Building a photography business

As a artist, and a veteran photographer I thought transitioning my love of photography to a business would be easy.  Boy, was I wrong.

Not only do I need to be able to take photographs that come out stunning, but I also need to understand business.  Artist and business is an easy comparison to mixing water and oil, which we all know only mixes if you do it slowly with herbs to make a delicious vinaigrette.

So, what's a girl to do?  I decided to turn to my all knowing and available boyfriend, Google! As always, he was Johnny on the spot!  Google provided pages and pages of information. 

Although I may have started differently that what would have been suggested by a "business" person, I was able to start building a client list and booking jobs. Please understand that I am in no means qualified to give anyone on the planet advise on how to start a business, but just for fun here is a list of what I've done so far.

Since starting my photography business in March I've done the following:

1. Designed a logo, which I also use as a watermark for my photos.
2. Put the word out on Facebook to my friends, and made a Facebook page for my business. 
3. Booked several photo shoots for free initially to have a working portfolio to show potential clients.
4. Made a website, which I advertise on Facebook. (Currently using www.livebooks.com - has templates that can be used, and is geared only to artist and photographers)
5. Joined an outside photo lab for clients to purchase their photos from.  (www.pictage.com)
6. Finally ordered business cards (this should have been step 2... oh well I lived and learned

While I love the look of my website, I recently discovered that I wasn't getting much traffic from my site.  HELLO? I thought the purpose of having a website is to help people find me on the web, see some of my work, and prompt them to call me.  Uhhhh... no!  Apparently, you have to communicate with search engines each month, list yourself with yellow pages, etc...

Again, I'm an photographer and not a web guru, so as of yesterday I found another web company from an advertisement on TV that will hopefully help me get traffic to my site.  The only down side is that will cost me a small fortune!  Cross your fingers for me (if anyone is reading this, since this is my first post) that the traffic will come, and the cost won't be an issue.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep researching and gathering information, and hopefully something really great will come out of my hard work.

Until my next post... keep taking pictures, and capturing what the day brings you. :)