Business Essentials

Pricing

Pricing yourself for profitability is one of the most important things you can do as a business owner. Without profit and a solidly booked pipeline, you don’t have a business; you merely have a very expensive hobby. All of that fancy camera gear, software, Photoshop actions, product samples, camera accessories, website, mailbox rental, studio rental, accounting software, pretty packaging, and promotional materials doesn’t pay for itself. As is true with any industry, being overworked and underpaid is one of the quickest routes to burnout. If you only plan to do pet photography part time on the occasional weekend days, profit isn’t as important as when you need to make a living at it, but you still need to generate enough to cover all of your expenses. If you plan to do pet photography as a full-time career, it’s critical that you price your products and services to optimize profit. So, how do you price yourself for profitability? What are competitive rates for pet photography? What are the industry standards?

To begin, I’d like to talk about something called perceived value. I have learned a very valuable lesson over time with my business, one that resulted from a lot of unpleasant experiences, trial and error, and general research over the years. That lesson is this: Clients don’t spend money based on what they make; they spend money based on what they value.

Many people in this world say they can’t afford to buy X, Y, or Z, yet they will not blink an eye over spending $4 for a latté at Starbucks, several times per week. If you pointed out to these people that they were investing nearly $800 per year on gourmet coffee beverages, they’d probably be shocked. It certainly shines a light on why they feel they can’t afford to pay for cable or buy that new couch they’ve been lusting after. For most consumers, how they invest their money is a choice. They choose to buy one product versus another. And often times, if not normally, that choice is based on the concept of perceived value. Your perceived value will be different when buying products at K-Mart, as opposed to buying products at Barney’s New York or Pottery Barn. When consumers see cheap prices, they expect cheap quality. Ironically, it is these same consumers that will think that your cheaply priced services are in their words, “wayyy too high.” (More on that in a minute.)

Next, I’d like to talk about how not to price your business for profitability, with an explanation of why these methods are undesirable.

“Jamie, what should I not be doing when pricing my
pet photography products and services?”

Don’t offer every product under the sun, except the kitchen sink. Don’t promote yourself as a one-stop source for pet photo–related products such as prints, mugs, mousepads, keychains, books, t-shirts, pillow covers, coasters, canvases, and so on. If your products scream “gimmicky,” your clients will expect them to be cheap and will expect to pay accordingly. It’s a sure-fire and quick way to lower the perceived value of your business. And if your product lineup is so extensive that your clients don’t even know where to start, they might not end up ordering anything at all.

Don’t offer pricing that includes products with your sitting fee as part of a “package.” Including products with your sitting fee is a no-no even if you aren’t calling it a package; and here’s why:

First, you are creating a finite value for your time. Because you are not separating out your time (sitting fee) from your products, it’s hard for a client to value your time, which is just as valuable as your products. And more often than not, once you subtract the retail value of the products you are including in your packages, you are telling your client you are really only charging $100 (or whatever) for your time, which might amount to be eight or more total hours invested when you factor in the pre-shoot prep, the shoot itself, post-shoot editing, any meetings and client communications, and other work that needs to be done. Divide the price you are actually charging for your time (after you subtract the retail value of your products), by the total number of hours you are investing (usually between 8 and 12), and you might be shocked at how little you are selling your services for per hour.

A second issue is that most of the time clients won’t buy more products on top of the package because the package already includes products. Once you remove that price ceiling, the sky is the limit when it comes to products they might want to order. The psychology of sales changes, and they will be far more inclined to spend double, triple, even quadruple what they would have had you set a package price for them that included the sitting fee and products.

Another problem is the word “package” itself. This term is used by the big box store portrait studios and other high-volume photography studios that you can’t emulate on a smaller scale. Package is also an outdated term used by high-volume studios that haven’t changed much since the days of muslin backdrops and cheesy family portraits. Do you really want to be the pet photographer taking photos of puppies in baskets with fake flowers, bad lighting, and ugly backdrops? Instead of using the word package, use the term “collection’” and refer to your product collections, not a collection of your sitting fee plus products.

Clearly, based on what I have outlined above, you shoot yourself in the foot by including products and/or images with your sitting fee. You might think you are undercutting the competition or doing your clients a favor, but really you are just undermining your own ability to create a good revenue stream and run a profitable business. Let your clients decide how much they want to invest; don’t set the limit for them. Again, people buy based on what they value. Keep the perceived value high and your bank account will thank you.

Don’t charge $75 to$150 for a photo session without expecting to do extremely high volume. First off, you’ll likely end up needing to do multiple shoots per day in order to be profitable. Also, selling well over $1,000 in products per client would be highly unlikely at those low sitting fees. If you needed to generate $3,000 per month to be profitable, for example, you’d need to do around 26 photo shoots per month, or 6.5 per week. Once you finished spending the time you’d need on marketing and advertising to book 26 clients per month (which is a lot), every single month of the year, you’d barely have time to do the photo shoots, let alone edit and process the images. And with that kind of volume you’d need to have employees, further (significantly) reducing your net profit, because employees are a very large expense. At those kinds of prices, more realistically you’d need to be doing more like 40 or more shoots per month. This is definitely not feasible or sustainable for one person, not at any decent level of quality, anyway.

Don’t sell prints for $5, $8, $12, $15. I think you get the idea. Again, this goes back to the concept of perceived value. Again, the client is thinking, “cheap prints, cheap value.” Sure, those prices are even higher than what you’d pay at a wholesale club chain, but never forget that you are creating custom artwork for your customers. Custom work that is labor-intensive should always come with a higher price tag, regardless of the product. The employees at the big box stores aren’t investing many hours of time into doing custom work like you do; they are “shooting and burning,” sending their customers out the door with minimal effort in terms of product quality. If you do some research on print permanence ratings of digital prints, you will quickly come to understand why clients should pay more for archival products from top photography labs. And looking at it from the revenue perspective, at those low prices, you’d need to sell a ton of prints to be profitable. And at those print prices, those kinds of clients aren’t the ones likely to invest in tons of prints.

