Aggressive Pricing

Price is rarely THE number 1 factor when hiring a photographer. Price plays an important role in determining where and when you are on the buyer's list. If a buyer is looking for the highest quality, she will not start by looking for the lowest prices. The higher the prices you charge, the higher the perception of quality of your work.

Some people are more sensitive to prices than others.

To most people: price = quality.

The secret of pricing

This "top secret" 3 words sentence will tell you what kind of customer she is:

What's your budget?

Are You Missing Some Sales?

This week I had coffee with Georges, it's a French Georges with an s. It's the same Georges from: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. He just lost $3500 Canadian, or just under $3000 US, because he forgot.

Two years ago, he made some photos for a company that used his photos for a national ad. Georges realized that they stopped using his photos in their ad. So Georges took his courage in his hands and phoned to see what happened. Why did they drop his photos from their ad.

Wordpress: Hacked Again

Over the last four weeks, hundreds of thousands of WordPress blogs have been hacked. Especially on GoDaddy, where thousands of blogs have been hacked. This is not just a problem with GoDaddy. It's happening to many other WordPress blogs. I know of half a dozen blogs that are not on GoDaddy that have been hacked in the last month.

WordPress has a history of being hacked regularly. The major difference is that GoDaddy operates millions of WordPress blogs. So more are being affected.

Many photographers are using WordPress for their blogs. Do they know that they have been hacked?

Whiners

Most photographers complain about:

  • How much better the world was when we were still using film instead of digital? Everything went downhill since Pentax introduced the first behind the lens light meter with the Pentax Spotmatic.
  • How much better the world was when we took 2 or 3 identical photos on Kodachrome so we didn't have to duplicate the photo before sending to a client for review?
  • How much better the world was when we did give our photos to only a couple of photo agencies because we couldn't make duplicates of duplicates?

What's the best...

I regularly get the question: “What's the best …?”

  • The best camera
  • The best lens
  • The best computer
  • The best import settings in Lightroom
  • …

You name it, it's been asked. The variation of what's the best is:

  • Is Nikon better than Canon?
  • Should I get the … 70-200 2.8 or the Tamron …

It's narrow minded. 125% of the people asking the question don't even think.

  • There's no best camera.

What To Do After You Are Laid Off

CNet wrote an article: 14 things to do if you are laid off from a tech job. What should people do? Become professional photographers! I am not making this up!

12. Take pictures

Put your $1,500 dSLR to use by selling stock-art pictures of household objects to Fotolia, ShutterStock, iStockphoto, StockXpert, etc. "It's cheap for people to buy images compared to the traditional stock (photo) market, but it can be lucrative over time because images sell over and over. I've made money without trying too hard.

Blog Summary

There are times when What The Duck hits the right note, this is one of these. We all know people who like to do beautiful diagrams to impress. But how do you intersect photography and blogs?

What The Duck, Blog Summary

What The Duck, Blog Summary

  • Bragging: I try not do it as much as possible
  • Social Networking: Foto-Biz.com does definitely do some networking for me.
  • Boredom: almost never. I have to admit that there's been a few days where I had to be green, aka recycle some articles.

Weasel

Weasel

As I mentioned a few times, I live in Canada. For most times, Canada is a quiet place, without big fireworks. We've never had a civil war. There is even an official party, elected in Parliament, whose only official goal is to break up of the country. In any other country, their leaders would have been jailed, run over by an errand truck... Here, in Canada, we elect them to the Parliament. Some countries have "drive-by shooting", we have "drive-by nagging".

Currently we have a minority government. The Conservatives form the minority government.

Trade Guilds and Associations

There are many trade associations. Their job is keep the status quo as of before, when "the times were good and easy".

The Author's Guild official policy was/is still to be against:

  • Libraries
  • Photocopy machines
  • Adobe Acrobat and PDF files
  • The Amazon's Kindle
  • ...

25% Off

As I have written before in Discounts and in Discounts Discounts that I don't like to give discounts. I am very firm on that policy. I give "freebies" and extras but not discounts. So why did I give in April a 25% discounts to a customer?

Him — Why don't give me a 25% discount? There'll be 4 more photo shoots this year.

I've heard that fairy tale many times before. I give him the discount now and goodbye, no further photo shoot.

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