A small gesture of thoughtfulness can make a surprisingly big impact
The post 11 Small Things That Make a Big Difference to Customers appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Content marketing is without doubt one of the best avenues to invest in, when it comes to promoting your products or services.
The post 10 Reasons Why Small Businesses Should Invest More in Content Marketing by @DholakiyaPratik appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
In addition to costing you money in lost commissions, failing to manage your time properly will also force you to work harder than necessary, and add a level of stress to your life that"s otherwise completely avoidable. Let"s go over a few specific ways that you can get your arms around your time and use it to your financial and lifestyle advantage as a real estate agent…
Want to Sell More Homes? Manage Your Time
http://www.engage360.me
Gone are the days when the yard is used for just a few months. Today, the outdoors are an extension of the indoors, with gracious spaces for eating, lounging, and playing year-round. The latest trends in outdoor living have you covered - literally.
The Hottest Trends in Outdoor Living
http://www.engage360.me
It"s great to have straight walls with no funky angles, no funky textures, and no funky decisions that need to be made about where to stop - and start - the painting. But that"s rare these days. Whether you have rounded corners and aren"t sure where the paint line begins and ends, chair rails or other molding that you"re not sure what to do with, or a tray ceiling that"s confounding you, we"ve got the tips to help.
How To Handle Tricky Painting Situations
http://www.engage360.me
William asked the following: I currently use QuickBooks online wich work fine for simple accounting and invoice tracking, but I spent a lot of time getting people to pay. I’m interested in moving to a credit card pay system that is more used in the hotel industry. Where the hotel would approve your credit card […]
What Do Real Estate Photographers Do To Minimize Time Spent Getting Their Clients To Pay?
http://www.engage360.me
We couldn’t be more excited watching folks try out Lattice, our new platform to help you discover great photography through collaborative curation.
This month, we’ve invited some of the industry’s leading photo editors, curators, and consultants from Outdoor Magazine, Feature Shoot, The Phoblographer and beyond to curate boards on topics they’re passionate about. Check out the beautiful boards they created below on everything from Austin, Texas to breathtaking aerial shots to the power of connection.
Take a look and get inspired!
The SurfSkateSnow board is curated by marketing and portfolio consultant, Neil Binkley.
Photo by Sarah Lee
Photo editor and founder of ILoveTexasPhoto, Jasmine DeFoore, curated an entire board dedicated to her hometown: Austin, Texas.
Photo by Tod Grubbs
Jason Schneider is Managing Editor at Resource Magazine, and regular contributor to Fstoppers. He curated a board featuring 5 aerial photographers in his board, Aerial Art.
Photo by Paul Lawrence
The Connections board is curated by Amanda Sosa Stone, the Chief Product Officer at Agency Access.
Photo by Rich Frishman
Rodrigo Orrantia, a free lance curator and project manager curated the unique Staring at the Sky board.
Photo by Jim Reed
Be sure to check out the plethora of other boards on Lattice curated by more photo editors, consultants and photographers.
A photographer captures an incredible real photo of a weasel riding the back of a woodpecker in midflight?!?! Plus, gorgeous photos of the American West by Jim Krantz. I Love Photography is our weekly look at all things photographic with Sarah Jacobs and PhotoShelter co-founder Allen Murabayashi and Sarah Jacobs.
Get the podcast: http://bit.ly/ilovephoto
Watch the broadcast: http://bit.ly/ilovephotoyt
For our recent guide, How to Grow A Wedding Photography Business in partnership with Tamron – we spoke to Bryan Caporicci, an award-winning wedding and portrait photographer based out of Fonthill, Canada. He had had no photography experience when he started doing computer work for another photographer more than nine years ago, but he saw a business opportunity, and took it—but then he had to learn how to shoot. Now he excels at both and is the author of the ebook Pricing for Profit and founder of Sprouting Photographer, an educational website and podcast that educates photographers about the business side of being creative.
As a new wedding photographer, how do you begin to develop a pricing system?
There are a bunch of factors that will contribute to where your price should be as photographer. There are subjective considerations and objective considerations. The subjective ones are items like confidence and the quality of work that you’re producing, your perceived value in the marketplace, what your competition charges and what your local market will bear.
There’s no subjective way to price your photography. Those are good things to consider, but none of those give any kind of starting point. So I suggest starting with an objective measurement of your cost of goods. From there you can influence that price with those other factors. It’s a matter of adding up what goes into a particular product or service then marking it up to allow room for your overhead and your ongoing expenses and some profit in your business.