The next topic I’d like to address is why it’s a bad idea to price your products and services based on what the competition is charging.

“Jamie, why should I not price myself according to what my competition is charging?”

You don’t know what’s underpinning its prices. You don’t know what kind of work a competitor put into determining its pricing or the logic it used to get there. Perhaps the competitor’s structure is based on working with 20 or more clients per month to attain profitability, and you just don’t have the ability to do that kind of volume. Perhaps it has years more experience that can justify higher rates, or are knowingly undercharging for their work because it’s desperate to make a buck. You are playing a dangerous guessing game when you copy a competitor’s pricing.

You don’t know what products your competitor is selling or what its costs of goods sold are (the hard costs involved in creating a product). Maybe it is selling products inexpensively because it’s selling non–archival-quality products. Or maybe it’s selling at a premium because it sells only top-of-the-line premium archival-quality products from the best labs. Maybe it does its own printing or pays to outsource editing, which will affect the price of each print. Without knowing the exact details of a competitor’s products, you can’t reasonably compare.

You don’t know if a competitor’s prices are based on those of another competitor. This is one I think most people don’t consider when evaluating a competitor’s pricing. Your competitor might be arbitrarily setting its pricing without really knowing why. This means that you could end up copying a competitor that copied another competitor, and so on, and so forth. Price yourself according to what makes sense for your business and your client base, not based on what any other photographer is doing.

I should take a moment to qualify all of this by stating that it’s always a good idea to be aware of what your competition is charging, and you definitely need to be able to justify your prices to clients if they are significantly different from the average in your market, but your ultimate pricing decisions need to be based on your specific business model.

Also, there are some industry average prices for photographing pets, and along with them, the commensurate competitive rates. These rates have trickled down from the portrait photography industry, although just as with portrait or wedding work, you will find rates ranging across the board, from the studio charging $49 for a photo shoot to the one that charges $1,500 for the same shoot.

A pet photography industry standard for a sitting fee is $250 for a 90-minute session. Some photographers bill by the hour, some provide two-hour sessions, most shoot until they feel they have a great selection of images. There is something magical about the $225 and up price range for a sitting fee in that it attracts higher-end clients who are willing to invest more in custom photography. More established and skilled pet photographers and talented pet photographers in major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York can get away with charging $300 to $450 or more for a sitting fee.

Here are some industry-standard sell-prices for prints:

♦ 5" × 7": $25

♦ 8" × 10": $45

♦ 11" × 14": $75

♦ 16" × 20": $150 and up.

You need to decide whether to call it a “sitting fee” or “creative fee.” Creative is a term borrowed from commercial photography. It carries a certain caché because it infers there is time spent making the final product beyond just the photo shoot; however, sitting fee is also acceptable because it is familiar and clients understand what it means. Use the term sitting fee until and unless you feel confident explaining to a client what creative fee means and all that it entails.

Canvases are generally double that of prints for the same size, and photobooks are priced according to how many hours of time are invested and the costs of goods sold, but they usually run several hundred dollars to well over a thousand dollars. A very important point to keep in mind is that you are not only charging for the ink and media on which the image is printed, you are charging for the time you expend toward making that image look absolutely perfect. You are sharpening, cloning out drool and cookie crumbs, making eyes sparkle, and generally working magic with software to perfect those images. Those skills must be taken into consideration and reimbursed commensurately.

One strategy you can employ when it comes to pricing your products is to double, triple, or quadruple the cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) on the products, with the resulting number being your retail price. For example, suppose that the COGS on a 16" × 20" gallery-wrapped stretched canvas is $125. If you apply the 3× pricing strategy, your retail price would be $375.

Always round up to numbers that are easy for your clients (and you) to remember. Nobody remembers $74.50 or $127.95, so keep it simple.

The 3× strategy is commonly employed by retail businesses because they look at it this way: one-third of the price pays for the product, one-third of the price pays me, and the final one-third of the price gets reinvested into a new product to replace the old one (or reinvested back into the business). You can exercise flexibility here depending on how much experience you have and what your business is like. If you are just starting out, maybe a 2× model is better suited for your business; if you are very experienced and do exceptional work, you can move into the 4× or 5× range.

A great way to encourage clients to purchase multiple products instead of just one 8" × 10" is to create collections of multiple, different products. Price your single items high and then discount them when you put them together as a collection. This is a strategy wedding photographers have been employing for years, and it works. This might be easier after you’ve been in business for a year or more, because by then you will know what your clients buy the most, and you can put the special or big ticket items that most of your clients buy in really attractive collections. Whether you are selling collections of products or single-priced items, it’s important to keep things simple so as not to overwhelm or confuse your clients. Begin by offering three different simple collections. You can also offer a set percentage off if your clients purchase over a certain dollar amount, and then increase the discount as the amount spent rises. There are many different strategies you can employ when it comes to pricing your work.

To sum up, keep perceived value in mind when pricing your work; don’t price based on what the competition is charging; ensure that your pricing fits with the quality of your work; pay attention to revenue killers; try to sell clients on multiple products instead of just one; and it’s perfectly acceptable that your pricing might be somewhat arbitrary, just make sure that whatever decisions you make you can easily explain to your clients, and that the prices can sustain your business model. When you are confident with your pricing, it shows, and your clients will have more respect for you if you can back up your pricing with sound logic. Although, ideally you’ll want clients to whom you don’t have to justify anything to at all.

