Your strip club (see this post, if you’re confused) is now flourishing! Those techniques you mastered after Marketing School have filled the club nightly, and Crystal’s g-string is stuffed full of singles at least four times a night. But…there’s a problem. You serve Chimay, your clients want Bud Light. The club offers lap dances starting at $95, and some clients want to pay $15.
You, my friend, need a bouncer.
In the online world, prices are often your bouncer.
Listing your session fee, base package price, and/or basic wedding collection price can be effective in wedding out your less-than-ideal clients. (Listing no price leaves too much room for assumptions about how ‘cheap’ or ‘expensive’ you are!)
Text can be your bouncer, too.
Using adjectives to describe your work as ‘classic’ will deter those who are looking for modern images. ‘Upscale’ or ‘elegant’ can trigger the dollar-signs that keep clients with a Craigslist budget from looking any further into your work. ‘Alternative,’ or ‘rock’n'roll’ text can attract the indy crowd, while clothing guidelines touting the wonders of smocking on children’s clothing will please the traditional consumer.
Let your images do some bouncing, too. Show only what you want to sell, one hundred percent of the time.
If you don’t want to sell a single image of a couple looking at the camera, don’t post one. If you’ll puke before shooting a couple on the beach at sunset, avoid showing those images to anyone. Ever. Teach your clients how to dress though the images you place in your portfolio, and help them choose locations and portrait scenarios the same way.
Oh, and take a tip from Crystal: call security when a client sets off alarm bells.
If an evil client happens to slip past the bouncers, deal with ‘em efficiently and break ties if at all possible. That pain-in-the-ass client only gets worse when you ignore him, give her bad customer service, or try to appease her with freebies. End the relationship as soon as humanly possible.
If you have any other tried-and-true bouncer methods, I’d love to hear ‘em!
One of the most rewarding experiences of my career has been working with Alicia Caine as the grammar and pretty-fying fairy on her Easy as Pie cookbook and the followup book, Pastry School. She’s gracious enough to call me a chef, but it’s her mastery of common sense practices that make the cookbook so utterly fabulous.
I can’t say enough good things about Alicia, this sale, or the fact that
THE EASY AS PIE AND PASTRY SCHOOL COMBO IS ONLY $99 FOR THE FIRST 100 PEOPLE TO USE PROMO CODE PIF100 AT CHECKOUT.
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The Easy as Pie chefs are used to receiving emails thanking us for increasing portrait sales by 100% in photography studios across the country, but we realize the first step is the hardest. You’re not sure of your pricing, you’re unfamiliar with our methods, and you’ve been waiting for your tax refund check to buy the case of wine that will finally drown your business sorrows. We get it.
And so…
We’re paying it forward with a once-in-a-lifetime special on the purchase of our Easy as Pie cookbook, complete with Pastry School bonus PDF! Save $100 on the combo, which is just $99 for the first 100 copies sold or through March 12, 2010, whichever comes first. (This deal will also be announced at the WPPI PIF party, so copies will be gone quickly!)
Get to know Alicia Caine’s common sense pricing strategies for the modern portrait photographer. Learn how to create highly profitable portrait collections, the secrets of a la carte pricing that will lead to collection sales, how to price your session fee effectively, and the answers to the age-old ‘what about the digital files?’ questions we all have. In addition, Alicia shares her personal schedule, pricing, portrait collections, and tips for moving up the sales ladder in Pastry School, the PDF that accompanies Easy as Pie.
We’ve NEVER received a negative review of our cookbook, which creates the kind of a-ha pricing moments Oprah can only dream about.
Save $100 with promo code PIF100 — buy now!
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Next Tuesday, it’s Strip Club, part II. Sorry to go all crazy salesgirl on you, but this is an unbelievable deal that you’d half to be bananas to pass up.
I got back fab black & white scans of an abandoned strip joint, shot on a roll of 120 film shot with my Diana camera. Since I’m not about to throw ‘topless go-go’ pics on my babies and kids blog, I had to find a way to share ‘em here. Thus, this post.
If you provide hot girls and cold beer at reasonable prices, you’ve got a time-honored business model working in your favor. Strip clubs should be profit MACHINES. But just because you have the prettiest, thinnest, hottest, _____est dancers doesn’t mean people will find you.
You’re nodding your head. You’re like, ‘duh, Kristen, of COURSE people won’t find out about Crystal Delicious and her miraculous pole-dancing on their own!’
So why do you assume people will find out about your artwork on their own?
You’re talented, you have great photos, you have a website. And no one cares. You’re dancing for an empty auditorium.
How do we go about filling that auditorium?
Generate buzz.
If you owned a strip club, I would hope you would attempt to generate buzz locally. Postcards, posters, and business cards shuffling from hand to hand help generate buzz. That giant dude standing on the corner, passing out pink 4×6″ signs with Crystal Delicious on ‘em? That dude is filling your auditorium. As an artist, strive to have marketing materials circulating among customers, potential customers, and other businesses AT ALL TIMES.
Differentiate.
That giant dude also knows the power of differentiation. You’re selling your club, yes, but you’re also pushing Crystal Delicious pretty hard. No other club has Crystal! Stand in awe of her upside-down-kerfuffle-lutz moves! What would a giant dude wearing brass knuckles be pushing on the street corner if those postcards were about your business? What will make you stand out like Crystal does? (Need a dose of differentiation? Try Marketing School.)
Reward your loyal fans.
