FocalPower…the blog

Another topic that came out of the wedding album discussion with my photographer friend a few days ago was the DIY wedding album.  Since she is a photographer, she really wanted to put together the wedding album herself.  Thus, she looked for wedding photographers who would give her the negatives immediately after the big day and didn’t offer (or wouldn’t include) the album in their price.

During my friend’s wedding, there were a number of enthusiast and semi-professional photographers who were there with cameras in tow and taking pictures that the wedding photographers were not.  In the end, many pages of photos in my friends wedding album were taken not by the professional photographers she hired, but by the guests who were just doing what they love to do.  And at every wedding I go to, I continue to see more and more DSLR cameras of increasing quality snapping away.

The technology of photography is constantly forcing professional photographers to be nimble and adapt their business models in order to stay in business. Thus, with the rise of the enthusiast photographer and the continual price erosion of high quality DSLR cameras, I am wondering: are more wedding photographers seeing requests from clients for the negatives to do their own wedding album?

This seems like a natural evolution of the business trends that have been occurring.   But I would love to hear from some professional wedding photographers to see if this is the case.

There is still huge value that professional wedding photographers offer in both photographing the day as well as album design.  The trick for wedding photographers is to make sure their clients don’t forget this value.

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A few days ago I was talking with a fellow photographer and we some how ended up on the topic of wedding albums.  We were comparing notes on how the different photographs that we had at each of our weddings handled the album sale after the wedding.  It was quite surprising the stark differences that each photographer used and the result that this had on the incremental revenue gained from the sale of an album.

The general trend amongst most professional wedding photographers is to offer multiple packages that the prospective couple could choose from.  The two main variables that are involved with sizing these packages is the number of hours spent photographing the wedding and the number of album pages that are included .  Including some album pages in the package is the first step to a successful wedding album sales after the big day.

The second step to a successful wedding album sale is selling the couple on the wedding album vision.  Regardless of what it says on our business cards, we are all sales people first and foremost.   Helping the happy couple have a complete memory of their big day is the value they will get out of their wedding album.  The trick is to be energetic and positive while showing them the vision of a complete album that is more than what their package contains.

I learned this trick from the wedding photographer who my wife and I hired for our wedding.   He knew I was a photographer and so was a bit more open on sharing before, during, and after our wedding.  This, coupled with my business sense from selling technology for years, allowed me to pickup on his highly refined sales process for the album.  His process was getting the couple emotionally attached to a vision and then enabling them to make an emotional decision on the wedding album.

Within a week or two of the wedding, he had scheduled a time for my wife and I to come back in to his studio and review the photos.  He had all the keeper photos from our wedding available as 4×6 prints.  All he asked was that we spend 30 minutes or so flipping through all the photos and making two piles:  likes and dislikes.  Then, we were scheduled to come back in within a week to “layout” our album.

When we arrived for the layout session, he had already taken our pile of likes and laid out the ideal wedding album from our big day using these photos.  He sat us down to review the layout with us and show us the options and alternative photos that could be used in certain spots.  Page by page, we saw our wedding day come to life before our very eyes.  Seeing moments of the wedding that we had not observed or had missed during the day itself.  When we reached the last page, it felt like we had experienced the whole wedding day for the first time.  This was the emotional hook.

The photo package that we had purchased included 12 album pages.  Laid out on the table in front of us was almost 30 album pages.  The additional cost for the ideal wedding album was easily a couple thousand dollars.  I could see that most couples at this point would just go with the photographer’s ideal layout and happily pay the additional money.  But my sales instincts kicked into high gear and allowed me to realize what had just happened.  After discussing it over with my wife (who hadn’t realized what just happened even though she has worked in retail sales for years), we went for the ideal wedding album.  We were very happy with our decision.  And the photographer had successfully upsold another client.

The lesson to be learned here for all photographers is to project a positive energetic feeling about the photos every time you interact with your customers. This positive energy will wash away the small flaws that we, with our photographer’s critical eye, always see and sometimes focus on to our detriment.   And this positive energy will not only transfer to the client but also stick in their mind.  You then need to have a sales process in place that times up selling during the most emotional interaction with your client.  This sales skill is not an easy one to learn, but can be learned by everyone who is willing to try.  In the end, you will end up with more business per client and a more successful photography business.

Eventually, you too can retire early to your well earned beach house…just like our wedding photographer did.

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Yesterday I came across an inventive Wedding Photography service that I hadn’t heard of before: The Proposal Shoot. Fort Worth Texas based and FocalPower Quote Widget patron David Kozlowski recently discribed this concept on his blog.

As a wedding photography this is an interesting option to offer to prospective customers and help increase your revenue per client. You would need to advertise this differently than you do your other serices however. As most grooms (statistically the one who does the proposing still) probably don’t think about wedding photography until well into the wedding planning. A focused advertising model would be needed to get the word out to them somehow before they propose.

The Proposal Shoot also has some risk. One of the most interesting parts of being a wedding photographer is that your dealing with one of the most dramatic moments in people’s lives. Human drama can lead to wonderful photographic experiences. During a wedding the drama should all be in a general positive sense (most negative drama occurs during the reception). With a Proposal Shoot, there is a higher risk of negative drama…imagine if she said now or wasn’t as enthusiastic as the he envisioned her to be.

