You’ve decided to venture into a new niche in photography.

First goal – a new brochure to try and bring in clients.

But where do you start? What packages do you create? What prices do you charge?

The easiest way to find out is to head to Google and type in “your new niche photographer” and pull up a few sites from your competition to find out what they’re charging.

Copy a few packages. Low-ball the pricing. And voila, your brochure is ready to go.

Yes, that’s how a lot of photographers do it. But that doesn’t make it the right way.

Here’s why.

You don’t know how they came up with their pricing.

Here’s a glimpse into the “copy” method of creating your pricing.

Photographer one decides to advertise his photography and creates a new brochure. He doesn’t know what to charge so he heads online and “copies” his competition. They charge $1000 – he low-balls it for $900. Photographer two does the same thing, only of course the price has now lowered to $800. Photography three – $700. Photographer four – $600. And so on.

That’s how we’ve wound up with many photographers providing a ton of service for $50. And of course we all know you can’t make a full time living spending all day servicing a client for $50. So this photographer either has a full time job making the money they need to survive, or they’ll be out of business in weeks.

If you “copy” pricing, you have no idea where that model came from or if it will work. And chances are it won’t. [Read more…]