Previous | Contents | Next

Social media platforms encourage you to feed them constantly. Fair enough, they have the audience. But you need to feed yourself! 

You’re lucky

Photographers are fortunate in that their work generates rivers of desirable online content.

You need to avoid giving away the Crown Jewels, and you need your clients’ permission to share, but your photography is a wonderful online resource.

The ideal

Things aren’t always ideal in the real world, but nevertheless…

— Real friends are better than Facebook friends.

— Visiting your studio is better than visiting your website.

— Printing an image says you’ve chosen it above the rest.

— Browsing an album is better than scanning an image gallery.

Try and get people to do the ideal thing — visit you, talk to you, size you up personally and admire your work.

Nevertheless, people’s first contact with you is likely to be online.

And these days, if you’re a wedding photographer in particular, most of your interactions, except for the big day, may be online.

Don’t hide

Maybe it’s something in the water, but a lot of people have gotten married at Queensberry. Here’s what they think about photographer websites:

— How do we know we can use you if you don’t tell us where you’re based?

— How do we talk to you if you don’t give us your phone number or email address?

— How do we know we’ll like what you do if you don’t show us?

— How do we know you sell products if you don’t show us?

— How do we know we’ll like you personally, or if we can trust you?

— How do we know we can afford you if you don’t tell us how much you charge?

Why hide the precise information we need to decide whether we should check you out?

You might not like our questions, but they’re the only ones we know to ask.

You

The hardest question on that list is the personal one. How do we know we’ll like you, or can trust you?

Put yourself on the line. If you really love your husband, green tea, cats and taking pictures, tell us. Keep it short though.

How about a photo? Or a video of you working?

If you’ve won awards, list them.

If you’re experienced, prove it.

If you’ve got customers, tell us their names.

Take your About page seriously. The best ones are powerful and personal, although the whole site should reflect the real you.

Write a blog. And share it. It’s an excuse to be informal, approachable and personal, and to tell stories.

Social media gets you out where the people are.

Be yourself. And remember, people’s bullshit sensors are highly developed.

Useful

OK,  your competitors’ websites are uninformative, but yours is professional and well organised. It looks good, describes your service, shows some of your work, outlines your prices, tells people your contact details, lists your terms and conditions.

Is that enough?

It might encourage me to make contact, so it’s a start.

You don’t own Facebook

You don’t own Facebook or Instagram.

They work in their own interests not yours, and they could lose their audience (or take away yours) as quickly as they gained it.

Social media platforms encourage you to feed them constantly. Fair enough, they have the audience. But you need to feed yourself! 

So yes, use Facebook and Instagram to reach out, but at every opportunity draw people into what you do own, your website and blog.

Social proof

If you’ve got customers, tell us their names. And show us their photos, and what they bought!

Social media is a new level of word of mouth, the cheapest and most effective marketing in the world. Real people showing that they trusted you, that you didn’t let them down … and this is what you did for them. (It’s even better when the viewer knows them personally.)

People are proud of their children, weddings, parties, horses, houses, bodies, fancy outfits — whatever it is you shot for them — and what you’ve done is help them express that pride.

Don’t assume your clients won’t want to share. Make it part of how you do business. Get people’s permission, which most will be happy to give. Let them control who can see what … and if you still have doubts, remember your competitors are already doing it.

Show and sell

If you’re selling products, show them.

If you design the best books in a hundred miles, let us see your work.

If your images are individually worked by the best artist in his field, and printed on museum quality rag paper, tell us. Online.

Take a look at how few studios actually show what they want you to buy.

Share

Musicians have had to learn to make money by giving stuff away, and you should think about doing the same.

The good news is that your challenge is not as great.

First, unless you’re shooting celebrities, not many people are interested in your photography — just your clients and their friends and family (plus a few rogues intent on stealing other people’s images).

Second, your photographs aren’t out there until you say so. Which hopefully is after you get paid.

If I was a photographer I’d want a reputation for being really good, really engaging, really understanding and really generous. Once I’ve been paid.

Until I’d made my sale I wouldn’t post too many photos online. Musicians may not have that luxury, but all you need to offer is a teaser selection.

Once I had my money I’d be really generous. Files, slideshows, shareable websites, mobile apps. How generous I was would depend on how generous they were. Bought well? Stand back, here come the goodies!

Especially the online goodies, because they can be shared at zero cost, and sharing is good marketing.

Polish ’em till they shine

I’ve said how lucky you are with all your beautiful image-based content, and the people who want to look at and share it.

But you need a few words to go with the pictures, and you should work on them.

Keep it short.

Be yourself, but don’t indulge yourself.

