I wish I could give you a step by step guide… just follow the steps and you’ll be pulling in 100K + a year… but I can’t.

I can however give you some tips, resources and other information that should point you in the right direction to making your photography business profitable.

First and foremost please make sure that you know your camera, the basics of photography and how to take a good photograph. It’s important to make sure you have the skill set it takes to do the job you’re charging someone for otherwise you should be doing it as a learning experience and not charging what those with experience charge.

Be upfront with people when they ask what you can and can’t do, most people will appreciate when you let them know that while you don’t have experience in a particular area you’re willing to give it a try and them a discount. Otherwise you may end up under delivering and one bad experience can lead to lots of bad word of mouth. You don’t want to have to try to counteract that later in your business career. Okay so there’s a side lesson there – happy customers equals good publicity – more on that later.

Okay there’s one other thing that is a slight pet peeve of mine, if you’re going to charge people and act like you have a business then you have to do ALL the parts. You need to pay taxes on money you collect on the upside that also means you can claim deductions for your expenses. You should also have business insurance, a tax ID number and any other important stuff your state requires of a business, while this doesn’t sound fun it really is the right way to do things. Also set up separate accounts for your business and personal money, yes when you’re just starting out you’ll be putting some personal $ into that business account but this is the easiest way to keep your stuff separate.

Oh yes back to the subject – making money. Making money (or I should say profit) requires that you know how much you’re spending.

I wrote this page about pricing and how to keep it easy, go read it please!!

Basically what it tells you is to add up all your yearly expenses (not things that are associated to sessions only) and figure out what you want to make a year. Add those together and multiply by about 1.35 so you can figure out what you need to make a year to pay your taxes and still take home the amount you want as profit. From there you can determine how much you want to work and therefore how much you’ll have to charge.

Okay so now that you’re back from reading the page about pricing and downloading the spreadsheet to help you figure out your product costs we’re going to talk about client relationships very quickly.

Happy clients = repeat clients. Period.

Under promise, over deliver. If you say that you guarantee 20-30 images in a gallery for viewing then feel free to throw in 35 – now don’t take this too far and give them 75 so they get overwhelmed. When a client purchases one of your packages throw in 8 extra wallets. Help your clients make decisions about wall art with take home materials.

I think you get the idea – I can’t give away all my secrets

Hope this has been helpful feel free to leave other ideas you have in the comments below!