Category: Uncategorized

This past weekend my husband and I went to Phoenix, AZ to visit my father who is renting a place their for the month. Actually, it was Mesa. My father is 80 and a golfer and he has friends and a sister who live in the neighborhood, so this is a good place for him to be. While we were there, we went to an OSU/Michigan football game party. A husband and wife set of friends of my father threw it and while we were there, one of them said to the crowd “That’s what Leslie does–photography. She takes pictures!”

As you all should know by now, I most definitely am not a photographer. I used to get frustrated that my father couldn’t quite understand what I do and that his friends didn’t get it either. Then one day it dawned on me–it doesn’t matter: these people are not my market. They’re not even close to my market. They are now retired, but even when they did work, they weren’t in a demographic that would ever have any use for what I do, so it didn’t serve any purpose to get frustrated. In this case, I just said, “No, I’m not a photographer. I work with photographers to help them make money with their photography–y’know, marketing and the like.” That evoked the polite nods I expected. By playing it light, they could let the topic drop gracefully and I could get back to the veggie dip.

Sure, I could have explained in greater detail what I do and made sure they all understood, but it would have done no good for my business (or for me personally even). The chances that one person in that group would have taken the info I provided them and shared it with someone who might buy from me was, probably, well less than 1% and that’s a lousy ROI (return on investment).

The point of sharing this with you is that many creatives waste their efforts on the wrong people. Photographers who do not sell directly to consumers or to local small companies waste a lot of effort (and money) trying to make their websites generally search engine-friendly, for example. They want to be #1 on Google if someone searches for, say, “product photographer Louisville, KY” but this is probably not targeting the right people. The very people who use Google to find photographers are most often the same people who used the Yellow Pages for the same function in the past–namely cheap corporate clients and/or people who want family portraits done (and mostly cheaply there too). So all that effort on the SEO for the website is wasted.

Instead, if a photographer spent the time and money getting listed on sites like workbook.com and altpick.com (and others) and keyworded those listings correctly, s/he would be getting site hits from the right demographic groups–art buyers, editorial clients who meed a local shooter in a specific place, etc. These are the clients any non-consumer-direct photographer should want to get. Corporate-direct clients also use these search engines over general ones like Google, so you’ll be getting in front of them too.

Yes, you will get fewer hits if you don’t pop highly on Google, but you will convert more of the hits you do get into clients. That’s getting a good ROI, and that should be your goal.

Unbelievable disclaimer on a new Maxim-related website (covered by PDN) that says, essentially, “we don’t need no stinkin’ permission to use copyrighted materials…because we say so. So there.”

Well, if that’s the way life works now, I’m the new Empress of the West and all of you have to send me buckets of cash in tribute…because I said so.

Sheesh.

If you make images they may be interested in, keep an eye on their site and sue ’em when they steal your work. Please. And let us know when you do.

Sometimes goofy creativity is a great thing. Take this site (which I found from Coudal Partners) which teaches us how to prevent mind control via the perfect tin foil hat. The writing is hilarious and the illustrations silly but appropriate. What a great piece of creative goofiness.

On the other side, there are those creatives who mangle pop songs for ads. Here’s a site that points out many of the offenders, including two of my top three (“Crumbelievable” and “Turning 23″…ACK!).  They’re only missing the Burger King abuse of “Melt With You” by Modern English.

What creative goofiness have you done lately?

I have no idea who first said that, but sometimes it’s hard to remember that it is very untrue. This weekend was one of those times. I posted my opinion on a topic on a pro photographer forum, giving advice which I believe to be the best advice I could give, with the hopes that readers would find it helpful, and suddenly a couple of the other posters decided to make my life difficult. They got personal and beyond snarky.

I felt spanked, and without good reason.

Now, I don’t work weekends (as a rule) but I looked at this forum on Saturday morning. So, I guess I was asking for some spankage since I broke my own rule, but this was too much. I started getting pretty down about it.

Then I started getting emails and personal messages from other forum members. They, rather than snarking, wrote lovely comments about how I had helped them or that they had learned from things I had written, etc.

So, what started out as a negative response to my efforts turned out, in the end, to be a good thing.

How many times in the recent past has something that started out as an apparent negative turned around for you? Did you do something to make that happen? To make it better? To see the positive side?

Squidoo is Seth Godin’s newest invention. You can make a lens to gather all your stuff about a particular topic, and share it with others. For example, I have one for my business while other folks have done them for their interest in SciFi or cooking or, well, just about everything.

