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Free Preview: Making Talking Protraits Profitable

E Products, Elektronik products. Why the electronic products are designed in order to help me as a portrait photographer. I've learned something real quick, and here's what I learned. I learned that print sales particular. When it comes to family portrait prints, sales are in decline and they're in decline pretty heavy. So I needed to figure out a way that I can help replace some of those sagging print sales. Now, of course, I go to trade shows. You've seen me at trade shows before. I go to all the big ones, and I learned, What is it gonna take to be able to boost my print sales? Because we do, well, my portrait studio. We're only doing about 600 per year. If you like, you can see them. You go to Chicago portrait dot pro, and you could see the in full. It's up there, but I needed to come up with a way to create higher print volume. Well, we're going to do that by selling prints that aren't printed. E product. Hybrid photography creates E products. Now what is an E product? Let me show ...

you a little video on exactly what they are when we combine still photos and movement of still photos with video clips and audio clips and graphics and MAWR. We end up with one video file that we call an e product on e product can be viewed and shared and shown on any screen that you could ever imagine. And an e product can also be distributed by a leak. That's right. Take a look at this. This is actually a leak from one IPhone to another phone hand. When you click on that link, it takes you directly to that E product that plays so an electronic product and e product is what we think the future of photography is about. As print sales decline in the world of professional photography, we're gonna replace those sagging sales with E products that leap off a screen. All the products are basically the shell of a video file filled with anything. We want to get our message our thought are feeling, or for commercial photographer like me, the idea of what a product conduce do across to anybody any time on any screen e products rock way got to get him to screens. People want to have our images on our screens. Lorenzo, you and I talked earlier. You're shooting sports photography. It's really hard to shoot sports action photography and then be able to sell those as Prince. That's hard enough. But then, to be able to sell those as a print on a screen for someone to view on an IPhone, that's even tougher, even tougher. I understand we got a handful of questions. Can I grab a couple questions, please? Absolutely. Well, I think people are really engaged in the chat rooms because this, again, is some things that people have never seen before. WAY might have some folks that are part of your linked in a group in here in the chat rooms or causing trouble again. People are pretty curious about the all of the technology behind. Is there an app for this? Ask a c. M 83. We're going to be getting into that Correct. We are. We're gonna talk about that. We want to keep this as least technol as we have to, because I prefer the easy and automated way versus the handmade technological way, and even if it costs me a little bit of money, so I don't want to spend a lot of money in order to automate something, but I want to spend a little bit of money to do it. One way we'll do it is will be using a product called Hybrid lab dot pro in order to actually do some of the editing automatically for us. And by the way, the linked in group that you refer to in there is actually very popular. It's one of the places where I get a lot of information and we get to exchange back and four with me as well as other folks. And it's called mirror Elice Foot Sorry, hybrid photography Using muralists cameras, I screwed up every time I see it. So I apologize for that and let us know they're in the chat rooms, which, which of you are the ones who are part of that group and movement because it's great to have those conversations in the chat rooms as well with folks who are already doing this. That's right. That's right and already being troubled. Absolutely so other types of e products that we're doing in my studio. There's a handful of them. We use one as a bit of a differentiator one of the e products that we use is a type of an E product for models and actors. So if you have, say, a career budding as a stage performer, well, you're gonna have to have a head shot. You're gonna have to have some sort of talent sheets. Well, it's much easier to have one little segment, in fact, where you're speaking into a camera instead of when you're just posed into a camera. Of course, earlier we talked a little bit about the Kids Sports E product and one of the others. That's E products. It's been very encouraging. Is the replacement to the Christmas card? I've got a couple of crazy ideas ready for crazy idea Number one. Why are Christmas cards still printed on paper? Don't most of the families that you communicate with wouldn't they much rather have photo video audio of something about you of your family? Say, Chris, you got a new dog in your family and you put that funny little hat or somebody years or something on your dog and you make a cool little picture. Wouldn't that be a fun little e product that instead of spending money on cards