Our Top Business Resources and Tools for Photographers

Figuring out the right tools and resources to run your business can be overwhelming. We tried out so many different things when we first started out and it took us years to finally find what actually worked and made the best sense.

There is a lot of noise out there when it comes to finding the best tools and resources for your wedding and elopement business. Whether you are just starting out or you are frustrated with what you are using now, look no further! We've compiled a list of our favorite and most helpful resources that we truly believe are worth the investment and time.

These are options we wish someone had told us about or that were around when we started! We stand by these resources and tools and our productivity, work/life balance, finances, and even our clients would agree too. These have been game changers for how we run our business and have allowed us to gain a little bit more of our life back from constantly being on the grind. So, here is our list of our favorite business resources and tools!

HONEYBOOK

For years, we used another client relationship management service, but we were frustrated with it. We won't name it, but we stayed with them too long because we didn't want to have to transfer all our data and contracts over to a new one manually.

Then we found Honeybook and it has honestly changed the way we run our business and they even helped transfer all our data and contracts over. We barely lifted a finger! It has helped us stay organized, on track, and simplified our workflow. It has cut our time handling the administrated tasks in half. Once we started with HoneyBook, we were able to spend so much more time creating, working on other projects, and focusing on the things that matter as well as being able to spend more time with each other and our family.

Since Honeybook lets us customize proposals, send contracts, invoices, questionnaires and you can automate nearly all of it, we had time to create this post! On top of all of that, you can make custom workflows for each type of shoot and assign them to specific shoots or projects and it will automatically send out your questionnaires, payment reminders, updates, etc. And lastly, it makes it super easy for your clients to pay you directly through Honeybook. We cannot recommend it enough!

Ready to get started or make the switch? Try it free for 7 days and use this link to get 50% off Honeybook!

QUICKBOOKS

The last thing any of us want to deal with is taxes and such, right? Before we knew better, we tried to handle this stuff on our own. We were basically just guessing at what to do and what to pay until we finally hired a CPA. She recommended we get Quickbooks, which sounded super intimidating. After we signed up and got started, we actually felt pretty silly thinking that it would so complex and hard to use because it was almost too easy.

We linked our business bank account and our business credit cards to our Quickbooks account and bam! It imported all our purchases and income. It makes categorizing our purchases super easy. You can set it up to auto-categorize most of it, so you don't even have to do hardly anything. Having every categorized appropriately makes it super easy for us and our CPA when it comes to tax time. At the end of the year, we simply export our reports and sent them over and thats it.

A nice added bonus is the mileage tracker! Through the mobile app, you can chose whether a trip was for personal travel or business and it automatically calculates the tax break for you.

Get started with 50% off by clicking the link below!

Just like plenty of other necessary tools we photographers need to use, we tried so many different client gallery options. None of them before Pic-Time offered everything we wanted.

We freaking LOVE Pic-Time. Built by creatives, for creatives. The gallery layout options let us express our vision and have a beautiful, clean and modern feel. You can add your own branding and customize the galleries. Their uploading isn't complicated and you don't have to pay for each gallery, plus your clients can choose who can do what when invited into the gallery and they can also hide images they don't want all the guests to see.

Even more, you can use the gallery to get album image selects, not to mention their incredible shop options. There are tons of options to choose from and you get to select what you offer and the pricing. There are all kinds of super high quality products from prints to calendars to albums to holiday cards. It's been a game changer for us and a solid source of income, especially with their marketing options. Pic-time even gives you the marketing tools and you can send those marketing materials straight from your account and simply watch the print sales come rolling in.

Sounds good doesn't it? Get a month free by clicking the link below!

NARRATIVE

Blogging was never really easy for us. Something about selecting the right images, organizing them and then trying to figure out how it all looked together was daunting. Not to mention the SEO and optimization of the images isn't very fun.

But then came Narrative. Finally, someone created an app that makes all of that so freaking easy that we literally just blogged twice in the last week and before using Narrative, we blogged twice last year. We are on a roll right now and have two more posts that we are working up.

Narrative has allowed us to tell our couples stories better through our blog and since you can customize the layout of your blog post, they really let our style and personality show through our posts. Back when we spent hours (sometimes days) working on compiling blog posts, we felt drained, not to mention limited.

When we blog, we see a strong correlations between blogging and inquiries. We couldn't go anymore without blogging, but we needed it to be practical, quick and easy. No joke, no fluff, but Narrative has made the possible and we owe a lot of our bookings to them. Had we not had Narrative, we probably wouldn't be blogging more and thus, we may not have booked many of the weddings and elopements we recently have.

Click below to get 15% off using code: brett44

FLODESK

It took us longer than we'd like to admit to realize how important effective email campaigns were for our business. You may have gotten some emails from us and if you have, hopefully you noticed how beautifully designed and laid out there were.

Well, all credit goes to Flodesk. Forget the old timers in the email campaign biz. Flodesk has it going on. They make it super easy to design, get your message across super simple and makes email marketing fun and easy.

It's basically drag and drop for your emails. You can set it up to send out to certain audiences like for print sales, new blog posts, product promos, etc. We got started when another photographer hooked us up with 50% off our subscription and honestly, at first, we thought we'd just give it a month because we didn't think we'd use it. Boy, were we wrong. We've sent more emails through Flodesk than we ever did with any of the other guys.

Flodesk has helped us sell more presets, prints and book more shoots than any other email service out there. So, definitely take advantage of the 50% off link below!

Get 50% off your subscription by clicking below!