Episode 302: Get Clients as a Way to Supplement Your Income with Chris Pieta

302_CHRIS_PIETA

Chris Pieta: Hi, this is Chris Pieta from Pieta Productions and you’re listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast.

Sponsor: Hey, awesome food bloggers. Before we dig into this episode, I have a really quick favor to ask you. Go to your favorite podcast player, go to Eat Blog Talk, scroll down to the bottom where you see the ratings and review section. Leave Eat Blog Talk a five star rating if you love this podcast and leave a great review. This will only benefit this podcast. It adds value. I so very much appreciate your efforts with this. Thank you so much for doing this. Okay. Now onto the episode. 

Megan Porta: Hello, food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, the podcast for food bloggers looking for the value and confidence that will move the needle forward in your business. This episode is sponsored by RankIQ. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode number 302. 

Today, Chris Pieta and I are going to have a conversation about getting clients to supplement your income. Chris is a product photographer at Pieta Productions. He teaches creative business on YouTube. He helps other creatives get clients, start their businesses and to scale down the road. He’s not a food blogger. Chris has helped other food bloggers seek out clients and has an understanding of the business of food blogging. Chris, I’m super excited to dig into this today, but first we’d love to hear what your fun fact is.

Chris Pieta: Hey, thanks for having me on today. I’m really excited to be here and share what I know with your audience. So my fun fact is actually that I don’t have a formal education in photography or business. My background is in chemistry. I pivoted a few years ago towards photography and building up the business after working in corporate America for a while, learning my heart wasn’t in it. So I pivoted and learned everything pretty much from books, YouTube and experience. 

Megan Porta: Wow. That’s a huge pivot. So were you always aligned with photography? Was it something that you enjoyed in your childhood or was this a completely new experience for you? 

Chris Pieta: Looking back, I don’t think I really was into photography that much during my childhood. I picked up my first camera at the end of 2016 for a big trip abroad. I just wanted a nice camera to take with me for that trip. I just kinda fell in love with it there. I was living in Chicago at the time. During the weekends, I would just go out and shoot portraits and from there it just evolved into product photography over time. I tried to just get better every time I went out shooting. Eventually we landed on product photography and that’s where the business started. 

Megan Porta: Your fun fact naturally led into our first point. That was seamless. You pivoted from a corporate job and something completely unrelated to photography. So talk to us a little bit about how you decided on product photography and maybe just a little bit about how that journey has unfolded for you. 

Chris Pieta: Yeah, of course. Pivoted from cityscape and landscape photography towards product photography. When looking to start my business, I knew I wasn’t happy in my nine to five job. I want it to be doing something else. I was good at photography at the time. So I started researching which niches had the most potential to actually make money from. I learned quickly that landscape photography and cityscape photography don’t offer much money in them, unless you are really good or have been in it for 10 to 15 years plus. But product photography was a really nice niche because lots of businesses require product photos and your photos that you take directly help make those businesses money. So it makes sense for those companies to spend money with you.

So that seemed like a good business opportunity at the time because I knew that companies actually need this kind of stuff. Especially with the shift to e-commerce. There was always going to be a demand for this kind of photography. So I built up my portfolio around that kind of stuff. Start out working with small coffee shops, getting their menus online. From there, pivoted to bigger coffee brands. Then just to the entire food and beverage space to do product photography for those CPQ brands. 

Megan Porta: That’s such a cool evolution. I love hearing that. I think this will supplement our talk because you’re here to talk about client acquisition and how food bloggers can put this on their radar in order to supplement their income. So the way that you thought through your product photography is similar to how food bloggers can approach getting new clients outside of ads and doing those kinds of standard things to get money and revenue. So why don’t you just talk us through that phrase, client acquisition and how you think this can help food bloggers supplement their incomes. This is not a phrase that I think we typically hear in our world. So I’d love to hear just your perspective on that. 

Chris Pieta: Yeah, definitely. I’d love to talk a bit more about that. Client acquisition is more like matchmaking, honestly. So you’re trying to figure out where your skills align with what brands need. So I actually found this podcast through my girlfriend. She has a blog, Broken Oven Baking and she’s been working to monetize that with ads, but I know that’s like a very long journey that food bloggers go on. During this time they may need supplemental income. So food bloggers are great at photography, great food photography, great at writing recipes. So these are all skills that you can pitch to clients to help them out in their own businesses. So big food brands, they need constant photos for their socials. They need recipes for their blogs or to share around holidays. They need videos for TikTok. So these are all things that food bloggers are already doing to build up their own brands, but they can pitch these skills and a certain offer towards bigger companies and actually get paid to do that while they’re in the process of monetizing their own blog. 

Megan Porta: How do we align with a brand that we want to pitch? How do we know where to go? There are so many brands out there. It’s hard to even know where to start. So where do you recommend starting? 