and on stamps and going through the headache of writing on that stuff down, wouldn't it be cooler just to be able to make an e card? And then instead of just mailing that to 250 people because it's gonna cost you 300 bucks, wouldn't it be easier to send it out to 3000 people? That won't cost you really anything. Maybe 9 10 bucks to go ahead and make smart right here is the other one wedding photographers. And I'm not a wedding photographer. I did when I was a youngster, and I learned real quick. Yeah, I'm not a wedding photographer. Yeah, I paid for my way to go to college by shooting some weddings, and I struggled, struggled, struggled, and I did pretty decent. But that's not my gig. I'm not cut from that cloth, but wedding invitations. Who wouldn't a wedding invitation just be the most beautiful thing that could be an electronic product? What if your e product was designed to be able to do two things right? There's really two things that a wedding invitation wants to do. The first thing is that it wants to be able to send out an invite to say, Would you please join us on our magical day? We're joining as one. Please, please come join us in the celebration. And then, of course, then there's other people that you know they're not gonna make it cause they live in Singapore or whatever, but that at least gives them the over the okey dokey to let you know you're getting married. If they want to send a gift or send a card or something, that's terrific, too. So wedding invitations. At some point, I think they're going to be eat cards. But the more popular ones for us are the short and sweet talking portrait's like we just shot, but we're gonna shoot him on a little bit higher level as we produce through the three days of this course, we're going to show you how we take the basic pieces and how we assemble them one by one, and we put him into a product that we can make quickly. We can produce automatically and weaken cell for riel profit dollars. One of them, of course, the replacement to the business part business card. Another one you'll see inside. There is a marketing message to restaurants. Now we're still under development on this, and pretty soon in the LinkedIn Group is well, as on our blawg site, which is called Hybrid photo dot Pro. You're going to be seeing a brand new product, and I think, in fact, you're actually working on a restaurant. E card. Was it you that's working on a restaurant? E card? Got a few ideas? Yeah, yeah, appear that's That's really a brilliant idea. And I love to see those brilliant ideas coming your way. Now, if you'd like to Seymour about how we actually create our E products through our portrait session, I'll show you a little bit on Chicago portrait dot pro. But in Day three of this program, we're gonna actually bring in via Skype. Patty Bradley and Patty Bradley is our marketing person at my photo studio. She course couldn't be here because she's got a lot of work to do. Selling prints, right? She can't be here in Seattle, goof around with with well, in the beautiful weather, by the way, it's raining to beat the band in Chicago today, right? God love that right? Totally love that, but we predict Here's the big news. We predict that Talking Portrait's hybrid photography Talking Portrait's will take over 18% to 22% of our business volume in this year. 2014. That's right, 2014. We're expecting to see 20% of our growth be Elektronik. Let's talk about why first up the basic element of e products is the talking portrait that we just shot. We need to first of all, learn how to shoot hybrid, right? That's what we've gotta learn how to do. The next thing is we're gonna have to learn how to edit hybrid. We're gonna have to edit photo and video and audio together. And if that scares you for one instance, don't be. We've got solutions. Looked at Christmas smirking because he already knows what these solutions are. We've got solutions that are going to make this lots last easier for you. Then we're gonna place the file into a delivery system because there's one thing we don't want to do. Folks, we don't want to sell video files. I don't want to do it. I don't want to shoot an e card. Aneke hard pro like you just saw my e card I don't want to sell a video file. I want to be able to sell the link. Why? Well, we've tried it. It's really tough. If you have the ability to try to sell a link to someone you'll discover it's pretty darn easy because they can store it. They conceive it a lot of times. In fact, they can speak it. But what happens when you want to sell them a video file? Now, all of a sudden, you're gonna have to figure out how you're gonna give it to him. Is it going to go on a DVD? Is it going to go on a CD? Is it going to go on a jump drive? Is it going to go on YouTube file? Huh? We don't want to do any of that stuff all that way Too difficult. We've got to make sure that we deliver the link to the clients. Plus the reason we want to deliver that Linked to that plant is we get the selling backwards on something kind of cool. Louis, how far away are you from being ready? About 15. You've got it. I won't explain something that's really kind of fun. Where I showed you my e card pro right? I showed you that Will Crockett e card and how that works. It's pretty neat stuff, right? All right, Well, an Ekkehard Pro allows me to do