Are you a photography business owner looking for music to place on your photography business website?  Many photography website templates (especially flash ones) allow you to upload mp3 files that will play on your website pages.  This may sound like a great idea, especially if you like music and have some great songs that you would like to upload.  However, here are a few considerations to keep in mind before you upload…

Musical Tastes

Not everyone has the same musical taste as you.  In fact, it is highly likely that they don’t .  Consider all the types of music out there today from Top 40 to Hip Hop, to Country.  Now what do you like?  What are the chances that your website visitors will like the same thing?  It is highly unlikely.  The more likely response is that they will not appreciate the music near as much as you do.

Quiet is Bliss

When you are using the internet, what else are you often doing? For many people browsing the internet takes place in an office with other workers, at home with the TV or radio playing or maybe while you are talking with someone else or on the phone.  So if suddenly you are in one of these situations and a loud song starts emanating from your speakers it may surprise you, your co-workers, your friends, etc.  You will probably reach for the speaker mute button as soon as you can.  You might even close the website to quell the sudden noise. This is a natural reflex but it surely is not what you want to encourage from your website visitors.

Royalty Issues

Another item to consider is the legality of placing music on your website.  Most of the time this is actually outside your rights based on the license granted when you purchased the music.  If you just ripped the music from a CD, then in essence you are replaying the music for an audience which is an illegal use of the music.  In order to get around this, you must either purchase a license which enables you to play the music on your website or you must upload only royalty free music.  A google search can take you to many places where you can find royalty free music, but it will not include the popular tunes today and will likely consist mostly of instrumental tracks.  So while you will at least be legal, you probably won’t like the selection of music available.

The upside of music

Okay so we just went over some of the issues with using music on your photography website. So what is the upside? Well if your visitor likes the music, they may enjoy listening while they browse your picture gallery.  Will this make them more likely to book a session?  I have no proof that it will.  It may, but I wouldn’t bet my business on it.

The Bottom Line

So as you can probably guess, my recommendation is to avoid putting music on your photography business website.  There is just too much of a downside in lost or annoyed visitors to justify the few positive reactions that you may receive.

Creating a photography website can be very intimidated to the photography business owner.  Typically as photographers, we have a great eye for design, patterns and color so our first inclination is to make a website that appeals to our visual nature.  However, little attention is paid to the actual purpose of the website which eventually leads to a beautiful but ineffective website.

The purpose of this article is to help the home based or studio based photography business owner to establish an effective website.  First of what is the definition of an effective website for your business?

In short, an effective website for a photography business is one that:

1. Brings in new clients
2. Helps retain current clients
3. Screens out bad clients

If you already have a website and it is not doing each of those three things, then it is time for a major overhaul.  All of these three objectives are easily achievable.  In fact new technology on the internet makes it easier than ever to reach new clients and stay in touch with your current clients.

There are also a few other considerations to keep in mind when building your website.  These will make your life a whole lot easier and save you a lot of money.  These consideration are:

Easy to update

If it is difficult to update your website, then you will never do it. Anything that takes too much time is the first thing to go when things get busy and you can’t afford to have a website that is more pain than profit.   But when you have a site that is easy to update, it will always have fresh new content for your current clients to look at.  This will help them return to you again and again.

Inexpensive

Most small business owners don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a website. Nor do they have hundreds of dollars to spend each month on maintaining it.  The good news is that it is possible to build a highly effective website for very little money up front.  I have never built a site that cost more than $200.  In many cases, there was no upfront cost at all except for the hosting fee.  And by choosing the right webhost your monthly cost for webhosting will be less than the price of a single movie ticket.

Professional Appearance

Putting out a bad first impression is worse than no impression at all. So your website needs to present an appearance that impresses your potential clients. Now above I mentioned that photographers often make the mistake of spending all their time on the website design and none on the marketing effectiveness.  So why here do I say that the design is important?  Well  you are in the photography business which is a highly visual enterprise.  So you don’t want to come across as amateur by having a poorly designed and ugly website.  Luckily it is easy to have a great looking site without losing any of the marketing effectiveness.

