January might seem like a slow season for most photographers worldwide. The weather can be either too hot or too cold, and let’s face it—there’s often a spending slump after the festive season. But hold on, this quieter period can be a treasure trove of opportunities! It's the perfect time to lay down the groundwork for the months ahead, and start taking bookings too. How? Let’s dive in!

If you’re looking to increase your average sale but you don’t feel like you can increase your prices right now, what can you add to your offering that would be too good to pass up? What price point would be a great deal for them, but also a bit of extra for you without doing more work?

As we wrap up this year, it's the perfect time to set your photography business on a path towards growth, success, and creative fulfilment. Here's a comprehensive checklist to ensure your photography venture is geared up for a thriving year ahead

Starting and running a pet photography business is a challenging feat in and of itself, often presenting a plethora of unique challenges, from networking to marketing and everything in between.

However, one of the most significant broader factors that you must bear in mind, more so now than ever before, is the issue of making your business as eco-friendly as possible.

If you’ve just switched to pet photography from primarily photographing people, you might have realised that a lot of your pre-shoot questions- either for discovery calls or pre-shoot questionnaires- aren’t really appropriate!

Or perhaps you’ve been doing this for a while but every now and again you have quite a challenging shoot and you find yourself thinking “if only I was prepared for that”.

Well, today I’m here to share with you my favourite questions to ask pet parents to ensure your shoots run smoothly!

I’m a big fan of plug-and-play marketing solutions. We even offer a few on the site, especially for pet photographers.

Over the last few weeks, I trialled a new marketing strategy.

I do this kind of thing from time to time as a bit of a test for you all! This time it was a great reminder that plug-and-play solutions are a really good starting point, but if they don't work at first, you might just need to make a small change to suit you better.

This is what happened.

Attending a workshop purely for portfolio building doesn’t make any sense. That means that you are not taking full advantage of learning from the instructor you paid to learn from.

Why not instead, fully embrace that opportunity and when you get home organise some portfolio shoots to further practice your new skills, in locations your clients can actually book?

Most of us love our clients. I mean, they’re all animal-people right? And our clients love us. So are you giving them the opportunity (or an excuse) to book with you again?

I did a bit of research for this article and time and time again I read this statistic: 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition. Sure that is highly likely made up of companies that are selling consumables, but the point remains. It is much easier and cheaper to re-book past clients.

Here’s a few reasons why:

We all want organic bookings; clients who search for a pet photographer Google, and decide to go with you. These type of bookings often have the highest average sales and as an added bonus, the conversion process is often much easier compared to enquiries from interruption type marketing (giveaways, Facebook Ads etc) since these client are already looking for pet photography.

So how do you get your site to rank on Google, and how do you know if it needs optimising? Here are some of my favourite tools that I use to answer those questions, plus some extras that I use to elevate the user experience on my website and increase my conversion rate.

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You’re already managing Facebook- perhaps even a group too, and Instagram which is getting more and more time consuming thanks to Reels, and that’s just social media. Then you likely dedicated a whole lot of time to a bunch of other marketing avenues too. Blogging is pushed down that to-do list and soon enough you start to wonder if it’s even needed at all. Sound familiar?

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I’m here to tell you that the answer is most likely yes.

When analyzing the numbers, most photographers I know, myself included, will see that their highest spending and most valuable customers typically found them through an organic Google Search.

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The words on your website, your copy, can have a positive, a negative or a neutral affect on your business.

Bad copy can lead to you being “blacklisted by Google” and it can leave your audience with more questions than they started with.

Good copy helps you rank on Google while relating to your ideal client, hooking them emotionally, addressing their fears and objections- without sounding condescending- and converts them to bookings, all while sounding like yourself (and your brand)!

My old copy wasn’t necessarily bad. I’d even argue it was pretty good. But it wasn’t doing enough of the work.

When I mentioned to fellow photographer, Adam Gray, that I’d just hired a copywriter so my website would have a higher conversion rate, his immediate reply was “you know she’ll just use AI right?”.

He was wrong.

Last year I hired Sarah Stangl to photograph my family (myself, my husband and our two dogs) and yesterday, our framed canvas arrived (yes, it's stunning- see below!). It reminded me of all the shoots I’ve had over the years and everything I’ve learned from those as a photography business owner.

Here are some things I’ve learned from hiring other photographers

If there’s one photographer I know who absolutely smashes expo’s, it’s Sarah Mounsey. She consistently generates over 300 leads at an annual event she attends which brings in $150k of sales. I asked her to share what she’s learned.

Here are her top tips to a successful (read: profitable) expo booth/ fair stall for pet photographers..

Keep reading to learn more

Finally it seems that travel is completely back open to most of us, and that means that many of the in-person events that were canceled or delayed- are back too!

For those of you who have joined our industry in the last couple of years, this is likely your first opportunity to experience an event and so I wanted to give you an idea of what these events are like!

Keep reading for my experience!

If you hang out in any Facebook group for long enough, you’ll soon see a desperate post of someone asking how to retrieve lost images from a corrupted drive. But that same person will never ask twice because, we learn the lesson. And I say “we”, because I’ve been there.

This guide looks to give you easy insight into how you can preserve those crucial photos. Whether these are photos of your client’s pets, or your own - the below will help you understand how to properly and easily store your images.

If you’ve recently started photographing pets, especially coming from another genres, you might be missing one or two things in your camera bag that can make a huge difference in obtaining variety for your clients.

Here are the top three non-camera items in my bag that improved my pet photography shots (and sales).

You’ve heard a bunch of professional photographers talking about outsourcing and their VA’s. You can see the benefits but knowing where to start is all a bit confusing. I mean, what tasks can you start with, how much do you pay, which is best between Fiver, Airtasker, the specific sites for retouchers? And that’s just for listing an ad! Then you have the hiring process, onboarding, sharing passwords and training. Is it worth it?

I’m not going to lie to you, there is a process to hiring any new team member and it’s no different for bringing on a Virtual Assistant. But it is worth it, and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

We had a marketing panel discussion at The Retreat. When I asked Mareike her best marketing strategy she immediately replied “partnerships”. Of course I was super excited to hear her perspective because that’s also my strongest marketing avenue and one I teach during the marketing lessons of the Business Foundations Challenge.

Then over the weekend, one of the Retreat attendees and photographers in the last Challenge emailed me on this subject, and asked me what I’d do.

I’ve shared the story in this week’s blog, and some suggestions for working with partners.

Do you know where your next clients are sitting in the buying cycle or what that even means?

If you’re just starting out, chances are, not many people know about your business yet. And if they don’t know you, how can they book?

Later down the track, you might be more known, but if you haven’t earned trust yet, your special offers won’t be booked.

Soon enough you’ll get to a point where you don’t need to take the risk of no-sales that come with giveaways, and instead, your phone will ring from enquiries who are looking for what you offer. But to get to that point- you need to lay really good foundations.

Let’s take a look at different marketing strategies, when they would work well and why!