something really cool, and that is to put a string on a sale. Here's how it works. Clients come in. They want to buy an e card pro from US sales people. Basically, here's how it begins. We find a real estate agent in City Chicago, and we get in touch with them. And we say, You know what? We've got a tool for you that you're really gonna like to use, and it's called an e card pro, and we're gonna be able to sell you that e card pro that you're going to use for your sales force to go out and make new leads. They need generate leads, right when you're a sales person, then real estate in particular, a place like Chicago, not a booming market, Right? Like I noticed when I came into Seattle here, there's a lot of crazy. There's a lot of growth going on here. This is a big deal. Well, not so much in Chicago. It's a tougher marketplace to sell that. Well, we want to be able to generate sales through these sales people. So here's what we do. We go to the let's see a 40 50 60 agent deep real estate agency. We find them, they're easy to find. We say Hi. My name's Will Crockett and I run. Whatever. Chicago portrait dot pro We have a tool for you to help you sell with your agents to get new leads a while, always interested in new leads. What's it gonna cost me and said, Oh, this is really pretty easy. So what we do is we typically will invite in the the owner of the company. So we're gonna invite in. Say, Guy never seen Chip Moses. We just did not too not too long ago And say, Tell you what, we're gonna be able to record this. We're gonna show you what this e card is. We're gonna show you what it does. We're gonna show you how it works. Then, if you like, you can offer to pay half of your fleet, right? Your sales teams e cards. Wow. I can see how that fits into my marketing budget. So Let's say that they've got 40 of their folks were selling these for either $299 or $399. Right? That e card pro that I showed you there was $300 card, right? They want to be able to be real estate agent wants to pay half. Plus, they love the fact that their boss gets to pay the other half. Right? That's part of the fun of the two. I get to take a couple 100 bucks out of the boss. Okay, Well, we're gonna also be able to sell them that e card so that when they come on in, they choose which one of the two or three templates that they like. Then they will be able to pull in that shoot. Then 11 months later, we're going to get in touch with him. You know why? Well, when we use a delivery platform that makes sense. When we use YouTube or if you use a jump drive and you just give somebody a video file, you run into a lot of problems. Oh, yeah. You run into a lot of problems. They're going to reuse that file. That file is going to be re edited. It's going to be distorted. It's probably going to be destroyed at some place to, and you're gonna lose that valuable customer. Well, what if you're able to give the customer the best possible delivery platform possible? Say you make this beautiful e card and say You're able to say, I'm going to give you one year free delivery on the best possible way to deliver an e card ever. And that's called my e card dot pro. Now, later in the program, we're going to talk much more about how which one of these delivery methods we're gonna use which ones we likes. What's once we don't like. But there's one called my e card dot pro that we like a lot, and we're going to be able to send people there, and at the end of the year, we can call them back and say, Hey, remember when I sold you that eat card pro? They go, Yeah, we've been using It's been working out terrific. Well, the end of the free subscription is now over, huh? You're gonna need to now re up in order to keep using your e card pro, or you're gonna have to come back in and do a brand new version of E card Pro or you could just let it expire. And if they let it expire, Not really a disconnect notice. You know, we wouldn't really do that to him. We wouldn't really give him a disconnect. It would just be a soft 404 page and say that, Oh, this e card is no longer active. Please contact so and so So it's so it's so such a such. But they're not gonna want that. Here's the goal. The goal is we want to be able to shoot that e card. We want to be able to get that person in every year to get a fresh one made because they're gonna look different every year anyway. Right then, we want to be able to offer them one more free year delivery on that delivery platform, and then off we go question questions on the chat site. Did you guys have any questions? For starters, I see 11 brewing up quite put my hands on. A question in my mind is blown by the possibilities. I I'm a service professional looks like a lot of servers professionals. So, you know, being able to interact with them, creating an e product for my clients. And then, you know, being for them to be able to connect with their clients on a personal level with that moving video is just fantastic. And, you know, obviously the reconnect every year. Yeah, get back in touch with your clients on a continual basis. Yeah, I mean, that's just that's amazing. So my mind is just racing. Here's another one that actually works for us. Now that we're working on now, we've got a couple of restaurants. If you know squid there there was one on a sushi restaurant. We've got a sushi restaurant