Be conversational. If you can’t read the sentences aloud without tripping over your tongue you’re not finished.

It’s tempting to market to people, but it sounds a bit creepy. Let the photos speak for themselves and let other people say you’re awesome.

Season with stories: personal stories about your clients, war stores that underline the fact that you can be trusted to do a good job.

Finally, leave what you write aside for a while before you publish it, then reread it.

Do the words still make sense and read well?

Polish them until they shine, just like your photography.

Here I am telling you how to write. I hope you’re OK with mine.

More to judge you by

Of course people will judge you by your images. You do so yourself.

But they’ll also judge you by the quality of your writing, your tone of voice, your graphic design sensibilities.

Plenty of people will judge you because you don’t know how to use apostrophes, or when to use i before e. Or because you use “like”, like, indiscriminately.

These days plenty more will judge you for not re-reading before you publish, and noticing how predictive texting has messed up your sentences.

Does what you say make sense? Is the tone right? Has it got typos or grammatical errors?

Neither you nor I have a professional sub-editor working our stuff, so the occassional srcew-up is OK. Although my spellchecker caught both those!

You’d be embarrassed if people didn’t respect your photography, but they’re just as judgmental about words and graphics.

Copyright

Photographers are very sensitive about copyright, which is quite understandable, but once you’ve got paid does copyright really matter in the wedding and portrait business?

Put an attractive watermark on your images and think of them as marketing collateral. Encourage people to share your images so they attract new customers. You might get ripped off occasionally, but it’s better to be pirated than ignored, and being ignored is your real problem.

Did you know that Prada’s and Chanel’s haute couture is not covered by copyright? Only their brand name and trademarks are protected.

Build your brand, protect your name, get paid, share your images.

Shoot, share and sell

I just said I wouldn’t post too many photos online until I’d made my sale.

But what about the Shoot and Share model? 

For many wedding photographers posting the images online is the sale today. You pay me, I do the shoot, I post the images online, you help yourself.

This has a lot of appeal, especially for the time-challenged  — those with real jobs, and those far too busy working as newspaper stringers or in commercial or sports photography to think about after-shoot sales or production work.

But it should be approached with caution.

First, most people are doing it. It may be trendy now, but the law of the market says that if you’re doing the same thing as everyone else you’re competing on price.

Second, you’re surrendering the Crown Jewels, so you can’t rely on people buying any extras. Sure, they might buy something, but it won’t be as much and it probably won’t be from you.

Beware turning a big sale into a small one

There’s a type of photography business for whom online sales platforms are nothing short of magic.

Imagine what’s involved in shooting thousands of images, and selling hundreds of reasonably priced prints to dozens of people from every school, sports club and event you shoot.

Some photographers deride this as “McDonalds photography” but it sure ain’t easy. In the past customers came in, browsed through your proof books and filled out their orders.  Or maybe you were a school photographer and sent order packs home with the kids. Either way you collected the orders, processed the credit cards, placed a bulk order with the lab, received the prints back, matched them with the orders and shipped them out.

Now your customers view their photos, place their orders and pay online. Workspace does the rest, from collecting payment to printing, packing and drop-shipping to the customers.

But you probably aren’t into “volume portraits”, and if so, here’s what our statistics say quite clearly:

While we certainly have customers who very successfully sell big-ticket items online, in Workspace most of those big-ticket sales are wholesale, not retail — in other words placed by the photographer not their customer — which probably means they’re the fruit of “in person sales”.

Why might this be?

People will happily spring for iPhones online (they know what they’re buying) or books (they’re cheap) or clothing (they can return them).

But you’re probably asking them to buy something they’ve never seen, and that isn’t cheap. Selling face to face quite simply improves your odds of making that big-ticket sale.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I’ll discuss selling albums online in a later chapter, but that’s a very different process. Fine art photography is another exception, but that’s not social photography, so different again.

Yes, I absolutely believe you should add shopping carts to your image galleries, but I’d treat the sales as nice add-ons, not rely on them as the main event.

Your online presence may be more about marketing than sales.

Discovering your tribe

(Warning: contains references to blue-grass and rock music.)

Johannes introduced me to his friends, Lyttelton band The Eastern. The who?

That’s OK, it’s not surprising you haven’t heard of them, and that’s the point of this post.

Some years ago The Eastern opened in Auckland for Old Crow Medicine Show.

Old Crow who? Heather and I had no idea, but we bought tickets anyway, probably the only people in the audience who didn’t know anything about the main act either!

But then they came out and played.

I was hooked after the first few bars.

