Professional Photo Lab and Photo Printing Blog

Watch as Georgia McCabe leads you through an overview of how professional photographers can use Pinterest to attract new clients and help out their existing base. Learn about the types of boards photographers can set up on Pinterest and more; to find more ways to be accessible and helpful to customers!

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Getting a new contract is great and it gives you a great feeling of accomplishment, but keeping the contracts you already have will provide a solid foundation to your business.  With that in mind, here are some tips to help you successfully keep your present contracts and the cash flow that comes with it.

1) Be sure your contact information is on everything that leaves your office.

• Picture delivery box
• Reorder insert
• Picture envelope
• Web site
• Coaches letter

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There are several types of sports photography and each has different ways to position a bid. Today we’ll let you know what to consider when getting Little League Sports Photography accounts.

A) Make sure to promote that your product provides parents with pictures that allow them to keep a time line of their child’s life.

B) Commission for league. In some larger leagues this is almost a second income.

C) Sponsor and coaches plaques. Many times the cost of these products is built into the package pricing and keeps leagues from reaching into their own pocket to pay for these needs.

D) If you get a league contract, many times a part of the contract is that you agree to shoot special events during the season. A few of these events could be awards night, all star games, opening day events, etc

E) Action photography. (more…)

Georgia McCabe takes us through some useful tips and tricks for optimizing Facebook activities. Interesting ways for navigating Facebook and for getting the most for your efforts. As an author, speaker, trainer and social media and photography evangelist, her perspectives entitled “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Friends…or Enemies” appear in print in the book entitled The Relationship Age, with social media guru Mari Smith. Georgia is a frequent guest blogger for our photo lab.

By now, saying you need to be marketing on social networking sites is like saying “don’t forget to blink.” Everyone knows they need to do it. The opportunity social marketing presents is enormous: the people you know help spread your message to the people they know, vastly expanding your reach. Most social media marketing is free or very low cost, and often — once you set up your accounts or pages — marketing efforts don’t take a lot of time.

The most obvious social sites for marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. MySpace has become less relevant to some audiences — but if your customers are there, then you should be there, too. LinkedIn is important if you’re doing any sort of commercial photography, such as products, ads, corporate portraits or headshots for models or actors. While Flickr is an obvious site for photographers, chances are most of your potential customers can be found on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

All social sites are most effective when used together, as a system. Have a new video on your YouTube channel? Tweet it, update your Facebook status about it, and share it on LinkedIn.

Facebook, of course, is the behemoth of social networks — and therefore, a critical site for marketing. You shoot a wedding, and both you and the bride get the images up on Facebook. Now, your beautiful work is on display in front of all your friends and fans. But more importantly, it’s being shown and touted by the bride — who, like every bride before her, cannot stop talking about her wedding. Instead of telling 5 or 10 people she knows in real life how dazzled she is by your pictures of her special day, she’s now sharing that with her 300 Facebook friends. Some of them are going to need a photographer too — and suddenly, on her recommendation, they’re looking specifically for you.

Social sites are invaluable tools for creating a community and building word-of-mouth sales. They are also excellent delivery vehicles for more direct marketing approaches. Any time you have a press release, a blog post, a new photo gallery, a video, or anything else that can build your audience, you should be using all your social sites to spread the word. Keep in mind, the more valuable the content is to your audience, the more likely it is they will share it with others.

Here are a few specific ideas:

• Make a video of the hottest new trends in senior portraits. Then spread the word that viewers can choose the poses they like best in the video for their upcoming portrait session.
• Send out a tweet offering a portrait discount to any of your Twitter followers who retweet your message within the next 12 hours.
• Do a “smile of the month” contest on Facebook with your latest image gallery (this is a great way to get your clients talking about you on their Facebook pages!)
• Do a series of blog posts on how your clients can take better pictures of their pets.
• Send a tweet every day — or several times a day — on new photo products or photography-related headlines.

With a little thought and creativity, you can create a network of people happy to spread your marketing message for you — to a constantly growing circle of potential clients.

Be sure to check out our other posts on social marketing, including “Boost your Professional Photography Business with Facebook Advertising.”