Products

Here’s a tip for you: pricing your products can be pretty easy if you keep it simple. I mentioned in the preceding section that you shouldn’t be selling everything but the kitchen sink. Keep it simple and clients will be inclined to purchase more. It will be less overwhelming for them and it will make the process more fun. It’s also easier for you to remember what you sell if you keep it simple; ideally, you want to be able to remember the price of every product you sell, and it will be easier for you to remember if you are selling five different products instead of nine or ten.

So, what types of products can you sell as a professional pet photographer?

Here are a few different products that can be purchased from most of the professional labs listed in Appendix A.

♦ Prints, from 5" × 7" to 16" × 20" or larger.

Be sure that you understand cropping ratios. 5" × 7", 8" × 10", 11" × 14", and 16" × 20" prints require cropping. Professional labs also sell 8" × 12", 11" × 16", and 16" × 24" prints, which don’t require cropping. You can offer these to your clients if they don’t want a shot cropped, but it will usually require custom framing, which is yet more expensive. It’s a good idea to educate your clients on this point so that they can make their own decisions.

You can sell 4" × 6" prints, as well, but generally the type of clients who purchase custom pet photography are buying 5" × 7" or larger prints.

♦ Greeting cards and notecards

These are a fun way to make thank you cards. They can be particularly popular during the holidays when clients love mailing them to friends and families. There are some great holiday card templates online for professional photographers. You can let the image shine and take up the entire card, or go hog-wild on design elements. As always, make sure you are being paid commensurately for your design time by including it in the price.

♦ Gallery-wrapped, stretched canvases

These are a premium product that clients of custom pet photography love. They come in a large array of sizes, including squares and long panoramas, and you can choose to do a single image on one canvas, or multiple images as a composite.

♦ Fine-art prints

These are perfect for the fine-art pet photographer or someone doing more traditional work, particularly if you tend to use effects to simulate a hand-painted look. Images can be printed on a variety of fine-art papers, including velvet and watercolor.

♦ Photo albums, photobooks, or coffee-table books

There is an infinite array of options when it comes to albums, photobooks, and coffee-table books (these are often interchangeable terms). You can provide albums with slip-in prints; albums that you assemble yourself; photo books that are printed on paper in either hard cover or softcover; or coffee-table books with seamless margins. Do your research and get some samples, and then decide what your clients would love. You’ll also need to determine how many hours it will take you to design a custom book. Be as accurate as you can because these might become one of your best sellers.

It’s generally a good idea to have some experience producing the products you want to sell before offering them to your clients because the pricing and design are not for the faint of heart. It’s an investment in time and money, both on your part and that of your client, but the results are worth it and can last a lifetime and beyond.

♦ Proof boxes

These are custom-printed boxes with proofs (small, low-quality prints) inside, usually in either
4" × 6" or 5" × 7" size. You can choose to do a set number of prints, or all of the prints from the client’s gallery. Keep in mind the costs can really add up on this product, so be sure that you are charging for it.

♦ Framed prints

Some clients are busy and appreciate being able to pick up a finished product. More and more labs are now offering framing services along with their printing services, realizing that it’s a valuable service to provide to their photographer clients. The downside to doing this is in the shipping costs and limited style options. Framing is about as individual as the person making the purchase, and sometimes an individual can have different ideas in mind than what your lab offers. It’s up to you to decide if you want to go down this route and whether it makes sense for your client base.

♦ DVD of the image files

This is a hot topic among professional photographers. Some think it’s a horrible, evil, awful idea to ever relinquish digital files to anyone; others give them away like free candy at a carnival. Most photographers take a stand somewhere in the middle. Here are a few logical things you need to think about when it comes to selling digital files. Once you hand over digital files to a client, it’s highly unlikely he will ever come back to you for future orders of other products from the same session. It’s normal for a client to purchase a collection of products, yet still be lusting after that one premium product (maybe a photo album) and come back to you in the future for it when the budget allows. Return clients/repeat buyers can account for as much as 10 to 15 percent of your overall gross revenue, which is a pretty decent chunk of change to be giving up. You need to ensure that you are pricing your DVD to make it worth the potential loss of revenue, both from that session and in the future.

Another thing to keep in mind is that your clients are unlikely to print your images. Most of your clients don’t know the first thing about printing. More often than not, those images will sit on a hard drive for ages. Isn’t it sad to think all of that work you did never amounted to a beautiful framed print hung on the wall or a stunning photo album? And when it does come to clients who do print their images, they don’t know where to go to get quality prints, and would just as likely head to a kiosk at a local pharmacy or big box store to get low-quality prints with a permanence rating of two to seven years (as opposed to the print permanence rating of 200+ years on the archival products you purchase from a professional photography lab).

The last thing you need is for your work to be displayed as a shoddy product on someone’s wall. Low-quality prints are prone to color shifts, fading, and other issues after just a couple of years. You want the work that hangs in your client’s homes to be the very best representation of your business possible for two reasons: first because it reflects on you and your brand, and second, because it’s also the ultimate marketing device, promoting your business as it hangs in a client’s home. When a client’s pet-owner friend visits and sees your gorgeous canvas, it might lead to “Oh wow, I have to have one of those!” BAM! Just like that, you have a new customer.

Most often, your clients don’t have the ability to purchase the same high-quality products that you can, because most photography labs sell only to verified professional photographers who can show proof of their professional business status via a website, UBI number, or other criteria. These are the labs that sell the supreme, archival products that far surpass the quality of consumer-printed digital images. Your clients deserve the best quality they can get because these animals mean so much to them. They are going to have your images for many years; don’t you owe it to them to provide them with gorgeous prints and other products? (A long list of professional labs is included in Appendix A, along with a list of great consumer labs that sell to non-professionals).

