In this photography business Q&A session, I share the answers to a few questions asked on Instagram. Hit play below or scroll down to read the post.
Read the video transcript:
1. “What is your tip for somebody who is predominantly an outdoor shooter, they photograph families outdoors and they want to start to transition into more in home work?”
What I‘m going to leave you with today is the number one rule across the board (this covers any kind of transition you want to make):
You have to photograph what it is that you want to shoot, and you have to only show that online.
If you don’t want to only do that thing, if you want to mix it into what you’re currently doing, you need to show a lot of it on a regular basis.
So, in order to get images where you have families indoors, you have to do one of two things.
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A model call (not a giveaway). A model call is where you intentionally vet people. You are interviewing people to see if they are a good fit for what you need. I would do three to five of them, so that you have a solid body of work where you are photographing people at home and you are intentionally doing it in a way that matters to you so that you are getting work that you can market.
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Another option would be to reach out to any families that are already on your calendar for the future, or who are longtime supporters of your business. Reach out to them and say “Hey, I want to start doing in-home work. I don’t have any practice or any images to share and I need marketing material. Can I photograph your family at home?”
Those are the two things I recommend. Yes, they both entail working for free. Yes, it is absolutely necessary to do this.
If you want to transition from one type of work to another type of work, it doesn’t matter what they are. You have to do free work so that you have a marketing budget. You cannot get out there on the internet and say I‘m photographing people in home and think that, that, that you’re going to have your email inbox flooded with people who want to do that when you’ve never shown an in home image before. You have to put out what you want to get in. So the more in home images you share on your social media feed, the more requests for in home work you are going to get.
2. “I have spent the last few years focusing on having babies and raising babies and my business has been on the back burner. I feel like I need to relaunch, what should I focus on first? “
I want you to spend some really solid time kind of mapping out what your goals and your intentions for your business are. Where do you want to be? How many sessions do you want to shoot a month? What type of sessions are they? What kind of clients are you working with? What are you not willing to do? What are your rates? What kind of support system or support staff do you need? What kind of things do you need to outsource and offload so that you can make this work? How many hours a week will you have to really pour into this?
The next thing I want you to do is pick a hard date for relaunch. You’re going to need time to intentionally plan everything out. Then, you need to make a timeline from now until then. What are you working on every day, every week? What are things that you want to get done?
So, you’re doing all this prep work and then when you do your relaunch, make a big deal out of it.
More importantly than any of that is intentional planning. Where do you want your business to go and what steps do you need to take to get there? It’s two totally different statements to say, “I want to have brought in $25,000 by the end of 2022 in photography business”, compared to “I want to have worked with 25 of my ideal clients, photographing them in home and they all order product at the end of their session.” The second one is a very explicit statement with parameters around it. Dictating what you’re doing, who you are, who you’re serving and all of those things.
I would really look into some education options in the first quarter. Either hiring a mentor, taking a course, joining something or other, just to really help that intentional dig deep and to have somebody come alongside you and do it together.
If you are interested in getting on my weekly subscribers list I would love to have you! I send out a Monday morning newsletter called Lifestyle Lessons and it has 3-4 tips, tricks or pieces of information. Easy Peasy.
