Our November 09 release saw a slew of new features to help you customise your portfolio and website design. The best thing to do is log in to your account and check out the revised tabs under Website , or if you’ve been sitting on the fence, our free trial is now completely risk free (no credit cards required) – sign up for the 14 Day Free Trial here.

“14-Day Trial” is now 100% risk free

You now no longer have to add your credit card details to take PhotoMerchant for a spin and you will not be charged for ANY FEE’s during the trial period. At the end of the trial your website will be placed into a state of suspension allowing you up to 30 days to upgrade your account and start using PhotoMerchant.

Register for your free trial today

Adding your own Website Domain

If you have your own website domain (example www.maxisphotography.com) you can now have it work seamlessly with your PhotoMerchant website. The “Custom Domain Wizard” will walk you through the process step-by-step.

Log in to PhotoMerchant and go to Website / Settings.

New “Event” gallery layout

Event photographers have been asking for a more traditional “lighbox” view for their photo Galleries – especially when attempting to display a lot of images.

It’s easy to browse (especially using the native aspect ratio) and the animated slide show preview option is functional and engaging.

New “Maxis” gallery layout

The new “Maxis” layout offers a much larger image preview area and a more traditional thumbnail layout. Your photos will load quickly and dominate the screen.

You also now have the option to turn on/off: title, description and tags in addition to aligning the main preview area left or right.

New “Carousel” portfolio layout

Allow your visitors to flip through your Galleries using the new animated “Carousel” portfolio layout. Your visitors will enjoy the interaction that comes with flip-book style browsing.

Additional options allow you to have up to 4 Galleries across, and for landscape photographers, it looks even better with individual panoramas.

Add non-photo elements to your website

Using the new “Asset” tool you can now add any other media element into the Custom pages of your website such as PDF Documents, Graphics, Sound files, Videos, Zip files and Word Documents.

Just upload them into your “Assets” and you can then drag and drop them into the custom pages on your website.

Heaps more customisation options

Change the Gallery order in your Porftolio by drag & drop. Go to Photos / Gallery Order.

2x new colour schemes.

Background images – upload your own.

Improved “Image Cropping” means your portfolio thumbnails will look even better than before.

Create individual Gallery pages (instead of having to navigate via the portfolio).

Create Portfolio pages based on Category (eg, create a portfolio page that contains all your wedding galleries, and then another for all your portrait photos).

Re-order and re-name all the pages in your navigation.

Create navigation links to external sites like your blog or twitter account.

Plus many others that we cannot squeeze in to this mammoth email!

Register for your free trial today.

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?

The new guy

I’ve been hazed and initiated into PhotoMerchant over the past couple of months and am now an accepted member of the PMCrew. Now that the emotional scars have healed and the physical ones are less visible,  I can begin to get stuck into my role as the Creative and Marketing Director.

To date i’ve been working on the “Member Interface”, and without giving too much away, it’s going to look similar to the PhotoMerchant registration page. The Member Interface is where you can manage your online photography business, and within half an hour of registering, you’ll be able to sell your photo’s online. But i’m getting ahead of myself – we’ll be posting details of the product feature set in another post coming soon.

I’m also going to be working pretty heavily on the blog, starting up the photographic tumblr blog, twitting and working on the new PhotoMerchant website, template designs and the next revisions of the member interface. You can read a little more about my background in the bio section, but to give you a quick sampler; you could say that i’m an amateur photographer with grand ambitions of selling my photographic art online. My digital camera is a Cannon EOS450D but my real photographic passion is my Lomography.

So, our apologies for not having posted to the blog much of late. We’re bursting at the seams with some exciting news which we’ll share soon and you should expect more posts that will detail our development progress, our beta testing phase and our ongoing discussions about managing and marketing your photographic business. In the meantime, make sure you register to join our mailing list and to join our beta program.

The workflow, presentation and sales methods and practices are an integral part of any photography business. However, they can also be costly.

In the last post, I raised the issue of the ‘real cost’ of photography.

As a youthful photography enthusiast, I thought professional photography was a pretty lucrative business. My contacts on photography business forums were charging anywhere between $1,000 USD to $15,000 USD for a wedding and I couldn’t believe the mark-up.

Great, I thought! So I just work for 8-12 hours one weekend, polish up the photos in Photoshop, and then sell the prints to my client at a huge profit – maybe 70-90% higher than the price of printing. And I get paid for my weekend work!

This was all true – but after quite a few long nights with Photoshop, I realised that my calculations had neglected one element – I hadn’t counted the cost of my time as well as the learning curve.

WORK = TIME = EXPENSE

Today I want to present a simple example to illustrate the costs associated with doing a single wedding. Weddings are relatively simple from a business and workflow perspective in comparison to other types of photography. They are a little more stressful because if you stuff it up… it’s not good, but generally, they’re straight forward and repetitive. Ask any seasoned professional photographer, traditionally, weddings are the bread and butter of your business, especially when you’re starting out.

Let’s consider the following example:You agree to shoot Bill and Jane’s wedding. You offer them a package which includes your time for 8 hours on the day, a set of printed proofs, 25 5×7″ prints, 8 8×12″ prints and 1 16×20″ print. You also explain that you will place the proofs online for friends and family to view and find the image numbers and email you so the prints can be ordered and shipped. You offer this package for $1,850.

You need to keep track of every hour you spend working on Bill and Jane’s wedding.

