoples’ sites. And I find a lot of business owners are so worried about spam, they leave off contact information in their fears. Guess what? People can’t contact you if they don’t know how. Fill out forms are great, and are the first step for contact. Give a phone number – some people prefer to call. Give an address - your prospects would love to know what city your in, and where your studio is. Give an email - you can make it a non-clickable graphic.

ContentA portfolio isn’t enough. It’s nice looking at a dozen images, but who are you? What’s your style? How did you decide to become a photographer? What’s the story behind your business? In person, you build a relationship with your prospect. The same thing has to occur online. Content is what sells your business.

Sales TechniquesYour website is more than a portfolio; it’s a sales tool. Think of how you sell in person, and use those same features online. Your website should be growing and changing all the time.

Proper NavigationIf you’ve ever been “stuck” in a website, you know navigation is so important. If you move to a page, it better be easy to move around and back out. Think like your customer. If that’s hard to do, bring a customer in and ask them what they think.

Ordering SystemProfessional labs and other online services have made it very easy to sell your images online. Connect to one of these services, and use this as an option for your clients. If you’re worried about upfront sales, use it as a bonus after the initial sale is complete.

Marketing

Your website is more than a portfolio; it’s a marketing tool. With over 6 billion web pages online, how will yours compete with the others? It takes marketing. Just like you wouldn’t sit at home without doing any marketing waiting for the phone to ring, you can’t sit at home without marketing your website waiting for the contacts. You have to use online marketing techniques to get noticed.

Filed Under: Blog, Website Marketing

How is your Photography Business Email Etiquette

by Virtual Photography Leave a Comment

E-mail is now common place in the photography business world, and yet itâ€™s surprising on how little people know and understand its ability. What works in an email? And what doesnâ€™t?

Provide a proper subject line, one that will make a person want to open your email. With all of the known viruses plaguing emails, people will more often then not delete an email if they are unsure what itâ€™s about.
Do not make your email downloadable.Â Provide an email that explains what you are sending, and then use attachments. Again, with viruses plaguing emails, people will not open up a document if they are unsure of what it is.
Keep your email short and to the point.
Provide name, addresses, email address, web site addresses, and phone numbers. Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to contact someone for more information, and not knowing how.
Hyperlink all web addresses for ease to the reader.
Check all links before sending the email. If you are unsure of what you are sending, send it to yourself first, check all hyperlinks, and then send to your client.
Check spelling! If you canâ€™t figure out to spell check in your email program, type up your email in Word, spell check, than copy and paste the message back in your email program.
Do not use all capital letters. So much is written on this subject, and yet I still get emails that are capitalized. Capitalized phrases are the same as screaming â€“ you donâ€™t want to be screaming at a potential client.
Do not include images in your email. Instead, direct them back to your web site for more detail descriptions.
If you are going to be emailing people on a regular basis, get permission. Simply put a clause at the bottom of the email that gives them a way of taking themselves off of your list. You do not want an irate customer if you can avoid it!

Filed Under: Blog, Online Marketing

How To Mark Up And Price Your Photographs

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The best photographer in the world will fail if he or she doesnâ€™t learn how to price with the ultimate profit in mind.

Occasionally I will put one of my paid reports on this site as an extra special bonus for you. This is one of those reports. I wrote a Pricing Guideline report, and currently sell it on my parent site, www.VisionOfSuccess.com. To view this report, click on Pricing Guideline.