As a photographer, you need a good eye for detail, a flair for creativity, and some technical ability. Although you don’t need any formal qualifications, a few college courses will refine your skills.
Unfortunately, even if you do happen to be an excellent photographer, it’s not enough to become a professional photographer. You need yet another skillset: you must learn how to run a business.
The good news is that it’s never been easier to start your own photography business. All you need is a few business classes to learn the basics of running a business and an online presence to showcase your talents and attract clients.
The digital world will equip you with the knowledge you need through a few online business courses. And it will also give you a platform to launch your business.
Assuming that you’ve developed your photography skills and learned how to run a successful business, then you will need to take three essential steps:
- First, you’ll need to market yourself as a professional photographer with a website.
- Second, you’ll need an online photography portfolio to win clients over.
- Third, you’ll need cloud storage for your ever-growing collection of photographs.
Step #1: Building Your Website
A professional photography website is essential for your business. It will give you a platform to promote your services to the world. With a beautiful website, you’ll be able to attract clients and interact with an international audience. The idea of hiring an expensive front-end developer or creating your own website from scratch, however, may be intimidating.
On one hand, you may not have the budget to pay for a professional to design your website from scratch. On the other, you may not have the time, patience, or skills to create your own website. Still, there is a third option: use a website builder for photographers.
When choosing an innovative photo website template, you have two possibilities: choose a minimalistic template or choose something more extravagant that reflects your work and what you have to offer.
The best thing about using a website builder is that you can design your website to reflect your unique personality and professional photography style.
Step #2: Developing Your Online Portfolio
While most professions rely on copywriting to impress potential customers, professional photographers don’t have to pen a single word. You have an unfair advantage–your photography portfolio, featuring a compilation of your best work, will extol your virtues.
You don’t have to tell people how good you are, you can show them.
Organize your creative work according to a theme, present your work in an organized way, and make it easy for your website visitors to navigate around your pictures. They will appreciate your excellent curation and instantly grasp that you’re a seasoned professional.
Finally, after setting up your online portfolio, focus on optimizing your keywords. Besides researching the best keywords, use simple URLs, easy-to-crawl content, and relevant meta tags. Make your online profile easy for a search engine spider to index on Google’s search engine results pages.
Step #3: Using Cloud Storage for Your Photographs
You don’t have to move to the cloud. You can store all of your photographs on your local hard-drive. But if you take this approach, you’ll realize how resource-intensive digital images can be, especially if you have hundreds of photographs.
For this reason, it might be easier and more convenient to use cloud storage.
When trying to decide on the best type of cloud storage for your photographs, research the pros and cons of your various options.
- Do you need a public web-based cloud storage, like SmugMug or Flickr?
- Do you need a local or hybrid folder synchronization, like Google Drive or Dropbox?
- Do you need a dedicated or private cloud storage, like Hewlett Packard Enterprise or IBM Bluemix Cloud?
Growing your professional photography business will need patience, dedication, and determination to succeed.
Establish yourself as a top professional photographer by building a beautiful website, creating a superb online portfolio, and using the almost unlimited storage space available via the cloud for your work. You can also checkout some of the best photo apps listed here at Pixpa.
