What Photographers Don’t Get About Marketing

This post is Day 29 of 30 Ways In 30 Days To Redesign Your Life With Photography. This series seeks to provide you with practical steps to get you from wherever you are today, to exactly where you want to be – this year! If your goal has always been to take your photography to a whole new level, hang on and start enjoying a new lifestyle you’ve always dreamed of.

I love time travel movies. It’s so much fun thinking about the possibility of being able to leap into the future to see what its like. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what the world is like in 50 years? What technology will we be using? What will our daily lives be like?

Unfortunately, we can’t make the leap today, and know instantly what we should be doing to make our future successful. And in today’s world, even a few short months can bring about drastic change.

Think about what we do today compared with what we were doing five years ago. Would you have ever predicted spending your time on Facebook? Statistics show that the average person spends over 10 hours per month on it.

I also read a statistic that a person starting a four year technical degree today is learning obsolete technology. In other words, technology is changing so fast, that what we are learning today will no longer apply a short four years from now.

So how do we look into the future and decide what we want to do when it may not exist?

And more importantly, how can you build a business today that is ready for the future?

The First Step

The first step towards the future is realizing that everything you learned in the past no longer applies.

  • Yellow Pages and phone books? Dead.
  • Newspapers and print advertising? Dead.
  • Television and radio commercials? Dead.

Okay, I know I’m going to get emails that say these tools are still being used effectively, and they are still generating business. And I agree. In some ways, they are still in use and people are gaining traction from them. [Read more…]