What Should I do to Start a Successful Photography Business? – Everything you want to know from A to Z.
Marketing is the Key to Success
Now that you learned to think about how to please the costumers, you must also learned how to grow your business with little marketing and advertising tricks. This is about some economic thinking which you can find on blogs like Photopreneur and others.
The Most Overlooked Photography Business Marketing Tool – you might find out things you never thought of: like a specific logo on each web gallery on the Internet (flickr, deviantart, etc.) in order to make a brand for people to recognize you.
Then, Building a Microstock Portfolio – is another thing to do.
Fotolia offers the possibility to find affiliates (if you want to know more about how this helps, search for affiliate marketing), which means that if they sell photos, you will also get paid. For example, if you make an account at Fotolia coming from Photoaxe, you will get paid each time I sell and Image and vice-versa.
You can buy books that offer plenty of information about how to obtain great success with you business and books about photographic opportunities. It’s a little investment that might bring you thousands dollars more back. As an example: Photographer’s Market – an yearly database.
Legal Issues in Photography should not be Ignored
Copyrighting and Model Release are the words you will hear all the time in this business. You can’t even upload a self portrait without a model release. But don’t worry too much: all photography stock websites offer model release examples which you can change, print, sign by hand, scan and upload.
As for copyrighting, as long as you are a reasonable photographer who does not steal photos from other, you don’t have to worry. Don’t forget that Creative Commons license stand that the photo under it may not be used in commercial purposes. However, you might worry about others stealing your work and by knowing the law you can get paid for the damage.
5 Of The Fastest Ways To Get Sued – will guide you inside the general issues for which one can get in trouble with the law.
But, before suing someone, make sure you read well the papers (even web pages) you signed. Again, Photopreneur comes with an article that quotes paragraphs from the aggrements of different stock photogrphy companies: Have You Read Your Rights?. In a few words: some stock agencies tell you that the author of the pictures are the owners, other agencies take the ownership over them once the photo is uploaded and you won’t be able to sell the same photo to other agencies for a period of time. These rules must also be read when applying to a contest.
