Creating a more profitable year.
In the previous nine posts I have covered a lot of things. Pay-per-click advertising, site design, search engine strategies, marketing tips, where to get inspiration and more. Many of you may be thinking that this is impossible to do in a short amount of time. You may be right, and that’s ok. Take some time to make plans for developing the tools and strategies that make sense for you.
One of the things that I keep in mind is the incremental approach to improving success. Most of us aren’t starting at zero. We have some good clients, a good portfolio, decent web site and at least some sort of marketing plan. We don’t have to chuck it all; we have to make it incrementally better. Let’s take a look at just a few things that can make a big difference.
Make a list of what has to be done to increase your revenue. Then make a list of what revenue streams you have and what you currently do to maintain them. For instance, say you currently shoot about a dozen corporate portraits a month. And to make it easy to figure, lets say you profit $100 per. That’s $1000 or so per month. It takes you on average 10 marketing calls per week to keep those clients and fill in for attrition.
So let’s just take a look at how we can incrementally increase these figures. Let’s add 10% to the profit you are making. So we raise rates a little bit. Now you are making $110 per shoot.
Now we increase our phone calls 10%… making 2 more calls per week. If we keep our rate of 10 customers for 10 calls per week, adding 10% more calls could get us an additional 2 clients. And if the referral rate is one per 10 clients, then we may get an additional client every month. This isn’t guaranteed stuff, but it does make sense.
10 shoots at an additional $10 profit is $100 more ($1100).
But we have also added a few extra calls so this month we have 2 additional client shoots. So we will add an additional 220 dollars to the month.
Incrementally we have added 10% to a couple of our identified items, but the result is more than 10%. We are now at $1320 per month, which is substantially larger than 10%.
My point is that if you look across all the things you are doing, add a 10% increase, or 5%… whatever makes sense. The cumulative results can certainly add up to serious increases in revenue, clients and more.
Another approach is to take some of the ideas and plan to implement one of them each month. That way costs, if any, are controlled and time commitments are not so demanding as to cause interest fatigue.
Competition is fierce, but I also see a grinding away of some of our basic expectations as photographers. Some things like Royalty Free images have been a thorn for lots of shooters, but now the Internet, affordable high-quality digital cameras, and lots of part-time photographers are taking a toll. 2006 will be a pivotal year for many photographers.
The tips and ideas I have presented are just a sample of the things you should be thinking about. I hope you found it helpful. And I hope you continue to look for additional streams of income to make your next year a wonderful, and profitable one.
Update: It came to my attention that I left out an important note. If you are currently doing something that is not working, please don't add 10% to that to see if it makes a difference. It wont. Measuring is important, and it can also be truamatizing. Sometimes we don't want to hear that what we are doing is not working, but that knowledge can also be very liberating. Move to try some different ways, measure them and refine the approach so that real numbers can be applied to the strategies.
And that is DAP10... work smarter.
Cheers. (I will make this 10 post item a PDF for free downloading. See my site at www.dongiannatti.com on January 3, 2006.)
Previous:
Move to the Web for Increased Productivity (DAP9)
Web Marketing Tips (DAP8)
Get Inspired (DAP7)
Selling Prints and Fine Art (DAP6)
Taking Stock of Your Stock (DAP5)
Web Design Options (DAP4)
Flickr… more than just a photoblog. (DAP3)
Show More Pictures (DAP2)
Be Found on the Search Engines. (DAP 1
No comments:
Post a Comment