I shared this quick photography sales tip with my email subscribers yesterday, but got so many replies that I thought I would also share it here on the photography business and marketing blog, together with some extra thoughts that I’ve had since then.
In the course of my work as a photography coach, I have the privilege of speaking to a lot of photographers each week, from all over the world, and one of the common themes I hear is:
I can’t get my prospects to say “yes” to hiring me…
- Are you having trouble getting clients to say “yes” to you? As a photography coach, I’ve found that many photographers are having difficulty in sales – when the answer is to get the clients to say “yes” to themselves first…
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Sales & Marketing
motivation, photography business, photography coach, photography sales
A quick tip from the photography coach for today, as a result of a very interesting conversation I had yesterday with a coaching client. Have you formulated your goals for 2012 yet? Did you actually commit those goals to paper, so that you can look at them in black & white and know that they are real aspirations for the future, not just pipe dreams? Are you doing what you love, and love what you’re doing?
When you look at that paper, with your desired achievement staring back at you, does it make you feel a little scared perhaps? Do you feel a small shiver of doubt that you might not realize your goal and that you might fail instead? How does that feeling sit with the idea that you love what you’re doing so much, that you couldn’t possibly bear to stop?
Of course, the answer very much depends on how realistic your goals are, but I’ll assume for the sake of this post that you did indeed set yourself the task of achieving something feasible. It doesn’t have to be easy – in fact, it’s much better if it requires a stretch out of your comfort zone, but not so much of a stretch that you can’t make it if you just try hard enough…
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Personal Zen
motivation, photography business, photography coach, photography success
Today’s post is a relatively short one for a change, but no less important for it. As you probably know if you read this blog regularly, I’m very passionate about one major idea:
In order to be competitively successful, the professional photographer in business today must understand the fundamental reasons WHY they do what they do…
Read on for a great example of this in practice, and for an opportunity for a specially chosen professional photographer (i.e. YOU) to be featured here on the photography business and marketing blog.
What's your motivation for being a professional photographer?
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How To Be A Professional Photographer
creativity, motivation, professional photographer, professional photography
How long have you been in the photography business? One year? Twenty years? Or, are you just starting out and want to know how to be a professional photographer? Whether you’re new to the industry or a seasoned veteran, there’s one very important idea regarding success that you should be familiar with:
Success comes through the application of focused and determined persistence.
You’ve seen others succeed because of it, or you’re still in business because you’ve been persistent yourself; either way, this is a quality that nobody who is successful in business can be without!
If persistence is not in your nature, and you’re unable to get out of bed every day ready to take on the world and all its challenges (because, believe me, there will be many) then you might want to rethink your strategy of running your own small business…
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How To Be A Professional Photographer
motivation, persistence in business, photography business, success
If the old adage of “you are what you eat” is true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t at least partially true, then I would probably constitute a significant commercial source of chocolate ice cream. However, food is not the topic of this post, but rather the content of our own minds. So, putting our opening adage aside, one thing I do believe to be very true is this statement:
We are the sum total of what we feed into our mind…
Whether or not we realize it, our mind is a hungry beast indeed, feeding and digesting everything around it in a silent frenzy. Our subconscious mind, the one responsible for most of our inspiration, emotions, dreams, gut feelings, and (ultimately) our success or failure, never rests or sleeps.
Constantly at work, our subconscious mind has all the emotional sense of a computer, indiscriminately processing and analyzing both negative and positive data equally…
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How To Be A Professional Photographer
inspiration, motivation, napoleon hill, positive attitude, success, think & grow rich
Why are so many of us scared of setting goals for the future? After all, it’s hard to imagine someone deliberately setting a goal they didn’t actually want to reach. If we assume that most photographers have at least some ideas of realistically achievable goals, why is it that so few fail to set any real objectives for themselves or their photography business?
Following Through Is The Important Part
I think it’s fair to say that a reasonable percentage of photographers would consider setting at least one major life goal or business goal. In fact, many of them do just that by adopting a New Year’s resolution. However, having decided upon an end result and then consciously deciding to go after their desired outcome, too many develop cold feet and back away from the challenge when the specter of their subconscious programming rears its ugly head with all those negative and limiting thoughts we’re so familiar with; “I’m not good enough…”, “I’m not smart enough…”, “It would never work anyway…” and so on.
The funny part is that those limiting thoughts then become, in the mind of the person having them at least, a perfectly reasonable justification for not setting or pursuing the result they desire in the first place!
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Personal Zen
business success, motivation, setting goals
Do you sometimes have a problem maintaining a positive outlook? Do the minutiae of day-to-day routines sap your creative energy? Do you find yourself feeling exhausted, drained and less than optimistic even when you aren’t busy or nothing much is happening? Are you often left with an inexplicable feeling of helplessness in your photography business?
You Are Not Alone!
If you answered “yes” to any of the above questions, then you might be experiencing what I’ve come to call “life in a vacuum”. This is that awful place we can find ourselves in where business & life seem to slow to an imperceptible crawl; we feel that nothing ever gets done, and the achievement of our goals seems far out of reach.
Life in a vacuum can result in feelings of depression, lack of energy, waning enthusiasm, or a sense of “what is this all for?” It’s not a pleasant place to be in.
