Running your own professional photography business is both loads of fun and somewhat of a challenge. The fun is that you’re working and making money at something you love doing – photography. The challenge is that operating a professional photography business is an actual business, meaning most of what affects businesses of all types will affect yours, too.
A typical challenge for a professional photography business is keeping everything going once it’s started. I’m talking about profits, reputation, customer base, and so forth. In other words, how do we boost our professional photography business?
This guide seeks to answer that very question!
Table of Contents:
- Starting a Professional Photography Business
- Networks Create Lasting Relationships
- Advertising Your Professional Photography Business
- Partner with a Great Service Provider
- Expand Your Offerings
Starting a Professional Photography Business
Photo by Rawpixel.com via Shutterstock
One of the first steps in boosting your professional photography business is to ensure it’s started appropriately. You can be an LLC, a partnership, a sole proprietor, or a corporation, but one way or another, the legal, tax, and insurance requirements should be met early on.
While some things may not be required by law, they are certainly a priority for businesses, such as insurance. I like to point out often that once you start taking payment of any kind for your photography, even if not monetary compensation but some sort of bartering agreement, then your homeowners, renters, or personal automobile insurance stops covering you for damages and liability when you’re engaging in that work.
This can be disastrous for a small professional photography business. You may be accepting only very hit-and-miss gig work or be operating as a part-time contractor or any other arrangement. Still, you can get great insurance coverage for all of these scenarios.
Photo by fizkes via Shutterstock
It doesn’t cost much, either. Being adequately covered also gives you great peace of mind, plus it looks good to tell a potential client that you’re covered. Coming across clearly at the start as the professional you know you are is a good boost to business.
Depending on where you are and what type of business organization you’ve decided on, things that probably are required by law are registering as a business and considering all the tax issues. If you don’t have a company name and are doing business as your personal name, you still should cover all these bases.
Thankfully, for most of us, all of the questions and variables of this can be handled online. As with insurance, having everything set up and properly arranged can boost your business from the beginning, giving your professional photography business legitimacy. Being legit definitely opens doors.
Networks Create Lasting Relationships
Photo by Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock
Networking is a good method for creating business and for boosting it. What networking does for a professional photography business is get you into places you may not have access to otherwise, literally and metaphorically.
An example of networking that can be applied to many types of professional photography businesses is as a wedding photographer, teaming up with other professionals in the wedding industry. A florist, a wedding planner, a dressmaker, a food caterer, a venue manager, all of these could be good people or businesses to network with.
Take any photography you do, and there will be non-photographic companies that could be networked. You generally offer something of value to their customers for coming to you from that business, and they likewise do the same for you.
Photo by Ira Lichi via Shutterstock
Going back to that wedding photographer example, an excellent way to implement networking is to give that wedding planner a special photography package for only their clients. This boosts your business by giving you access to their clients that you may not have found otherwise.
The wedding planner could also give your existing clients a special discount or upgrade. Everyone benefits! Again, adjust the particulars by what type of professional photography business you’re running and promote the networking for maximum boost potential.
Keep Reading: Essential Tips for Earning Passive Photography Income
Advertising Your Professional Photography Business
Photo by BongkarnGraphic via Shutterstock
How does a potential customer know you have a professional photography business? Some form of advertising is necessary. In a lot of photography, clients can be found all over. You may be entirely locally based, but you will still want to be visible to more than only those who see your business card on the grocery store bulletin board.
For more and more professional photographers, being online is vital to boosting your customer base and bottom-line profits. Online can mean different things to different photography businesses. You might be talking to people through social media accounts, running email campaigns, or have a website for your professional photography business. Check out more advertising tips for photographers in the video below by Matthew Anderson
Whatever method you choose, engaging with potential clients is critical to being effective. If your website has a blog, update it regularly, ask for subscribers, and give them something to look forward to. Respond to comments left on your social media posts. Also, be quick to reply to email and phone messages.
Postal mail campaigns, flyers, business cards, and signage for your physical location can also be effective advertising methods. Don’t neglect physical items for your networking contacts, either. A nice enlargement of your photos on their wall is a powerful advertising tool. A photo book is another great option.
Partner with a Great Service Provider
Since we’ve already brought up physical photography items several times, it’s obvious that physical products will likely be a part of your professional photography business model. We could be selling fine art prints, making wall art of family portraits, offering photo packages, or delivering product photography digitally. Having something real to show can boost our business.
Perhaps our business model relies on delivering a physical photography product, such as photo books, wall art, or photo gifts. We’ll want a good idea of the quality and pricing of whoever we use to make these items.
A printing company should be easy to work with, have great customer service, be reasonably priced, make superb prints and other items, and ideally cater to you as a professional photography business.
Shiny Prints hits a home run on all of those criteria. The team at Shiny Prints makes some of the best metal prints I’ve ever seen. See what I mean in the video above!
From the quality of construction to the depth of detail to the color accuracy, each metal print I’ve gotten from Shiny Prints has been spot-on gorgeous. And that’s exactly what you want to deliver to your clients – a gorgeous print that brings the image you worked so hard to create to life.
What I appreciate about Shiny Prints the most is that the specialize in metal prints. There’s no mucking about with tons of different substrates or products. Instead, the Shiny Prints team has honed their skills over the years to be among the very best metal print companies today. When your reputation and the quality of your work depends on the printers you work with, you dang sure want to know that they have your back. Shiny Prints most certainly does!
Expand Your Offerings
Expanding what you do or offer photographically will boost your professional photography business. Let’s go back to the wedding photographer mentioned earlier as an example of how this can work for you.
Instead of only offering a small variety of photographic products in a photo package, such as a photobook and a wall print or two, make available some of the specialty items that the service provider you’ve partnered with makes. That will boost your business in profit dollar amounts and increase your perceived value and reputation.
Consider this as well, going back to that wedding photographer example. He’s getting a workout today! There are some times of the year when regular business lags. What can be done with any professional photography business model is branch out…
That wedding photographer could offer portraits, maternity photography, boudoir photography, or headshots. Another tack is to have something well removed from that genre of photography for sale as wall art prints, such as landscape photography images. Printed from a great service provider like Shiny Prints, sometimes these items seem just to sell themselves!
Try out these essential tips to effectively boost your professional photography business, and let us know how they worked for you!
A quick heads-up: If you snag something through our affiliate links or check out our sponsored content, we might earn a commission at no extra cost to you. But fear not, we’re all about recommending stuff we’re truly stoked about!
Learn More:
- The Pros and Cons of Offering Photography Packages vs. A La Carte Pricing
- What Types of Images Look Best on a Metal Print?
Hero photo by Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock
