Are we there yet? How many times must I have put this question to my very talented partners in crime, Derek (co-founder and CTO) and Kain (Creative and Marketing Director)? Wind back the clock to September 2007. It was two years ago when Derek and I met at my home to discuss a number of start up ideas. After some discussion we settled on pursuing two opportunities. Opportunity one was to develop an online sales tool for photographers, a project Derek had been toying with for almost a year, and opportunity number two isn’t even worth mentioning as it lasted a mere three weeks. We learned very quickly that a) you need focus and b) things generally require a lot more time and effort than you think.

I won’t tell you what our initial time line for the project was as it is a tad embarrassing, but suffice say, we expected a sprint and found ourselves running an ultra marathon.

So what took us so long? Well, there are probably three key factors that turned this little project into a two year nose to the grind stone kind of endeavor.

1. PhotoMerchant is a turnkey online business system for photographers, and as such, the application turned out to be a complex beast of 2.5m lines of code and counting.
Yes, Guy (Kawasaki) and all you other smart people out there, we know, good enough is good enough, start small and iterate etc., etc. That all makes sense and we thought we understood the meaning of your words. But what do you do if you’re a delusional perfectionist? We thought what we were planning to build was bare bones (delusional!). We didn’t realize we were little perfectionists (delusional!). We thought we were using superior technology (not delusional) and as such, this was surely only going to take a couple of months or so (delusional!). Anyway, I think I’ve made my point. We’ve learned a lot and at the end of the day, we don’t regret the past for two reasons. Firstly, some things you just have to experience for yourself. Secondly, what we ended with is a very well thought out and executed solution, designed from the ground up to let you be more effective at what you do and ultimately run a more profitable photography business. But don’t take my word for it. I encourage you to see for yourself and be the judge of that.

2. Until recently, all of us were working full time in our respective day jobs, hence software development and business planning was a night time and weekend effort only.
As independence and total control over the direction and integrity of the product was important to us, we made the decision to self-fund the venture. Clearly development would have been much quicker had we raised external funding but with that would have come a loss of control, larger overheads from the get go, commercial pressures and considerations that would not necessarily have been in the best interest of the business/product, and last but not least a compromised vision and, no doubt, a different company culture to the one we’ve shaped over the last 24 months. That said, we have recently raised a small amount of cash from an investor who not only presents a great strategic fit for us, but also is culturally aligned with us. The decision to raise funds on the eve of launching PhotoMerchant was motivated by our desire to work full time in the business so we can provide the best possible support to our customers.

3. Had we known back then what we know now, we would have been considerably quicker.
If you work as intensively as we have on a project, you can’t help but learn a lot. Clearly, if we had to start all over again but with the experience of hindsight, the technical knowledge we have amassed over time and the technological developments that have occurred in the last couple of years, we would be significantly quicker now. No doubt about it. However, we believe there is a clear benefit of us having taken some extra time with getting PhotoMerchant to launch. The last couple of years allowed us to look at our business and the PhotoMerchant application from many different angles. What you see now is what be believe to be a well considered solution which should help you considerably with running your photography business online. We know there’s lots of room for improvement, because there always is, but all things considered we’re pretty confident you’ll be impressed with the functionality, ease of use and overall usability the inaugural version of PhotoMerchant offers.

So, are we there yet? You bet we are! And we have big things, very big things, planned for PhototMerchant.

The PhotoMerchant crew and I hope you will take advantage of our free 14 day trial and we hope you will enjoy using PhotoMerchant as much as we enjoyed making it!

Any serious business book will tell you that Goals are an essential part of any good business plan. The same is true when planning your online marketing strategy. Goals should be ambitious, realistic, inspiring and should represent where you want your business to be heading to. Goals should be SMART (learn more about SMART Goals), meaning they need to be specific, measurable and have a target date in which the need to be achieved.

print out 3 copies of your business and marketing goals: keep one beside your bed, one in your studio / computer workspace and the last one in your camera bag.

Your Business Goals are the aspirational signposts for what you want to achieve by running your photography business. Take a moment to write down two to four Business Goals. Your Business Goals could look something like:

• Earn a yearly salary of $68,000
• Increase my customer base to 250 by the end of the financial year
• Sell 500 canvas prints by June 30
• Convert 20% of my wedding clients to Child Portraiture within 12 months
• Increase the profitability of each wedding job by 25%
• Generate a passive income of $50,000 from selling my photos online
• Retire at 40 with $1,000,000 in the bank

Marketing Goals represent the methods by which you plan on achieving your Business Goals. Your Marketing Goals could look like:

• Create an email marketing database of 1000 opted in users in 3 months
• Have 10,000 unique website visitors by years-end and convert 10% into a qualified sales lead
• Appear on the first page of an organic Google search by 30th June for the keywords “Alabama Landscape Photography”
• Generate 50% of all future business from Word of Mouth
• Send a quarterly email newsletter with a 50% open rate and a 20% click through rate to my website
• Win 4 International Photography awards by 2010

Note that each goal is specific, is measurable and has a timeline in which the goal needs to be reached. Your goals are going to be unique to you so ensure your goals reflect your personal ambitions.

