Month: August 2008

Sometimes it’s fun just to play. This is one of those times. 

Create your own!

While mine’s not perfect of course (I have big smile lines and a third earring on one side) I did manage to whimsically recreate my new hair color and bangs:

 

   (hat tip to adland for the link)

Rob Haggart has another interesting post on his blog today. He interviewed Ryan Schick, a photo editor at Portfolio.com (Condé Nast) who shared lots of helpful information. You should read the whole post, but I did want to highlight a couple of things. 

First, blogs are gaining traction for photographer marketing.

Second, when he talks about print portfolios, remember he is talking about for editorial only. They are still quite important for advertising marketing.

And third, if you are calling/emailing more than once a day (without getting a response and thus replying), you are stalking your target. Stop it. It’s incredibly bad form. Quote from Mr. Schick:

What started as a recommendation and an appointment to view his body of work turned into a multiple-times-per-day phalanx of phone calls and emails [from the photographer]. By the time the actual appointment to meet came around I had frankly grown exasperated by his persistence and for better or worse was uninterested in the actual meeting.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that these people are very busy and your call or email is not a priority for them. That’s not them being rude, that’s them taking care of what they need to first. I bet when you are busy you don’t immediately call back or reply to an email from an assistant who contacts you about a possible gig. You’ve got other fish to fry and you’ll get to it when you have the time. Same for these people. So no more than one attempt at contact per day at the absolute maximum. No more than twice a week is probably better.

During SB2 I mentioned that hand writing thank you notes can go far to connecting you, positively, with your targets and clients. Some people looked at me like I was nuts and several said that they thought an email would do. While an email is better than nothing, I still like the hand written notes. Seth Godin has an interesting post on the same topic today. In it he suggests that many people use technology to distance themselves from their customers. Could be, rabbit.

My next book is on marketing for photographers and it is just about done…at least my part is. My editor is hard at work churning through my odd prose and hopefully my designer will get moving on the layout shortly. I will, of course, let you all know when it is published.

My days are pretty much consumed with the book now. As law school looms, I want to make sure all the “heavy lifting” work of the book is completely done before classes start…and that is next week. I figure for the first month or so, I will be in a cave called “the newbie 1L” (a 1L is what first-year law students are called), only emerging to write here, write a Manual, and record another Creative Lube podcast. After a month I’ll have a better idea of what I will and won’t be able to reasonably do. But for that month, I won’t be doing any one-on-one work.

Of course, just like going on vacation or already being booked up, suddenly it seems like everyoone wants to work with me. I’ve been having to say “no” to an awful lot of you lately and I can tell you, it sucks. I certainly am feeling the loss of income (that was expected, of course), but I also feel frustrated that I have to say “no” and can’t directly help those of you in need. 

However, this is exactly the time for me to keep my eyes on my goals and to reach those, I have to say “no” now. Even though my pocketbook makes a sucking sound when I open it and the guy at the bank looks at me oddly these days, I know that I am doing the right thing to make my business what I want it to be in the long run. I know that in order to be the best lawyer I can, to be able to serve this community better with legal advice as well as the marketing and business advice I already offer, I need to disappoint some of you now. Just know that I’m not ever “gone” or completely out of touch. I hope to serve you with the materials here and in the books and videos and podcasts, etc., that I offer. And you can always email me your questions, as long as you give me lots of time to respond.

I don’t like having to let some of you down now, but like getting a vaccination, better to suffer the pain now to ensure a better future. 

What I hope is that many of you can learn from that. Some of the choices we have to make are often difficult, especially in the short term. But when that unpleasant thing is the right thing to do, in the long run, you must do it. As they say, one must keep one’s eyes on the prize.

For your businesses, that means things like not panicking during the downturn, doing your marketing when you’d rather do almost anything else, and holding firm to the usage licensing model for your business. It might also mean going back to school to learn new skills like producing video (and editing, etc.), which would cut into your income now but which could be a great boon in the long run. Keep focused on the long term, and even though things might be very rough now, you can get to a better place.

Thinking about adding emails to your marketing plan (a very good idea) or sending more if you’ve been at it already? Agency Access has a deal right now on their emails: $200 off and 3000 additional emails with bundle purchase. Great deal on a solid system with effective reporting (and I know many of you don’t use a reportable system (sigh) so now is your chance).

The promo ends at the end of this month; check it out now.

[I really need to start charging for such advertising 🙂 ]

Okay, I have to share the screen-shot of the PDN page where, in the flippy-flippy of the animation, the blurb about my consultation appears.

Just like how you might get excited about seeing your work on a billboard or in a magazine, it’s fun for me to see my name there (and know it’s connected to my work). 

