105: Why Photographers Stay "Busy" But Under-booked

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*Milky Way Giveaway*

I break down why you can feel exhausted from constant work and still feel stuck, especially when your to-do list is packed with safe maintenance instead of uncomfortable growth. We share a simpler way to think about visibility, trust, and marketing so the right clients can actually find you and book.

• the effort versus momentum gap and why it feels like spinning wheels
• common “safe” tasks that look productive but avoid growth
• what growth work looks like and why it feels uncomfortable
• why more talent does not solve being invisible
• how to market without feeling pushy or sleazy
• why one clear offer and message builds trust faster
• what a photographer website must do to reduce emotional friction
• why the market has changed and why touchpoints matter more now
• the four reasons photographers wait and how to move anyway
• an aggressive simplification checklist for getting unstuck

Keep your eye out for the Milky Way class, if you want to see that video on building a maternity brand from zero all the way through launch.

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Transcript

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Why Busy Still Feels Stuck

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello. Okay, this episode is going to be about why you might feel stuck even though you also feel like you're working all the time. So maybe you feel like you're editing a lot, posting a lot, changing your website, learning, trying. Um, and yet somehow with all of that, you feel sort of inconsistent. Maybe your finances are a little bit stressful, things feel unpredictable, even though you're trying to create predictability, and the whole caboodle feels a little bit harder than it should be. And I think the problem here lies between the disconnect of effort and momentum. And so the issue is that many times when photographers are in this kind of stuck puddle of mud, they're spending too much time maintaining things and not enough time growing things. So it's like you're you're keeping the the wheel rolling, but it's not going up the hill, kind of

The Maintenance Tasks That Trap You

SPEAKER_00 1:08

how it feels. Um, so these are the sort of tasks that you might be spending a lot of time on. Messing around in Lightroom, whether that's trying new presets, trying new editing, like organizing, reorganizing Lightroom, um, changing and trying new fonts in your branding, uh, tweaking your website wording, updating galleries, meaning like you are just sort of even you can spend a lot of thought time around galleries. Like, did I get everything I wanted? Are they gonna like this? This ends up taking up a lot of of brain power, but it's not dedicated towards growing. Uh, researching things. This can be like, I'm researching marketing. It's like, well, you're a research laboratory mouse, but you're not actually doing anything with that. Scrolling for inspiration. Hey now, how much time? How much time? Uh, re-editing old work is a really good one when you're like, okay, I have two hours right now that I could work on growing or hear me out. What about if I tweak the greens on that gallery that I delivered last year? Um, redesigning graphics, aka tinkering around in Canva. So the reason that our brain loves these little tasks is because they feel like very safe. Nothing bad. There's no risk, really, beyond just massive amounts of wasted time. There's no risk here, but you're doing work, meaning your brain is buzzing and your fingers are tippy-tapping and you're feeling things, but you're not really doing anything that's gonna move the needle per se.

Growth Work Feels Risky On Purpose

SPEAKER_00 3:04

So, like growth is completely different, and you'll know you're doing growth work because it feels uncomfortable. It feels like a little unsafe. So that means you're sending emails, running ads, going to networking events, you're pitching sort of local collaborations, you're showing your face online and talking about what you're currently offering, you're repeating things. That's a big, sticky, uncomfortable soup that a lot of you feel stuck in when actually that's just the normal, that's just normal soup. If you're running a business and you're repeating your offer, that's normal. But we often are like, ah, this is so uncomfortable. No, it's just what it is. There's only so many freaking things we can say about our work. Like, I cannot come up with brand new content every single season about what it is to either a be a family photographer or be, no, I really confused myself there. A be a family photographer, B, be on the other side of the lens. That was really rough for my brain. So, how many things can I say about that? It's not an infinite. I can't be like, I have new ideas about what my job pertains to or what it feels like. It's just gonna be repetitive, and that's totally normal. So there's a lot of photographers who accidentally sort of build up their habits, their habits when it comes to the work they're doing in their business, all around avoiding discomfort. So they're very busy. If you talk to them, they're very busy, they're very overwhelmed with their own busyness, but they're not doing anything uncomfortable or forward-facing or growth-centered. Um, they think like before they do the uncomfortable work, this is like very, very common that people say to me, like, before I become more visible, I need to be better at editing, at posing, at just the job. The job needs to be perfect. And then when I make myself be visible, I won't feel uncomfortable because my uncomfortability is related to my talent problem. But that's not actually true because you could be the most talented photographer in the world. And A, oh, people are still gonna hate you, and B, that doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna book clients. I see this all the time. I'll see these photographers, and I'm like, you are so good at this, but they suck at marketing. So it doesn't matter if it doesn't matter how good you are if you're invisible. And that's only if you're trying to book clients. If you are a really good photographer and you want your photography to just exist within itself and solve the issue of being a being a pro being a thing that you created and no one has to see it, no one has to see it for it to have value. So I'm talking about marketing, I'm talking about business owning. Your talent is not the problem for the vast majority of you. And getting more talent and getting better at editing and getting better locations does not allow you to market without discomfort. That I'll just tell you right now. Because I feel like I'm pretty good at photography at this point. 15 years in, I feel like I produce really consistent galleries. I like my own work, which was a massive breakthrough for me to stop comparing my work to everyone else and just let it be its own self. I feel like I'm as close to I as I can be for just letting the art exist without my judgment against it, which it was hard fought to get here, but I still have uncomfortability around visibility. That's just the human brain.