Chris Pieta: There are many different routes to go down this path. I think the first step is to figure out what your niche is and what you can offer inside of that niche. So with bloggers, there’s a wide variety of different types of blogs out there. So the first thing is to make sure that your type of blog aligns with the companies that you’re reaching out to. Next thing you need to know what you’re offering. Do you prefer to do food photography? Do you prefer to do recipe development? Do you like video more? You have to figure out what you can actually offer to these brands before even pitching them. 

Once you know, like your niche and what you’re going to be offering, then you can start looking for brands. You can start with the really big brands. There are grocery store names, but those are a bit harder to work with because there’s going to be a lot of competition around those. You can also look up smaller brands. What I did when I was starting out was I used Amazon and I would pick like food. So you can pick up like cane sugar searched on Amazon, and you’re going to come across smaller brands that you might not have heard of in the past, but they still need content for their own Instagram pages, their websites, all of that stuff.

You can approach those bigger brands as well through Instagram or through email. If you do approach them through Instagram or email, you just have to, again, know what you’re offering to those brands and how you can provide value to them. 

Megan Porta: All right. So I have a few questions. One thing I wanted to say was I’ve been learning about this too, from other guests I’ve had on the podcast and something that just comes out of every conversation that we have about this topic is just finding the gaps. So finding the brand that you potentially want to work with and figuring out where the gaps are that you can offer. So maybe they don’t have product photography on their website and they should. Or something along those lines. What do you think about that? 

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I think that’s a really great way that you can offer your services, especially in that first initial outreach that you do. You can even bring up how you think their website would benefit from this kind of photography or you notice that their website doesn’t have any recipes on there. How do they feel about creating recipes to help boost their website’s SEO, stuff like that.

Megan Porta: So it’s really doing a little bit of research ahead of time and letting them know that you’ve been through their site or their accounts. That will show that you’ve put some time into it on your end.

Chris Pieta: Exactly. Showing that you care about the company and you’ve actually done research, will definitely set you apart from those people that are just messaging everyone without any personalized messages. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. So you mentioned photography, video for social media. You could do other videos, like long form video as well, recipe development. What am I missing? What else could be a potential offering? 

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I think that kind of hits most of it. 

Megan Porta: Writing would probably. 

Chris Pieta: That’s another great one. Or even like optimizing stuff for SEO. If you feel confident with that. 

Megan Porta: That’s the great thing about being a food blogger, we’ve got all of these skills. We are so adept at doing many different things. So we really do have a lot to offer. So I love this perspective. You’ve already got skills that you’re doing every day, every week and that you can offer to others who would find value in your skills.

Chris Pieta: Exactly. To build off of that, a lot of the time, if you’re starting out in this kind of space, you may feel like you’re not good enough yet to be working with the brands, but one thing that I realized pretty recently was that there’s room for almost every level of photographer blogger out there, because there are some big range of brands from small brands to big brands and they all have different sized budgets. So you just have to find the brands that match your skill level. So if you’re a beginner, you might want to just start with those really small brands and reach out to them. As you grow, you can reach out to bigger and bigger brands as well.

Megan Porta: This is something that I did forever, Chris, I would sit around and think if someone wants to work with me, they’re going to find me. But that is not necessarily the case. We have to put the work in. We have to take action and we have to be the one to initiate this sort of work. Correct?

Chris Pieta: That’s probably the biggest, if anyone listening is going to take one thing away, it’s that they have to put in the work in order to actually get clients to come to them or to actually get clients because clients aren’t really going to be coming to you.

Megan Porta: It would be nice, right if they just fell from the sky. 

Chris Pieta: Yeah. I think that’s something that a lot of people get caught up in because they’ll put together a portfolio and publish a website and make sure their Instagram looks really nice. Then they’ll just gonna wait for clients to come to them. They feel like they’re ready to start working with brands. So they’ve put all this effort into building a portfolio and everything. They sit around and no one comes to them and they think that they’re not good enough. But in reality, building that portfolio is really just like step one.

Next step is to actually find the brands out there, reach out to them. Go on discovery calls with them. Really figure out what those brands want and put yourself out there. 

Megan Porta: Where do we meet these clients? I think everybody has a little bit of a different perspective on this. Some people say start on Instagram through direct message or email. What are your thoughts about where to actually meet and talk to these people? 

Chris Pieta: So personally in my product photography business, I solely do email. So I’ll reach out to the brands via email. My girlfriend, who is a food blogger, does Instagram messages and through the Instagram DM she’ll get their marketing director’s email. From there, I reach out via email. So Instagram is a great place to get the right emails from the people that you want to talk to. 

Megan Porta: So I am just thinking, this is not only a good way to supplement your income while you’re waiting for ads, maybe, but it’s also a good way to enhance your skills. What’s the word, accelerate your skills too. What do you think about that? 