Having found myself there many times in the past, sometimes for extended periods, I can speak from experience when I say that no one ever wants to be here, but it can be a very tough situation to break out of!
The good news is that you are not alone, and many of us feel exactly the same way from time to time. More importantly, there are ways to escape…
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Photography Business Ideas
coping with negativity, motivation, positive attitude, success
I’m going to start off today’s post by having you ask yourself a question… “Why did you want to be a professional photographer?” Was it something you knew you always wanted to do, or did you (like many of us) come into the business later in life, having first tried working for other people?
I belong to the latter group, having spent almost 20 years working as a computer programmer, systems analyst and project manager for various corporations in the UK and, finally, in Bermuda. Although I really enjoyed the challenges, I found myself with the increasing feeling that something was missing in my life, and I longed for work that was more satisfying on an emotional level than writing computer programs. I needed something more gratifying to my soul than a well-written piece of computer code. This was quite scary to someone who had spent their whole life involved in science and technology, because I felt as though I was turning into, of all things, an artist…
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I ended up leaving the world of IT to make the radical change of becoming a professional underwater photographer. After several amazing years of working in the Red Sea and the Caribbean, I moved to the US to open what you might consider to be a “real” photography business.
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How To Be A Professional Photographer
e-myth, motivation, photography business, success
This is another follow on post to the “12 Ingredients For A Magic Pill In Your Photography Business” (read Part I and Part II), this time exploring the idea that we need to remove our mental boundaries in order for us to move forward into the success we can achieve for ourselves.
Let me begin by stating that I firmly believe success is not a rare commodity, available only to an especially select few. It is readily available for all of us, and that all we need to do is simply reach out and grasp it. There was a time when I would have disagreed with that statement, citing the reasons that life is hard, there’s a recession on, no one wants to spend money, there’s too much competition, I’m not that good a salesperson, my marketing isn’t good enough, and so on…
In reality, these so-called “reasons” are nothing more than excuses thrown up by our own subconscious programming, designed to keep us precisely where we are by preventing us from taking the necessary steps to progress out of what we might consider our comfort zone.
Don’t believe me? Then let’s consider a simple thought experiment…
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Photography Business Ideas
motivation, photography business, positive attitude, success
Recent posts have outlined the “12 Ingredients For A Magic Pill in Your Photography Business” (read Part I and Part II), and I thought it would be useful to explore each of those 12 secrets in a little more depth, starting with number 1: “Eliminate Negativity”.
What Does This Have To Do With Photography?
Of course, “getting rid of the negative” doesn’t mean, “stop using film and go digital…” but it has to do with our photography business nonetheless.
The ideas presented here can apply equally well to any business circumstance or, indeed, to any aspect of our lives. While you won’t see any mention of apertures, shutter speeds and focal length, or any debate on whether Nikon cameras are better than Canon cameras, the concepts contained herein are at least as important, if not more so, than the technical elements of photography.
After all, it really doesn’t matter how much gear you have in your camera bag if you have no one to point your lens at, since the only way you are going to have someone to photograph is if your marketing is effective. The power of your marketing is a direct result of your own personal attitude to life and your business, which has everything to do with whether your thoughts are more positive or negative.
So, yes, the idea of eliminating negativity does have a lot to do with your business, and its ultimate success or failure…
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Personal Zen
motivation, photography business, positive attitude, success
There are so many passionate and talented photographers out there working today, including YOU. I know that many of you struggle every day to ensure that you don’t lose sight of the passion that constantly drives you to become a better photographer than you were yesterday… but…
Being A Professional Photographer Is Not Easy
You and I both know this to be true. Running a business, any business, where we have to pour our hearts and souls into what we do for our clients, is difficult. It’s a daily challenge; we test ourselves from the moment we wake up in a morning until we fall asleep that night, often mentally and physically exhausted from the effort we put into our work.
Sometimes, we don’t see the immediate results of those efforts. I don’t mean the photographs, as we edit them in Photoshop or Lightroom; I don’t mean the finished prints, the canvas wall portraits, or completed wedding books…
I’m referring, of course, to the look in our client’s eyes when she sees and feels the fruits of our labors for the first time. I’m thinking of the tears of joy as she looks at the portrait of her child, or the smile she gives us as she says a simple, “thank you”…
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Personal Zen
business success, motivation, positive attitude
My thought experiment for today is, “What does it mean as a human being to be in business, and where does the human factor fit in with our marketing?” This is an interesting question that stirs up some of the mud at the bottom of our deep-seated preconceptions about business and our place in the world…
“Welcome To The Machine”
Apart from being a great song from the 1975 album, “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd (playing now as I write this, actually), this simple statement embodies the collective notion of “The Corporation” as an entity devoid of what many have historically considered to be the weaker elements of emotion, empathy, compassion, integrity and humility.
This idea of the corporation as a machine was born out of the industrial revolution and the great factories it spawned, each operated by masses of expendable people. The human element was mostly eliminated or repressed at every level, from the machines on the factory floor on up to the financially driven masterminds sitting on the board…
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Personal Zen
authenticity, business and marketing, motivation, social media
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