Business Day Thursday: 5 Ways To Make Money With Your New iPad

Good Morning Everybody,

OK, are you ready for the big announcement today? 

All My Technique Tuesday videos will now work on your new iPad and iPhone!!!

(eventually, like in a few more weeks) BTW, this past Tuesday's episode works just fine.

Isn't technology wonderful? Viddler, the fine company that hosts just about all my video tutorials are beta testing their new HTML5 viewer. This comes after all the brew-ha-ha about Apple NOT supporting Adobe's Flash platform, like ever!  Here is Steve Jobs open letter on the subject right here.  It all sounds pretty silly to me.

In two more days LaDawn and I are off to NYC. It should be a fun trip.  In addition to visiting my daughter, Elizabeth, who is attending Pace University in Manhattan, we are also planning to visit Animoto's World Headquarters!

Animoto makes it soooo easy for photographers to upload our images and video files to them and then they miraculously turn those images into a really cool slide show.  Check out the show I put together at Photoshop World, complete with video, scroll down the page a bit and you can find it right here - so cool. I don't know how they do it, but while in New York City I’ve been invited to Tour Their headquarters. I can’t wait to peek behind the scenes. Tune in next Thursday for my report.

Hey, let's get right on with today's post. Here we go.

5 Ways To Make Money With Your New iPad

Yesterday I was pretty fired up with how we photographers could use our new iPads to rally promote and showcase our images [link]. Sure, everyone knows it shows photos and kind of leaves it sit right there.  Let's put on our thinking caps and explore how we can creatively use the iPad to really leverage it as a wonderful sales tool. Just leave your ideas in the “Comment …” section.

Here are my 5 Top ways to use your new iPad in your business.

1.  Create albums that showcase your work. Sure, That's the easy one, but how about taking it to the next step.  Let these albums you create reflect different niches of your work.  One album could feature your wedding photography.  Another could feature family portraits, and another your high school senior work.  There you have it, several portfolios all in one compact package instantly available to share with your clients.

Hit the "Read More..." link below for the remaining 4 ways to make money with your iPad.

2. If you work with several favorite vendors, be sure to put together a few albums that feature your images showcasing their products and services.  For instance, if you work with a special florist in town, be sure you have an album that features their beautiful flowers in your images.  Now the next time you both are working on the same job, be sure to pull out your iPad and show them an album of your images featuring their flowers.  They will appreciate the fact that you are making the effort to showcase them too.  It's a win-win situation.

3. Here is a really easy one.  Slide shows at wedding have been the rage since we've been doing them the "hard way" with slides back in the early 1980's.  Slide show "life" has just gotten a lot easier with the iPad, even easier than downloading to your laptop computer. Yes, the iPad will import your RAW files - way cool!

Here's how I plan to work it.  As we're shooting the wedding, every hour or two, pull out the camera cable, attach it to you iPad via the iPad camera adapter, and transfer a dozen or so images to the iPad. Nothing could be easier.

DAZNOTE: You could also import them from the card but be sure you are using a Delkin DDREADER-38 card reader.  I've tried others and get an error message from the iPad that "Device requires too much power."  The Delkin reader listed above works just fine.

By the time you hit the reception, you should have a nice collection of images that you can easily show at the reception with background music from your iTunes collection. Really easy and so impressive.  Heck, hand it off to the bride and groom and let them show their guests.  What a great way for them to introduce YOU to their guests and to your great photography.

4. Here is one I picked up from my friends Kent and Sarah Smith.  They run a very successful high school senior studio in Ohio.  When I was talking with Kent a few weeks ago, he told me he plans to have an iPad or two sitting in his reception area. When the clients come in, they will be invited to have a comfortable seat after which one of his staff will grab one of the iPads, hand it to the client, and invite the client to browse a few of the "senior" albums for some ideas for their senior session.  Sure beats having them look at a magazine.  The "cool" factor alone should be a nice sizzle for the studio.

5. And last but not least, why not feature a few compete album layouts on your iPad?  Who wants to carry all those heavy albums around like we did in the old days. The benefit is the fact that now you have a very portable album solution when showing your potential clients your work. 

Seeing how a large number of wedding images can be designed into a beautiful album may even deter them from the "shoot and burn" requests so many photographers are bombarded with these days.  Now you have talking points right in front of them as to why the album is so important.  I was visiting a client a few days ago and showed him his daughter's wedding layout on my iPad.  He loved it!  Hmmmmm, potential sales idea anybody?

Hey folks, you get the idea.  There are lots of ways to use your iPad  to impress your new clients, vendors, current clients. Get those thinking caps on and keep yourself excited about the possibilities.

Have you got some good ideas you would like to add to the list? Why not post them in the "Comments..." section below for the benefit of all our readers.  If we get 20 really good and different ideas, I'll send the winner my very popular 2010 DWUC Success Collection [link] - What a deal!  Get those "thinking caps" on now!

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Hey gang, that's it for me today. Lots to do, places to go, and things to see.  See everybody back here tomorrow, same time - same place.

Have a good one,  David