Starting a photography business is actually the easy part...
It's sustaining a successful photography business for the long-term that proves most difficult.
With that in mind, here are four pro tips for optimizing your photography business for long-term success.
Fill the Gaps in Your Schedule
Photography is a highly cyclical business, so you need to have contingency plans and ways of making money when business slows down.
For example, if you're a portrait photographer, try working as a second shooter a weekend or two a month during leaner months.
As another example, you might farm out your processing skills to another photographer that has too many photos to edit and not enough time or get into videography as a secondary means of earning money.
You can add things like workshops, fine art prints, ebooks, and other products to your suite of offerings as well. These items don't even necessarily have to do with the specific type of photography you usually undertake, either, which can help protect against some of the ebbs and flows of your business.
The point is that making money now and in the future depends in large part on your ability to diversify your income streams and fill the gaps in your schedule as they occur.
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Treat Every Client as Though They're Your First One
Remember how you felt when you got your very first client? Remember how much time and effort you put into working for them?
Bottle that feeling up (along with that work ethic!) and use it on every single client that you have.
With so much competition for photography clients these days, it's vital for you to stand out from the crowd, not just from your photos but because of your next-level customer service, too.
After all, any professional photographer can take a great photo, but the way you make your clients feel, the way you interact with them and earn their trust is something only YOU can do.
Besides, great customer service is just about the best marketing there is! If you treat your clients right, they'll recommend you to their family and friends. It's really the gift that keeps on giving!
Streamline Your Editing Workflow
I don't know many photographers that got into this business because they love to spend hours and hours editing photos...
We all love to be behind the lens and interacting with clients, not hunched over our computers late at night editing images!
That being the case, it's important to find ways to streamline how you edit your images.
On the one hand, creating presets in programs like Lightroom can help you get basic edits out of the way (and get a consistent look to your images as well).
But before you even start working on your images in Lightroom, there's something you can do to save you loads of time now and in the future.
The worst part about working in Lightroom is that you have to manually tag all of your images. But Excire - an award-winning Lightroom plugin - changes all that because it uses artificial intelligence to automatically keyword your images as you upload them to Lightroom.
Not bad, right?
Here's how it works...
Let's say you do a photo shoot with a couple in the mountains with nice greenery filling the midground of the shot.
When you use Excire to catalog and organize your images, it will automatically tag those photos with "mountain" and "green."
What's more, if the couple you're photographing is an older man and woman, Excire can even tag the image with "adult," "man," and "woman."
There are actually two versions of Excire - Excire Search, which has 125 keywords and Excire Search Pro, which has over 500 keywords. Excire Search Pro also has a keyword transfer function so you can utilize its powers to keyword your existing photos in Lightroom.
No longer do you have to search and search your Lightroom catalogs in vain for a specific image, nor do you have to spend precious time manually keywording your images.
Instead, you can optimize your editing workflow right from the start with Excire!
Get a complete review of Excire in the video above by Anthony Morganti.
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If You Need Gear, Borrow or Rent It
A big mistake that some professional photographers make is that they begin to stockpile gear when they really don't need it.
If you primarily shoot portraits in the studio, you probably can do without your own 300mm telephoto lens. If you find an occasion to use one, hit up a friend and borrow theirs or spend a few bucks to rent one. Either way, it's much cheaper than buying one!
Buying gear is kind of like buying a house - only buy what you need, and more importantly, what you can afford.
Just like being house poor is a bad situation to be in, being gear poor is a bad situation as well.
Why work longer hours, more often to pay for gear you don't need?!
If you can resist the urge to splurge on new gear - as well as follow the other business optimization tips above - you'll be well on your way to building a photography business that can be successful in the long-term.
Bonus Business Tip - Develop Relationships With Reliable Service Providers
One of the primary benefits of being a self-employed photographer is that you have no one to answer to but yourself.
But your success is built not just on your talent and hard work, but also on the relationships you build with the companies that provide you with critical services.
Photo by PeopleImages via iStock
From your insurance agent to your lawyer to your hosting service, you need reliable people in your corner.
Of course, the problem is that many people (and many companies, for that matter) simply aren't reliable at all.
That's a problem for many reasons, but particularly when you rely so much on your website and online store being up and running.
I've used many different hosting services over the years, and I've found most of them to be just plain bad.
Then I found OVH.
In fact, I switched to OVH three years ago, and it was the best decision I've made with regard to PhotographyTalk.
Since switching to OVH, our uptime has been 99.9% - just as OVH advertises. Get better hosting today.
They can offer such incredible reliability because they have a worldwide presence with 27 data centers and over 300,000 servers in 19 countries on four continents.
They have awesome customer service as well. It truly is the best of both worlds with OVH - superb uptime backed by people that really care about your success!