Business Insurance
Everyone has an opinion on the value of insurance. Personally, I wouldn’t work without business liability insurance. If you work in a studio it will be required. If you strictly work on location then you’re taking chances without it. Take, for example, the wedding photographer:
* Will the venue (church, reception hall) allow you to work there without a certificate …

Who collects and pays the sales taxes?
Here’s an important point: when something is subject to sales tax it is only taxed once and only the final person receiving the good or service pays the sales tax. I think of every sales transaction as a train and every step along the way is a car on the train. The end user …

Sales taxes for photographers
Photographers find sales taxes particularly perplexing (and that’s understandable). I can only hope to give an overview, please speak to a professional advisor or accountant to get specific answers for your state or locale because things are always changing. The short story is this: if you are going to sell photographs or photographic services to consumers then, …

Photographers are creative people and customarily hate structure and dealing with the legalities of running a business. Well, if you’re going to earn income from your photography then you’re running a business and, as such, need to understand the legal requirements. In prior installments we talked about fun things like cameras, business cards, websites and cooking up marketing ideas. Those …

Getting the word out
This is a blog about marketing photography and we’re just now talking about websites? Gathering up your best images and putting them on a website is a challenging but really fun part of marketing. It’s also a step that people want to put ahead of too many other important details. A website is now an essential part …

Developing your identity
A photographer should create their own unique identity to show why they are different than the competition. In recent years the word “branding” has pretty much been beaten to death but it’s a valuable word to understand. Branding means creating a unique identity (in look and message) and then projecting it consistently across multiple marketing platforms (whew, that …

Analyzing the local professional photography market
Now that you know what type of photography you want to pursue, let’s do some research. So you want to be a pet photographer and live in Peoria. Start looking around to find your competition. Do a Google search on phrases like “Peoria pet photographer” and see what you come up with. Look in the …

How do you market yourself as a professional photographer? Thanks to the internet the answer to this question evolves continually (and there are lots of great answers to the marketing question available on the ‘net). But, at the core, marketing photography (or anything else) will always have its constants.
In the most simple terms, I think there are four basic steps …

Maybe I point to the past too often sometimes, pulling references from a time that no longer exists. But like Popeye used to say (where has Popeye gone?), “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam”.
There was time before ATM machines, email and online ordering. In those days it was necessary to speak to people face to …