5 tips to organising the work of a photographer successfully

Becoming a good photographer is the basis for the success of any photography business, but in addition to taking great photos. It is important that you know how to manage other tasks that every entrepreneur should be aware of, such as organising the work of a photographer. These types of actions will be the basis for achieving the stability you long for to turn your passion into a totally profitable profession.

To help you achieve this goal, one of the steps you have to take is to know how to organise your time and learn to do a series of jobs that have nothing to do with taking a photo shoot and editing it. That’s why at Arcadina we have created a guide with 5 tips for organising the work of a photographer that we are sure will be of great help to you.

What are you waiting for to learn how to organising the work of a photographer thanks to this simple guide?

Why is it important to know how to organising the work of a photographer?

When you have a constant rhythm of work, your day-to-day life fills up very quickly with the tasks of a photographer, such as: shooting sessions, editing reports, attending to clients, etc. But when organising the work of a photographer it is important to take into account a series of other issues that will really help you to take off and consolidate your career if you have not yet reached this point and to maintain a constant flow of clients if you already have a certain trajectory.

These other actions that you have to carry out every week are usually tasks that you don’t normally do, which are more focused on the world of marketing and business management but which are fundamental for any entrepreneur who is setting up a business on their own.

In addition to knowing what kind of actions to take, it is also important that you make time to address them. And knowing how to organise your time will be essential to fit all your objectives into your working day.

5 keys to structuring a professional photographer’s day-to-day life properly

Leaving aside the time you spend on photo shoots from the moment the client walks in the door until you deliver the edited images, as we have already mentioned. In addition to doing this type of work, if what you want is to create or even improve your photography business. It is important that you add to your daily routine a series of actions that have nothing to do with photography but that will help you to underpin your business.

The problem that always arises is that in order to tackle this type of task, time is required and we know very well that photographers don’t have the time to take marketing courses or elaborate business strategies, do they?

To help you make time from where there is none and add to your daily tasks a series of actions that will allow you to make a living from what you really like. At Arcadina we have prepared a small guide with 5 simple actions that will help you to achieve this type of objectives.

1# Advance your photography business by creating goals and meeting objectives

There is no worse feeling than waking up on a Monday morning and not knowing what the day will bring. That’s why one of the first habits you should acquire to learn how to organising the work of a photographer has to be to schedule your weekly work with some time in advance. And for this, the ideal thing is to work by goals or objectives.

But for this planning to be productive, ideally, at the start of a new year, you should stop your work routine for a moment and think about what you want to achieve over the next 12 months of work ahead of you. Get into the habit of setting yourself very realistic and achievable goals, although always somewhat challenging, such as: increase my turnover by 20% or get an average of 3 more clients per quarter.

The best way to meet these annual objectives little by little is to break down all these goals into small tasks or milestones that you should include in your work calendar. At the end of each month or quarter, you should take stock of your photography business and see if you are meeting the overall goals you have set for the year.

To make the work even more manageable. It is important to break down those monthly or quarterly goals again into simpler tasks that you can spread over the different work weeks.

To make this idea of work clearer to you, let us give you an example.

Case study on creating a goal for your photography business

Let’s suppose that one of your goals for this year is to increase the visibility of your photography courses for beginners and for that you have decided to create a YouTube channel where you are going to show your work and some tips for your potential students.

Your annual goal is to increase your visibility by 20% compared to the previous year. If you have to face this challenge, you will not know where to start or what actions to take. So it is important that you get used to, on the one hand, breaking down each of your ideas and, on the other hand, dividing the tasks into months or weeks.

• Step 1: Create a YouTube channel. Month of January.
• Step 2: Create content for the channel. Months of February, March and April.
• Step 3: Publicise the channel. Month of May.

This could be a first planning of your big goal, then in each month of work you will have to break down each task in more detail, e.g. for step 2:

• Create a list of possible ideas for creating a YouTube video.
• Writing a script.
• Video recording.
• Edit the video.
• Upload it to YouTube.