Ketch looked wry, ironic and like he was after your girlfriend. Willie wore a Neil Young T-shirt and a beard. He looked like every second guy in the 70s, and sang and played like a demon. Morgan broke his upright bass! I suspect he was holding back after that.

We’d never heard of them, but on the night everyone else in the audience seemed to know the words.

It’s completely unsurprising that I liked them.

Here’s why.

Dave Rawlings produced their first record. Don’t know Dave? He’s Gillian Welch’s partner in life and music. You must know her – she wrote the best ever tribute to Elvis.

OCMS, Gillian and Dave recorded a version of The Weight, one of The Band’s best tracks. You know them, the guys who recorded with Bob Dylan at The Big Pink.

I can sense you rolling your eyes, so what’s the point?

I love every name I’ve mentioned, and if you like some of them, but don’t know others, chances are you will as well.

The chances are less good if you’re, I dunno, an Eminem or Macklemore fan … although I’m one too.

For The Eastern to make it, somehow they have to find a way to plug into the network of people who already love them but don’t know it yet.

The best thing a fan can do is shout out to the like-minded, because the real problem is not discovering your tribe, it’s your tribe discovering you.

How might you go about it, as a photographer?

Your tribe doesn’t need to be huge, and you don’t need to be world famous.

Publishing your work on a blog, and using social media to encourage your clients and prospects to visit, takes some time, but is easy and free.

When you help your clients share your photography they’re shouting out to their own tribe and helping build yours.

Finding ways to support and cross-link with other local vendors (dressmakers, florists, wedding planners, venues etc), and your community, spreads the net wider, and needn’t cost you a cent.

But keep away from politics. No point in turning off half the people in your community.

Hat tip to Seth Godin, the Tribes guru.

The best thing a fan can do is shout out to the like-minded, because the real problem is not discovering your tribe, it’s your tribe discovering you.

Zoom

We’ve been talking about your website as if it’s a passive shop front, where people come, take a look at your photos — share them — and maybe buy prints and products.

But what if you could turn the online experience into something much more proactive? If you can’t meet your clients in person, Zoom can be a game changer. 

I use Zoom regularly, but for internal conversations, normally involving screen sharing, so we can work with documents of various sorts, from photos to charts and spreadsheets.

I imagine you using it to strike up a relationship with a prospective clients — showing your friendly face, learning about them, explaining what you do, looking at dates for a shoot — just as you would over the phone and face to face.

 But what if you could go beyond that, to the post-shoot sales phase? Using Zoom to choose photographs, or set up a product design or album planning session? You could certainly come close with the Workspace wall art and album design modules.

It’s a powerful idea. Here are a few things to consider:

— How do you look onscreen? Camera angles, distance from the camera, background, audio, your personal presentation, engaging smile, self-belief.  Dogs and kids part of the act or out of the way!

— How are you going to to show your clients photos, videos, price lists or packages? It would be great if they were all on your website, and in your browser, and you knew where to find them.

— You’d need to call up Workspace to work with the client’s own photos. To choose their favourites, plan album pages, or design a frame. It’s not rocket science but you need to know your way around the software.

— If you’re going to prepare an estimate for them while you’re talking, how will you do that?

— With practice you’ll learn to pace yourself, and notice if you’re getting your message across, just as you would face to face. I’m regularly told I’m going too fast!

— And of course Zoom doesn’t help by changing the interface so regularly.

I said you needed three skill sets to be a successful professional — people skills, business skills and photography skills.

File Zoom under “people skills”. Really, all it requires is practice and thinking ahead. Oh, and projecting the authentic you!

The bleeding edge

I was at a seminar by one of Australia’s most professional presenters, and he started talking about his gear and workflow.

Unfortunately, despite all his professionalism and preparedness, his Dell laptop wouldn’t recognise his microphone. A simple problem, but he couldn’t fix it and neither could the audio tech who was recording the presentation.

What happened? The presenter demonstrated with an audience member’s $25 Logitech headset instead, and we moved on.

Technologically speaking we’re living in revolutionary times. Everything’s changing, and that will continue, for sure.

Someone said that technology is stuff that doesn’t work properly yet, and Seth Godin suggests that you shouldn’t wait until it works perfectly before you start using it, because by then it’ll be too late.

You’ll probably notice that often the tech that works best is that which feeds the big corporate machines … and in the process turns you into one of the crowd, which is not the best outcome.

So I’d add to what Seth says, that shit happens at the bleeding edge, and it helps to be comfortable with that reality.

Sometimes things just go wrong, like the time Heather and I were presenting in the English Lakes District, and someone broke a vital audio connector by stepping on it. On a Sunday, when everything was closed.

Photographers are lucky. Their work generates rivers of desirable online content.

NEXT