I would always require payment up front for the Proposal Shoot…just in case.

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There is an email scam that I was made aware of recently that seems to be targeting photographers (thanks to Daniel Lemin for alerting me to this!). It’s a variation of the “Nigerian money scam” email that you have probably heard of before. Since this scam targets photographers (possible hoping to catch a high number of enthusiast or semi-professional photographers), we should all be on alert.

Below is a copy of one of the email variations:

From: Marcus Garvey <**********@yahoo.com>
Date: Jan 24, 2008 8:07 PM
Subject: BOOKING

Hello,
My name is Mr. Marcus Garvey, I want you to handle of Physics seminar going on round the globe for my clients,which your country is the next place this seminar will take place.

If you are a very good documentary photographer and portrait shooter.

They were non governmental organization by name; THE INTERNATIONAL PEACE MOVEMENT with sole ambition of bringing peace to the world,

I will be happy to discuss this more with you. by day rate for documentary photography that is not going to be used on the cover of a magazine or newspaper.that is just for images we need for internal use,

You will go and cover the event at another location?:seminar halls is located at:483 Great House Road Stratford Hall Stratford, VA 22558.

This seminar will start from 1st June to 22 June same month in the year 2008. Get back to me with your total cost for the 22 days.

So we can get this done. confirmation that you will be free to handle this project.i find your email from : photoserve.com .

You can call me to confirm:+447045708***.

32 Liverpool Avenue, Doncaster,
South Yorkshire, DN2
Mobile:+44-7045-708-***
Fax:+44-7006-069-***.
Kind regards,
Mr. Marcus Garvey

I did say variation above. There are variations on this theme targeting photojournalists, wedding photographers, etc.

The way this works is basically upon confirmation of “availability” and a pricing by the photographer, “Marcus Garvey” (who, BTW, is a famous Jamaican activist from the early 1900s) will send the photographer a check and ask them to forward a large portion of it to the conference organizers. Of course the check will bounce and the scammers hope the photographer will forward the money before the bad check settles in their checking account and bounces. Another way this could work, is the international phone number’s could be ones that cost you extra to call, well above and beyond the cost of a normal international call.

It’s a scam that all photographs should be aware of. Remember the old axiom: It it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

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Photographers that are seriously engaged in doing business online should know what their website’s Google page rank is, especially if you are doing any sort of advertising on Google.

A few days ago, Google tweaked their page rank algorithm. If you haven’t checked your page rank recently you should, there is a good chance that your rank has changed. This latest tweak appears to have primarily closed a loop hole in the algorithm that some sites (specifically blogs) were using to inflate their ranking. Some sites would accept payment to have multiple links to your site placed on theirs or create a network of similar blogs and cross link to them all, also know as a link farm.

Before, Google would count these links toward your page rank. This latest tweak doesn’t count them. So sites that were artificially high because they payed others to link to them, will see their Page Rank corrected to a more realistic level. But, other sites might also see their Page Rank increase as a side effect of these changes. (The above detail of the tweak is most likely just one of many aspects that were adjusted in the algorithm).

How Do I Check My Page Rank?

The easiest way to check your page rank is to install the Google Toolbar (you probably already have it installed) and then visit your website. When the toolbar is visable you will see an icon labeled “PageRank” that will show you the ranking of the page you are visiting–hover over this icon to get the specific rank number (x out of 10).

I also recommend that you create an account for your website on the Google Webmaster Tools. This is a set of tools that will help you understand how Google sees your website. You can use this information to fine tune your site for an increased page rank.

What Does This Have to Do With Photography?

For those who are making their living with photography, their web presence is a required aspect of their business. If you are doing advertising to draw in new customers to your website, then you need to understand Page Rank. The faster and easier you can capture new customers, the more time you can spend doing what you enjoy…photography!

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In the past few days, I have talked with a number of photographers who share a common trend. They are all striving to save time. Either by streamlining their work flow, more carefully managing the time that they spend online, or by reducing their amount of community participation. It has become too easy to loose track of time today in the inter-connected electronic photography world we all live in. Especially with all the wonderful advancements in photography online.

And I’m just as guilty as the next person. Notice the time stamps on a lot of my blog posts…I find myself posting late into the night (or early morning). With all the work that’s required to launch FocalPower my own photography has taken second seat. But I’m not upset about that at all, because one of the corner stones behind the designs of FocalPower was a realization that the technology has not kept up with helping photographers optimize their time. There are now all these great ways to share your photos on line and channels to increase the awareness of your photographic brand. However, there are few ways designed to help you utilize these with the minimal work.

During the research conducted before starting work on FocalPower, I sensed an undercurrent of frustration over how much time was spent just managing photos online. I also shared that frustration. Over the past few weeks, I have noticed this frustration has reached a breaking point with many photographers. Photographers want to engage in multiple channels of distribution online but end up sacrificing the opportunities in order to save the time to do what they want or need to be doing…taking pictures and building their businesses.

Luckily, some of the work we are doing here with the first release of FocalPower will help address this issue. I’m excited about some of the capabilities we are building into FocalPower…to enable photographers to better manage their online photographic assets with minimal effort. I’m also looking forward to hearing the ideas of the at large photographic community in additional ways the FocalPower technology can be adapted to help them optimize their time.

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