The odd thing is that, completely unconnected from this and the release of my video presentation on websites (available here), there seems to be a sudden increase in discussions about photographer websites on several forums. And, unfortunately, most of what I am reading is about how to get it cheap. 

Cheap is not what you should be thinking about when it comes to your site. This is where you need to be willing to loosen the pursestrings because of the potential impact. Your website is your most important marketing tool in many ways and if it so much as gives off a whiff off cheap or passé or poorly designed, it will hurt you more than I think many of you realize. 

I would rather see someone allocate more funds to making a great site, even if it means, say, not having print promos for a year. It’s that important.

By now many of you will have already heard about a site where people “share” (read: violate copyright) magazines in their entirety, online. I’m not posting a link to the site here because I don’t want to contribute to the numbers who visit, even out of curiosity. 

Canadian photographer John Fowler sent me a link to an interesting post about that mag site and its ramifications. It brings up a very important point: now that the idea of free magazines online has been let out on the masses, will anyone be able to force the masses back into some other monetization/distribution format or is the proverbial genie out of the bottle?

Discussions of whether or not there are copyright issues here will, in my opinion, not serve the community too well. Yes, we know that these are rip-offs and both the magazines and their contributors are being damaged by this site, so there’s no real discussion there. But the impact on the general public is something we should be paying attention to.

Of course we’d love for people to rise up and say “this is wrong and we will not stand for it!” but the fact is, that is not very likely to happen. When we have relatively few people rising up to protest  those who are financially supporting the promotion of the Beijing Olympic games (I am not talking about the athletes, who should be supported, but rather the media companies and the advertisers–people won’t even turn off their tvs!) when the Chinese government has been responsible for supporting countries that engage in genocide (hello Sudan!) as well as the mass murder of millions themselves (over a million Tibetans alone and other minorities are also tortured and killed), I think the chances of getting a groundswell of interest in supporting copyright protection is an unlikely proposition. People just don’t want to be bothered. They want what they want and they’re perfectly willing to ignore the ramifications if those ramifications do not directly affect them.

In other words and in our industry’s world, copyright really doesn’t matter to the outside world very much…except when it costs them money and then they are against it.

The reality is people love free. Even more than cheap, free is compelling. Once we humans get something for free, it’s damn difficult to get us to pay for it later, and that’s what is happening with magazines on that pirating site. It’s something APE has mentioned, and others, but which still seems to be causing a lot of nothing (but griping) in the photo community in general.

We need to get out heads out of the sand and face the reality that the system as we have known it is changing radically. We must figure out some way to work with the change. Magazines may move to entirely digital formats which they distribute for free but pay for only with advertising. Okay, if that is the case, that means we need to figure out how to develop a pricing system that is based on that advertising as well. 

This is the new model, I think, for almost all creative work–advertising based. I’ve talked about it before as a possible system for pricing advertising usage, but it could work for editorial as well. Maybe something like this: if a magazine averages $X per content word in advertising revenue (online + print), then the usage fee for an image to run as editorial content (online and print) would be a small percentage of the total number of words of the accompanying article times the per content word figure. For example, the usage fee for an image running with a 1200 word article would be (at $X per content word) 1200X times 10% (or some other percentage).

This is just one idea, and one which I haven’t even begun to think through at any depth. I’m just throwing it out there. But that’s the point–let’s start throwing ideas out there. Wwe have to start thinking someplace and start thinking now. Other ideas should be discussed so that we can, together, find a way to implement change ourselves rather than drown when it’s implemented on us.

I’ve got a very brief survey that I’d like only commercial photographers (not wedding or other consumer photographers) to fill out. It’s anonymous and only the first 100 responders will be tallied. It’s 12 whole questions on your print and email promotions. You can take it here and the data will probably appear in an article or Manual, or maybe my book.

Thanks!

For those of you who do not get the Manuals via email, the most recent one has just been added to the Manuals page of the main BAP site. Free, of course (though if you’d like to make a donation–see the column on the right of the main Super Premium Blog page–that would be very helpful and appreciated). This one again comes from my new book (which is headed to the editor this week!) and is also on the topic of marketing tools, like the previous Manual.

While you are on the BAP site, don’t forget to check out the recent updates to the Spark Plugs and the Parts Department areas. There is new stuff available there like the new videos on Targeting and Websites, as well as the now-classic BAP t-shirts. 

As always, I am looking for ways to serve you. Suggestions are much appreciated!

When I talk about diversifying and thinking of new ways to monetize your creativity, I could hardly come up with a better example than Nick Onken. Note that this project came about because of his (and his friend’s) MIND, not his camera.

Btw, these slow times are a great time to let yourself think about new, “crazy” ideas and how to sell them.