Engages the visitor

When you visit a website how long is your average stay?  It is probably less than 10 seconds.  This is about average.  So you can see how important it is to grab your visitors attention and provide them what they want quickly and easily.  If your website visitor has to endure endless animations, slow-loading images, or a splash page you are essentially driving them away.

Tracks Results

The single most important item in successful businesses is the ability to track what works.  By knowing how and why people are visiting your site, you will be able to capitalize on trends and increase visitors. All of which means more clients for you! This is actually very easy using a free tool put  by Google called Google Analytics. By inserting a small piece of code on your site you are able to see how visitors arrived at your site, what areas they visited and where the left.  This is invaluable in targeting your marketing campaign.

So there are a few considerations and rules to live by in setting up your photography business website.  I wish you the best success in your business endeavors!

If you are interested in owning your own photography business then it is well advised to develop a photography business plan. This is particularly true if you need to raise funds for capital expenses such as building rent/lease or purchase. It is also a good idea to create a business plan even if you are not looking for capital because it can help solidify the vision for your business and help you to set realistic goals.

So what are the key criteria for a business plan?  There is no standard format for all business plans but I have provided a sample outline below that worked well for me.  You can adjust it to suit your own situation. The key is to provide a solid well-defined plan that addresses the key issues of profitability and risk.

1. Executive Summary- An overview of the pertinent facts found later in the document.
2. Objectives – List of your business objectives.  Market share goals, type of services offered, client list size, revenue, etc.
3. Mission – Mission statement for your business.
4. Keys to Success – Critical tasks to accomplish in order to achieve your objectives. Examples include establishing online presence, outsourcing retouching, reaching new client base, etc.
5. Company Summary – Brief overview of history and current state of business.
   1. Company Ownership – Who owns the business and under what type of ownership?  Sole proprietorship, LLC, etc.
   2. Start-Up Summary – Description of initial start-up costs and how capital was raised (if needed.)
   3. Locations – Description of studio location (if any). In the absence of a dedicated building, describe how shoots are completed on-location.
6. Products and Services – Description of products and services offered.  Include general costs such as session fees, package ranges,etc.
7. Technology – Description of technology required such as cameras, lighting, photo processing software.
8. Market Analysis Summary – Overview of market. This information can often be found at your city’s website.  Include information such as median household income, family size, age, etc.
   1. Market Segmentation – What age(s) are you targeting?   How will you reach that market?
   2. Competition – Who is your competition?  What is their size?  What do they offer?
   3. Value Proposition – How will you provide value to your customers?  What will set you apart?
   4. Marketing Strategy – How will you reach your target audience?
   5. Competitive Edge – What sets you apart from your competition? Why will you succeed?
9. Management Team – Describe the owner(s) and their management and technical experience. This is a mini-resume in a paragraph form.
10. Staff – If you have staff workers, you can insert their responsibilities here.
11. Financial Plan – Include the following financial information:
    1. Income and Expense – Provide data  for current year and past year
    2. Break Even Analysis – How many clients do you need to break even. This is critical for capital investments such as building purchase.
    3. Trends – What trends have you seen in the past and what do you predict for the future based on your marketing plan?
    4. Projections – Provide projected income, expense, and profit numbers for upcoming years. (3 years ideally).
    5. Capital Investment requirements – Outline what amount is required and for what.
12. Exit Strategy and Risk Assessment – What will you do if profitability cannot be maintained?   This is your exit strategy.  How high is the risk that this will occur?
13. Conclusion- Wrap it all up

Something that almost all small business struggle with is marketing.  The photography business owner is no exception.  It can be very difficult at times to come up with fresh marketing ideas that will deliver the proper message to your customer.  Photography Marketing Templates can be a low cost alternative to hiring a graphic designer to create marketing pieces. They can also be much better than trying to create your own.