Schedule your next week’s work ahead of time

Once you have your annual and, at least, quarterly goals well defined, ideally, once a week (for example, on a Friday afternoon) you should plan all the workload you are going to have in the next working days. In this planning you have to take into account:

• Organise your diary and make a note of how much time each week’s photo shoot will take up. This way you won’t miss any appointments and you won’t overlap several photo shoots. If you use Arcadina’s Booking Calendar service, you can avoid this step or reduce it considerably since all the appointments made through your website will appear directly in your usual calendar.

• Always reserve time in your schedule for editing work. Depending on the number of reports you have each week, you can modify and adapt these hours in your calendar.

• Include the goals you have planned to improve your photography business in small weekly actions. This way it will be easier for you to carry them out.

• During the weeks when you have less work to do, take the opportunity to improve some aspects of your digital business. You can renew the photos in your portfolio, upload an article to the blog or give a new look to the aesthetics of your website.

• Always leave time for unforeseen events. Illnesses, delays with a session or even the arrival of new clients who show up unexpectedly.

• Etc.

Check every week whether you have met your targets

To keep track of your progress, you can help yourself with some of the tools that you can find on the Internet for free, such as. Trello, Toggl, asana, etc. or a simple Excel sheet in which you can write down all the tasks that you are going to do each month. As you progress in your weekly work, mark the tasks that are already completed. This way you will be able to check very quickly if you are fulfilling the planning of your goals and how far you have left to reach them.

At first, you may think that this kind of tasks are a waste of time and that you manage just fine as you have been doing so far, writing down all your tasks on your yellow post-its. But when you make this activity a weekly habit and see for yourself how you optimise your time. We are sure that you won’t be able to do without this productive habit. Because starting each week with a clear idea of all the work you have ahead of you will give you much more peace of mind and will make you value every little achievement you make.

The idea of this work methodology is that you set small daily goals and check day by day (or at least once a week) that you are achieving them. This way you will end the day with the feeling that you have done a lot for your digital photography business.

2# Learn how to automate processes in your photography business

In your job as a photographer, you know that there are certain tasks that you have to perform from time to time that have nothing to do with your passion for photography. Some of these tasks may be:

• Overseeing the accounts of your photography business, such as: creating invoices, sending them to clients and the manager, closing each quarter, etc.
• Improve your marketing strategy by finding clients, advertising on the Internet, creating content on your photography blog, etc.
• Seek new business avenues to increase your turnover and strengthen your accounts.
• Attending to customers and suppliers via email and telephone, sending quotations, etc.
• Etc.

In order to save you time, especially when your photography business is starting up, many of these tasks can be delegated and with others you will have the opportunity to automate them. The idea is that these jobs that have nothing to do with your vocation as a photographer take up as little time as possible in your day-to-day life.

To help you in this process, here are some ideas to help you carry out these tasks more quickly and easily:

Ideas for tasks you can automate in your day-to-day work as a professional photographer

• Automate the emails you send to your customers and to those who are not yet customers and are looking for more information. You can also prepare a list of regular replies so that you don’t always have to write the same thing.

• Create templates of your quotations and contracts so that you only have to modify the details of each client.

• Consider creating a list of subscribers (by email, SMS or WhatsApp) to massively send offers, news or announce new services to people who are interested in your services.

• Include as much information as possible about your sessions on your photography website to minimise the time you spend answering emails or calls answering the same questions.

• Schedule your social media posts so you don’t have to check Facebook, Instagram or Twitter every day.

• Include in your website an automatic sales system for your photographs, so that while you spend your time on other matters, you will be able to continue selling photographs through your website.

• Etc.

Prepare all the information for your photo shoots, dossiers and frequently asked questions

When launching a new photo shoot, it is important that you define a series of aspects, such as: how long will the shoot last, will it be a temporary or permanent shoot, what will be included on the day of the shoot, more than one client, several wardrobe changes, etc., will it be a studio or outdoor shoot, what products will you include for your clients, digital photos, enlargements, etc., how will you offer these products to them? Digital photos, enlargements, etc., how are you going to offer them these products? Are you going to have a digital platform or are they going to have to come to your studio, etc.?