George has sent twelve guys to your club in the past month. Oh, and he’s urging his buddy to book his bachelor party with Crystal. George needs to be rewarded for his loyalty! The same goes for the bride who urges two other brides to book, or the Mom who hands out your business cards to her entire preschool! Get those women some freebies, some special pricing, or a bottle of wine — never forget to reward the people who spread the word about your business to others.
Optimize your web assets. (Heh, I said assets.)
After hitting the local scene, I would hope you’d be a touch tech-savvy and optimize your strip club for search engine placement. This is a slower build, and people might not find out about Crystal’s pole-dancing right away, but over time and with the right resources you’ll have clients making a trip to your joint as a destination! SEO School has the tips you need to optimize your web assets for search engines. Promise.
Outsource.
Finally, while you’re waiting for your strip club to hit it big, I would outsource wherever possible. This doesn’t appear to make much sense, because your inclination is to do everything yourself. But spending four hours cleaning the entire club means you wasted four hours that could have been spent on marketing. Do you make more money by having clean toilets and no customers, or by having a small cleaning staff and a club packed with people?
 Any other strip joint/photography buzz-generating tips for us? Share ‘em! And let me know what you think of today’s post, pretty please?
It was the day Apple announced the iPad. First, I laughed at the name. And then I realized that if Apple keeps refusing to work with Adobe Flash, it has to go. This means yet another website build, yet another chunk of change being yielded to a team of pros, and yet another iteration of my brand.
Of course, you can argue that Flash is still relevant, but HTML is simpler. I’m all about simpler. So I set about creating a framework to display my images that could convey my brand without overwhelming the work. The questions I asked myself, that I challenge you to ask about your website…
Is the website easy to navigate? Are all the buttons easily located?
The buttons on the new website are visible at all times, remain stationary through page changes, and have boring names. Those boring button names like ‘FAQ’ and ‘Info’ and ‘Contact’ mean that website visitors will know what each one does. ‘Blow it up!’ and ‘411′ and ‘Buzz me!’ are cute, but not necessarily effective.
Does the website look the same on every computer?
The website will never look exactly the same for every viewer, but the elimination of image and website scaling (common in Flash templates) makes uniform user experience a distinct possibility.
Is all the website text relevant?
No fluff, just enough of your features and benefits being highlighted to distinguish your brand from others. Potential clients know just enough to know if they want to know more. (Need brushing up on features and benefits? Marketing School is for you.)
Who needs a splash page?
I know the major industry web template providers have splash pages, but I don’t get the point. Stuffing keywords on an HTML page because the rest of the Flash website is invisible to Google just isn’t a sound SEO strategy.
Have you hired a professional?
This is the most expensive website I’ve ever purchased, but it looks the least flashy. Fabulous coding with search engine optimization hints provided by Naomi Dunford’s SEO School are hidden from view while my images take center stage.
Want your own HTML website?
Take a look at the super-sleep Kimtown HTML sites, or consider modifying your Wordpress blog to be a blog-site using the Prophoto 3 theme. Save $10 with code BNDCMP717 — if it doesn’t work immediately, just email customer support at Prophoto.
What about the website?
Oh yah. View the new, super-simple site for Essential Imagery.
So, I’ve had to do more shoveling in the past few weeks than in the rest of my life, combined. Forty-five inches of snowfall in less than 10 days will do that to you. And while I was huffing and puffing away, digging my car out of drifts taller than the car’s windows…I thought about how easy shoveling is.
I mean, when you shovel, you see results immediately. Shovel, shovel, shovel…I see pavement! Shovel, shovel, shovel…I see my car! It’s a gratifying task because x leads to y, which leads to hot cocoa the minute you step inside your nice cozy home.
De-icing, on the other hand…you just have to throw some salt on the sidewalk and wait. And wait, and wait. Did you buy the right salt? Should you have purchased the premium salt? Did you use enough? How long does this stuff take to work? Should I just go out there with a shovel and try to chip the ice away instead of waiting?
Marketing your business is a lot like the shoveling and de-icing process.
When you’re first starting out…you get to do branding, yay! Hire peeps to make a logo, get a website, compile a portfolio, make major decisions for your business and shape a brand that’s awesome. It’s all shoveling snow, baby! Immediate results are awesome, aren’t they?
A year or two later, you’re sprinkling the sidewalks with salt. Sure, your blog hits are growing, your clients are great, and you’ve distributed postcards to the tri-county area…but are they the right postcards? Is it the right message you’re sending? What if you could have better clients? Or more, even-awesomer-than-awesome clients? What if you’re tired of photographing newborns and want to give weddings a try, or vice versa?
By year three, you’ve probably tired of your website, your logo, and your marketing techniques. You’re quite possibly a bit bored. You’re ready to go out there with a shovel and just chip the hell out of the ice in the hopes that this whole deal will turn into shoveling again.
Truth be told, starting is the easy part. Sitting with your own doubts, then overcoming them to sustain and grow your business is exponentially more difficult.
How are you working to overcome your own doubts? How can you keep pushing, keep growing, keep guiding your business without being able to see obvious progress? (I’ve had clients hold to my business card for two years before calling. Two years is a long time to wait for ice to melt!)
This post doesn’t have any answers…I would love to hear your thoughts on tough business bits, working on your patience, or how you balance your business processes with grace.
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Once upon a time I was a Girl Scout and enjoyed earning many merit badges. I've made a merit badge for grown-up photographer-people to make business stuff more fun. 
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