Selling Your Photography

If you are a photographer who has received comments from people such as:
–Your photography is wonderful.
–You have quite the eye
–Have you considered selling your images?

And you don’t market your photography, why not?  When I was writing fiction and joined a writer’s group over twenty years ago, I wrote because I felt compelled to, I didn’t feel as if I needed to market my fiction.

I wrote for myself  became my refrain.  I found a friend in that first writer’s group I joined and he gently prodded me to get better.  Jason introduced to Heinlein’s Rules of Writing.

A couple of these rules can be translated easily to the field of photography:
–A writer must write.  Just as a photographer must take pictures.
–You must put your story on the market.  Just as a photographer must put his work out to sell.
–You must keep it on the market until it sells.

This took me some time to get brazen enough to “put myself out there.”  I believe being a writer first, marketing my fiction first, taking my friend, Jason’s advice and putting that first manuscript in the mail helped me realize that showing my photography for sale didn’t have to be a challenge.  Seeing the success I experienced selling my fiction made it that much easier to convert to selling my photography.

My friend, Michael Bennett over on Google+ recently sold his first image.  What if he thought:
Ahhh, I’m only doing this as hobby, I’m only doing this for myself?

How will you know if your photography is “sale worthy” if you don’t make the attempt.  You can’t be intimidated.  I can tell you from personal experience that underneath the:
I’m writing just for myself that I did my best to convince myself of lay the factor of intimidation.

I felt that maybe my fiction wouldn’t be well received.  Maybe that’s what is at the root of many artists.  Let me tell you something:
Get over it!

Too Much Work:

–When I began selling my photography, I built my own website using Adobe GoLive/Dreamweaver.
–I added new pages and new images to each new page.
–Customers would email me the images they wanted and I would print them, and ship them out myself.

You can certainly see how time consuming and financially challenging this can be.  I worked this way for over five years.  Thankfully, my friend, Jeff Buxton who is also a photographer helped me see the error of my ways and unbeknownst to me, he researched photography services that hosted websites.

I resisted this at first, because I felt didn’t want to lose control.  As I began using one of the services Jeff discovered I realized just how much time I could save.  Using templates, having print services and drop shipping product to customers, I discovered left me a staggering amount of time to concentrate on the important part of a photography business:
Actually taking pictures.

So, if one of your challenges to marketing your photography online is that you believe it is too much work, you can put that to rest right now.  There are several websites that host sales sites:
SmugMug
Exposure Manager
ZenFolio

These are the three most popular template based photography services available.  Each one offers a trial version.  They each of their own benefits.  WHEN; NOT IF you consider selling your images online, review these services and come to a decision about which to use.

And as far as promotion goes, you can look back at last Wednesday’s column here:
Marketing Your Small Business for advice on that topic.

In the mean time:
Focus on what’s ahead of you.
–
Chris