Toot Your Own Horn: 7 Steps to Maximize Visibility After You’ve Been Published

Guest Post by Lara White

When you see your work published, it feels incredible. It’s an amazing validation of the work you do and the impact you are having in your field. But what does it really do for your business? Do you start to fill all those empty Saturdays because you have a featured wedding in the latest wedding magazine? Sadly, no. While it is great to get published, if you want to see results, you need to take action. It’s not enough to simply have your name in tiny, tiny print next to a photo in a magazine. Most brides will not even see that. Brides are glancing through magazines for ideas mostly.

Once you’ve been published, that is only the beginning. You now have a tool that you can use to promote yourself and your business. No one else is going to do it for you.

Create a PDF

We purchased a scanner several years ago so we could scan magazine features and covers to make pdfs to share with brides and the vendor team responsible. You never know, the bride may email the pdf to all her friends and family that attended the wedding, or better yet, her unmarried friends. Hopefully vendors will do the same, or put the feature on their own websites and blogs.

Besides helping facilitate further spread of your news via the bride and the vendors, you also signal to the vendor team that not only do you get press coverage when you photograph and event, you also help them build up their press coverage by providing them with the tools they need to self-promote as well. I’ve seen other vendors proudly frame and display these editorial features like awards in their shops. [Read more…]

How To Take An Engagement Portrait They Will Love To Buy

A while back I gave a few tips on how to take great engagement portrait sessions, and concentrated more on how to use them within your studio for larger sales.

An engagement session isn’t like a typical family portrait. An engagement session is actually designed to be so much more. It’s designed to introduce the couple to your services. And it’s also designed to get the bride and groom excited about being together, and sharing their love with the world.

I remember when Andrew and I had our engagement photographs taken. It was a standard session in studio, smiling at the camera, without much glamour and romance.

So when we moved into wedding photography, we set aside the traditional portraiture, and created a new way to view engagements. In fact we didn’t even call it engagement portraits. We called it Love Portraiture, and it was designed to celebrate the love a couple felt about each other.

What Do They Love?

Every couple has a unique aspect to their love. And they are always happy and excited to tell it to you. Ask them a few questions. [Read more…]

Ways To Control The Wedding – A Photographers Guide To Becoming A Wedding Planner

Over the years, we’ve photographed hundreds of weddings. And when it comes to planning the wedding, there are two kinds of brides.

Cinderella – the type who takes control over every detail, planning day and night until the big event.

The Queen – She’s busy and relies on others to plan for her. She puts in her requests and lets a planner narrow down the choices. Then she makes final decisions.

Cinderella

Because Cinderella brides don’t rely on a planner, they go into their wedding day with high expectations and little direction. Because they’ve never put on a wedding before, they don’t have any idea how long an event should last, or how to structure the individual pieces of the day to make it run smoothly. In essence, they are lost the entire day, letting people control them as they move along.

With a Cinderella bride, you have to step in immediately, or risk being at the event many hours that day.

The easiest way to control a Cinderella bride is to gently make suggestions. Explain that you have photographed dozens or hundreds of brides, and know how to keep guests happy. Never put it back on her – tell her you know how to keep the party moving and exciting for each of her guests. She’ll quickly rely on you as the planner.

Then make suggestions.

[Read more…]