Finally, if you price your image DVD lower than your highest priced product, you will likely never sell that product. Think about it. If a client can get a DVD of all of the images in your gallery for $500 and then go somewhere and pay $200 for a canvas, whereas the client would have to pay $1,500 for the same canvas from you, why would this client pay you for what is (in her mind) the exact same thing.

“So, how in the world do I
price these things?”

First, I recommend not selling single-image files for the reason I mentioned earlier; sell them only as a group (the entire gallery on DVD) for a set price when bought alone, or include the DVD in a collection with other products, or sell it for a discounted price if the client orders a minimum in other products. For example, if the client buys at least $500 in products, you will sell her the DVD for $350. Or, for another example, you can create a collection that is priced at $1,250 that includes prints and greeting cards and a DVD of their 25 favorite images.

Second, I recommend not selling DVDs for $250, or $400, or even $500 if sold separately. Ideally, you want to price the DVD higher than your highest-priced product; otherwise, you have shot a hole in your own logic. Think somewhere in the range of $850 to $1,500, and now we’re talking. The goal is to have the client walk away with some really killer archival products that they can actually enjoy on a daily basis in addition to having rights to print the images on the DVD.

Let me tell you a secret: clients who are investing good money into professional custom pet photography aren’t looking to have the images to print; most merely want them for archival purposes. It’s the penny-pinchers who don’t value you as a professional who want the DVD so that they can go make their own cheap copies. You don’t want to work with those folks anyway. And if you are pricing your work right, this becomes a moot point.

As I said earlier, keep it simple with your product lineup, choosing a handful of these products to sell instead of all of them. It will make your life easier in the long run. If a client asks for something you don’t have on your product list, respond by saying, “I’d love to be able to provide that to you! Let me do some research on the top vendors and I’ll get back to you with some pricing.” You then do just that and provide the client with some options. Ideally, if you expect that your clients might regularly ask for a product that you don’t have on your price list (perhaps a print size), it’s a good idea to already have your pricing done for that item so that you can send it to them quickly. Just because you don’t have everything but the kitchen sink listed on your product list, doesn’t mean you can’t still offer it.

Also, it’s a very good idea to have a sample of every product you offer on hand to show to clients. This is another reason why it’s a good idea to keep your product list simple (certainly in the beginning). This way you don’t break the bank investing in samples alone. Most professional vendors offer discounts on product samples, sometimes as much as 50 percent, and often they’ll send you proofing prints for free so that you can check the color calibration against your monitor.

Branding

My own personal definition of branding is as follows:

The process of creating a unique, positive, and recognizable identity for a product or service. Branding is the messaging work a company does to encourage consumers to feel a certain way about their product. It’s the attitude, look, and feel of a business.

Branding is an oft-overlooked but critical component in the success of any business. Branding includes but is by no means limited to:

♦ The look and feel of your website and blog, including colors and design

♦ The look and feel of your logo

♦ The personality of your business name, mission statement, and tag line (slogan)

♦ The style of your photography

♦ The way you speak and communicate with your clients and fans

♦ The look and feel of any printed advertisements and/or promotional or marketing materials you have produced

When you look at the website of any of the highly visible pet photographers, you are seeing branding in action. You can view the more traditional aesthetic of Jim Dratfield’s brand, the clean and modern appeal of Amanda Jones’ brand, or the colorful and playful style of my own Cowbelly Pet Photography brand. The one thing these brands share in common is consistency. Whenever you see a magazine ad, a photograph, or webpage that any of these photographers have done, you know who did it, just by the branding. So, a strong brand is one that is consistent and easily recognizable. For example, if your website is meant to convey a soothing feel, washed in natural greens with lots of soft tones and vintage processing on your images in your web galleries, don’t make your marketing materials wild and crazily colorful or use wacky language on your blog. Alternatively, if you are doing a magazine ad that is all black and white with a black-and-white photo, don’t host a website that contains only color photography. Keep it consistent with every single thing you do to present your business.

The best way to define what the brand of your business will be is to let it be a reflection of you. The number one asset you have that sets your business apart from your competition, and will always do so, is you: your personality, your essence, your artistic viewpoint, and how you experience the world. It’s how you express yourself to others, and how you project your inner values. Nobody can ever really compete against you because, well… they aren’t you. There is only one of you in this world. Don’t be afraid to express that in your brand. Ideally, your business image will project who you are on a personal and emotional level. It should express how you feel when you work with animals. Is it calm and Zen-like? Is it energized and playful? Is it artistic and contemplative? Remember that your business image is the first impression potential clients will see along with your photography, and you rarely have a second chance to make a first impression!

When determining what you want your brand to be like, ask yourself what your own personality is like. What are your favorite colors? What kind of language speaks to you? Again, ideally you want to be attracting clients to your business who are similar to you, or as I often like to say, similar to me but with a lot more money. Ha! If you are being authentic in truly expressing who you are through your brand, you will naturally attract kindred spirits who you can relate to and appreciate who you are.

Not surprisingly, pricing and branding are joined at the hip, and you can increase your client’s perceived value just by improving your brand. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s pretty much axiomatic that increased perceived value equals increased revenue. In other words, don’t neglect your brand.

Marketing

Marketing is quite different from branding. Branding addresses how you appear to clients, marketing addresses how you attract them. Although there are many different definitions of marketing, I define it as the following:

The tactical or strategic techniques and processes a company uses to promote its products and services in order to attract potential clients to buy what it sells.

