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

For the last few weeks, I’ve been giving you some tips on how to get your photography business running in the online world. We’ve covered things like workflow, sales and online websites. But now I want to go one step further than just tips, and give you a sneak peek at the application we’ve been working on. PhotoMerchant is not just a blog – we’ve also been working on developing an application that will enable photographers to upload their photographs to the web, show them to customers, and sell online – all in one application. We think our product will revolutionize the way photographers do business online.

I am pleased to announce that in a few days, PhotoMerchant will be entering the alpha 1 phase of its development. This is a very exciting time for us as we have been working on PhotoMerchant for quite some time now and the alpha stage is where we will put its functionality, stability and usability to the test.

PhotoMerchant is primarily aimed at photographers who want to sell their photos online. It allows photographers to upload and manage their photos with the end goal of selling them online to either their existing customers, new customers or the world at large.

If you’re interested in using the “pre release” version of PhotoMerchant and helping us to put it through it’s paces… email us at alpha@photomerchant.net. If you help us test out our new web application you’ll get a PhotoMerchant subscription of your choice at HALF PRICE.  That’s right, when PhotoMerchant goes live, you can choose the subscription level you want and get it for 50% the marked price! Interested yet? Email us at alpha@photomerchant.net.

Want more detail? Read on…

What is PhotoMerchant?

PhotoMerchant is an online sales, workflow and presentation tool that allows photographers to sell their photos online. Imagine being able to setup all your print sizes, paper types, options and products you wish to offer, as well as various discounts like volume, earlybird and coupon discounts. Then, adding shopping cart functionality along with credit card processing facilities to your own website, or if you don’t have a website, using the one that PhotoMerchant automatically creates for you. This is what PhotoMerchant does. It actually does more, and you can read below for more detail.

PhotoMerchant can integrate with your own website to turn it into a fully fledged e-commerce photography site where you can sell your photos and manage customers as well as handle orders, payments, printing and shipping. In the not too distant future PhotoMerchant will also be integrating with a number of Professional Printing Houses around the globe as well as providing post processing services and a host of other value-add features.

If you are interested in having a “first look” at PhotoMerchant and also helping us test the alpha version, leave a comment on this post or send us an email at alpha@photomerchant.net.

Alpha 1 Testing Phase

The alpha 1 testing phase will commence on 2 April 2008 and we are now looking for a cross section of photographers from the following genres: portrait, wedding, event, sports, landscape, school, seniors, animal, divorce, glamor, product, real estate, corporate, baby, travel and food photographers. If you fit any of these categories and you take photos with the objective of selling them then we want to hear from you.

Okay, so what can you expect?

The application will contain almost all of the functionality we will go to market with, however, it will neither have the final interface nor will it be bug free. What we need you to do is to put the application through its paces and record any bugs, suggestions for new features and usability issues in the process.

So you think you’ve got what it takes to become a PhotoMerchant test pilot? Then read on.

If you are interested in participating in the alpha testing phase please send an email to alpha@photomerchant.net or just leave a comment on this post with your email address and we’ll contact you!

Read the full story

We’re half-way through our mini-series on how to sell your photos online. In this series, we’re covering:

• Planning your site
• Content you should consider
• Choosing and creating your website’s functionality
• Marketing your website
• Using the website to increase business and profits

There are three important things I want to cover here:

1. Choosing functionality
2. Creating the website
3. Getting online

Now, I don’t want to mislead you: I’m not going to tell you how to make a website in one little blog post, but I will give you some ideas about what to think about, what your options are, and where you can find out more. Read the full story

When designing a website for selling your photos, plenty of photographers start in the wrong place. They start by trying to learn how to ‘create’ a website… yes, it’s important, but as I discussed last time, you need to start by understanding your site’s goals first. Now, wait… there’s one more thing you need to do before you fire up a development tool…

Plan your content

When I talk about content, I’m referring to all the stuff you’ll put on all your web pages:

• information (words)
• images
• portfolio
• functionality

If you’ve ever tried to create a website, you’ll be familiar with this problem: you spend hours working out how to make a web page… and by the time it’s complete, you can’t think of anything to write. Or maybe you can only think of one or two things – not enough for a proper ‘website’. So, let’s take this step by step… Read the full story

Selling photos online might seem like an obvious step for any photographer who is planning to take their business to the web. However, creating a website that showcases your work and makes it easy for customers to purchase prints can be complicated.

This is the first post in a series aimed at helping the photographer who is considering or trying to sell photos online. Over the next five posts, we’ll cover the topics of:

• Planning your site
• Content you should consider
• Choosing and creating your website’s functionality
• Marketing your website
• Using the website to increase business and profits

So, on to planning your website… Before you start trying to work out how to use HTML or any other web development tools, you’ll save yourself some headaches by answering a few key questions. Read the full story

Sometimes life hinges on the most insignificant things. For example, my life could’ve been very different but for one sturdy lunchbox.

When I was 9 years old, I was run over by a bus. While playing around with the other kids at the bus-stop, I slipped and fell under the wheels of the school bus as it arrived.

Lucky for me, I had a chunky Décor lunchbox in my backpack (remember those?). Talk about tough! The lunchbox took the force between me and the bus, and instead of life-threatening internal injuries, I got away with just a broken pelvis. (The lunchbox didn’t make it.)

Like I said, insignificant things can have a big impact. Another apparently insignificant thing in my life was a certain Excel spreadsheet, an ordering sheet for photographs following an event shoot.

OK, I’ll back up a bit…

A few years ago, I was hired as the photographer for a girls’ College Ball. The College was in Brisbane and I live in Sydney, so all my contact with the customers was done remotely. When it came time to get all the girls to order their photos, I sent them an Excel spreadsheet and asked them to enter what they wanted into one sheet and email it back to me. Read the full story