Ask A Photographer Podcast

After a couple of years in business I have saved up a small amount of money. Should I invest the money back into my photography business or buying new equipment to update aging cameras and computer equipment.

Where you can spend money in your business to get someone kind of return. either by reinvesting or upgrading your current equipment.

9 Pros & Cons to upgrading camera equipment and reinvest money into the business?

Reinvesting back into your event photography business

* Using a WordPress.com site so you don’t have to worry about updates, backups and security.

* Advertising such as google adwords to get more leads

* Paying other people to help you in your business

* Branding e.g. new Logo

* Take someone out for coffee to network

Updating your camera and computer equipment

* Gaining more confidence in your photography by upgrading you camera

* Buying new equipment for added cash flow

* Increasing your productivity with a faster computer

* Investing in your Back up system

Hey Helen, thanks for your question, and it’s great that you’ve saved up a little bit of cash. It means that your photography business is making a profit, which is awesome.

Now, what would I do? I would actually reinvest back into the business, only because I would try to maximise my profits. If I’m buying new camera equipment or computers, it would mean that I may not see the results straight away.

Whereas if I was to say, do something like advertising, I could hopefully get a return on my money. But having said that though, everyone’s different.

I’m not too sure what type of equipment you have, or how old your computer equipment is, so what I’ll do today is just go through the things that you potentially can spend your money on, and just talk through some of the things that can come from that.

Reinvesting back into your photography business

I’ll start with investing back into the business, and what I would do is advertising.

Advertising

I really like Google AdWords, the fact that I can set up ads and bid for certain keywords within my local area. And as we all know, when you want to go find something, you always jump on Google, right? So, it’s one way that you can get results quite quickly, or leads quite quickly, without having to do a whole heap of work.

Now having said that though, you can’t just set and forget Google Ads, or any ads that is. Facebook included, Instagram and Pinterest, and all that stuff. You’ve got to keep on top of it, so if you don’t, you can end up spending a lot, a lot of money.

Because in effect what you’re doing with say Google Ads, is you’re bidding for a keyword. It could be like New York wedding photographer. It could be portraits New York. Whatever it may be, right? And, there’s obviously other photographers bidding for the same thing. The more people that bid, the higher the cost of the price of that keyword.

I’ve seen wedding keywords go as high as 10 dollars or so, depending on the time of year. A couple of years back, I noticed that, and obviously I did not bid for that, because what in fact was happening, is that if you are successful in that bid, and the customer had clicked on your link, your ad,