Marketing for any business, whether the business is new or old, is absolutely crucial to its success. And you need to be smart with your marketing decisions, because you can be putting all of your marketing eggs in a basket that doesn’t produce revenue without even knowing it.

In the subsections that follow, I’ll describe some strategies to get you started.

Networking and Complementary Marketing Partnerships

I always tell my workshop attendees that getting out into your community is the single most important thing you can do to market your pet photography business. Get out there, meet people, shake hands, shop at the stores, and go to events. Start networking with other like-minded business owners who can help to spread the word about your business. You can even create formal complementary marketing partnerships, exchanging business cards to give to each other’s clients. A really effective marketing strategy is to do a complementary shoot of a business owner’s pet in exchange for the owner displaying the work in her store or business. Think outside the box when it comes to ways that you can help each other reach your respective target markets.

Similar to how it’s important to have a written agreement in place when photographing pets, it’s important to have a written agreement in place with other business owners anytime expectations are involved, especially if any products or services change hands.

Some parallel and related businesses to pet photography with which you might explore mutual marketing opportunities include the following:

♦ Dog daycare centers

♦ Boutique pet stores

♦ Dog trainers or large training centers

♦ Veterinary hospitals and spay and neuter clinics

♦ Dog-walking or pet-sitting services

♦ Dog trainers or large training centers

♦ Pet clothing, product designers, and retailers

♦ Grooming shops

♦ Breeders and breed clubs

♦ DIY dog washes

A business doesn’t need to be pet related in order to be a successful marketing partner. Marketing relationships with non–animal-related businesses can translate into success if the owners really love you and they have pet-owning clients. Examples of these can include:

♦ Hair salons

♦ Medical offices

♦ Cafés and coffee shops

♦ Art galleries and artists’ studios and art walk opportunities. (Art walks are monthly events taking place in a set neighborhood in a city, usually taking place on a weekday evening after regular business hours, wherein galleries, art studios and other nearby shops hang a new art display, and patrons go door-to-door, viewing each display and chatting with the artists.)

Leave your printed promotional materials at these locations, and/or hang several pieces of photography, to help spread the word about your business.

Word of Mouth

Long before there was the Internet, television, radio, or even movable type for that matter, there was word of mouth (WOM). This if the best marketing method to grow a business and create a solid client base. All you need is one satisfied client to start. They tell two friends, those friends tell four friends, those friends tell six friends, and it grows exponentially from there.

How do you create and maintain solid WOM? Here’s a few suggestions:

♦ Produce excellent-quality images that they will rave about and show off.

♦ Provide outstanding customer service.

♦ Be professional.

♦ Be friendly and personable and love your client’s pet(s) as if they were your own.

♦ Be memorable.

♦ Offer referral rewards (more on that soon).

♦ Gift your clients (every single one).

♦ Be accommodating. This is easier if you aren’t underpricing your work, as I pointed out earlier in the chapter.

♦ Don’t be shy; ask for referrals.

In short, you want to create an experience that your clients will laud. They’ll tell all of their friends about it, and then their friends will book you, too. When working for each client, treat them as if they have four of their friends along with them, mystery shopping, looking over everything you do. It will keep your motivation up and make you more inclined to go the extra mile.

Website and Blog Presence

These are a given in this day and age, because gone are the days when photographers carry around physical portfolios to show every potential client. Your portfolio will exist online, and it’s important to make a good first impression. These days, many people will search online for a local pet photographer, and you want to ensure that they can find out about your products and services through your website. Arrange with your marketing partners and vendors to provide links on their websites to your website, and to add them to any blog or Facebook posts they do on your business so that people can find you from other sources that they might have stumbled upon. Also, ensure that you list your website on your business card and any other promotional products you have printed for your business.

Social Media

Although social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus can be baffling for some, others thrive on them and can use the power of social media to propel their word of mouth. It’s very important to use these tools strategically so as not to get sucked into a big time drain that ends up hurting your business. Create a fan page for your business on Facebook and a Twitter profile, and plan to devote no more than a total of five to eight hours per week working with these tools. You can use them to promote new products, show off new images, announce news or accomplishments, find models for projects, and just generally keep in touch with people who support you. Social media can be an awesome tool for a small business, just be sure that you know what you are using it for, set goals for its use, limit the time invested in it, and always be professional in everything you say and do.

Newspaper Articles and Blog Press

The great thing about this type of marketing is it’s free! Contact writers of blogs and local papers to see if they’d be willing to do a story on your business. Pet photography by nature is fun and interesting, and most papers would be more interested in doing a story on a local photographer who rolls around in the grass than a local dentist explaining the coming trends in fillings for kids. If someone is doing a story on your business and the article will go online, be sure to ask to have the article include a link to your website and blog. Write up a press release on a new product or service you are offering and send the release to your local news outlets.

E-Mail Promotions and Newsletters

Once you have that WOM ball rolling and have any kind of client list going, keep in touch with them about any special events, new products, or promotions you have going on. For your e-mail subscribers, implement double-opt in. This is a technique by which a recipient must confirm that he has willingly and actively signed up for your mailing list, and you then acknowledge the confirmation via e-mail and confirm that he is officially signed up. If you don’t do this, not only might the unsolicited e-mails leave a bad taste in a potential client’s mouth, but you risk being banned by your ISP for sending spam. If you use a service such as MailChimp or Constant Contact, they will help you navigate the murky waters of e-mail newsletters.

When doing promotions or sales, it’s best to offer an added-value incentive (that is, something the client gets in addition to your regular offerings), such as a complimentary 8" × 10" print with a standard session fee, instead of arbitrarily reducing your fees by a certain dollar amount or percentage. The latter only serves to lower your perceived value and harms your eventual sales. Ensure that whatever added value you are including is of nominal cost for you to make it worth your time.

