Marketing for Photographers: Do these 3 things daily to boost your confidence in business
Image by: @marcospradobr
Our mindset is the ONE thing that holds us back. We can learn all sorts of things if we wanted as education is so accessible. We could decide tomorrow that we are going to change our life and go from one reality to a completely different one. What holds us back? What we think about our ideas and what we think that others think about our ideas. Yes there are physical or logistical or financials realities to consider in life, but mindset is like the one ring that rules them all. Control the ring, control the destiny. No wonder Gollum was so obsessed in Lord of the Rings!
Let me ask you this. Do you have low prices in your business? May I ask why? You could tell me people in your area can’t afford much, you can give me a stat on average income from a quick Google search, or you could tell me that your area is saturated with photographers. But none of that truly matters because when you sat down and created your price list, YOU wrote down a low number. Not your competition, not the people in your area. You used those arguments/ explanations in determining your pricing, but it was still you. Because your mindset absorbed that information from media, from your research and your mind mulled that over, decided that these things were against you and then created a story to tell you that you must lower price to compete and you don’t have what it takes to charge more, and no one will pay that much for photos. It all happened inside your mind and you believed it. But there could be dozens of other, and totally viable stories in addition to the one your mindset latched onto.
Have you ever changed your mind? Twice? Three times? What outfit to wear, how to wear your hair today, what kind of food you feel like ordering in, what flavour of ice-cream to choose? Where to go on vacation? We make up our mind and then we can change it. A million times if need be. Sometimes feelings help us change it; sometimes new information. So what does that tell you about your mind? Nothing is permanent, or fact.
When we can come to see our mind for what it really is, we can learn to read it and use it as a tool to advance us instead of cripple us. Like so many villains in movies, they will steal a technology to use it for evil, while the superheroes save the technology from the villain so that it can do good in the hands of the do-gooders. Your mind is that technology. The mind itself is neutral, and has the capability to swing to the most positive things (I look great in this outfit!) to the most negative (I look like crap in this outfit!). If there can be a different perspective on the exact same thing (like an outfit) then imagine how our powerful mind has the capacity to make us or break us if we don’t harness its power.
Your mind is the ORIGINAL AI
What is your mind, at its core? It’s an information processing system, the ORIGINAL AI except that it’s NI - Natural Intelligence rather than Artificial. It takes many inputs from many places and then give you results. Kind of like a Google Search or what chat GPT is doing. You input words, or a phrase, or filter your search and it interprets that information and learns along the way. Your mind takes input from your external environment (safe, dangerous, hot, cold etc) from your body (hungry, thirsty, in pain etc) and from your emotions (sad, happy, angry, frustrated, elated) and from previous thoughts and beliefs that have been determined to bring back certain results. We’re fascinated by the capabilities of AI, and yet embedded right into us is our own Intelligence system that we don’t use anywhere near its potential - and actually we use it often to our detriment.
Just like we pick our own low prices for our business, we also pick low self-esteem, and low confidence. Translation = Imposter Syndrome. We pick these things because we’ve added a lot of negative inputs into our NI and it gives us back more of the same. Our NI can be so powerful that even new, and contradictory information to our negative tapes could be either spun negatively or dismissed, to keep our reality intact. We go to school to input information into our minds to learn, but no one really teaches us how to take care of that amazing processor and keep it healthy as we would our bodies. As Dr. Joe Vitale of the Secret says: It’s not your fault (for how the messages turn negative) but it is your responsibility. Meaning, our minds have been fed a diet of things that may not be so healthy - through media, through misunderstanding, through well-meaning people and their opinions. If your dad constantly told you that you weren’t good enough or that money doesn’t grown on trees, without you ever realizing it those opinions are internalized. It’s not our fault - the NI just continued to absorb and learn the same message. But with it being our responsibility, it means we can do something about it. We have power to discard what we don’t want and absorb what we do want. Say in a different alternate universe that same dad said that money is always abundant and available, and that you are worthy just by being you. If those messages were the ones absorbed over years, would you not be a different person today? What about if you changed that script today? What happened in the past happened and we can’t change that, but we can flip the script today, right now.
Three ways to boost your confidence in business daily
This may not seem related to marketing education for photographers, but hear me out. When our mind is healthy and working towards our good instead of our detriment, then we are harnesses a lot of power towards positive outcomes. This is critical to marketing your photography business because if your mind is constantly working against you, it sabotages and undermines every effort you try to make. Maybe even discourages it. Posting on social media and not getting traction? Your mind tells you that you aren’t good enough. Emailing past clients and not getting bites? No one is interested in hearing from you. If we could be objective we could see that if these tangible strategies aren’t working, we can actually adjust them in very concrete ways. They don’t actually require any mental flogging! That’s why we need to address our mindset in marketing and boost our confidence. Here are three ways that I do this:
Read Marketing Books (or a chapter if doing daily)
There are tons of marketing books out on the market. It may overwhelm you to think about it, but look at it this way - if there are this many books out about it, there must be concrete strategy and action in the field. Why does that matter? Because I’m sure you feel that ‘marketing’ is like trying to catch a cloud. An unclear entity that consists of you doing a whole bunch of stuff like keywording your website, writing blogs, posting on socials. You don’t really know much about it all but you do it because that’s what you hear or see being done.
Marketing is a field of study and business. There are tried and true methods for approaches in lead generation, sales & closing, advertising, PR and networking. Even social media marketing now. Create a mindset that you will have a methodical approach. Treat it as a business activity. Take yourself, the impostor and all those mindset messages your mind serves up when you think about marketing, out of the equation. Read a book that relates to a topic you are preoccupied with, such as pricing (a good one for that is Dan Kennedy’s No BS Price Strategy). Digest it, make notes like you’re in school. Build a plan and execute. If even reading a marketing book seems daunting, scour this blog for posts relevant to you. They are more bite-sized!
The 15: Breaths, Hydration, Nature
I learned this from a popular sleep doctor when researching methods to help my husband who kept having early morning waking with inability to fall asleep. The doctor recommends this as a great way to start a day on the right foot, to then prepare for a good night’s sleep. Take 15 deep breaths when you wake. Drink 15 ounces of water: we get dehydrated at night so it’s important to revitalize ourselves first thing) and take a 15 minute walk, preferably in the sun to get our natural dose of Vitamin D. Even more preferable in nature if possible as it has a positive effect on our well-being.
Doing these things sets us up in a refreshing way to face the day ahead. A well-being boost is a self-confidence boost. We often breathe very shallowly and we don’t drink enough water. We also sit a lot, especially as photographers when we’re editing and doing our business and marketing tasks. This is a gentle way to counter those things. We start there and then if we become more mindful we can do these things much more often in our day, creating a positive cycle all around.
Write intentions for the day (or in journal)
I journal every single day and have written about it quite often on this blog. For me, it’s a magical and transformative experience. It allows me to reflect and process things that occurred in my previous day, and allows me to set the stage for my day to come. It clears the old and welcomes the new. I decided that my journal was going to act like a vision board - that what I write will eventually come true. So I write all of my goals and dreams. Doing this daily immerses us in the things we want and are aiming for, and releases negative mindset, leaving a clear path. When you finish writing about how you intend to take that trip to Greece this year (one of my goals!), you start the rest of your day with a little sparkle from writing about it!
Join the Facebook Group with over 6,000 like-minded members to chat with others on this topic, and more!