Talent Will Not Fix Visibility

SPEAKER_00 6:59

So if you're disappearing for weeks and you have unclear messaging and your website is confusing, and you never talk to anybody about your what you're booking, locally you're like not available. Okay, so let me tell you something that I had this meeting and I'm not gonna say too much about it, but it was very pushy on the other end. And the second that I identified this meeting that was pitched to me as let me get to know your business was clearly a actually I want you to pay for my business. Um, the way that my whole I felt my eyes darken in this meeting, right? And this is just like a this is to me was a felt uh like a a little bit of a of an emotional bait in switch. It would be like if I was meeting with you, if I saw you and I was like, oh my gosh, I saw your Instagram and I love your work. I would love to get coffee and just learn more about you. And then I was like, Pay me. That's how it felt. Anyway, this person, they're trying to get me to like feel away about what I'm currently doing and feel like I needed this person's help to do something. So they said, Well, I well, you've been here all this time and I didn't even know you were here. That was like the hit, that was supposed to be the hit piece, right? And for like I thought about it because the of all the things that this person said to me that affected me the most, obviously, because I care about visibility. Um, and then I was just like, Well, you know, we're not all going to, you're not gonna see the right people who want to see you won't see you. So it's not about every single person knows who you are. That's not because I because I talked to somebody who is like, Oh yeah, I just ran in. This was like a student of mine, and she's like, I just ran into the coffee shop owner and I, and like we've been in the same town for all this time, and she like didn't even know that I do family sessions because and she has kids, and so she was like, Oh, I didn't even know that you did that. And then it's like she's not in the market for it, so she's not seeing it. So this is what's hard, this is why visibility is so hard fought because you can be next to someone, but if you have no interest in what they're doing, you don't even clock them. That's just the human brain, it's not personal, right? So, like these this person and I had no reason to know of each other because neither of us were looking for the other one. So it's about being visible to people who are actually looking, not being visible about visible to every single person in your town. Um, and so after I kind of worked through that, I was like, okay, yeah, that's fine. Like, I don't need every single person in this island that I live in to know who I am and what I do. I just need to the right people who are looking for it to be able to see me. And I can't be seen if I'm gone, and I can't be seen if I'm unclear, and I can't be seen if I'm confusing or invisible. Like that is just the bottom line. This actually also very clarified for me a lot of the ways that I feel that there's a lot of uncomfortable and has been since 2020, really, just like a lot of like uncomfortable emotion-led selling that's like driven on. I see a lot of photographer educators starting to market about like what their income is. And I am always just so want to be so careful of that because I feel like it becomes this bar where it's like if you don't have a hundred thousand dollar a year business, then your business is just meaningless. And I talk to so many family photographers who have very, very meaningful businesses and they are providing meaningful work for families and they're nowhere near $100,000. And so that just being with this person who I considered not like a on the line of just a pushy salesperson. I just want to say, having experienced that, I think that's what we're all afraid of being, right? We're all afraid of being like pushy and annoying. But this was a situation where the pretenses of why I was even in that meeting were not true. That's just how I felt. I felt like, ooh, I'm kind of like, I kind of got snuck into this. That's not how people are gonna feel about your marketing if you're just authentically and excitedly talking about your work locally. So, really quickly, because I haven't been in that environment in a long time, ever since I got swindled by the meat delivery man, which isn't story for another day. This guy selling door-to-door meat, and he was such a good salesman that I bought meat from this man that I would never do. It was the first time I it was the first time I was like, oh, sorry, I'm not supposed to swear. Oh poo. I uh I'll have to go and edit that. Um I was like, oh, I I just caught like he he drove away and I had my frozen meat hunks, and I was like, I did I just get swindled? Okay, so like you talking about the work that you love is not the same as leaving someone on their porch with frozen meat hunks that you just swindled them into buying.