Photo by Bryan Caporicci
A lot of photographers will say, “My 8×10 cost, $2 for my lab and I put some on packaging, so maybe it’s a $5 cost. I’ll multiply that by 3, and therefore my print price is $15.” The problem is that they don’t factor for their time. If you’re pricing an 8×10, you should calculate every single minute that goes into that 8×10 print.
The practice that I teach is literally to record what goes into every single product and service that you do on a piece of paper. If it’s an 8×10 print, you say, “Okay, I spent 5 minutes retouching. I spent 2 minutes ordering it from my lab. I spend 3 minutes getting it back from my lab and packaging it up. I spend 10 minutes with my client when they pick it up.” Let’s say that adds up to be 30 minutes. Then you have to put a price on your time. That’s challenging for a lot of photographers because we’re close to our art. It’s a creative pursuit and so we don’t really like to charge for our time, but, unfortunately, if you want to be sustainable and if you want to run a career and a photography business that’s profitable and able to allow you to make a living, you have to be paid for your time.
The best way to do that is to look at the bigger picture and say, How much do I want to make per year? What would I pay myself if I were an employee of my own company? Let’s say you come up with $60,000 as an annual salary. Then you have to then extrapolate that $60,000 to a per-hour wage. Divide it by 52 weeks, and divide that by 40 hours in a week, and you’ll get your per-hour wage. This example translates to just under $30 an hour.
Photo by Bryan Caporicci
If we go back to the 8×10 example, that means that your cost for your time is about $15. From there you add what the actual material goods cost you. How much is the print? What is the shipping from your lab? How much packaging do you use? In this 8×10 example, let’s say it adds up to be $25. Now, you have to consider marking up the product because we have other expenses. We need a profit margin to actually pay for those things.
How do you figure the profit margin?
A good industry standard that is something that the Professional Photographers of America came up with in their benchmark survey—a 2.85 markup factor. Figure out what that cost of goods is, multiply by 2.85 and that gives you a good, profitable and measurable number that will allow you to pay yourself, pay for your cost and cover all your overhead and expenses and have enough room for profit in your company.
That’s the short version of pricing for profit. This is where, whenever I’m teaching this or if I’m in a podcast or whatever, someone would say, “Okay, so looking at these calculations based on a $25.00 8×10 cost, that means that my price should be $71.25.” Many photographers would balk at the idea of charging close to $75.00 for an 8×10 print, although I don’t think that should be the case. I think that’s a reasonable price for it. For newer photographers that’s very scary.
This gives you a starting point. I’m not saying this is where you have to end up. From there you can use the other factors—quality, perceived value, confidence, what the mar- ket will bear, competition—and you can fudge that number up or down depending on where you are in those different categories.
How do you suggest structuring wedding packages?
I suggest having a couple of different packages. It always makes sense to have a bare minimum package, but you need to price that and present it in a way that you under- stand that you may have people booking and buying that package.
I think this is where a lot of photographers will fall apart because they’ll have their low-ball package, and then they’ll get upset when somebody actually books that package. There are strategies that we can use to steer people away from it, but there will still be some people that will buy that package.
For most photographers, the base package should be something like 7 to 8 hours of coverage, digital files delivered, either on a CD or USB key or via download, and an engagement session. That’s what every couple’s going to want.
Photo by Bryan Caporicci
That’s sort of a bare minimum. Figure out whatever you’re comfortable with. What’s the least amount of coverage you want to do on a wedding day? What’s the least amount of other items that you want to include for a package? Walk through the process of pricing for profit to calculate your cost on that, and then associate a price with that. As you go up in the packages, you can start to include things like extra time, products from the engagement session, print credits or canvases or albums or books.
How many packages or tiers of packages do you find works for clients to choose from?
You should ultimately have three or four packages with varying amounts of items and times and additions. There’s a reason that we have good, better, best in terms of psychology for packages. The only time that I would say not to have three would be if you wanted to have a fourth whopper package. Basically it’s everything and the moon. The whole point of that is not necessarily to have a package that people would book, but to have a package that anchors the price at a high price point so it makes your other packages look much more affordable.
When you’re walking a couple through prices, if you were to say, I’ve got a $2,000 option, a $3,500 option and a $6,000 option, they know your spread is from $2,000 to $6,000. If you instead present the whopper package first, and you include everything that they might ever possibly want and the price is $12,000, you’ve anchored the price in their mind at $12,000. They’re not going to book at $12,000, but now your $6,000 looks very, very reasonable.
