[00:00:00] Real quick, if you have an extra 15 seconds before we start, please rate the show on whatever platform you're streaming on. It really helps me spread the message to more creatives and impact more people around the world. Thank you.
This is one of the most important parts of getting photography clients that most photographers actually mess up. We're talking about your portfolio. Now, you may think your portfolio is great, but if you're listening to this Chen, Zara, you don't have as many clients as you'd like. I'm sharing a few key mistakes that photographers make when creating a portfolio and presenting their portfolios.
After listening to this podcast, you'll know how to create a portfolio that actually attracts clients. Now we'll get into how to create a great portfolio in just a second here. I'm guessing most of you already have some sort of portfolio. So first I wanna start off with one big mistake most photographers are making.
I. They hide their portfolio, not on purpose. Let me explain here. When you go to a photographer's website, what's the homepage? The homepage should be your portfolio. People's attention spans is [00:01:00] super low these days. That's why talk's reels and YouTube videos have hooks as the intro. This concept should be applied to your website as well.
When a potential client visits your website, they should see exactly what you do right away. They should be greeted with a portfolio and know what your capabilities are. If you go to your website right now and dive into the analytics tab, you can find out your bounce rate. I'm guessing this is over 50%.
That means over 50% of people that click on your website only visit a single page. Your homepage. If we can create a portfolio that pops up right when they visit your website, Two things happen. Your bounce rate goes down because you capture attention better and you are able to showcase your work to people that would normally just click out of your homepage.
If you were to stop listening to this podcast episode right now and only applied the single thing, I guarantee you. That your business will transform. The amount of clients that you'll get will go way up. But if you really want to increase the number of clients you work with, you'll listen [00:02:00] to the end of the episode.
Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures. Whether a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. All right, so we understand that we need to have our portfolio as front and center on our homepage.
What kinds of photos should we include in our portfolio? Well, it depends on your niche, but Chris, I don't have a niche. I like to take photos of all things. Well, then you're not going to get many clients if you actually want to make money from photography. You need to niche down. This episode is not going to be about finding a niche.
Go ahead, find a previous episode that talks more about nicheing down. There are plenty on the Creative Biz Launch podcast. I'm a product photographer, but not just that. I'm a product photographer that works with. Food and beverage. C P G brands. That's pretty specific, and that's a good thing. I'll be using prop photography as the example niche for the rest of the video.
But these concepts apply to whatever your creative niche is. When we build our portfolio, we [00:03:00] don't do it for ourselves. We don't pick our favorite photos that we've ever taken. No. When we are building our portfolio, the goal is to build it for the client, not for us. Let me say that again. We're building our portfolio for our clients.
The goal with our portfolio is for the client to envision their products inside of our portfolio. We want to showcase a variety of work inside our niche that allows clients to really envision what their product would look like. If they were to work with us.
When a client clicks on your portfolio, they're immediately judging you. They're trying to picture their product inside your portfolio, and if they can't do that, the chances of them working with you go way down. If you're starting from scratch, keep this in mind. When I was starting my product photography portfolio, I made sure I had a wide variety of photos.
Before I started working with product photography clients, my website had landscape photos, street photography and lifestyle photos. A big variety of content. But I wanted to pivot and everyone told me to niche down. They were successful. I wasn't. So I listened to them. [00:04:00] I started creating a product photography portfolio.
I grabbed some random products from my pantry, went to the store to buy some products with cool looking packaging, and started shooting away. I used different backdrops, harsh light, softlight, a lot of props, not so many props. I had a lot of variety here, but all the photos I was taking were within the same niche.
Everything was within the food and beverage product photography niche. I captured probably a hundred photos, chose a few dozen from that set, posted them on my website. And I was good to go. I had my portfolio. I made sure I had a variety of photos and things looked decent together. I went to upload them to my website and I realized that I had all this other content for my street photography days.
Those landscape and street photography photos were really good. I thought to myself, Okay, well, I have these amazing photos of landscapes and my product photography is just, okay, so maybe I should leave up all these landscape photos so that potential clients see how good I am. Thankfully, I did not do [00:05:00] this.