One popular method for finding marketing pieces for your photography business is to frequent the online forums for professional photographers. I have found that in certain forums photographers are much more willing to share information than others.  One forum in particular that I have quite enjoyed is the NoBSPhotoSuccess.com forum.  Here I have found many photographers willing to share their marketing tips and designs to assist their fellow photographers. Be advised that this is a paid forum however so there is some cost to joining.  I feel that it is worth it however and would recommend it to a new photography business owner.

One other solution is to purchase marketing pieces online from design stores.  A simple google search for photography marketing templates will result in many results.  There are many popular ones for wedding and senior photographers in particular.  They can be purchased individually or in sets with consistent themes and colors.

If you are looking for branding help, then I recommend you visit Brand-ography.com.  This website provides concise branding advice to help establish the personality of your business.  This is very important to building a rapport with your clientele which increases the number of repeat visitors.  Additionally, this site offers many free marketing pieces, especially for those who specialize in baby photography.

It is also important to remember that marketing your business doesn’t have to just mean flyers, posters and business cards.  It also includes items integrated into your website such as blog postings and email subscriptions.  Both of these are critical to building a large following of loyal fans.  My photography internet marketing manual goes into great detail on how to setup your own website with these marketing features built in.  I highly encourage you to sign up for my free marketing mini-course to test some of these techniques in your own business.

I have found that by allowing your clients to receive emails of your blog postings that this constant refresher of your great work helps them to think of you whenever the special events happen in their lives that they want to photograph.  Additionally, it enables you to provide them with information on when you will be holding special promotions that they may be interested in.

One last point to consider is that there are many opinions on marketing your business. But the one approach that is guaranteed to never work is to do no marketing at all.  Remember, that as a photography business owner, you are a business person first and a photographer second.  So budget time to your marketing efforts and always track your results to keep continually improving!

Are you a professional photographer looking for help on marketing online?  If you are, then a complete step by step photography website how to manual can be a welcome alternative to spending hundreds of hours learning how to build a website on your own.

There are many things to consider when setting up your business website.  Key factors include the choice of domain name, webhost, type of website, and design considerations.   I have been building websites for a long time and the internet has undergone some drastic changes in the past few years.  Not long ago it required thousands of dollars to hire a webmaster or hundreds of hours of dedicated study time to learn how to do a website yourself in order to get an effective website.  However, that is no longer the case.

With the advent of Content Management Systems, and in particular WordPress, it has become much easier for non-webmasters to build their own websites.  Unfortunately this ease of use can also lead to a false sense of capability.  This is because despite the apparent simplicity, there are many techniques and secrets that will greatly increase the effectiveness of your website.

After viewing many photographer websites I came to the realization that some education would be very helpful in creating more effective websites that would be ranked well in the search engines.  As a result I constructed the Photography Internet Marketing How-to manual which would provide the education I gleaned over thousands of hours online.

Some of the items that are covered include the following:

-Keywords:  What are keywords and why selecting the proper keywords is one of the most important actions you can take.

-Domain Names: What are the best domain names for your business?  How long is too long? Are extensions other than .com okay to use?  Where should you register your domains?

-Webhosting: Which webhost to use?  What features are important?  How much should you pay?

-Site construction: What type of website is best? (Flash, HTML, WordPress etc.)

-Design:  How to have a professionally designed website without hiring a professional designer.

-Traffic: What Plugins should you include to get your website ranked higher in the search engines.

These are just some of the subjects that are covered in the how-to manual.  It is not necessary to be fluent in HTML or PHP or any other programming language in order to create your own website.  In fact, it is often better to build the website yourself for a number of reasons to include the fact that no one knows your business better than you.  Not to mention the fact that you will save a lot of money.  However, this would not be possible without a complete guide that would show you exactly what you need to do in a step-by-step fashion to establish your website online.  Once established, this website will bring new clients to your business every day with no additional cost or time commitment to you.  That is the magic of the internet!s.