These goals will be the basis by which your success will be measured against. From now on, every decision you make about your photography website or marketing strategy needs to contribute to the achievement of these goals. These goals should be part of your daily focus. I don’t want to get too caught up in the motivational aspects of these goals as there are plenty of blogs, websites and books that cover these in much greater detail than I can. But as a suggestion, print out 3 copies of your business and marketing goals: keep one beside your bed, one in your studio / computer workspace and the last one in your camera bag.

Make sure your goals are audacious and a little bit scary. Do not start the next phases until you are totally inspired by your goals. Visit us at PhotoMerchant to get photography business online.

Your photography website is the most essential piece of your digital marketing strategy. A great website will enable you to capture new sales leads, improve your production workflow, enable you to understand your customers and increase your profitability. An ordinary website will just tell people who you are and what you do, and a bad website will only ever be seen by the people you tell directly and at worst, may present the wrong first impression. The success or failure of your online marketing depends upon a range of variables but you can save yourself a lot pain and effort by investing in some thinking time up front and plan your online strategy first.

All to often, photographers start their online marketing efforts by jumping into Photoshop and attempt to design a web page. In other circumstances, the photographer may have some coding skills and start building their own website in something like Dreamweaver. Or, the photographer uses an online gallery service and realises that their options are limited. Pretty quickly, the photographer ends up scouring photography forums and communities asking for recommendations on flash galleries, web hosting, JavaScript/Ajax libraries, “the best photo sharing sites” and such…

A strong online presence takes time and careful planning. As the saying goes: Only fools rush in. By taking the time to plan your website strategy properly you will potentially save yourself a lot of pain, and you’ll have a much better sales, promotion and marketing tool.

Over the next seven articles we’ll provide practical tips and advice on how to plan your website and online marketing campaigns, including:

1. Establish your Business & Marketing Goals
2. Know your Audience
3. Creating your Marketing Plan
4. Decide on the Technology
5. Design and Usability
6. Building your Website
7. Learn, Refine & Repeat

Next: Establishing your Business & Marketing Goals

Leveraging Digital Tactics

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the websites of professional photographers and reading a lot of community discussions about how to market photography businesses online. If you take the time to look around, there is a lot of great information out there, but a lot of it is either grounded in the language of self-proclaimed digital marketing experts or it is full of nonsensical waffle. It is my goal (with these posts) to try and make the business of digital media marketing simple, accessible and open for discussion.

But first an important disclaimer:

I would classify myself as a self-proclaimed digital marketing expert. I’ve been working in the field for nearly 15 years and have a healthy portfolio of campaign successes from which I can draw experience from. But! I fervently believe that no-one can ever rightfully claim to be “the expert” in digital marketing. Yes, this a contradiction, but my reasoning is that the world of digital marketing is changing every day, and what works today may not work tomorrow. Despite popular information to the contrary, consumers are actually pretty smart, and the disruptive tactics of old do not work as well as they used to. Equally, modern marketing tactics that are coined “viral” or that leverage “social media” can as easily destroy a brand as make it the coolest thing in town. So my theory is that there is no single blueprint for online marketing. Instead, there are range of online tools, marketing tactics and best practices that can be deployed to improve your marketing capabilities. So, whilst theoretically I am an expert, I do not proclaim to know everything. Let these posts be an opportunity for everyone to express and share their opinions on what works and what does not.

Learn from our mistakes

At PhotoMerchant, our goal is to help professional and amateur photographers have the best set of online marketing and business tools at their disposal. We plan on sharing our own successes and failures in marketing PhotoMerchant as a point for discussion and as place to learn and grow from. We encourage everyone to join in on these conversations either through the comment system, the “Feedback” tab on our website, through twitter or by writing to us directly: wave [at] photomerchant.net

In upcoming posts we will discuss:

• Website best practices
• Email marketing
• Digital relationship marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• How to maybe/kinda/sorta use Social Networks
• and Integrating with non-digital campaigns

To put it simply, we want to practice what we preach. As I write this post, I’ve realised that there are a whole range of things we should be doing on our current website to improve our marketing capabilities. Like you, we’re a very small team with very limited resources. I look forward to sharing our experiences, no matter how painful that might be.

Kain Tietzel
Designer / Digital Strategist (and self professed Douche bag)

Tell us what you think!

What would you like us to cover in our “Digital Marketing Tactics” posts?
Do you have any stories or insights to share?
Are there any links and resources that you have found invaluable?