Referral Programs for Clients

You can create a formal referral program and make it as fancy or as simple as you want. If you know you are averaging high sales per client, why not try gifting your client with a complimentary 11" × 14" gallery-wrapped canvas whenever they refer a new client who books a session with you. Give the same gift to the new client. For a very good client who manages to refer three, four, or five new clients to you, offer to make the referring client’s next session on the house.

Get creative when it comes to what you think your very best clients might like. More often than not the best clients don’t need or expect any kind of gifts of appreciation from you in order to sing your praises, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to offer it.

Art Shows and Gallery Displays

If you live in an area that has an artistic community, you can pitch your photography to be included in an upcoming art presentation or gallery opening. Even better, if you have a community that has a monthly art walk as I detailed earlier, you can get involved by hanging your work and chatting with buyers as they come through your location. This is a great way to network with your potential clients, show off your work, and collect names for your e-mail newsletter. And if you are doing traditional or fine-art pet photography, this will be a natural fit and potentially be where you will meet a lot of your client base.

Events, Donations, Rescue Organization Work, and Mini-Shoots

Some other marketing strategy options you might want to explore include hosting events, donating to auctions, performing rescue organization work, and doing mini-shoots, but I’m placing them in a separate category here because generally they are not the best strategies for directly producing appreciable revenue. However, although you can’t expect to help pay for your business expenses doing events, donations, and mini-shoots, ideas such as these are great for increasing visibility, which is important for any new (or established) business. Following are some thoughts on what you can do and what you can expect (this is based on my own personal experience and anecdotal experiences of many of my colleagues over the years).

Events

These are events such as “Furry Fun Runs,” “Pug Galas,” “Walk for the Dogs,” or fundraisers for a breed group. Although these are generally fun experiences that enable you to chat with a large group of pet owners and have fun with the animals, events, as far as revenue and bookings go, often draw the “gimme-gimmes,” the “lookie-loos,” and folks who are just generally out to score something cheap. A colleague had a booth at an event and a woman approached her and immediately asked what she charged. To my colleague’s reply the woman inquired incredulously, “Two dollars and fifty cents??”. “Uh, no…,” my colleague responded, “Two-hundred and fifty dollars.” You will get a lot of people who start the conversation by asking, “what do you charge?” Usually, anything over big box store prices will be too high in their eyes. Depending on the event, you might have contact with more serious buyers, but generally you will find them in other ways. Products that do sell well at events are low-priced greeting cards sold as singles, (offer to discount them when purchased as multiples,) and other very low-priced products such as matted 5" × 7" prints sold for $8 to $10, or postcard-sized refrigerator magnets. You’ll obviously need to sell some volume to make it worthwhile, but if you have a few hundred to invest in products you can get a little buzz and name recognition in return for your investment.

Donations to Fundraising Auctions

It’s hard to translate a donation winner into a buyer of extra goods, but it all depends on how you go about it and what you include in the donated collection people are bidding on. Some pet photographers choose to only include the sitting fee in a donated gift certificate, although I find this to be a bit misleading; clients might not understand that even though they won the product bid—or in other words, they “bought” the product—they then have to spend yet more money to get an actual photograph. A better strategy is to include a nice product with only one image in your gift certificate, and then knock their ever-loving socks off by presenting an astounding array of images, increasing the chances that they’ll want more. You can also create special collections of products that you think might appeal to those who attend this particular event, in the hope that you sell more after the session. One problem with donations is that it’s not uncommon for winning bidders to never contact you at all. There is also the issue of expiration dates, or lack thereof, which might fall under the auspices of state laws (check the laws in your state regarding gift certificates and expiration dates), because in many states, it’s now illegal to place an expiration date on a gift certificate (laws vary). Keep your expectations low when it comes to donations, and remember that your primary goal is to give back to the organization you are supporting, with your donation ultimately serving to help the animals more than you.

Work with and for Rescue Groups

Don’t expect to make a killing donating your photography services to Fluffy Friends International. Most rescue groups are far more concerned with trying to find Fluffy and Fido a new home and being able to buy ink for their printer than they are trying to help you market your business. Far down on their list of priorities is being concerned about whether you get new business from your donated services. And that is as it should be.

But it’s certainly no imposition and not to much to ask that a link to your website be included on the organization’s website. To make things official, get involved with an organization such as HeART’s Speak, which can help you maximize the benefit of your relationship with your local rescues. Like donations, keep your expectations low and remember you are doing this work primarily to help the animals.

Mini-Shoots

Mini-shoots are short, abbreviated sessions, often between 15 and 30 minutes, held in one location for multiple clients and pets who sign up ahead of time. Mini-shoots are popular among new pet photographers, although they are very tricky to get right. Unfortunately, because of the price of the mini-shoots (often in the $25 to $50 range), the perceived value of the product and service is very low. These events naturally attract people who want to spend less—often a lot less—than your regular rates. They will be happy with their single, included 8" × 10" print and be on their merry way, never to be heard from again. It is also difficult to create great quality when you are working with so many different animals in a short period of time, forcing them to sit on seamless paper, and trying to create great shots in only a few minutes time. It’s imperative that you have an assistant, really great lighting, a solid (and stable!) backdrop setup, and have really dialed in your pricing for these types of events. One strategy you can employ to try to increase your revenue is to offer different product options. Create collections with different session lengths for each. Bundle an inexpensive 10-minute session with two 5" × 7" prints, but also offer a 30-minute session plus two 11" × 14" prints, plus greeting cards for quite a bit more money. Offer three different collections and let your clients choose. Sometimes you will get regular bookings out of it later on, or the mini-shoot clients might tell their higher-spending friends about you. There are ways to make this viable, but it can be tricky.