In this example, your time was used as follows:

• Driving to wedding (0.5 hours)
• Shooting the wedding (8.0 hours)
• Driving home from wedding (0.5 hours)
• Downloading images to computer (0.25 hours)
• Making duplicates (backups) of original files (0.5 hours)
• Post processing of photos (12.0 hours) – you took around 700 photos and are going to provide Bill and Jane with 150
• Preparing images for web presentation (2.0 hours) – This is basically resizing images to lower resolution
• Uploading images to website & making it look pretty (2.0 hours)
• Sending order for 150 proofs to print house (1.0 hour)
• Speaking with Bill & Jane, managing their order(s) as well as any orders from friends and family (approx 5.0 hours in total)
• Managing the shipping and billing of all orders (3.0 hours)
• Misc (5.0 hours)

Total time spent: 39.75 hours

The cost of printing and shipping the 150 proofs to Bill and Jane is $0.90 per print (you are using a reputable professional print house, printing on archival paper on commercial grade Lambda or similar printers). $0.90 x 150 + $12.00 (shipping) = $147.00.

Once the entire package is delivered printing and shipping costs are:

Proofs as above = $147.00
$1.35 x 25 (5×7″ prints) = $33.75
$3.50 x 8 (8×12″ prints) = $28.00
$7.00 x 1 (16×20″ print) = $7.00
Shipping = $12.00
Total for prints: $218.25

You can’t forget the costs of your equipment, fuel for the car, paying an assistant, and general business operating costs:

Fuel = $15.00
Wear and Tear on equipment (depreciation) = $50.00
Assistant = $120 ($15/hr)
Business Insurance = $35 – this is based on a $2000/yr cost
Equipment Insurance = $20 – this is based on a $1040/yr cost
Marketing material = $5 – this is a very small marketing budget approx $260/yr
Misc = $35 – there’s lots of expenses we haven’t covered here
Total operating costs: $280.00

Now we take the package price of $1,850, subtract the print and materials cost of $218.25 and the operating cost of $280.00 and then divide the result by the number of hours worked (39.75):

1,850 – 218.25 – 280.00 / 39.75 = $34.00 per hour. This equates approximately $70,720.00 per annum. Now this isn’t really your salary, you have to put some money back into the business. Let’s say you put $10,000 per annum back into the business. your hourly rate drops to $29.20 and your take home salary would be $60,720.00 per annum. It gets worse. From the salary you need to deduct tax and money for your retirement plan. That will leave you with much less in reality.

The above example is just that. An example. All calculations are based on doing 1 wedding such as the one above each week for 52 weeks. A photographer just starting out isn’t going to have this much business and an established photographer is likely to have much more business than this but also higher expenses.

So,

How can you increase your photography income?

You should always be endeavoring to improve your photography and editing skills. This boosts the “quality” of your product which as was discussed in my last post, will generate more business and therefore more income.

Streamline your workflow. In the example above you spent 12 hours on post processing. More experienced digital photographers might spend less time as well as achieve better results. This comes with learning and experience as well as trial and error.

Raise your prices. This is always an option. Especially if your work is good.

It’s my belief however, that skill alone will not solve these problems entirely.

I believe that in this era of digital photography, we need to rethink the way we deal with photographs. We’re still struggling because we’re still working from the mindset of traditional photography. My feeling is that we need to start using digital technology not only to shoot and edit – we need to start using digital technology along the whole workflow.

Sure, in the end, customers are always going to want a picture they can hang on their wall. But there’s a lot more we can do with digital technology from shooting to printing that will help us take better photos and produce more efficient, valuable images.

I have much more to say on the topic of streamlining your workflow and the use of digital technology, especially when it comes to using the Internet to your advantage. Stay tuned over the coming weeks.

So let’s hear it… how can we start using digital technology more to improve our efficiency? Any ideas? Anything you’ve tried?

Leave me a comment – I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas.

In this post, I want to tell you about a principle that I think is more important than any sales, marketing or workflow technique. I treat this principle as a rule in my work:

Your product must be the base of the business you are
trying to build – and your product must be good.

I’ll explain…

As a photographer, your product is your photo. If your photos are poor, you can’t expect your business to succeed – it’s a no-brainer when you think about it.

To make a living from your photography, you need to sell your work – this constitutes a business. Customers drive your business, and to attract them, your photo must be good.

What makes a photo good? That’s a complex philosophical question that we’ll save for another post, but from a business perspective, you need to define your market and meet their needs. There are thousands of photographers seeking to sell their work – how are you going to differentiate your work? I see so many photographers who aren’t offering anything new. Your photos don’t have to be unique, but they should be good – high-quality and targeted to your customers’ demands.

Like I said, it’s really a no-brainer, but it’s not something that photographers readily consider – we’re usually thinking about the technical and artistic merit of our work, rather than its value as a marketable product.

Workflow + Presentation + Marketing = Sales?

You can streamline your workflow, present your photos online beautifully, and market your imagery like crazy. But, in the end, your time and effort will only translate into sales if the photo is worth buying – if it’s got value to your potential customer.

As an aside – have you ever counted up the amount of time and effort that goes into each photo or shoot? Do you ever recoup the cost of this time when you sell a picture or charge for your time? Is your product worth the time you spend on it? This is a topic I’m looking forward to discussing soon…

The idea of ‘photo as product’ is really pivotal for me. I believe this principle to be at the heart of any photographer’s efforts to sell photos and make a living doing what you enjoy, especially in the online world when your competition is so unrestricted.

I’ll be elaborating on some of the points raised here in later posts, but please feel free to comment on my thoughts. I’m sure not everyone would agree with me and I’m looking forward to discussing the matter further.

A final thought…

As the digital photography market grows, it seems like every man, woman, and their family pet are taking digital photos and posting them on Flickr, Facebook, MySpace and the other social/media networking sites. Digital photography makes it easy, and some of these new-breed photographers venture into the world of traditional photography, doing weddings, portraits, events etc, for their friends and family.

Now, I have nothing against this – I started out in a similar way – but my point is that The Internet is flooded with photos, and more people are starting to sell their photos online. How do you think this will affect photography as we’ve known it in the past? Are we already seeing some of these effects?