I just finished reading one of the most inspirational and truly useful books I’ve read in a long time – “Start With Why” by Simon Sinek.

If, like many, you’re finding business difficult or you have that nagging feeling that you might have lost focus on what you’re doing… If you’re struggling with how your business life can find a new purpose… If you can’t understand why some people and businesses are successful and others aren’t… then you are going to love this book.

Simon clearly takes us through the idea that it is not WHAT or HOW we do things that make people want to follow us or buy from us, it is WHY we do it that counts – the underlying philosophy and principles that drive us, if you like.

This book is easy to read, entertaining, enlightening and, above all, inspiring. The principles in themselves are simple, yet profound, and affected me on a very deep level that has changed the way I think and feel about my own photography business.

I buy all my books at Amazon and it helps me a little if you do too. But, wherever you choose to get this book from, I urge you to get it NOW – it will change your life.

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Personal Zen education, encouragement, marketing, review

I came across something the other day that truly changed what I believed about how the business world works.

It also answered a lot of questions that had been buzzing about in my head about why some companies are successful and others are not so successful. Why is it that some businesses enjoy far more success with the same resources and time as their competitors? Why do some brands enjoy loyalty to the point of fanaticism?

Check out this video of Simon Sinek, the author of “Start With Why” to find out the [simple] answer…

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Personal Zen branding, marketing, studio branding

Sometimes I’m not the most organized person in the world (well, okay, more than sometimes), and I actually ran out of business cards a few weeks ago. Since we recently moved the studio from our home to a retail space late last year, I needed to redesign the business card anyway, and have been trying to get around to it.

So, this week, I sat down at the computer and produced a new design that I was fairly happy with (it looks pretty, has all the right information on it, no spelling mistakes etc.), fully intending to send it off to the lab to be printed.

Then, this morning, I opened up the files for one last check, but a single thought stopped me in my tracks:

“Is the business card, as we’ve all come to know and love it, dead or dying?”

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Sales & Marketing business card, marketing, professional photographer, professional photography

“Location, location, location!” – the often-touted necessity for a successful business. But how true is that statement really? I’m not really talking about the fine detail of location here; after all, common sense would dictate that an office located between the city dump, county jail and the water treatment facility might not be a great choice. I’m referring more to the perceived differences between one city and another, or between different parts of the country.

Any photographer that studies or learns from other successful photographers eventually hears or even speaks the objection, “that won’t work in my town!” It’s very tempting to think that most marketing tactics that work in one part of the country simply won’t work in our own locale, for a variety of (false) reasons:

• Our town or city has no people with money
• People are different here
• I live in a bad market
• There’s too much competition in my area

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Sales & Marketing marketing, professional photographer, selling

So many photographers (myself not excluded) have made the mistake at one time or another of ignoring their current clients. Some even make the worse error of referring to them as “past” clients.

The truth is that when someone becomes a client by allowing us to create photographs for them, we ought to treat them as though they are clients for life. They are now an integral part of our business family.

The only way to make sure that these people feel valued and a part of our family is to keep in constant contact with them – but without committing the sins of spamming or making them feel as though we’re constantly trying to sell them something.

So how can we keep in touch with our clients in order to remind them we’re there for them the next time they might be in need of photography services?

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Sales & Marketing client communication, marketing, professional photographer

How many times over the last weeks and months have you heard the word “recession”? Even if we discount those references that might pertain to hair loss, we hear it a lot more than we’d like to. There does not appear to be an economic analogy for Rogaine though… Turn on the TV or the radio, open a current-affairs magazine or newspaper, and the word leaps into our consciousness and sticks there like a limpet.

I actually heard the phrase “we seem to coming out of the recession” recently – but only once. I strongly suspect that the person who said it was taken away somewhere and is spending their days counting salt grains in the depths of an anonymous mine…

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Personal Zen marketing, photographer, professional photography, recession, success

Post Highlights: 

• It’s not enough just to be in business as a photographer
• Marketing is essential to being noticed and building your brand
• Local-based marketing efforts need not be expensive (many of them are FREE!)

