How Is Business?
People often ask me, as small talk of course, how business is, or if I am staying busy. As a self-employed person I am as busy as I want to be. As someone trying to maintain a successful photography career there is no shortage of work to do! As for how business is, its great! I am certainly not making as much as I was a couple of years ago, but my income appears to be stable and I still believe there is ample opportunity for growth.
The Photography Business Is A Marathon
Achieving growth in a photography business, at least in my photography business isn’t easy. But I keep in mind that my business is a marathon, not a sprint. I need to be the tortoise, not the hare! My goal this year is to do everything just a little bit better. Learn a bit more about social media (especially Google+ and possibly Tumblr), keep adding content to Cafepress.com, adding content to Imagekind.com, adding content to my website, blogging, and most importantly, creating a wide variety of stock imagery. Ultimately, everything is important and doubly so now when competition in the photography industry has reached such astounding proportions!
Forecasting Winners
As I mentioned, this business is a marathon. A lot of those things that I want to do a little bit better are things that may take years to provide a reasonable payoff, and I understand and accept that many things I do may never pay off. But just like with stock photos, some will payoff, some won’t, and it is very hard to forecast which ones will be the winners. It is helpful to remember that there are photographers (and others) who are employing pretty much all of these processes successfully, whether it is selling fine art prints online, successfully employing social media to attract new clients, or earning significant revenue through online ads.
Increasing Visibility
I do believe that core to the future of my business is building traffic to my site. As I increase the visibility of my images I increase my revenue from all of my sources…and from sources I have yet to begin participating in. With an increase in visibility and traffic more people license my stock photos, more people buy greeting cards and other photo imprinted merchandise, more people buy fine art prints, and more people click on Google ads. I make more revenue from more sources.
Business Is Great
So, like a tortoise in the fabled race with the hare, I plug along testing the social media waters, adding new sources of revenue, improving and refining my business activities and work flow, making stock photos, and possibly most important of all, enjoying my business. How is business? Business is great!
