Subscribe by email
Subscribe by RSS feed
Freelancing? How about a Free 4GB CF Card?
March 19th, 2008Raise Your Rates. Here’s How.
Today’s FreelanceSwitch has an excellent article on negotiating, beginning with the advice/challenge to immediately raise your rates 25% for all future clients. If you struggle with your hour/day rates, and dealing with negotiations/pricing issues, this is a solid article. Find it HERE
Marketing. Be Proactive not Reactive.
As a freelancer you understand the daily crush more than most. So much to do, so little time, so little money to do it with. You are the CEO, the COO, and the VP of Marketing, and the Photographer, and the Tech department. Hopefully you’re learning to farm out tasks that don’t play to your strengths. Marketing is likely not one of those. So it becomes a reactive thing, something you do when things get slow, when you have a spare moment or not enough work. Then you scramble, throw something together and hope someone, ANYONE, hires you. An approach like this virtually guarantees you will never find a solid market.
Here’s my challenge to you: Print off a calendar and make a one-year plan. Who will you market to, how often, with what materials? Actually plan the thing out. And then stick to it. At the end of the year evaluate it and repeat. The more proactive you are, the more targeted, intentional, and intelligent your marketing and advertising efforts will be.
I get together every six months with a colleague. We sequester ourselves at a downtown hotel and spend the whole weekend planning, brainstorming, and bouncing ideas off each other. Also, we eat out and have some scotch. It’s kind of a reward for sticking to our guns and being proactive. It’s also really productive, and there’s a built-in safeguard of having someone that can look at your ideas and say “have you considered doing this…?” or “that’s possibly the lamest idea I’ve ever heard, try again.”
However you have to do it, pay attention PROACTIVELY to the business-side of things. Here’s one more idea:
Open a new bank account and deposit %10 of your income as a “Taxman Cometh” account. For you the figure may need to be larger. Now at tax time you’ll either have enough, in which case you’ve just alleviated some stress and the need to start looking for a bankruptcy trustee, or you have more than you need and you can roll that into the next account you should consider opening - “My Gear Will Break and Become Obsolete Account”, which you’d do well to put 10% of your income into.
Free Lexar 4GB CF Card
What do you do proactively to keep up with your game, hone your craft, keep your marketing current, and keep the cashflow moving? I’d love to hear from you, leave a comment with your best idea and in a week or so I’ll randomly select one of the comments and send the author a Lexar 4GB CF card, as a thanks for being part of the conversation.
Operators are standing by.
Well, I work 8-5 every day, and so my “personal time” for shooting is rather limited. So, every few weeks I force myself to drive around my town on a local photo safari. This keeps me using my cameras and lenses, but it also forces me to “see” the same little town I see every day in a different way.
Teaching workshops actually gives me a good reason to stay on top of industry trends, techniques, equipment, and industry news. I have to stay relevent in order to keep people coming back or signing up inn the first place. Plus- when you are in front of a class of highly motivated people, you can’t help but get inspired by ideas from the others around you!
Preparing for these classes and events, seminars, etc….makes you focus on planning ahead- both so you don’t fall flat on your face and so that the experience is a positive one for others.
When you photograph during these events, your own work seems more inspired than if you “go it alone”
I think doing this kind of work in addition to “regular” photography jobs keeps you on “the edge” and your work looking fresh!
Though not at a level of a working-photographer, I am attempting to hone my skills by re-teaching what I learn to my peers via my website. Helps others and myself by really making sure I know what I’m doing by hearing myself explain it. Also trying to find inspiration in less than likely places (for me anyhow), by shooting on really ugly days, finding spots in the house, and attempting to make them look interesting, or hide their true identity, or shooting the same old thing in a new way. Though I’ve only done a couple of paid shoots, unlikely practice helps to know my camera a little better.
When I was starting and experimenting on whether I could currently make a living at this thing called photography, I looked through the public calendar and sought out interesting events. I would go to said events and usually inform the event coordinator that I was there and who I was and ask for any neat details about the event (CG helicopter landing at one event). I would then go photograph the heck out of it. My first event was a grape stomp and actually landed me two paid photo shoots for that winery. Later, I shot a kayak symposium and captured some photos for my portfolio but also caught the interest of the local kayak club who also asked for some photos. In short, it was a good way to get exposed to the community and practice real-time event/photojournalism photography. I realize that not everybody has that kind of time, but a few hours a weekend during these big events at minimum hones your skills, and at best generates some leads.
Well, I’m a little late on this, but I promised to randomly pick a comment from the entries. Frankly, I’m surprised I didn’t get a little more action. I wasn’t even looking for GOOD ideas necessarily, you could have written some totally uninspiring gobbledy-gook and still been eligible.
Anyways, a thanks to all and a new 4gb card is heading out to Greg Kendall Ball. Thanks!
David-Hi
Sorry that the rest of the community failed to pile a bigger response to this……
A forum such as this is always useful.
My motivation comes from having taken a break from shooting. I was a working pro for newspapers and magazines, such as Time, The London Times magazine, The Telegraph, Newsweek, BBC etc, and them somewhere along the line, became a father. With a working wife, there couldn’t be two parents away from home, so I decided to give being a ‘domestic technician’ a go. No regrets so far!
When a colleage told me of the Eos-5D, I told myself, “Get one”, whhich I promptly did, with a 35mm1.4/85mm1.2 & the 70/200mm2.8 &580EX.
Not being able to get back fully into the swing of full-blown asignment photography, I decided to take a look at the new burgeoning market of stock photography. It has changed into a world of new opportunities, where the middleman has altered. Stock used to be an area where one would simply ‘dump’ all of your images that were left overfrom assignments. Not so now!
By researching the subjects and destinations of your intended shoots, you can fill the areas of needs of the stock libraries.
So that’s what I’m doing. Self-assigning, and working on building as many images into my stock acounts as possible. It gives one the chance to use every lens,technique, iso setting, stance,..you name it….. with shooting digital, you can do whatever you want! Like you David, coming from the age where we spent our lives either in the darkroom or waiting around for E6 results, being able to shoot card after card, without having to hang around in labs, is SO liberating. All that equals to is ..more time to get out there and keep shooting. Great website.
Best regards, Paul Salmon.UK