So when you set up your website, your facebook page, your twitter page, you start a blog and have a domain so you can have your emails sent to a professional sounding email account, you wonder why you are getting a few people viewing your info, reading you blogs and giving some comments on you photographs but no one is contacting you regarding a booking WHY, one reason could be…
… have you shown your charges, no!!! no of course not they are probably negotiable and even not worked out yet. But would you contact someone to ask about a service when you don’t know if they will charge you £10 or £100. So have you considered how you will work out your rates or charges?
Think about how much work is involved before working out your rates, I recently spent an hour with someone taking portraits, twenty minutes were spent discussing their requirements, then I spent about 2 hours processing the images, selecting the best 20 and then another hour with them showing them the images and discussing which they wanted and at what size. I then spent about 30 minutes printing and mounting images and a further 30 minutes copying images to disk for the customer to have all 20 for further use.
This means I spent 5 hours working for this customer, two images sold at A4 size and 3 at A5 size, 5 out of 20 sold and one memory stick of images. Do you want to work out an hourly rate or a price per photograph, what about a combination of both?
Do you want to do your own printing or do you want to use a third party, getting a photo-book for a customer is a very simple way of giving a customer a good selection of images and some of the companies can give a phenomenally quick turnaround, but are you planning on spending the time with the customer to plan the layout of the photo-book because that would add to your time further.
Have you looked at the prices of other photographers in the area, are you offering anything different, anything unique or do you want to compete on the price aspect?
Do you put your rates on a separate page of your website, do you do special offers? after all after the work spent on the shoot, any further sales of photographs are almost a bonus for you. Consider the aspects of putting up a package, showing a couple of photographs of different sizes, perhaps different mounts whatever you want to offer with prices.
Having considered all of this, do you think you can make a profit at the prices you are going to charge. Don’t forget any travelling, any consumables, inks, paper, mounts, covers, memory sticks, CDs, DVDs. electricity, rent, studio costs. Are you still making money? The cost of you camera, lenses, computer, software, lights, memberships of organisations, insurance? Still making a profit?
In the coming weeks I will show you how to plan to recoup your capital outlay of equipment against each job, keeping a record so you can track all your finances.
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