Episode 101 – What to do during downtime in a pandemic

Transcription was done by Rev.com, using their AI (artificial intellegence) generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video or listening to the episode.

Welcome to episode one zero one my name is Scott Wyden Kivowitz and today we are going to talk about this pen demic going on and how it impacts photographers, photography business, your finances in general, your lives in general. Now I'm not going to go into too many details. I'm going to do a quick overview because while we're in this, we're living it so you most likely your photography business has most likely been impacted. You are having clients cancel, you're having events canceled, you're not having the photo sessions that you've had booked because either you have to cancel it or they've been canceled on you and there's so many things that are going on that is costing you money. Whether it's you losing money on these sessions or you having to pay for something that you'd have to pay for before. For example, in my case, my wife is a teacher.

She is still working but she's now going to be doing virtual classes for her students public school by the way at home and she has to do this. Her normal schedule to eight to three or whatever her normal schedule is at school. Now I am here working at Imagely. We are a remote team so I'm at home as well, working normal hours. My daughter has always been in her daycare, her preschool and that is changing because now the, the preschool is closed and everybody's at home. That means that I have to have childcare to now watch two kids, which means I now need to pay for two kids at with at-home childcare for my older daughter and my younger son instead of the one that I would have one I'd be paying for one child typically for at-home childcare so it's going to get expensive. It's going to get expensive because now we have to buy more food, more groceries and we now have to pay from work childcare at home.

We now have to figure out the schedule of how is it going to work between my wife and I both working at home and maybe our childcare doesn't want to come certain days because their children are at home as well, so we'll see. But we are impacted already already we are impacted and it just going to keep getting worse. Now keep in mind, besides from certain things, having to pay more revenue coming in less. There's another issue. Our retirement accounts, our stocks, our 401k is our IRAs, our Roths, they're all going down and down and down and down. It's kind of scary actually. Now this will bounce back. The economy will bounce back after everything is gone, but it will take time. It'll take a far more time for it to bounce back than it did for it to go away. So with that, I want to share what you can do during downtime in a pandemic, like where like we are in right now.

So for one you can update your sites onsite. SEO, this is far easier than offsite SEO, but you can update your sites onsite, SEO internally linking where you need to editing important landing pages and making them more SEO ready, more optimized for search engines. You could add table of contents that are good for schema on Google and being and things like that. You could also go off site and update your Facebook page so it's more optimized. Your your Yelp listing, your Google my business listing. You can do all the on offsite things. He citations that'll help your local rankings. So you come up better in search. These are things that you can do SEO wise to during this downtime to help your business. So when the economy comes back, you are already doing better. Now when you're on your site, you can also start thinking about more blog content.

You know, whether you write the content or you just create quick drafts and come back to a later start brainstorming new blog content. You can also edit some older work, some, some older photos, right? So when I say older work, I mean multiple things. You can edit older photos that are in your catalog that you wanted to revisit that you just haven't had time to do. You won't. You now have time so you could edit older photos. You can also edit older blog posts, go back in your archives to the older blog posts and edit those as well. Now if you have a lead magnet, then go ahead and update that. If this is what gets you, your leads are a lot of your leads update it. Make it more up to date. You now have the time to do so or if you do not have one yet, create one.

If you don't know what a lead magnet is, I recommend checking out my course. More leads, more clients, lead generation and that can be found at my website, Scott, wine.com I will link to that in the show notes. On the same note, if you have a lead nurturing campaign in place, now might be a good time to analyze the stats and update it or if you don't have one in place, again might be a good time to create one. We as businesses have workflows, we have systems for things. What happens when a lead comes in? What do we do to ha what happens when we Mark this person as now? It's an opportunity and then it's a, it's a book job and how do we do the bookings and all this stuff. We have these workflows and systems. If you don't have one, create one.

If you do have one, audit your workflow and systems. See what's working, see what can be adjusted, improved, tweaked, and go ahead and do that. Again, you have the time. The last thing I want to mention that things you can do during this downtime is to update or create new contracts and agreements. If you don't have these already in place, you need some, I recommend the law tog our friend Rachel Brenke, he has tons of contracts. I will link to that in the show notes as well and where you can get some contracts and then fill in the blanks for your own business there. They're amazing contracts that are ready to go and then you could tweak them a further by sending to your attorney and have them you know, fine tuned for your specific location and situation. But otherwise they're pretty general and work for most businesses.

That's all the tips, these little tips that I want to give you, what you can do during the downtime. Now I want to talk, share some. Now I want to share some additional links of, of places that you could go and read more about how or listen to cause I'm more podcasts. About what you could do to improve your business further from during this downtime or things you can do to help your clients during this pandemic. So there's a few links I'm going to include in the show notes. One is to skip cone university, one is to sprout studio there. They create a great basically a database of content that's called first aid and it's fantastic. Then there's a great con, a great article from SLR lounge, and then last Spinelli's again Rachel Brenke. He has a podcast episode talking about some of the legal aspects and things related to this pandemic.

So if you would like to see these links and access all this content, go to imagely.com/podcast/one zero one I hope that will you comment, share how you've been impacted. I know you've been impacted. It's obvious, right? This is something that is an impacting the entire world. Everybody's affected by it, whether we're photographers or not. Okay, so go to go to imagely.com/podcast/one zero one share with us in a comment how you have been impacted, what has been the worst thing and how are you dealing with it now? I hope that you also will share this episode with your colleagues, your friends, your coworkers, because this episode, while this is a WordPress photography podcast, this is for anybody, no matter the business type because what I just shared goes way beyond just photography. And by the way, if you didn't notice, this episode is audio only. We are testing out audio only episodes and we're doing this for a good reason, which maybe I'll talk about at a later time. Until next time. This is Scott Wyden Kivowitz, the chief community officer here at Imagely, and I look forward to talking with you in episode one zero two.