Marketing Without Being Pushy

SPEAKER_00 12:18

So just to be clear, okay, the other issue is marketing in just too many directions. Let me just again say that to myself, okay, because I feel that. But for the but this is again, I'm a person who likes marketing and understands what I've got myself into. A lot of you guys don't really understand what you've gotten yourself into when you talk about too many things because that talking about too many things just causes everything to be watered down. Clear businesses are easier to trust. That's the bottom line. Photographers who are drowning might be able to rise out of that drowning feeling and back onto land if they go with one clear offer, one clear booking path, one clear message, one clear visibility strategy. Think about really quickly what that would feel like to compared to what you're doing right now, just as an experiment of your brain. You might be like, oh my gosh, I if I could just talk about one one or two, one or two things consistently, this whole thing would be so much easier. And it might clear up a lot of that confusion that's keeping you really quiet.

Simplify Your Offer And Message

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Um, okay, the website. Let's talk about the website because I keep running into a lot of what so what's going on in the Fiona amargo world here is I'm doing the um Milky Way. I'm doing another class, and it's basically building out a marketing strategy from the ground up, is my class. It's a little class that's it's a video, it's a presentation type class. Last time I did a video through them, it was like actually me filming and editing sessions. This is marketing based. And it's all about like, let's say you are starting a maternity brand, and I walk through exactly how to build up and market said maternity brand. Um, and part of the thing that I that like when you are an educator through something like that, they are they want you to offer something as like a special thing for people who are students. And so the thing I'm gonna offer is a discount to the website course that's I'm almost done with. Because this is what's so hard for me. I keep like I part of me, okay, blah blah blah blah. So as a photographer, I offer a lot of things, and that annoys me about myself and I don't like it, but I but I I can't, I don't want to. I'm actively choosing not to simplify and I'm actively choosing to take on the additional marketing work. Okay. When in the educator space, part of me wishes I was a specialist in one thing. There's been times where I'm like, I should just become the person you go to as a family photographer and you want to get an F a meta ad up and running. Like that should just be who I am. I love those calls. They're easy for me, they get real results. It's very fun. But the issue is them like if you have a crappy website, your meta ads won't work. So we actually have to start there. And if you have a crappy booking system and you're and everything set up on the back end of your business, your meta ads won't work. Your Facebook ads won't work. So that's how I stall myself out from becoming a one-shot pony when it comes to marketing. The website is still the absolute most important thing. That is the most important thing to all the marketing that you're going to do. But the danger is if I say that to you and you picture your website in your head, you want to go tinker, tinker, tinker in a way that's not actually helpful. So the website course is the goal of the website course is to be like, no matter what platform you're on, it doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be simple and clear and driven towards your offer and getting someone on the calendar. That's what the website has to be all about. So, like if I think of a family photographer and I'm like, what do I need them to do to be a good marketer? The very first thing is you need a good website. And then that gives you the place to send people. There are photographers, and like I have a photographer I know here who books out a ton. She has no trouble booking, she has no website. She is a unicorn. And so then what happens is other people will be like, but she doesn't even have no, she has a massive, massive email list, and that's how the bookings are coming in because it's they already have trust with her. Their galleries that she's delivered to them are the trust-building asset, and so she doesn't need a website. So that's a very unique, and you could build a business that way too. You could build it through email and you're releasing your seasons and you're emailing strategically, and that's how you're booking out. Um, and you're not spending any time worried about a website, which this person hasn't done. But I will say that is a unicorn situation. That's not the norm. Most people, most potential clients want to go somewhere where they can build trust. And speaking of trust, you're probably underestimating how much it matters because this is a business that requires people to feel emotionally safe before getting on your calendar. They need to know: will my kids be comfortable? Will this be stressful? Will my partner hate this? If they do, like they can't come to my brand. But like, I think there's a part of it where all that needs to be said in that regard is your grumpy behavior is not allowed here. That's just a side note. Uh, will I know what to wear? Will I be awkward? Can I trust this person to get the type of work that I want from them? Those are all questions that they have. And your website is the place where you can go, where they can go to answer those questions. But so often the the websites that I review are clunky and complicated and don't have spaces like that for people to build trust. So your marketing's job, your marketing's job has two jobs, right? The initial job is visibility, like you just getting out there, putting your toe outside the door. The second most important job is reduce emotional friction constantly. Constantly, you are reducing the emotional friction that goes along with a family signing up to come to one of your sessions. And if you have a low-priced, high-volume photographer, they have less emotional friction that they have to overcome, but they have more emotional friction on the business side sending invoices that they feel resentful for. The higher you go up in price, generally the more trust that you need to offer, more trust-building buckets you need to let people simmer in because they're spending more money. So you need to show your personality, you need to educate, you need to share the process, you need to share reviews and testimonials. This is not none of this is new information. You guys already know all of this. And