I was glancing through the stream of tweets from various photographers yesterday and one in particular caught my eye, and subsequently became the inspiration for this post. The tweet simply said something like, “Sitting here by the phone waiting for a client to call. Perhaps my phone is broken.” This got me thinking about one of the biggest mistakes professional photographers make when trying to build their business…

Kevin Costner was a lucky man, or at least his character Ray Kinsella was in the movie “Field of Dreams”, armed as he was with the now famous mantra, “Build it, and they will come.”

Sadly, the fictional world and the real world are very different things and the concept of building something that will inherently attract its target market like iron filings to a magnet really only applies in one of those worlds. I think we know which one that is.

It’s not the one we live in.

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Sales & Marketing branding, marketing, professional photography

At the risk of giving away my age, I wonder how many readers here remember the famous song by Genesis called “Follow You, Follow Me” from their 1978 album “Then There Were Three”. Of course, Twitter was something birds did in those days, but the title could easily be the theme tune for what we know today as one of the largest social media networking sites on the web.

If you aren’t already using Twitter, or have tried it and wondered what all the fuss is about, you might want to think again. When I first ventured into this strange new world of tweets and followers my first reaction was bewilderment. I simply couldn’t understand why everyone now wanted to text online, as if mobile texting wasn’t enough (blimey, I just realized the word “texting” is now a verb, and wasn’t in my spellchecker). Why, I thought, do all these people need to know that Bob’s cat has fur balls? It seemed like everyone was spreading the totally mundane 140 characters at a time.

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Sales & Marketing marketing, professional photography, social media, twellowhood, twitter

Do you have more Facebook friends than a new lottery winner? Do you tweet more than a caged canary on steroids? If so, then you are obviously on the social media bandwagon and loving it, which is supposed to be a good thing for our photography businesses, right?

Well, yes it’s a great thing, but…

As with everything useful in life, there’s usually a “but” that puts a wrench in the works. Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with friends, family and clients (but please don’t tell us all what you’re having for dinner – we really don’t care), and it’s a wonderful place to showcase our work, perhaps in the hope of it going at least a teeny bit viral when our clients share it with their friends.

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Sales & Marketing copyright, facebook, marketing, photo-sharing, viral

If you earn your living from pointing your camera at people (or things) and creating photographs, you might disagree with the rather odd-sounding title of this post. If I listen carefully I can hear you protesting your innocence – “of course I’m a photographer – I take photographs all day of weddings, families, products, children seniors etc. My camera has practically become a part of my body and would need to be surgically removed to get it away from me…”

I understand totally but, sorry, you are still not a photographer – not if you earn a living from your camera; not if photography is your primary source of income.

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Sales & Marketing marketing, professional photographer, selling, success

I encourage anyone working as a photographer to check out the new blog by Mr. Charles J. Lewis. I have been a student of Chuck’s now for about two years and have found his teachings to be solid and based soundly on proven experience. One thing is certain - I would not be in business as a photographer right now if it wasn’t for Chuck, and I know of many others who can say the same.

If you’re looking for information on the latest gear, the newest Photoshop tip or what f-stop to use, Mr. Lewis’ blog may not be for you… but, if you’re interested in the business of being a photographer, marketing & selling then I would advise you to hurry on over to http://www.cjlewis.com/blog/ as fast as your mouse will get you there…

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Photography Business Ideas blog, charles lewis, education, marketing, professional photographer, selling

Unless you’ve been away on an extended expedition to another galaxy, you should be aware of the recent and rapid rise of social media networking – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, MySpace and so on.

Everyone agrees that social media is the latest and greatest way to connect with our niche markets – following the adage “go where your customers are.” In contrast to traditional marketing methods, social networking is a method of directly engaging our market by contributing to the flow of conversation and sharing their lives.

For example, consider trying to market yourself at a cocktail party. How could you go about that? You might cruise the room, handing out brochures to everyone you see. Perhaps you could hang a huge banner on the wall, advertising your services. Or, you could engage your target market in real-time by listening to the conversations and joining in with those that catch your interest or provide the best opportunity to make productive connections. In a social scenario, it’s pretty obvious which of these strategies would be the most effective.

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Sales & Marketing facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, networking, photography, social media, twitter