Squidoo earns money by selling ads. When someone clicks on the ads, Squidoo (and the lensmaster if s/he so chooses) earns a bit.  Lots of this money goes to charity and now there’s a chance to help even more–there are lenses devoted entirely to charitable contributions. I made one. Please go there and click on the ads. Send the url to others, and have them do the same. All the money generated will be donated to various causes like helping kids in Africa get anti-viral meds or to buy schoolbooks for other kids. It’s all good, and it’s so easy.

Here’s a quick diversion, also in the creative vein (but much less time consuming than yesterday’s fun): can you guess the correct logo? How fast?

Hat tip to Jane G. (aka caffeinegoddess) for the link. You should check out her blog for many good things creative/advertising/design related.

Sometimes it’s a good thing to just “waste” time in some sort of creative play. I suggest Line Rider as a good toy to play with. Deceptively simple idea: draw the slope for the sledder to slide on. The results, however, can be spectacular.

Warning…addictive.

Thanks to everyone who participated in my quick, 4-question survey (request posted on ASMP Pro/Student and APAnet forums). The results are in. There were 100 respondents, so this is by no means extensive, but it’s probably a decent sample.

When asked how business in 2006 has been (total billings), 49% said they were up this year over 2005. 37% said they were down and 12% said it was about the same (note, total is not 100% because someone didn’t answer). The largest group was those who said they were up 26-50% over 2005 (17%), which sounds like good news to me. On the down side, 13% said they were down by more than 25% for the year. Ouch.

For October 2006 compared to 2005, 43% said they were up, 22% said “the same,” and 32% said “down.”

On the open-ended question about how the respondents thought the rest of the year would be, and why, the answers were mostly positive, with neutral next and then a few negatives. However, the negatives were highly negative. For example “all I hear is that budgets are low or non-existent” and “dizzzzmal [sic] at best. A lot of companies are going out of town” are two of the negative comments.

On the positive side, one photographer said s/he was expecting a $2 Million year (bravo!) and several others said that their marketing was paying off (ex. “We […] have repositioned ourselves in our markets, targeted new markets and are rebuilding a client base. This has been successful and we are growing steadily.”).

As for what kind of photographers responded, here’s the breakdown (note, multiple answers were possible):

Advertising   60%
Corporate    53%
Editorial     48%
Weddings/Event     18%
Other, please specify  27% (mostly architecture, portrait, and a coupe of fine arts people)

While there weren’t enough data to do hard interpretations, my general sense is that those who were working their marketing plans were correlated to those who had more positive results and/or outlooks. Whether this is because people with plans generally feel more in control of their businesses (and thus are more positive in attitude) or not, as I said, there’s no sure way of knowing.

Thanks again to everyone who participated!!

Seth Godin, on his blog, recently posted about how the idea of some action being labeled “just business” is a warning sign–that is, when someone does something mean or nasty or unethical and says “C’mon, it’s just business.” I completely agree with Seth (yes, again).

Every day we get to make choices about how we choose to run our businesses. There are those of us who choose to make a little less money now rather than shoot for tobacco or to give away full rights for little or nothing, but in doing so, those people are standing up for their beliefs. They are being ethical.

Yes, my ethics and your ethics may not be 100% the same. Maybe you don’t have a problem with tobacco ads but I do. That’s fine. Those are the fine points of individual ethics–everyone has her/his own code.

But the larger issues should have commonality. I think we can all say that killing someone to improve business is right out. But what about putting someone out of business by, say, undercutting their fees. Is that okay? I say no.

See, business, for small creative businesspeople especially, is life. Besides the intimate connection between one’s art and one’s soul, on a practical level, if a creative’s business fails, s/he could lose her/his home, pretty easily. Is putting a creative and her/his family out on the street, just so one can make a buck/pound/euro/loony, ever acceptable?

What if it happened to you? What if someone undercut your business by lowballing, or badmouthed you to clients, or took credit for work done by you, etc. How would you feel?

Would it be “just business” then?

ADBASE has become a member of the PLUS coalition. Good for them. Yes, they are joining a group that connects them with their target market, but they are also helping out a group which may change (some might say “save”) the photo industry. It’s a great pairing.

Regardless of whether you are an ADBASE user or not, supporting PLUS is a great idea. Check ’em out (both of them) at PhotoExpo.