I deleted every single photo for my website. That wasn't a product photo. This is extremely important. When you choose to niche down, you need to get rid of any photo outside of that niche. Clients don't care about your landscape photos when they're trying to buy product photos from you. They can't envision their product inside a pretty sunset photo, but they can envision their product inside your product photography portfolio.
Do not make the mistake of leaving up old photos because you love them. Always think of this in terms of what the client wants, not what you want. You're starting a service-based business. Your sole job is to make the client happy. The lesson here is that you need to niche down and your portfolio should reflect your niche and only your niche.
Okay? We have our portfolio inside a single niche. It's right on our homepage of our website. What's next? Well, a lot of the time you might think your portfolio isn't good enough. You feel like you constantly need to be updating it. And constantly reshooting products. This is not the right move. Usually you cannot seek perfection when it comes to these things.
[00:06:00] Yes, it's important to have great photos, but aiming for perfection will bury you and your business won't take off while you're trying to redo your portfolio. For the 10th time, another photographer will have reached out to 100 brands. And they're going to land client after client, and you want to hear a harsh truth.
Your portfolio is probably better than theirs, but they know how to run a business and they will win. This is exactly what I teach inside of Creative Biz Launch. I want all of my students to win the program, teaches them the business fundamentals to start and scale their creative business to six figures.
My students win because they follow the right strategies and they avoid the painful mistakes along the way. If you wanna join the program, when we open again next week, the wait list is in the show notes. So we know perfection isn't important, but we need. Great photos, right? Well, yeah, but honestly, when I started reaching out to businesses to work with them, my portfolio sucked.
Within a couple of months of learning pro photography, I was already reaching out to businesses. I was putting in the boring work of doing sales [00:07:00] outreach and it worked. I got clients with my crappy portfolio. It proved to me I don't need a perfect portfolio. I did update my portfolio as I got better. But at the start, I just didn't bother with it.
I had to do the work that actually mattered, which was the outreach. Okay, so I have one more thing I want to talk about at the end here, but first, let's sum up the key points so far. One, make your portfolio front and center on your homepage to capture attention immediately. Two, niche down and create a portfolio tailored to your target clients.
Three. Remove any irrelevant photos from your portfolio. Focus solely on your niche. Four, don't strive for perfection, but do update your portfolio as you improve. Five. Prioritize business outreach and client acquisition over obsessing about the perfect portfolio. Okay, so I know I promised something really big at the end here, so let's dive into the bigger picture of client acquisition.
You want a great portfolio to attract clients, right? Your portfolio is a crucial piece of the puzzle, but it's only one part of a more extensive [00:08:00] system to attract and secure clients to create a comprehensive client acquisition strategy. You'll need to combine the following things along with your portfolio.
First off, how are people even learning about you? Where do you drive your traffic from to your portfolio? Well, there are only four ways to drive traffic to a portfolio. Number one is warm messaging. This is messaging people that you know. Number two is cold messaging. This is messaging people that you don't know.
Number three, posting to an audience that you know. This is organic social media. And number four, posting to an audience that you don't know. This is paid advertising. So those are the only four ways to actually drive traffic to your portfolio. Everything falls into one of these categories. My suggestion is to just start with one and scale that until you have a steady stream of clients coming from that one channel.
Now, the way you do this is difficult. You need to know how to write effective copy to convert people to actually click. You need to know the tactical details of cold email and not ending up in spam [00:09:00] folders. You need to know how to book a meeting once people actually do see your portfolio and express interest.
You need sales scripts to actually get people on the phone and get them interested in what you're selling. You need proposals to close those deals. You can start to see how the portfolio is just a tiny piece of a puzzle that requires a lot of effort to land clients. Luckily, I teach all the stuff inside of Creative Biz Launch where we have dozens of students already achieving success.
If you're not getting as many clients as you'd like, I urge you to invest in yourself and join the program when we open in just a few days. Wait list is down below. That's all I got today. Thank you so much for your time, and I'll talk to you next week.
