Business, Startup
Photography Startup – How to start an online business in photography
Every person with a camera is an artist!
for all photographers or photo enthusiasts … and you with the camera.
I have to admit, I was always passionate about photography. However, I have not found the courage to start anything. Yeap a coward!
I have helped friends to start, to rise and fly in the online realm with their own business and I believe they had the courage which only a heart of an artist could be. Brave Artist Hearts!
Background
My experience to get online photo video business started in 2010. For the first time, I had to integrate a fully flagged website dedicated to wedding photography: an online business in photography. The website is adimage and it looks like it stands even today.
More recently I have integrated and introduce some of my friends into the online realm of photography. I will not brag about it, however, some of them need to be mentioned:
Yuli Panayotov FB Page on his alternative web page www.yulipanayotov.co.uk
There are many benefits of having an online presence as a photographer. Your unique name and portfolio will impact your business term search via online medium coming from any possible customer and will increase opportunities, also. Presentation and social delivery in the online environment will increase your audience which is very important as your business is growing. A website should have the following benefits (at least):
- Increase traffic
- Convert visitors to customers
- Online photographic sales: services or affiliates [bust income for the photographer]
How should you start? When? Build from what? Those are the questions and much more will be answered in the next chapters.
Strategy
One of the first steps to consider is the … courage to start. I know is probably the thing you have never thought about it, however, this is your starting point. From there you have two options:
- With portfolio
- Without portfolio
A website without a portfolio, I think this is the easy start. We build a website and promote the services over the web. Networking will do just fine. However, there is a chance to wait too long for the first job to land. With a portfolio, there is something to show and therefore is more appealing to the visitors just because there is something for you to show to your potential customers. Let’s not reconsider completely the … without portfolio option. If you think is worthless well you are wrong because the website will be crawled by the search engines and your presences on the web will not be useless. In the meantime, you can build your portfolio.
Portfolio
As time goes your gallery will grow and you will need to a categorization of your photos. The categorization of the photos should be considered at the stage when the website is built. Of course, if there are no means for categorization or any reasons, you can do it after all. Still, categorization is important. This means we need to identify business overall purpose as a photographer:
- What the photography style we are going to use: photo-journalism? Why not! It’s totally appealing.
- Are we going to photoshoot events?
- If we are going to photoshoot events what kind of events?
You are the artist. You have the camera and therefore you are able to answer all those questions.
Categorisation – Event photographer
Let’s presume that we are Event Photographer. This means we are going to photoshoot events and there can be :
- Weddings
- Concerts
- Portraits
- name it …
Probably you have already a set of photos which you like to show and are not included in the categorization tree. The best option is to include them in a special photography category like Others or Personal Perspective. Use your imagination and build other categories which could more representative of your style like Landscapes, Nature, Birds, etc.
This way we are trying to get the traffic to our website and of course push the website in the search list of the web search engines.
Growing business should consider at some point, categorization carefully because is impacting the SEO. Keywords and content are very important and they play an important role in search engine indexing.
Example
Let’s dive in a typical event website would have the following structure:
Home
Portfolio
Weddings
John & Claire
Chris & Stephanie
Concerts
Portraits
About Me
Style
Kind Words
Prices
FAQ’s
Client Area
Selected client area
Thoughts before closing
Our endeavor can be extended over so many things to talk about.
However, let’s have a look back, to the article and digest the information. I will be writing a part two of this series of articles where I’m talking about:
- Inspirations – how to get inspired and not reinvent the wheel when it comes to the layout of your website?
- Themes and skins for the website – yes this is important also.
- Domain and hosting for the new website – set up the right name which is going to make history.
- Legal documents for photographers – another item to consider and which we are going to discuss in the next part.
Till then I wish you a good reading and … get started.
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