Creating an Online Business
A personal Story
When I was about seven years old I was given a D.S. gaming controller for Christmas. My parents had intended for me to use this to play video games on long car trips, which we often took. But on the first family road-trip to Grandma's after Christmas I discovered that my D.S. had a camera on the front of it. Suddenly I became glued to the controller, but not for the reason my parents had intended. Instead of playing games to pass the time my nose was pressed up against the cold car window looking for beautiful scenes to capture from the world outside. That Christmas my parents gave me the best present I could've asked for, the gift of photography.
I continued to grow my passion for photography throughout middle school and high school. Eventually my parents upgraded my D.S to an Apple I pad mini. After which I filled the camera roll with photos of every flower that happened to bloom within a mile from my house. In 8th grade I was given my first real DSLR Cannon camera. That was a special day. I had my Aunt Julie, a professional landscape photographer, teach me all about the different settings. I became obsessed with learning how to control the manual settings on my new camera to create new images. Later that year I explored and even helped teach a film-processing class in my middle school. Photography had become my passion.
That passion continued to grow throughout high school where I was blessed with the best photography teacher. She really believed in me, but better, she helped me to believe in myself. Throughout the next four year in photography she taught me about composition, color theory, photoshop manipulation, lighting techniques and more. At the same time she taught me about business, and taught us to take risks and follow our dreams, and helped us when we did. She mentored me through my first few years of owning a Buisness and showed me how to use instagram to gain clients.
While I did well in high school, college brought on a new set of challenges. With my photography Buisness continually growing, I am now able to make money off of my passion in photography. However, I still have a lot to learn before I can turn this passion into my career. Through marketing classes I have learned that I need to do more than just post on instagram and hope for clients. I have learned that photographers can market their work just like any other Buisness through multiple social media platforms, emails, ads, and more. But, at the heart of those media platforms, my business needs to have a home, to have a website.
That has brought me to this web creation class. Over the last couple weeks we have looked at different Buisness which have been interesting to view. We've learned about B2B companies versus B2C companies. We have also looked at affiliate Buisness structures, merchandise companies, drop shipping, and so many others. One of the most helpful lessons we learn in the last few weeks was about SEO and how you can use keyword tools on google to find out what consumers in my geographical area are looking for. After looking at all of these different Buisness models, I had to really consider of photography was still a career I wanted to pursue. Yes, I have the passion for it, but is there enough people in the geographical area that I am in looking for photographers? If I made this a Buisness is it probable that I would make a profit? Is there too much competition? If I were to start a Buisness, what platforms should I use to market my photography, where are the customers I am trying to reach? What other costs are there to starting a Buisness that I need to consider? Overall, this class has caused me to really think more about the Buisness side, and not just about the art.
As I have thought about the Buisness model I want to have, I have decided that I want to have a Buisness to consumer model, and specifically I want to continue to offer photography services. In the past, I have marketed myself as a well-versed photographer who does weddings, couples, families, seniors, and products. However, learning about key-wording and target audiences has caused me to believe that I should really focus on one area of photography, weddings.
While having a broad range of skills is unique, consumers really are looking for professionals of a certain trade. In addition, with SEO google is best going to recognize a company based on the key words built into their website. If my keywords are jumping all over the photography industry, it may not give me the best SEO results and it may be harder for clients to find me.
Now that I know what kind of Buisness I want to create, the next part of the Buisness was finding out what kind of tax form I wanted to get. After talking with another professor on campus who has owned 4 different video production companies, I decided that having an LLC as an S-corp would best suit my needs as a photographer, and would allow me to possible grow and start other photography businesses with time. That way, if I wanted to add on another sub-business in family portraits I could do that under the same LLC.
Next, I needed to create a marketing strategy. I did some market research asking my friends who have been married where they found their wedding photographer. Through this I discovered that couples are finding their photographer through instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, and google searches. Knowing this, I decided that I would focus my marketing efforts on social media marketing.
However, I did not want to book clients through social media. That is why I am building a website for my Buisness. I can create content to organically, grow my photography Buisness's reach through social media, however those social platforms need to be set up in a way where they can funnel my audience to my website. Through this website customers can fill out contact forms that will help me to book my calendar with clients. In addition, a website would allow me to create blog posts about weddings or photoshoots that I do with couples. This would give me SEO key words which would allow me to start organically appearing on google.
I am excited to start on this new Buisness journey. I still have a lot to learn but this web creation class has given me many questions to consider before launching my Buisness. I now have a clearer idea of the Buisness model that I am pursuing, some of the costs associated with that Buisness models, and a little bit more about where the clients I am pursuing live online.
