Aug
31
7 Items Every Photographer’s Website Should Have
Filed Under Photography Website, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
A Gallery of Images
People visit a photographer’s website to see images. Don’t disappoint. Your gallery should show more than a dozen images. 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.
Content
A 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 Techniques
Your 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 Navigation
If 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 System
Professional 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.
Helping your photography business, how to start a digital wedding photography business and wedding photography business visit virtualphotographystudio.com and keep up-to-date with all of the photography happenings via our free newsletter.
Aug
29
Nikon’s Newest Digital SLR Arrives With A Host Of New Features Aimed At Professional Photographers
Filed Under Camera Equipment, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
After decades as the undisputed leader of the market for professional 35mm cameras, Nikon finds itself in an unfamiliar position in the digital age. Canon so dominates the professional market today, particularly when it comes to photojournalism, that it recently tweaked Nikon’s nose with an advertising campaign about its triumph. Now the companies are renewing the fight. On Thursday, Nikon is introducing two cameras that it hopes will help it regain its old position. And last week, Canon promoted a new camera with a 21-megapixel sensor, more than twice the resolution of typical digital single-lens reflex cameras for consumers. “It’s always been a competitive field, but digital stepped it up a notch,†said David C. Lee, senior vice president of Nikon USA.
The new Nikon D3 is the first camera from the company with a full-size sensor. Well, almost full-size. One side of the frame is 0.1mm short. The sensor has 12.7 megapixels, which is not exceptional. Its light sensitivity, however, is another matter. The camera’s maximum ISO setting is 25,600, about 64 times what was commonly regarded as high-speed film. Unlike Canon’s full-frame cameras, the D3 is intended mainly for photojournalists and can take 9 pictures a second. Indeed, Canon said that its new super-high-resolution EOS 1DS Mark III camera, which is full-frame format, is intended for photographers who formerly used larger-format film cameras like the Hasselblad. Lee said that professionals’ camera choices influence consumer tastes. Price is less of a concern for pros, making these cameras more profitable. The Nikon D3 will sell for $5,000, and the Canon Mark III will cost $8,000; both cameras ship in November. Neither camera comes with a lens.
Helping your photography business, how to start a digital wedding photography business and wedding photography business visit virtualphotographystudio.com and keep up-to-date with all of the photography happenings via our free newsletter.
Aug
29
Do you freeze up or run in a different direction when someone mentions the word networking? You’re not alone. Unfortunately most people don’t understand the power of networking, and how they really are networking with people in everything they do.
The whole idea of networking is to make contacts. Get your photography business idea out in front of others, and learn about other people and services that may be of benefit to people you know. You shouldn’t be looking for new clients every time you meet someone. Instead, concentrate on making each client a referral source for you. If you can tell them exactly who you are and what you do, you will be remembered when someone is looking for your service. Â
When you tell people what you do, also provide them with a benefit, and with the ideal client who would benefit from your photography services. Make it easy for them to think of you and your studio when they meet your ideal client. This is all a part of your elevator speech. If you had 30 seconds to impress someone, what would you say? If you would like to read a wonderful book that really plays on this 30-second speech, read “What I Learned Before I Sold To Warren Buffettâ€, by Barnett Helzberg. Barnett Helzberg actually ran into Warren Buffett on a street corner in New York, and used his own 30-second elevator speech to start the process of selling his company to one of the largest investors of all time.
Part of effective networking is being 100 percent passionate about your photography business, knowing exactly how to sell your business to anyone at any time, and look for opportunities everywhere. Don’t be afraid to ask for opportunities when you see them. You may receive a lot of no’s before you receive your yes, but that one yes may be all you need to push your portrait photography studio to the top of your industry.
Helping your photography business, how to start a digital wedding photography business and wedding photography business visit virtualphotographystudio.com and keep up-to-date with all of the photography happenings via our free newsletter.
