I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude for a newborn photographer in Raleigh, 27 times in all, the way a new parent would. The names changed with almost every ask, and yet one studio made 8 of the 9 lists. The price answers came straight off the studios' own websites, which is the part I'd act on. That's the main topic below, part 2 of the AI series.

Alex

QUICK TIPS

0 is a price, and your store will happily charge it.

I was going through a client's print pricing on a call recently, and three sizes in the Prints category were sitting at 0. She'd put those zeros in to stop offering those sizes, that was the whole intention. What they were really doing was publishing three prints that anybody could order and pay nothing for 😬.

In a PhotoShelter pricing profile (and it's the same in any platform where you fill in a price table row by row), the price column is the on/off switch, and empty is the off position. Clear the field and there's no number to publish, so the size just drops off the list buyers see. But a 0 is a perfectly good number, so that row stays live and the print still gets made.

So open your pricing profile today and read down that column. Every 0 in there is a decision you never made. Give that size a real price above the wholesale cost, or clear the field so it goes away.

If I had to pick, I'd price it rather than hide it, since a size you never enabled is a sale you'll never hear about. But a 0 isn't a choice either way.

When did you last read your own print prices, row by row?

The person booking your team headshots usually isn't in the photos.

On the company side it's often someone from HR or marketing, or an executive assistant, organizing photos for other people. What worries them is logistics: how the on-site day runs, who covers the people who miss it, what happens with the new hire who starts later, whether 2 offices end up with matching photos.

Most headshot pages I open talk to the nervous individual instead. The session is relaxed and you'll be coached through it, which is true, and all of it aimed at the person in the chair. So the HR manager reads a page about someone else's worries and goes back to the shortlist.

When I planned the site for a mobile headshot studio, the team page got its own job: the on-site workflow step by step, guidance for teams spread across offices, a retake and missed-employee policy (the plan called that one a huge concern for HR teams), and a comparison of the staff hours lost sending everyone to a studio against bringing the studio to them.

The idea was that whoever is organizing sees someone who takes care of the logistics, rather than one more photographer to coordinate.

How often is the person booking YOUR headshot work actually the one in the photos?