Should photographers incorporate “freebies” into these packages or how do you get your customer to feel like they’re getting something extra? 
Anything that discounts your value or that could look like you’re trying to make a price exception does not do well for photographers, because photography is a luxury purchase. No matter how much we want to justify to ourselves that a client needs wedding photography from us, they could just have their uncle bring a camera to the wedding and that would be it.
We can’t be making the reason they book us be price, because there’s always going to be somebody who will beat you with that. Instead of offering freebies or discounts, I love the idea of having value-added services, or value-added products. The things that you can add into it to increase the value of a package or a product or a service, not to decrease the price of it, though.
You could say something like, if you purchase our main package at 8 hours of coverage, you could actually present that as 7 hours of coverage. Then, in the negotiations with the client, say, “I’ll tell you what, I’m going to add in an extra hour of coverage for you guys.” You’ve budgeted for it, so you’re not losing money, and the client feels like they have a little bit of a win.
Photo by Bryan Caporicci
You could also find little things that don’t cost you a lot to sweeten the pot. A little $10 gift card from Starbucks with your booking package would deliver a really nice feeling to the client and show them that you care. You could do little things like that here and there to sweeten the pot and give better service if you wanted to. I’d rather encourage photographers to consider value-added things as opposed to price lowering things.
How do you know when you’ve got your pricing right?
Like everything, there’s going to be a balance. If you book every client that contacts you, that either means that you’re making a really solid value proposition and you’re doing a great job, or it means that your prices are too low. I would say more often than not it’s the latter. If you’re not booking any clients that call you, that’s a sure sign that you’re too expensive. I’ve heard many stories of photographers that completely price themselves out of the market. You go through this process where you kind of get a little bit overly confident about things and you just jump your prices up like crazy, and all the sudden it’s crickets. That’s a dangerous place to be.
If you’re booking 25 to 35 percent of your inquiries, that’s a pretty good conversion rate, and an indication that you’re pretty much in line with where you should be in the market. That’s not to say that you don’t have room to increase your price, but when you increase your price, you have to then also increase you’re value proposition. You need to raise the quality of photography that you make by doing a better job with communicating, by improving your timelines, by marketing better, whatever that is.
Want more tips to help grow your wedding photography business? Download the guide today!
Every week, we compile our favorite photos from Lattice, our new destination for people who love photography. You can use Lattice to discover beautiful images and also curate boards on topics you’re passionate about.
For this week’s post, we are choosing to showcase great use of color in photography. While a lot of color can often make for a beautiful image, using it selectively, and subtly, can also produce wonderful photos. We found these images on boards covering various topics, from Street Photography to Aerial Art.
Check them out:
We begin with this aerial shot of the Golden Gate Bridge by Herb Lingl. On a dark and foggy day, the use of color works very well as it shows the iconic red of San Francisco’s biggest landmark. For more shots from the sky, take a look at this Aerial Art board curated by Jaron Schneider.
Photo by Herb Lingl
Next, we follow a similar palette into Portugal’s streets with this photo by Alberto Bernasconi. The woman’s red skirt, catches the light and matches the red graffiti on the wall, while the sky’s blue is mimicked in the street sign. Check out more great urban shots in this Street Photography board by Aaron Sosa.
Photo by Alberto Bernasconi
We move to Japan and this photo of train cleaners by Cubic Photography. Here, the women’s pink uniforms separate them from their monochromatic surroundings, and the color brings attention to their importance. Go east and explore with the Japan board, curated by Cubic Photography.
Photo by Cubic Photography
Now, we follow the river with this serene photo by Nour El Refai. The green and yellow tones in this foggy scene blend together to resemble a painting, with the two figures in the canoe carefully breaking the stillness. Sit back and relax with the Tranquility board by John Greim.
Photo by Nour El Refai
Finally, we finish with the Canadian sunset in this photo by Carla Pshebylo. The color range from dark orange to light yellow follows the mountains in this image and almost make it seem like a digital rendering. Check out more great photos of Canada in this board by Adam Hill.
Photo by Carla Pshebylo
From the introduction of color in photography with the iconic Kodachrome film, to today’s over-saturated environment, the use of color can be incredibly important in an image. However, it can also be a hindrance, and for those moments, we examined when getting rid of color was the better option, with our post on 5 Lattice Images of Black and White Done Right.
And if you’d like to become a Lattice curator, we’d love to have you. Head on over to Lattice and sign up!
