As photographers we convince ourselves that we all have to go through this same “rite of passage” in order to be legit. It looks something like this:

Get Camera -> Work For Free -> Charge $50 -> What the Hell Happens Next

Most of you are probably in between the “Charge $50” and the “What the Hell Happens Next” stage of business. Maybe you’ve upped that $50 session fee to a *gasp* $150.

So the goal here today is to take you from “I could make more money working at Target” to “Holy sh*t I’m looking at a $2k+ deposit”. Ready?

So you keep hearing the following statement, “As a business you should probably get around to sending out some ‘professional’ email.” And you may be wondering where the heck you should start or if it is even worth your time.

Email Marketing has some powerful benefits, but to be successful it has to be well thought out and carefully managed. Today, we will cover some of the benefits, how and where to get started and then the ideal anatomy for your newsletter.

Sounds pretty dreamy right? Someone finds you online. They are interested in what you have to offer and learn to more about you. They like what you do, say, and sell and eventually buy. Well folks, to make this happen you really have to focus on a couple of key things.

If you’re a product-based business it’s probably no surprise to you that you can make sales from Instagram. You probably do it all the time and it feels natural. However, to those of you that are service based (with a potentially high dollar price range), selling on Instagram seems like a long shot. Who would’ve thought that after less than one year of being very intentional about our Instagram game that we’d see actual, real life, high-dollar clients from it? Well it happened for us, and it can happen for you too. Luckily, it’s not rocket science.

We have taught thousands of creative entrepreneurs from all over the world. We teach what we know, what works for us, and the strategies that are totally doable for you and your small business. We teach not for you to get a flood of thousands of followers, but a flood of followers that are authentic and totally “your people”. We haven’t fallen into the “follower obsession” and we don’t want to make you fall into that negative space either. We only focus on finding truly targeted, amazing, and engaged followers who will become brand advocates, clients, and online friends.

By following the same steps that we use to grow our audience you will curate a tribe of dreamy clients and forever friends. This is why having a social media game plan is worth it. When you put your energy into growing the right tribe, it will pay off in referrals and sales. Period. We see it happen constantly for us so we know the engagement is ready for you right around the corner. 

So you own a business, startup or blog, or all of the above. You continue to push out social media post after social media post. And you keep praying that follower number increases. You obsessively check your phone to see who added you on Instagram and Twitter. You await new subscribers. And celebrate every time you gain a new follower on Bloglovin’. STOP WHAT YOU ARE DOING! That number doesn’t matter. Whether it is 200 or 20,000 it is moot. Your focus needs to shift. 

Instagram Stories debuted and our biggest complaint is that we don’t know what to call them. InstaSnaps? Instants? Snaps? Insta Stories? #TheStruggleisReal.

Besides that, we’re in love. 

We’re not here to debate whether Instagram stole SnapChat’s idea or any of that jazz. We love them, we use them and we know they’re going to help with engagement. If you want to figure out how to make actual sales from them then you’re in the right place. P.S. from here on out we’ll be referring to them as Story or Stories. You can call them whatever you want.

As a small business owner, Facebook is definitely not the hot place to be. With less than 5.5% referring traffic for our own site, Facebook was never the platform that made sense for us to invest our time on. Until they changed the live streaming landscape in August 2015.

Now, it wasn’t until February of 2016 that all accounts were able to use the streaming capabilities on their own pages. From August to February the only type of accounts able to use live streaming were celebrities and journalists. But it’s interesting to note that these two (very different types of people) were using Facebook Live in the exact ways that would be helpful for small business owners (see, our obsession with Amy Schumer was for research!).

Do you ever notice how you read one post online about a topic and next thing you know you’re being served up ads or related content out the wazoo? Yeah, the secret that our phones are listening to us 24/7 is out. Although this is fantastic for a personalized ad experience it certainly doesn’t help our already overwhelmed minds. When we sit down to read just one thing, all of a sudden we look up and we’ve zombie-style zonked out, staring at our phone for hours on end.

When this happens it makes us begin to hate our phones. It makes resentful of social media apps that may not be at fault in the first place. So what do we normally do when we feel this way? We shut down completely and never look back. Well, since our businesses rely on the buzz of social media, we can’t leave it for too long.