As you can see there are many answers that you are going to have to define when launching a new report to the market and the ideal is that all this information, once you have planned it, is also very clear on your website so that potential clients have all the information in their possession to decide whether they are interested in hiring you or not.

 In addition to including a section on your website with all this information for everyone to see, you will also be able to create a “hidden” page or landing page, like a dossier, to share the URL with the people you want. And thanks to the WhatsApp Business service that you can include in your Arcadina website, you will be able to send all this information privately to any user who wants to ask you a question through your site’s WhatsApp.

Turn your website into a shop for photo sales

Whether your main business idea is to sell photographs to any kind of clients, because you do nature, landscape or sports shoots or if your main service is social photography but you always like to do a series of stock photos or your last holiday, having the option to sell your images through public galleries for sale to anyone in the world who has access to the Internet while you are doing other tasks is a great business opportunity.

And if your thing is social or studio photography and you don’t take photos for other users who are not your clients to buy them, having the option of offering your clients the possibility of buying, selecting, downloading and ordering directly from their homes is a very interesting option for today’s world where the vast majority of transactions are done online. Private galleries will give you the option, not only to offer your customers a much more up-to-date service, but you will also be able to automate a series of processes that will free up your schedule in a surprising way.

3# Optimise your daily working hours to the maximum and avoid distractions

Believe it or not, you can waste a lot of time every day doing tasks that may be secondary or not directly related to your photography business. Because how many times have you gone on social media for a work-related matter and ended up watching videos that had nothing to do with the task you had set yourself? This is just one example of the dreaded “time thieves”, those distractions both related to your work and external distractions that make you less productive.

Let us give you some examples:

Tips to be more productive in your daily work as a photographer

• Reading emails that are not important, getting distracted by social media or your mobile phone are small habits that we have acquired automatically and that are making us less productive in our working day.

• Just as you do when you’re on a photo shoot, avoid distractions from your phone when you’re doing other tasks, such as editing photos or improving the content of your photography website. To do this, it’s as simple as disabling social media or email notifications on your phone.

• Do you know if your photography website is getting a lot of visitors? Nowadays there are programmes that analyse every step a user takes on your website. You can also automate these queries to use the right amount of time to analyse this data.

• Did you know that there are ways to stop advertising emails from arriving in your inbox? As well as not annoying you and taking up space, they will help you to avoid being distracted.

• Having each customer’s information well organised will save you a lot of time. You can create folders in your email and on your PC to organise each client’s information and the emails they send you. You can’t even imagine how much time you will save searching for their emails.

• A trick that can also work for you is to plan small chunks of time (e.g. late in the day) to read emails or check your social media and reserve the first hours of the day for more important work or work that requires more concentration (such as editing photos, looking for clients or improving the content of your photography website).

• Etc.

Rest is very important in order to perform better in your non-photography tasks

We know that all the marketing, business management, accounting, etc. tasks that, in short, are not directly related to taking photos bore you and whenever possible you leave them for another time. As we have already mentioned, creating a calendar of daily tasks will help you face these challenges with much more encouragement, but as with everything in life, we also encourage you to take it easy.

Our recommendation is that when you start with a task, no matter how tedious it may seem, try to finish it completely before moving on to something else. If you leave it unfinished and move on to other things and then come back to it later, the total time you will need to complete this goal will be much longer.

In order not to lose focus, one option is to take short breaks from time to time, especially if you find it difficult to tackle a task, such as writing an article. For these cases you can use the Pomodoro technique, which consists of doing small 25-minute tasks with a 5-minute break between each one. This way you will be able to progress little by little in your most tedious tasks without having the feeling that you have been sitting in the chair in the photography studio all morning.

Learn to prioritise your tasks

When planning a day’s work, it is important that you know how to prioritise the different tasks that you will have to tackle that day. To do this, you have to assess which actions are the ones that, if you do them, will bring you one step closer to an important goal, for example: getting 3 more clients per quarter, or on the contrary, a client sends you an email asking you a question. This task is also important, clients have to be 100% satisfied with your work, but the world is not going to end because you answer that email when you finish the task you are doing at this very moment.