“What are the three most important methods that I can use to market my pet photography business?”

WOM, web and blog presence, and networking in your community. (Social media follows in a close fourth.)

Strategies to Increase Revenue

Many people assume it’s impossible to make a full-time living as a professional pet photographer. Obviously, as you can see from everything presented up to this point in this chapter, whether you make money depends on many different factors, but it is absolutely possible because pet owners will spend an inordinate amount of money on their pets. I remember the first time I had a client place an order for products over $3,000. My jaw hit the floor. Now it’s commonplace and I don’t blink an eye. One way to make it more likely that you succeed is to expand your offerings to increase your revenue.

In the subsections that follow, I’ll lay out some strategies for moving more product and thus increasing your revenue.

Create Special Art Products

Call it fine art, digital art, pop art, or whatever you like. If you enjoy creating art, you are creative, and you can make something clients really love, you can add an additional stream of revenue to your business. Perhaps it’s printing on fine art paper that you then embellish with mixed media, or it might be pop art designed in Adobe Illustrator or Corel Pro that you print on canvas, or perhaps it’s collages or shadowboxes designed from your printed photos, or paintings derived from the photos you take. Price it as a premium and you will have clients who not only want “all that and a bag of chips,” but also, that “cool art,” too. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing sales in the thousands.

Web or Graphic Design for Your Pet Business Clients and Partners

If you are adept at Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe InDesign, you might have a valuable skill that other small business owners need. You can help them design their business cards, logo, website and more. You need not have gone to school to study these things; you just need to have the skills to produce quality work and charge adequately for your time. Ensure that you have an excellent understanding of printing processes if you go this route, because most labs printing promotional products require files created in the CMYK color space and prepared in specific ways. Also, invest in Adobe InDesign if you plan to do graphic design work.

Stock and Commercial Work

If your work is of commercial quality and you are being solicited by businesses to use your images for their promotional purposes, perhaps it’s time to look into doing custom commercial photography and/or stock work for corporations. One of the advantages of commercial work is that it usually entails a much higher payout than private-client work; disadvantages are that it can be confusing when it comes to pricing and hard to know where to begin or with which stock agency to align yourself. And, of course, it carries much higher legal risks. Join the American Society of Media Professionals (ASMP), a professional association for commercial photographers, and buy the latest issue of the book Photographer’s Market for tips. Consult with an attorney familiar with intellectual property and corporate contract law before doing any commercial work. Having solid commercial contracts is not just a good idea, it’s absolutely critical, and having someone in your corner should you have contract term issues can be a lifesaver.

Self-Printed, Mass-Produced Products for Stores

Greeting cards and small matted prints are the perfect example of products you can mass-produce and wholesale to local stores. Do some research on short-run versus large-quantity print jobs and compare costs of each to determine what the best investment will be.

Craft Goods

Do you enjoy working with your hands? Are your clients the kind who would love little handmade key chains or lockets embellished with their pet’s photo? Are you totally into Etsy? Make that a selling point of your business by creating a really unique handmade product that you know your clients would love.

These are just a few options that you might consider to increase your revenue. Think outside the box and try to incorporate your pet photography into other things you like to do that might lead to yet new revenue streams.

Competition and Colleagues

Most photographers have connections with other photographers in their area. If they aren’t connecting in person, often they’re at least connecting online via forums and e-mail. There are ways that you as a professional can make this a good thing—and ways you can make this a bad thing. Colleagues can become some of your most trusted and cherished friends, or they can become some of your worst enemies. To help you navigate the waters, I’ve put together the following Do’s and Don’ts lists:

Do’s

♦ Respect your competition. They are working in the same industry as you and probably working just as hard on their businesses. You never know what kind of struggles they have had to go through to get their businesses off the ground.

♦ Be friendly toward them. You never know when a kind word, a smile, and a handshake at an event might come back to benefit you. Remember that they are forming their own opinions of you at the same time.

♦ Network with colleagues and competitors via e-mail or online so that you can both pass on information about opportunities and events, and tip one another off to potential problem clients and community members. You can also refer work to them if it’s something that you can’t or don’t do. I don’t do any studio or fine-art work, so I’m always happy to refer clients looking for more traditional posed portraits to my local colleagues who specialize in that style.

♦ Reach out to them. It can be a simple e-mail introducing yourself and telling them how much you love their work. It shows you know who they are and respect them as a professional. Tell them where you saw their work, mention any friends or partners you have in common, and point out that you just wanted to reach out and say, “Hi.”

♦ Be aware of what your colleagues are doing, what they are working on, who their marketing partners are, what their style is, what projects they have created that are unique to them, and what their pricing is. Being informed about what your colleagues are doing can help you be a better business manager because you will know what to do to set yourself apart.

With a positive approach, some respect, and patience, you can create rich, rewarding relationships with your colleagues, even if they live right down the street and practice the same style of photography as you. Some of my best friends are also my biggest competitors!

Don’ts

♦ Avoid saying anything negative about the competition to potential clients when selling your services. This would include making negative comparisons or claims on your website (for example, making negative comments about the competition’s pricing saying “I’m cheaper/better”), saying something derogatory about studio pet photography if you’re a location photographer, implying something negative about a competitor’s services to a potential client, and so on. Confident photographers don’t need to compare themselves to others to sell their own work. The work should be good enough to speak for itself.

