So how you going to find clients? Well some of the key marketing points, do you first sessions free, get your studio set up, get some friends and family, in practice, take some sessions, you know, do free four or five sessions completely free, but keep it too close family and relatives. And then once you've got a portfolio, you can start putting it out there. Now when it comes to pricing, simple tip to remember is this. Never, ever price low. Okay, you might decide that your portrait session that someone comes in for an hour, you're gonna just let you know we charge 120 pounds for an hour.

But we have a lot of commercial clients. The consumer end of the market is a lot less money. So when they come in, you might decide that your rate is going to be 90% for maybe a free photo shoot, it's going to take about an hour, or $90. When you start in your business, what you might find is, before you get going, the price point you're actually able to get clients in is about $45 or 45 pounds a booking. So what you do in that situation is you do promotions, your price is 90 pounds is always 90 pounds. But every now and again, you're going to have a special offer for 45 pounds.

Now, what that means is that you can then generate some sales, get some people get your portfolio going, get more and more people aware. But you you never change your prices. They're always the same but you're going to run specials and discounts. Whenever you decide. Now you don't want to do too often, because if you're always at $45, then people realize your rate is actually $45. And you don't want that to be the case.

But the story business you want to generate some sales you want to get some people in you need to get some clients and what you're going to need to do in that situation, obviously, is just given that discount. Now when it comes to marketing I've got a full marketing course social media marketing comm check that out if you want to learn how to do social media marketing really powerfully, but let me give you some quick, quick wins. Facebook ads your friends now Facebook is where most of your clients are going to be if you're doing home based studio for public clients, so you need to have a presence on Facebook. The problem with Facebook is this. You set up a page on Facebook he got you put your photos up and you think you do really well and you get 200 people to follow you and every time you put out your photo post you think 200 people have seen your post.

That is not what happened. Facebook will only show about 2% of your posts to your followers. But that means only four people at a turn before you're actually going to be shown your posts because the business page and the reason Facebook have done that is because they want you to pay for ads, they want you to pay for advertising. Now, advertising on Facebook is really interesting. Because what you can do is, once you build up a few people, you can then start doing some Facebook ads and Facebook ads are really cheap if you do them correctly. But one of the things you want to look for is something called a look alike audience.

Now you might have, say, 20 3040 5060 people in your area start to follow you on Facebook. Now what you do is you select a page that they're following, so your photography business page, and then look for a look alike audience within the Facebook advertising. And what Facebook will do is they'll reach out look at those people and find similar people in your area that you can show Your adverts to be prepared to spend a little bit of money on Facebook advertising to get your business up and running. Another thing is to consider referral fees. So you have a client, they come and have their shoot done, and then they recommend someone to you. And if they recommend someone, they have a specific referral code, you can then pay them part of that.

So they get a little bonus for recommending you. It's a good way to get people talking about you know, if you're going to use, again, to create your own website, have a look at smugmug you can build a beautiful website real quick on smugmug. And it's designed to manage photography businesses. So check that out. If you're looking for a website and you're thinking in terms of website, maybe at the beginning, you start with Facebook page and a bit of advertising. And then when you start to get some traction, you want to build up your portfolio.

You want a beautiful site because people will buy your photography services based on the quality of your images. So you need a good site. smugmug is designed for that and the other thing too Remember, we're building a photography business is very competitive. What that means is you got to stick at it. So you got to keep at it, you got to be single minded, you're going to take a year to build that business up, at least get that, you know, year to 18 months, I would say before you can really, really start turning lots of clients over and you haven't, you're not having to worry about discounts and promotions and those sorts of things. But the difference between those who succeed and those that don't oftentimes in that market is it's tough to get into so people fall away quite quick.

If you stick at it, set your studio up and get everything sorted out, get slick, get the advertising going, get your web presence going, get yourself a website, then that is the basic principles of your marketing system in place and you can start growing your business