Mind Your Own Business – Business Forum: 10 Tips to Build Your Business!

Like everybody else, I’m tired of the media telling us it’s going to be a bad year! It’s going to be a hard year, but not necessarily bad. Downturns in business force us to deal with challenges we’ve been avoiding. It’s still early enough to tackle a few key projects and have an impact on 2009’s outcome.

1 Your Website: You can’t be in business today without a website, but when was the last time you checked how it’s working? This past week I found at least three websites that never loaded. So, check out your website on somebody else’s computer and pay attention to the following:

Load Time: I know you like the music and ego-driving introductions, but don’t get carried away. If it doesn’t load fast you’ll lose your potential customer.

Image Quality: I’m amazed to see how many photographers simply load in images to fill up space. If it’s not your very best work, don’t put it on your site.

Diversity: You never know who’s going to look at your site. Display images showing your full potential and include a good variety of at least three specialties; for example, fashion, family, landscape, macro, wedding and portrait. Also mix up the techniques and show black-and-white, color, infrared, cross-processing, etc.

Contact Information: Give people a way to respond and talk to you live. You’re in a service business and nobody has confidence in an email contact system by itself. Let people call you!

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then give people lots of images, NOT copy. Check out websites by people like Yervant, Joe Buissink, Bambi Cantrell and Jerry Ghionis for example. Lots of images!

2 Network: As I’m writing this, WPPI is just around the corner and is considered the biggest and best networking experience in professional photography. You don’t need to travel the road of building your business by yourself. Take advantage of the wealth of information out there through contacts you can build at every function you attend. Obviously I’m a WPPI fan, but you should be at your state conventions, PhotoPlus in New York, every monthly chapter meeting of various groups in the community and any other major conventions in your area.

3 Social Networking: Well, it started as a joke, but I finally joined Facebook three months ago. I’m amazed at how much I can learn and how many people in the industry are on board. Take a look at Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter. In every one of these social media empires there’s an opportunity for you to keep up your network’s strength every day, talking to other photographers.

4 Read and Watch: We just don’t do enough reading and there’s a ton of great information out there, much of it written by some very talented photographers. Dane Sanders has his new book Fast Track Photographer, Doug Box has a ton of great marketing material, Eddie Tapp has at least one new Photoshop book, Bill Hurter, our editor, has at least 25 books out there. Just type in “photography” on Amazon and see what comes up! There are also some great DVDs out by people like Bambi Cantrell, Julieanne Kost, Mike Colón, Yervant, Kevin Kubota and Jerry Ghionis, just to name a few.

5 Community Involvement: If you want your community to be good to you, you have to give something back. Get involved! Do some volunteer work. Let people know they can count on you for support—and I’m not talking about donations of money, but your time with local charities, the Chamber of Commerce, the school system, youth sports leagues, etc.

6 Add-ons: What are you offering your client base? Make it a point to offer as many products as you can and consider frames, albums, image boxes and canvas prints. There’s a lot of research that supports an increase in satisfaction when consumers can “accessorize” their purchases!

7 Right-sourcing: It’s an expression borrowed from Jeff Jochum, but think about how much time you spend working on projects—taking time away from marketing yourself. For example, if you’re spending hours every week cleaning up your images, when you could be turning it over to a good lab, then you’re missing the opportunity to promote yourself and your work.

8 Back to Basics: There are too many photographers out there spending too much time on mouse clicks instead of shutter clicks. It’s time for many of you to take a refresher course on photography basics! You won’t need to clean it up in Photoshop if you get it right in the first place! And, that leaves more time for marketing.

9 Take a Break: On those days when you just feel like you’re going to crash and burn, take your camera and get out for a day. Jason Group in New York has built a whole project called “I (heart) New York.” He takes a few clients on what is essentially a day-long fashion shoot in various areas of New York—no charge, no strings, just getting back to basics and having fun! He’s doing it strictly for the creative challenge and the work is stunning—and, it recharges his battery.

10 The last point may well be the most important one of all—spend time with youR family! When times are tough the pressure is overwhelming and we all forget our priorities. If you don’t stop and smell the roses then what good is working so hard to grow them?

Skip Cohen is the president of Rangefinder Publishing Co. Inc. He frequently lectures on marketing and business principles throughout the United States.