♦ Never copy the wording or pricing from a competitor’s website, especially the information on pricing, frequently asked questions (FAQ), and process pages. This is a sure-fire way to show the competing photographer that you have no respect for her, and bridges once burned are hard to repair. Copying written content found online or in printed form, even when edited to make changes, is a copyright violation and can get your website pulled down for violating the terms of use of your web host. Create your own written copy and your own ideas for pricing off the top of your head; don’t look at other websites to see what your competition is saying.

Your business should be a reflection of you, and you alone. Clients can smell inauthenticity a million miles away, and if a potential client is comparison shopping and spots something you have on your website on another photographer’s website, it’s usually pretty obvious to them who the more experienced photographer is and whose content came first. Copying a colleague only makes you look bad in a potential client’s eyes. If it’s hard for you to know what to write for your website at first, keep it very simple and short, and add to it as you learn more about your clients and have more experience.

♦ If your competition has been in business considerably longer than you, don’t ask them for anything (for example, advice or counsel) when you first talk to them or contact them. Although there might be a photographer who has free time and the inclination to help, many busy, successful photographers will think, “I’ve spent many years figuring all of this stuff out the hard way, why should I just hand it over to this person just because they asked for it? What’s in it for me and why should I take time away from my paying clients?”

Be respectful of their time, knowledge, and experience. Not everyone is in a position to give you something you are asking for. And remember, they might even want to help but are just too busy. Try not to take it too personally. There are many other resources for help out there.

♦ Do not copy a direct competitor’s unique creativity. This can include unique compositions, branding, designs, logos, or project ideas. You can use another photographer’s idea for inspiration, but always ensure that you are giving credit to them and linking to their work in any blog post or webpage where you show your inspired work.

♦ Do not interfere with any of your competitor’s promotional material or assignments. This would include asking a store owner or manager to remove a competitor’s promotional material so that you can display yours, instead; approaching event organizers about doing work for them when a known competitor is already photographing the event; or trying to undermine a client by telling her you are the better photographer. There is enough work to go around that doesn’t involve negatively impacting another’s business.

Most of the items in this list are just basic common-sense practices and good business ethics. But good or bad ethics can make or break your business. The pet industry and photography industry are very small, and people talk. You want your reputation among your peers to be a good one.

The Top-Five Biggest Keys to Success

I often get the same question in interviews or e-mails from photographers: what in my opinion are the biggest keys to success? Although no single aspect will make you successful—there is no secret recipe for success, and ultimately it’s based on enduring drive, determination, time, and hard work—the following five characteristics are really crucial to achieving it.

1. Creative and Technically Skilled Photography

Create great photography and people will hire you. It’s as simple as that. Chapter 11, looks at the process of determining if you should go pro. The discussion emphasizes creating a solid professional skill that is based on good raw talent. Clients hire photographers who do good work, and those who do outstanding or unique or creative work, are more likely to win more business and make more money. If you are great with business but technically lacking, it would be a good idea to take some photography classes, read books, take workshops, and study and practice as much as possible to really refine your skills.

2. Outstanding Customer Service

Earlier in this chapter, I talked about great customer service as it pertains to word of mouth. We’ve all read bad reviews on Yelp, talking about poor customer service consumers have received. Providing poor customer service is a quick way to kill your success. Let your desire to serve your clients be your guide, and leave your ego at the door. As a photographer, your goal should always be to please your clients first, and yourself second.

3. Aggressive Marketing

By aggressive, I don’t mean nasty. I mean consistent, determined, and passionate marketing. You can have a great product, but if nobody knows you exist, you will never be successful. Aggressive marketing increases the chances that your business will be seen. Try setting marketing goals for yourself on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, complete with deadlines, and then track your progress. This is a great way to stay on top of your marketing effort.

4. Pricing Accurately

As you learned earlier in this chapter, pricing is so crucial when building and growing a profitable pet photography business. You can shoot yourself in the foot with prices that are too low (or too high), or by including images and products with your sitting fee, or selling too many products or tacky products.

5. Networking

Get out from behind the computer. Get seen. Meet people. Show off your awesome personality. Flirt, charm, cajole (yes, the guys, too; of course you might have a some ’splainin to do with your significant other…). Make people fall in love with you. Become popular. Make a name for yourself. Shake hands and smile. Find out what is going on in your industry. Become an industry “insider.” Some of the most famous, successful modern-day photographers are not necessarily the ones who do the best quality work, they are the ones who know how to promote themselves.

So to sum it all up, the five biggest keys to success are providing creative and technically skilled photography; providing outstanding customer service; pricing your products and services appropriately; aggressive marketing; and personal networking. If you follow these tips, and put in practice the information you’ve learned from throughout in this book, you can go very far indeed as a professional pet photographer.

Don’t let anybody tell that you can’t do it. Don’t let others (or your inner voice), tell you that you’re crazy, unless they are trying to offer some advice that might be useful as a startup. Don’t become discouraged or let circumstances, or challenges, or self-doubts get you down. Just take one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, and you will get there, my pet photographer friend. Be the tortoise, not the hare, and remember to always have fun. Pet photography is not funeral-home directing. It should be fun. And always keep in the back of your mind that you are doing it for the animals and the owner’s who love them dearly. The gift of a lifelong memory of a cherished family member, preserved in a beautiful photograph is one for which you simply cannot measure the value with earthly tools. It is a good, good thing you are doing, whether as a fun hobby or a serious business, and you should be very proud of yourself. Ultimately the only limits you have are self-imposed, and any dream you have is worth trying to attain.

Reach for the stars, baby!

Exercises

1. Set a sitting fee for your photo shoots and list what it includes and what it doesn’t.

2. Create a price list for your business and create three collections of products that you can include on it.

3. Decide which products you plan to sell and order samples of each product.

4. Brainstorm branding for your business.

5. Develop a game plan for the marketing strategies that you intend to use.