Aug
20
I just read an interesting case study put out by MarketingSherpa about Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer. In 2007, this company made $1.6 million in sales. This year, they expect $800 million, and hope to top the $1 billion mark in 2008. How did they do it? By concentrating on customer retention.
Most small businesses put their entire marketing focus on customer acquisition.  They search high and low for new prospects, and spend most of their budget trying to bring in new sales. Zappos.com did it a different way. They chose to make their existing clients happy - who in turn refer their friends because of the great customer service they come to expect from this online giant.
It definitely shows in their bottom line.
What can you do to improve your own customer retention?
Higher quality customer service
Overnight shipping
No questions return policy
24/7 fulfillment
Listen to your portrait and wedding photoraphy customers - chances are they are telling you what they want. You just have to listen.
Aug
17
Begin Planning Fall Promotions For Your Portrait Photography Studio
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Have you seen other photographers plan and market fall portrait weekends? Take that idea, and add a new twist.
Does your city have a fall festival? Here in Denver, we have many. We have a pumpkin festival, corn mazes, October festivals – the list goes on and on.
Choose one festival, and set up a meeting with the head organizer. See if you can combine a fun-filled day at a festival with quality images that will make the memories of a lifetime.
How do you find a festival now? Go to your local library and look back at the newspapers from last September and October time frame.
What do you offer? Think Santa Claus on steroids. The great thing about fall festivals is you’re guaranteed fall colors, lots of leaves, pumpkins, scarecrows, hay bales and more. If the festival agrees to have you, they will agree to create a nice outdoor backdrop for you to create incredible portraits. If bringing a printer isn’t an option, pre-sell one or two small packages, with the promise of putting the images on to an online shopping cart system for more sales. Read More on Planning Fall Promotions>>
Helping your photography business, how to start a digital wedding photography business and wedding photography business visit virtualphotographystudio.com and keep up-to-date with all of the photography happenings via our free newsletter.
Aug
16
Facelift for your Wedding and Portrait Photography Business Website
Filed Under Photography Website, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Your website is an important piece of your business should have a very professional appearance. Many photographers are tech savvy with their ability to produce well-designed, well-navigated photography studio websites.
If you don’t have the capability or time for doing a website design for your own studio, looking at website templates may be an option for you. Website templates are ready-made professionally designed websites for the Internet that provide a high-quality web presence and easy to modify with your content. Templates are available in standard HTML language of design, as well as popular flash format to display your web content and photography portfolio. Templates will have the some limitations of the expansion, but for the cost, offer a great solution to many studios. These templates are fully customizable, and available for immediate download.
Designs usually have layered Photoshop files for easy customization, as well as HTML layouts, so that you can open them in your favorite Web program like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. You don’t have to wait for your web designer to start from scratch on your design.
As studio owners, we have many responsibilities to worry about and our specialty should be our photography. Here’s a resource that you can check out the latest in photography website designs and see the catalogue of professionally designed templates.
Helping your photography business, how to start a digital wedding photography business and wedding photography business visit virtualphotographystudio.com and keep up-to-date with all of the photography happenings via our free newsletter.
Aug
6
Run you photography studio with more time - Get Human
Filed Under Photography Business, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
When you own a photography business, it can be a very time-consuming task. With networking, creating advertising and brochures, meeting with clients, sending orders to labs, or working with images in Photoshop, your day can jet by quickly. The last thing we really need to do is call someone and be put on terminal hold with an endless supply of voice prompts to get you to the people you really want to talk to.Â
We found a great resource called get human. It allows you to instantly get to a human voice to ask the questions that you need to be asking instead be prompted by all these voice prompts. Press one for this too for that three for this do to the human and get on with your day. There are hundreds of shortcuts to use in your everyday work schedule. From banking to insurance to airlines … Check them out.
Helping your photography business, how to start a digital wedding photography business and wedding photography business visit virtualphotographystudio.com and keep up-to-date with all of the photography happenings via our free newsletter.
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