Photography Business Seminar

Sponsors

Pancakeapp Invoicing

How to create your pricing

Know your market

What is the average value of photographers work in your area? Compare and contrast and decide where your work can fit in. Don’t forget to evaluate your service, quality of imagery, and professionalism.

Considering Multiple BrandsThis depends on a number of factors. For example, if you’re a glamour,

then it might make more sense to go with a single brand and play off its well-deserved reputation in seeking both assignments and stock sales. Most shooters, however, don’t enjoy that kind of status, and for them it could make more sense to build one brand based on assignments, while a separate brand weddings.

How you answer the phone, what you wear when you meet with clients and prospects, the design of your work, whether or not you are punctual and meet deadlines and, of course, your photography all result in an overall impression of you and your business. That is your “brand.”

Know your client

Some people would rather pay more for a service if it means higher quality. Some people cannot afford anything but the basics. Determine what clients you want to reach and begin arranging your price structure from here.

Evaluate your investment

How much time to you put into a portrait shoot? A wedding? Evaluate hours of prep, driving, shooting, editing, development, service, quality, and interaction. When you have an idea of your hours of investment per shoot, divide your price by this number. How much are you really making by the hour? What is your return on investment?

Determine your expenses

Every photographer has expenses above and beyond the time spent in a shoot. This is where many photographers fall short of “making it” in the business; they have not learned to identify the additional expenses of running this business outside jobs.

Equipment costs. Time spent. Services. Presentation and packaging. Insurance. Unless your jobs can cover this overhead, you will be hurting for a

way to increase your income. Add up this number to get a ball park figure of additional coverage from your jobs.

Establish your jobs

Total your hourly rate, and your expenses. This is the number you need to shoot for when pricing your work. After you have totaled this number, divide it by how many jobs you would like per year. This final number is what you ought to charge for your sessions and shoots. Of course, you may need to adjust your pricing more or less, or increase the number of jobs you aim for. At this rate, you will be able to target the pricing of your work to maximize your overall profitability.

Branding why is it important

1. LOGO: It’s hard to argue against the importance of a logo. In non-visual fields it’s often what buyers first identify with in a brand. In the photo industry it plays second fiddle to your images, but it’s still an important visual cue and tie-together for your clients. Also watermarking your work is very important (questions)

2. Build relationships! This is so important for photographers to understand. Building lasting relationships with existing clients can lead to more clients (aka their friends and family), which will save you money on Marketing! A happy client will come back to you and want you to shoot their next portraits, birthdays, weddings, family photos, etc. Building relationships will also help bring in new customers without spending a fortune on marketing and trying to locate new customers. Be consistent by delivering value and the experience to all your clients all the time. Be quick at replying to customers and getting back with them. Make sure each client leaves the photo shoot thrilled and happy with how it went.

Branding who is your client?

What is your ideal client. Many people say this, but it’s because it works. What do they do for a living? Where do they live? What are their interests and hobbies? This may sound silly but the more you define that person the more you can figure out just where your target market is. My first time around I had done this step but I still had a huge disconnect between that person and my brand, it was because I wasn’t targeting my brand enough.

Create a Slogan

It’s best to do this after you have have a very clear understanding of your target market and your brand for your photography business. Then it becomes a game of trying to convey your message in as short of a slogan as possible, but it needs to tell the prospective client exactly what you want it to.

It’s definitely a brainstorm session, the more time you take to write down different ideas the more you will fine tune it and come up with something that fits.

Since doing these two things, finding my target market and setting my branding, I have seen so much more interest in my photography business.

Software

Website Joomla (free) or Wix (paid) FaceBook (personal and Fanpages) Tumblr Instagram 500px Flickr Proofs ZenPhotos (free) Invoicing Pancakeapp ($49 unlimited)

What is PancakeApp

Simple, Easy, Awesome Business Suite! Pancake is your app for invoicing and

billing clients online.Manage your projects from proposal to payment.

What can Pancake do for you?

Online Invoicing

Invoice clients like it ain't nothing and get back to doing something work! After all, you just want to get paid right?

Send invoices with one clickOnce you've created your invoice, it's

super easy to send a customized email to your client with a link to their invoice. They can then pay it immediately, no waiting, just paid.

Project Management

Generally Project Management is probably the least interesting part of your day, but Pancake does a great job of making it quick and easy. You won't see any Gantt charts in here, just simple milestones, tasks and time tracking, which can be turned into invoices with one click!

Keep track of your tasksTame the beast! With simple to use project

management, keep track of what's important - getting tasks accomplished. When those tasks are done you can mark them as complete to show progress!

Time Tracking

You might tell yourself you'll remember how much time you've spent, or you might have a whole application specifically for time tracking, or even use a dashboard widget. Stop all of that and use Pancake's crazy-simple timer, built right into your tasks!

Use the timer to track your time easily Track time spent on a task with a start /

stop timer that is smart enough to deal with you going offline for a bit.

Online Proposals

Win new business like a super hero! Pancake Proposals allows you to create awesome, gorgeous proposals swiftly and without hassle. Your client can view the proposal online and download a PDF of the proposal, accept it on the spot and get on with it!

Send proposals to your clientSend links to the proposals to your client and see when they

view them. The client can then accept or reject the proposal, giving you a chance to update things and send it again. You can keep doing that dance until an agreement is reached, without having to scramble around trying to find old emails.

Drag and drop proposal builderPancake hates complicated interfaces, so Proposals are

ridiculously easy to work with. Click around to insert text, WYSIYG content, estimates and new sections or pages. You can drag and drop stuff around to re-order it.

Client Access Area

Clients can be crazy and needy, we get that! Through a simple interface you can interact with your clients, show progress and hours logged on tasks, share files for approval, brainstorm ideas as well as allow them to view all their invoices and proposals. Pancake makes CRM easy!

Give your clients access to their own dashboardOnce a client is logged in they can see everything that is

going on in one place. They will stop pestering you for progress reports because they can see exactly what is happening.

Your client and only your clientHaving your client spy on your every move is handy, but

allowing others to see this however would be bad news. The Kitchen (Client Access Area) is protected with a password so your information can be kept secret.

File Delivery

Everyone can use some muscle! Why sit around waiting for your client to pay, just so you can email them files. When they pay... Pancake will deliver the files for you! It's like a nicer, friendlier file hostage situation.

Attach files for deliveryWhen you create an invoice for a client you can attach files

to that invoice. As soon as the invoice is marked as paid Pancake will provide your client with a download link so they can download them.

Stop waiting for payment!So this Friday night - rather than waiting for payment - send

your client their invoice and then go to that Justin Bieber concert you were so excited about... or drink beer. Your choice. Whatever you do, you don't have to wait on your client.

So, so much more.

There's just so much that Pancake can do, here's some more for you to peruse.

Self HostedPancake lives on your server, not ours and unlike a hosted

service there are no limits to what you can do with it. Pancake has a very simple installer and takes just a few minutes to get up and running.

Super CustomizableThey designed Pancake to be really easy to customize. This

means you can make it look exactly like the rest of your brand. No more having to use templates that look like everyone else out there, customize the theme to fit your needs :D

(Questions before Video)

PancakeApp DEMO Video