As I’ve mentioned in a couple of posts, I currently work as a freelance photographer and videographer. I love my job; I love capturing true emotion on film. This is what I’m good at and I hope to one day turn my passion into an alternative creative media company.

What I’m not so great at is the business planning side of things. I started freelancing just by putting an ad on Gumtree and I have gradually been growing the business ever since.

Today I decided to set aside the day to set out a business plan. I divided this into three categories.

1.  Business goals
   Here I set out the things that I want to achieve in the short term and long term, and outlined the steps in achieving them 
2. Work efficiency
   This category covers all the boring organisational stuff. Payment methods, booking sheets, editing software, file organisation and backups etc. The stuff that no one enjoys in but it needs to be done in order to work effectively.
3. Advertising and social media
   All my advertising is done online, on free ad posting outlets and through social media. I intend to create more work opportunities and contacts by putting more effort into my online presence.

Advertising and Social Media should be the area that I most enjoy working on, but I quickly found out that it is more difficult than other people make it look.

I already have a pretty decent website up. I’m quite proud of it because I did everything myself through Adobe Muse. I also have a work Facebook page and I occasionally use my personal Twitter and Instagram accounts to post  work related content.

View my blog here.

Today I set out to make the tools I already use more effective and to integrate other popular social media tools in order to reach a greater population.

I was inspired by Linh Luu’s work, he’s a classmate of mine who happens to be an extremely talented photographer and possibly an even more talented social media tycoon. His Facebook page has over 27 thousand followers.

I’m also inspired by Lakshal Perera, a wedding photographer whose work I follow through his Facebook page. Other than admiring his work, I really love the way that Perera uses his blog on his website to connect with fans of his work. He reflects on every wedding he photographs and his blog is a reflection of his amiable nature, talent and also genuinely caring work methods. This is so effective that he doesn’t even need to advertise.

I genuinely love filming weddings, and I feel a connection to the couples that I capture on film through the emotion that I sense on their big day. But this is something I find very difficult to get across, not in my work but when I talk about my work. Letting the work speak for itself isn’t enough online.

So today I went about adding a blog to my website. I had a long series of issues with embedding the blog, I tried multiple platforms and landed on one that worked. Then I had trouble uploading the photos, I couldn’t upload them how I wanted them no matter how many different methods I tried.

I decided to give that a rest and move on to something else. Adding new social media profiles. There are so many visually engaging sites that people are using these days which I could utilize to promote my work, such as:

• Facebook pages
• Tumblr
• Pinterest
• Twitter
• Flickr
• WordPress, Blogger, Weebly, LiveJournal etc
• Instagram

I want to get my work out there, but posting individual photos to each of these platforms would just be too much work. I decided to use IFTTT in order to integrate some of these processes. Again, I had a lot of trouble. I ran into problem after problem and after five hours of work, I feel that I have accomplished very little.

I expected it to be difficult and time consuming, but I didn’t expect to be right back where I started, only with less options and a throbbing headache, after hours of work.

However, I am determined and I am going to jump right back into it. I am hoping that once I find something that works, with practice and effort it will become much easier. So adios, I have tutorials to watch, questions to Google and code to attempt. Trial and error until I find something that works, and it could be a long night.

Oh and here is a great blog post about creating great content rather than flashy content. Once I figure out how to get my content online and integrated, maybe I’ll be able to take the advice!