Website Trust And Emotional Friction

SPEAKER_00 18:59

we need to recognize that the market has changed. And there could be photographers who've booked heavily through referrals who no longer can simply because attention spans are shorter and families' booking habits are changing. So if you're if you are sending out one email a month and then you're not hitting the person when they're actually looking and their emotions are high and they're ready, they may find someone who is in their face more. That's why I like Facebook ads because you are in people's faces without you having to be in people's faces. They just need many more touch points. The algorithm, if you're relying on social media, is changing. Visibility is different all the time. And so too many photographers are still marketing like 2018. We miss you. We miss you 2018 and 19. You were so fun, and we didn't even know where we didn't know what was coming. Let me just say also, if we enter a pandemic 2.0, I'm just gonna have to build a bunker and live in it because I can't do that again. So the way that it affects all of our businesses, also, like obviously, I care about people's health, and it's devastating to have anything like that. But just after for family photographers, the emotional roller coaster of this past five-year period, and then starting over again after that would just be, I mean, really rough. So I'm hoping that the that situation will for everyone's health and safety, first of all, but also just for like the ability to live in a tough economic situation as creatives, um, really hard to do in a crazy health environment. So I'm definitely keeping my eye on that. I saw someone that was like listing all the things in the past 10 years that have happened. And I mean, it is it is like 90s me was really just completely unaware of the level of unprecedented events that were gonna punch me in the face.

The Four Excuses For Waiting

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Um, okay, so you if you're waiting for it, let's talk about why you might be waiting to to market. Because this is this is like very, very common. Like people are like, I'm waiting. It's these are the the these are the four sentences I wrote down. I need a better portfolio. We already talked about that. Like chances are the average client is looking for consistency over perfection. I need more followers first. At no point in time have followers mattered less than they do right now. In fact, I saw the other day, it didn't, for some reason, didn't affect my account. I think I lost like a hundred and something, but who cares? I have no cares about followers. But people were losing thousands of followers in one second yesterday because there was some weird glitch on Instagram. And like secretly, I just hope that people realize how little I hope that made them realize how if their care, if they cared about that. Um, of course, if it was legitimate followers that just fell away from your account, that'd be one thing, but I have a feeling it was bots or whatever. Um, how little that matters. Matters at all. Um, the third is I need a better branding. The majority of photographers, and not to be like hurt any branding people out there, but the majority of photographers do not need complicated branding in the beginning because your consistent work is the visual for most people. Um, so you don't need to have a fully branded brand that has like branding elements, a logo, colors, fonts, like the majority of family photographers don't need that. I always think of branding as a reward for hitting a milestone. Um, this one is I just need to feel more legitimate. Legitimacy will come with bookings. And so you may just be spinning around at the bottom of the, where am I going with this metaphor? The ladder, that's who's spinning at the bottom of the ladder. Literally no one, but it could be you if you're waiting for legitimacy, but you really just need to go. You really just need to try things because the confidence and legitimacy and the feeling of this is a real tangible business comes after the consistent action, not in the silence of nothingness. So that is just so important. You won't, you can't wait for motivation, you can't get confidence with no action. All of this is just doing stuff, trying stuff, and then trying to not be overly emotional about the result and be curious instead of furious if you feel like things are flopping, failing, or not going how you want them to go. So

The Aggressive Simplify Checklist

SPEAKER_00 23:27

let's say that you came to me and you're like, my business feels super stuck. The first thing I'm gonna tell you to do is aggressively simple simplify everything. If you're if you're literally in an income crunch and you're like, it's either I figure this out or I go get a job, I'm gonna say wipe it and go one offer, one audience, one or two booking paths, one platform, social platform to nurture consistently, one weekly email, one local visibility strategy, one repeatable workflow, and then just go until you cannot stand yourself. And you'll probably dig out of that hole. You're not gonna dig out by constantly introducing and building trust with new offers. That is just completely overwhelming for everyone, um, including seasoned marketers like me. When I have a new offer, I am like, oh my gosh, so much work is ahead of me. So I I actively choose the work. But the majority of you do not need to do that. So if you're like, I am totally stuck, literally, if you had one offer a season and you just marketed the poo out of it, you're probably going to dig out of your hole faster than anything else you could do. Okay,

Milky Way Class And Meta Ads

SPEAKER_00 24:44

I hope this was helpful. And um if keep your eye out for the Milky Way thing, if you want to see that video on building a maternity brand from zero all the way through launch. Um, and then again, the main thing that I'm doing with meta-ads is either the DIY course or the one, the Loom video of your landing page slash website of where you want the ad traffic to go, reviewing that, then the call talking about setting up the Facebook ad and actually getting it launched, and then six to eight weeks later, the follow-up call on how to interpret the ad data. I feel like that particular thing will help you say, okay, from here on out, I have the information to be someone. I want you to embody being someone who can run ads if you need to. So that's the goal of that particular training. Okay. Hope you guys have a good week.