https://www.facebook.com/WildTreePhotography

A good portfolio site is part of the Big Four marketing pieces I recommend Photographers start with (alongside business cards, an e-mail newsletter, and Facebook). Popular as Facebook may be, having your own web domain stocked with your best work and information for clients offers a huge boost to your professionalism and credibility.

I love blog-driven web sites myself – check out WordPress.org and do a Google search for WordPress Themes for Photographers. You’ll find a huge variety of free and paid portfolios that are basically turn-key web sites, often with great documentation to help you get everything set up. If you know someone who is web savvy, or have a college nearby from which you could steal a budding web designer for a few hours, you can very inexpensively get set up and trained in how to keep your site updated. There are even paid themes that come with all the support you could need to get set up and running (although they can get pretty expensive).

As for growing your portfolio, you can most certainly offer as many free shoots as you like to get more practice under your belt and broaden the variety of subjects and locations and looks in your portfolio. Don’t get in a comfortable rut, though – it’s easy to shoot for free for far too long, when you could have flipped the switch and been getting paid well for your time much earlier. Set a goal, such as a dozen or so solid shots of different subjects in different locations, and work toward fulfilling that goal. Then flip the switch, and start getting paid for your work. If you go the no session fee, no minimum order route, you run very little risk of running off potential shoots, and you open yourself to the opportunity to start bagging some good sales along the way. As your art and the experience you provide your clients improves, and your marketing and exposure within your market improves commensurate, you’ll only see those numbers and averages improve.

All that said, you can start charging any time you’re ready, web sites and Facebook be damned. I always recommend going by bookings – if you’re booked solid with free shoots for the next month or so, your art and exposure in the community are obviously more than capable of getting you paid bookings. If you’re struggling to keep your desired shooting schedule (whether that’s once a day or once a month) busy, then you may need to continue with free shoots until you’ve better defined and refined your art and what you have to offer your market. Ebb and flow.

Thank you again for your readership! I look forward to hearing what you decide on, and how it turns out for you in the coming months!

To answer your question, I think ProSelect is the software you are talking about: http://www.timeexposure.com/ps_review3.php

I can honestly say that, while I have done projected viewing and had great sales results, I’ve never tried to display images to scale. But I’m very big on digital sales, so wall art isn’t my game – if you’re leaning toward the latter, I don’t think you can beat projected proofing. As they say in car sales, “Behind the wheel seals the deal!”

Please do keep me posted, if this software works for your needs, and what the results are for you on the sales side!

Please do keep me posted on your progress! You have a great attitude, and I have no doubts, great successes ahead of you. Enjoy!

What I’ve learned over the years is that cheap clients usually come as a result of cheap marketing. If I’m running around town shouting from the rooftops that I’m doing free shoots with only $10 prints, I’m begging to end up with a bunch of clients that just want to spend $10 or $20.

As in all things, there is a balance to be achieved.

My goal is always to stay booked to my personal desired capacity. Whether for you that’s five shoots a week or one, you know about how often you like to or want to shoot.

In the early stages of your business, any client is a good client. Every single one lets you grow as an artist and business owner. They allow you to experiment, fail, and grow using live guinea pigs for fodder. They let you poke at this price, prod at that policy, and begin to really define and refine your work. All the while, improving your artistic talents.

That said, if you’re booked solid with cheapie clients, don’t be afraid to raise your prices, or likely better, stop marketing yourself on price and start marketing yourself solely on art and the experience you create for your clients. This was a big step I took once my art was good enough to keep me booked solid for a month or two in advance – and when you stop advertising price, you start getting clients whose primary concern is your great art, not your great prices. When they find out how low risk your pricing schedule is, they don’t hesitate to book.

Early on, it takes very little stress or worry to offer no session fee, no minimum order, and prints/files starting at just $xx. When your art and experience mature, it takes a lot of confidence to sell on the same platform – the onus truly is on you to create art so excellent and varied that your clients can’t keep from buying it.

There’s certainly an argument that digital files are premium products (maximum size, unlimited number of reproductions, kills potential for follow-up sales). There’s also an argument that digital files are virtually free (can be reproduced infinitely without cost, a CD full to the brim costs a fraction of even the smallest print). When you’re setting prices for any product, have a reason – a real, arguable, logical reason for why you charge what you charge, for any product.

I love selling digital files – I love the ease, I love the simplicity, I love educating my clients on what cool things they can do with those images, I love seeing my images all over Facebook, I love empowering clients, I love just handing over a CD and not having to stress about what the lab will or will not have done to my image upon its printer, I love that what I hand my client is a pure and perfect copy of what I showed them when they made their purchase.

There are many, many photographers who love prints and wall art for a completely different set of reasons, and for those photogs, it makes sense that they price digital much more expensively, or don’t sell digital at all – it’s not what they or their clients love. Every photographer, and every market, has its own personality.

To directly answer your questions:

- When I hand over digital files to a client, I always educate them as to where to get the best prints, what will happen if they print at a one-hour shop or drugstore, what cool stuff they can do with the files, how they may look different on different computers because of monitor calibration, etc. A little education goes a long way to ensure the client knows how to get the most out of their images.