4# Training must always be part of your objectives

In addition to the training as a photographer that you should never miss throughout your professional career, it is important that you also take into account when choosing a course or training a series of less artistic and creative aspects such as: marketing techniques, client acquisition, business management, SEO, social networks, website creation, etc. The truth is that the list can be very long, but at least one of these subjects at the end of the year you should touch more in depth in order not to be left behind and get the stability you need with your digital photography business.

Nowadays there are hundreds of classroom and online training courses on almost any subject you are interested in and if you do a little research you will have no trouble finding quality training courses focused on improving the business of people who are starting out on their own.

As part of the creation of a specific website for photographers with the option of including a digital business with multiple functionalities, some time ago at Arcadina we launched a very interesting training course. Below we are going to share with you an article where we explain it in more detail.

>> Get to know Arcadina’s most comprehensive training for photographers

5# Get good visibility for your work as a photographer

And to finish with this little guide to organising the work of a photographer, let’s talk about the visibility of your business. Because no matter how good the photos you take or how happy your clients are, if you don’t manage to get good visibility for your work, all the effort you put in will be for nothing.

That’s why it’s important that you always set aside time in your schedule to plan actions to get yourself known, whether it’s being active on your social networks, creating advertisements, articles of interest to your clients or updating the content of your photography website.

Below we are going to share with you a series of channels and actions that can help you to be more visible on the Internet:

• Keep your website always up to date both in the content you have published and in the images of your galleries.
• Create a YouTube channel to share valuable content with your followers.
• Be active on your social networks and use them to create online exhibitions.
• Create articles that are of interest to your customers and that will help you get more visibility on the Internet.
• Use online and network advertisements to boost your visibility.
• Find out where your customers are and make yourself known there.
• Etc.

Learning how to organising the work of a photographer will be the key to the success of your digital photography business

As you can see, working as a photographer is not just about taking pictures. You could say that this is the pretty face of this profession. But, as you know, if you want to dedicate yourself professionally to this vocation, you must dedicate time to other less pleasant but very important tasks and learning how to organising the work of a photographer is the first step to reach that longed-for stability.

Because if you know how to optimise your time and learn to delegate and automate certain tasks, you will be able to improve your photography business by spending less time on those jobs you are so lazy to do.

Learn how to organising the work of a photographer

• Plan your work each week and forget about writing down your bookings on a piece of paper. As an idea you can use the Google Calendar app that will allow you to check your tasks and appointments from any mobile device, PC or Tablet and connect it with your Booking reservations.

• Automate the tasks that are repeated over and over again, such as sending emails, reporting information, creating quotes, creating social media posts or articles on your photography blog. And if you find that you still need more time for your shoots, delegate this type of work.

• Avoid distractions during the most productive times of the day and follow the schedule you have set for each week.

• Spend some time looking at other colleagues’ photos, whether they are in your field or in other fields. This will help you to be more creative and get ideas from here and there.

• Practice new editing techniques with Photoshop and don’t forget about AI.

• Never stop looking for customers, they are the basis of your success.

• Set aside time and always try to leave time for leisure.

At Arcadina we are always here to help you and as well as offering advice on how to make your digital photography business a success, we can also help you set it up. Would you like to try our business solutions for free? You have 14 days to see what they look like inside.

Today we are going to share with you the testimony of Víctor from Pepe Fotógrafos.

>> How does a wedding photographer achieve success? Víctor from Pepe Fotógrafos tells us about it

And to end this article we would like to know what actions you take to organise your daily work? We would love to hear from you in the comments.

Arcadina goes with you

Fulfil your dreams and develop your professional career with us. We offer you to create a photography website for free for 14 days so you can try our platform without any commitment of permanence.

Arcadina is much more than a website, it is business solutions for photographers.

If you have any queries, our Customer Service Team is always always ready to help you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We listen to you.