that every four times per year, they use a seasonal ingredient to make a special. And then that special becomes something that people actually look forward to right in the fall. They do this really cool thing with this funky, gored type of thing. Right in the spring time, it's got this funny high biscuits flower thing, I guess, on there this is edible flower. Hopefully, hopefully, that's the flower you can eat right out flower that she'd die right the flower that she lives, The one good one that you want to. Well, we come back in and we make a new e card for them every quarter. So they're able to have us come in, make another e card. They promote that through typically through their Facebook and works like a champ one. I know another way that works really well when it talk comes to social media and hybrid photography. There is s sushi restaurant, but uses a logo in Chicago that is a It's a sumo wrestler to great big sumo wrestlers this big. What we did was we took the E. P s file of their logo and we blew it up with a five foot tall print. And then we mounted it on one inch thick foam core and then we cut it out. So that got this big old outline of the sumo wrestler. And then you just got his head right there. And then what we want people to do is want them to stick their head into this hole and then take a selfie, right? Just take their phone, do the whole selfie thing. All right, well, there are no signs on this whatsoever. It's on Lee, a social media viral type of campaign. So if you go into this restaurant and you happen to see back in the corner that you've got this crazy little thing over there, then you go over and you take your selfie on that, you show it to your server, and then the service sees That's terrific. You get a free a free blue plate of sushi, right? Whatever. Say, it's one of those rotating sushi. Thinks it goes back and forth, all right. That has never been advertised, Chris, That has only been presented on. They only used farthings, these Google plus two, but on Facebook. So if you go to Facebook, you will see that there are hundreds of these people that just have these goofy selfies of them looking like a big, ripe big Sewell guy. And they end up getting a free plate of food off that right Can't beat that. That's totally fine. Totally fine. Louis, I'm gonna you have a question? We sure do it right ahead. About 100. But I'm gonna whittle it down. T think you probably get this question all the time. Well, sir, this is from Joe I. Lawrence. What's the difference between any product in a video with still images? Why not just shoot a short video with a video camera? Oh, that's a great question. The difference between a piece of video that's sold or say, produced on any sort of delivery platform and the photo is the ability of us as professionals to be able to combine those two things together. I sometimes had can get a better portrait, for instance, with a still photo that I can just with video. Now some things are better recorded as a photo than they are as a video, but yet others are better recorded as a video. Let me give you, for instance, ah, kid's birthday party, say, a three year old birthday party, that one little moment in which the kid blows out the candle, right, You've got the inhale thing. You've got that beautiful flame moving over, right? That's definitely a video moment, but the rest of it all the little pictures, the vignettes of grandmother hugging a little person that's not video that takes way too much time. You can tell that story of Grandma getting all tear. Isha's they hugged that three old click with one little photo with Mom all nervous because the kitchen's a wreck, right? That's better with one little clique than it is a piece of video piece, right? So it allows us to tell a story better and faster than anything else. One of the tests that we did, and I'm really glad you asked that question. One of the tests that we did was how long is too long for an E product. Say that you want to show on E product about your daughter's new dance class. Let's say your daughter now has elevated herself into this new special traveling dance class. All right, you see your your buddy at the grocery story, right? You're in the line, buying up whatever cake mix and some beer. I mean, what about a remember right? Right, Right. And then you hang out and you see your day, but you haven't seen for a long time. Gay Mike. How you doing? All a man of great Good. How are you? It's what you up to it. So just getting ready for a big party. My daughters got this big. Hold the thing. She's in some now really what she doing? Well, let me show you. Well, if you pull out on e product, that's a combo of photo and video. You'll find out that you've got about 25 seconds before that person loses attention. If you happen to pull out a piece of video and you just start playing a piece of video, you got about eight or nine seconds before they realize Ope, this is a video. I think I know this is going to break bad. So So there's a handful of different ways on why we want to stretch between those two things. Plus, coming up a little bit later in the program, we're going to dive a little bit in deeper in the interaction between what's gonna happen after we have end of play between that photo and that video. Excellent question. Thank you so much. Sure,