- I have never feared what my clients might do to my art. I’m too busy photographing more clients. If one out of a hundred load up my images into Paint Shop Pro and make them look like a dog threw up a cat, and then post their artistic interpretation to Facebook or their wall or wherever, it’s still just one client out of a hundred. The breadth and depth of my portfolio, online and in print, the art I show in my marketing pieces and advertising, on social media, and what my other 99 clients share in pure form with their friends and family, creates a tidal wave of good impressions that reduce any lesser examples to impotence.

- If you worry about your clients buying digital files and printing them too low of quality, educate your client as to where they can get best quality work done. Hand them the keys to the kingdom. The professional lab I use has a consumer division that produces prints and products of near-indistinguishable quality from what I sell for much, much more. And I tell my clients as much. I give them the web address, and tell them how easy it is to just upload and order “for just a few dollars more than what you’ll pay for fuzzy, off-color prints from Walmart.”

- If you do offer files at a higher price, you just shift your place in the market more toward prints. You’ll market to and earn more clients who want prints, desktop framed images, wallets, and hopefully, nice wall art to enjoy for generations. I only recommend photographers push a more digital-friendly offering because it’s what the majority of the market wants, it’s very low-risk and low-cost to the photographer, it breaks the mold of what most other professional photographers do, and most importantly and true of anything I recommend here on PTP, it works very well for me. When a client buys a full CD of images from me, even at a highly discounted price, I look at my per-hour earnings (in pocket, after all expenses), and grin like a Cheshire cat.

Your questions are fully valid, indeed I should write an article on the “letting go” aspect of selling digital files, and I thank you for the inspiration. If you focus on ever-improving your value to clients, through better art and a better experience, you’ll quickly grow beyond pricing and soon be able to book yourself solid on the merits of your good work alone – which leads to an equally better quality of client, as well.

Please do keep me posted on your progress, how you decide to handle and price your files and prints, and what the results are for you this year! Don’t be afraid to experiment for a few months, then change things up and see how your business changes with it. Nothing is ever set in stone – never forget, you’re the boss, you’re in charge. Look at it as an adventure, a grand and profitable experiment, which only grows more profitable over time. It’s a wonderful profession to enjoy!

As long as you are proofing online, you’re going to have a glass ceiling on your sales averages. Putting photos online takes away a huge opportunity, through in-person viewing and ‘sales,’ to further your relationship with your client. It’s a major touchpoint in your timeline with any given client, and it’s very hard to improve sales when you’ve handed over the responsibility to a web site or gallery.

I highly recommend switching to in-person viewings, in your home studio on your desktop computer, at a neutral ground like a coffee shop on your laptop, on your iPad, whatever you’re able to do. You will see measurable improvements in your sales averages (and likely also your referrals and repeat clients) very quickly.

That said, there are plenty of photographers who have enjoyed success with online proofing. If you stick with this route, I’d suggest trying to let your words serve as a tour guide and consultant when you send out your e-mail to your client with the link to their album.

- Be friendly, be personal; talk a bit about how you enjoyed the shoot, include specific moments, and what you feel about the photos that have come out of the shoot.

- By this point, I assume you have talked with your client (pre-shoot and during) and have a good understanding of what they wanted to end up with from the experience – wall art, wallets, digital files, etc. Use this knowledge as your primary area of commentary in suggesting certain images to match those purposes. The client can always buy what they want, but you’re the expert; don’t be afraid to offer guidance and suggestions.

- Always tack on an additional, creative idea – a product or usage for the photos your client may not have thought of. I always like to encourage my clients toward canvas, wall clings, accordion prints, whatever I think they might find cool. Always create a little window of opportunity for clients to see something they didn’t know about, and invest if it excites them.

- Have a ‘sale’, a special of any kind, that encourages your client toward buying a product or package you love to sell. For example, I always offer a big discount on CDs that include all my hi-res files from a shoot. It costs me next to nothing to produce other than processing time, and over half my clients buy it upon suggestion. The savings are deep per-image, but the cost is always more than my average per-client sale – which just serves to raise my per-client sales averages!

- Be clear about how they can order, and what happens then – are the proofs fully edited or just for exposure? Are blemishes removed on anything your client buys? What’s the turnaround time for what they could order (prints, wall art, files on CD)? Is there any tax or are the prices as-is? Bulk discounts? You don’t have to say yes to all this, you just have to answer the five most likely questions a client may ask.

- Ensure the tone and texture of your e-mail is focused on helping your client buy what they love. The goal is never to maximize sales, upsell, or get a client to buy something they don’t really want. By the time you deliver proofs, you should have a dang clear idea of what your client wants to do with the art you’ve created. Show them how best to make that happen, and give them “one more thing” (as Steve Jobs loved to do) to potentially multiply their enjoyment of your art.

Please do keep me posted on your successes and adventures! I look forward to hearing how your sales improve here in 2012!

One quick question. I already have the projector, screen, etcetc. but would like to display photos to scale. IE: “Here’s what an 8×10 looks like on the wall.. and here’s what a 40×60 looks like”

I’ve heard this software exists, but I honestly can’t find it for the life of me. Any thoughts?

Thanks! Excellent article.. all very true!

Thank you, Vianna

I was wondering, what would you suggest I do now that I have put my images up on line for viewing and how I can get the client to buy more products.

Thanks and I await your reply.
Vianna