Marketing tipps to run a successful retouching business
Hello, my dear retouching friends! Today’s episode of the podcast is all about running a successful retouching business. Just recently I have asked people on my email list what they struggle with. My intention with this was understanding you guys better and offering help. Therefore, I asked not only to respond with retouching related questions. You can imagine some responses to be quite personal, and for that reason, I have already replied to every single individual with a very personalized email.

Looking through all the questions, I found a few to be asked multiple times, ultimately leading me to make this episode. And interestingly enough, this non-retouching-related topic seems to be more popular, or let’s say, people, struggle with these topics more than with retouching.

So, today’s episode will be about the business side of retouching and what is involved with running a successful retouching business.

Surely the list of topics always can be enhanced and tweaked, but I am confident to provide some valuable information to everyone listening. We all struggle and at the same time grow and learn from our experience. I’ll share my experience, hoping for it to be beneficial to all of you. Shared experience and knowledge let us all grow and become better retouchers and better humans.

To give you a brief overview of how I will structure this episode topic-wise, this is what I will be talking about:

* Getting retouching jobs and getting new clients
* How can you keep existing clients?
* How to market yourself or your retouching business
* Pricing your retouching services
* Tools to run a retouching business (hardware tools and software tools)

Getting New Clients And Retouching Jobs
One of the most asked questions I can think of is from people new to the retouching industry asking hot to get new clients or how to land their first paid retouching job. We have already done an episode on this, so maybe check out episode #008 How to find retouching clients and how not to. But of course, I will mention a few things hopefully helping you in the process of acquiring new leads.
Solid Retouching Portfolio
My first recommendation and a first step on the way to getting retouching jobs is to have or to build a robust retouching portfolio. But what makes an excellent retouching portfolio. You need to start working on reasonably good source material. Starting with crappy images, that are badly lit and a model that is just a girl from next door won’t do you any good. You can surely practice a few basic techniques on any image; however, freelance retouching is a very detail-oriented job. You need to be on top of what is going on in the industry that you are working in. If you retouch beauty, you need to know what retouching companies expect to see, what they want to have fixed. Getting proper source images helps you to understand what to expect from such a job as other members of an already established team will work towards what clients want to see. If you have no access to good images, you can download some free raw files from our website to practice your retouching. To get to the free resource, head over to https://boutiqueretouching.com/free-raw-files/
There ‘s no excuse for you not to have a retouching portfolio matching today’s standards. Just make sure to work on your portfolio, keep updating it with recent work and cohesively showcase images.
Advertising where potential clients can find you
A logical next step of gaining clients is to market with your killer portfolio. This can be paid or free advertising on various platforms. The question always is whether you advertise in the right places. Or let’s say if your investment in time and/or money results in any qualified lea...