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. With the client work, I think naturally you’re going to try and do the best effort possible for this client because you’re getting paid for it. So you want to deliver the best results. So it pushes you to do better and better work, which will help your blog in the long run as well. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, totally agree with that. The more you can dig into these individual pieces of food blogging that you’re doing anyway, you’re going to get better at them. That’s just going to make you a more well-rounded business person and entrepreneur. I think there’s only good things involved here. What are your thoughts about creating contracts? Do you recommend creating contracts for absolutely every piece of work you do for a client? 

Chris Pieta: It’s a good question, but has a few different answers. So from my personal experience with my product photography business, I have my own contracts that I put out and I have clients sign those. They’re very straightforward. They’re just saying you get these usage rights for the photos. It just talks about the scope of the project. Just very straightforward. Bigger clients tend to usually want you to sign their own contract. A lot of this stuff I know, just because I mentioned this before, but I’m helping my girlfriend with her business. So she gets contracts from bigger companies. So you’re probably going to have to sign contracts for almost every project. If they don’t send you a contract, I recommend that you draft something up yourself. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just to make sure that the terms are clear. The deliverables are clear on the contract. Just to protect yourself because you never know what can happen. 

Megan Porta: I know that can be a stumbling block. If somebody is thinking about this being a great opportunity for them. Yeah. I love doing photography. I would love to get clients. But the contract piece is waiting, that’s a big hangup. I have no idea what to put in it. I don’t know where to go to get it. So I can see that being something that keeps people from taking action. Do you know what I mean?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, it’s definitely one of those stepping stones that you feel like you should, you need to have it right in the proposal, but you’re not sure where to find the kind of stuff. So for me, when I was starting out, I took… What’s that website called? Hi, give me just one minute.

Megan Porta: Yeah, no problem. While you’re looking, I can just mention Business Ease. I know that she delivers a lot of really thought out and very thorough contracts for food bloggers. So it’s everything from non-disclosure agreements to working with a brand to hiring a contractor. There’s a whole scope there. So that is one resource. I can put that in the show notes, but I would love to hear if you have any others. 

Chris Pieta: Yeah. So when I was starting out, I used a Tani book and they have some pre-built templates in there for their contracts. So I just pieced together one of their templates into a contract that made sense for me. I just kept it very simple. Again, just have the project scope in there. Something saying that I’m the sole photographer for this project. Something that involves the licenses, but yeah, I used HoneyBook for the contract portion of the proposal. 

Sponsor: I’d love to take a moment to tell you about Clariti. Clariti is a powerful tool that allows you to organize, optimize, and update your blog content for maximum growth. Clariti gives you unparalleled insights into the ways that your content can be stronger and more valuable for your readers. Not only does it help you optimize your extensive library of blog content so you can increase your traffic, SEO, ranking, and revenue, it also allows you to validate your updates with a direct integration to Google analytics. Some bloggers are tracking this information manually with multiple spreadsheets and countless hours spent uncovering the data they need in Google analytics. Clariti automatically syncs all of your data for you, saving you hours upon hours of admin tasks. All of your posted information appears in Clariti. Everything is done directly from your Clariti dashboard, and you can be confident in the fact that you’re getting the most up-to-date insights to the health of your content. If you’re interested in checking out Clariti, head to clariti.com/eatblogtalk. Clariti is spelled C L a R I T i.com/eatblogtalk. To sign up for the waitlist and take advantage of their $25 a month forever plan. Go to clariti.com/eatblogtalk, or check out the resources page on eatblogtalk.com/resources. 

Megan Porta: What else do you have for us? I know that there are a few different pieces of this that we could talk more about. Is there anything that you want people to keep top of mind as they’re approaching this and considering it? 

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I think one important piece of this. I talked about knowing your offer earlier. I think it’s very important to have some sort of portfolio page on your blog, or maybe even a different website that kind of outlines what the services are that you’re hoping to offer. So it could be a few food photography photos, a sample sponsored recipe development post that you made for a company, or just even a mock sponsored post, something that will show the clients that you’re reaching out to what you can do for them. Anyone can write an email and say, I can do blah, blah, blah. But having something to back that up is really important. So this is one thing my girlfriend did. So her blog is Broken Oven Baking, but she also made a separate page that shows what she can do and different types of client case studies that will help future clients see what she’s capable of. So I think that’s a very important part of this client acquisition process, because even if you take really great food photos, clients want to see what their product would look like in those photos. I know from my own experience, clients sometimes are very picky about your portfolio and they want to see exactly what their product would look like if you were to take a photo of it. So having some sample portfolio like that with your offering is a really important piece of the puzzle here. 

Megan Porta: It also shows the client that you’re reaching out to that you put effort into that, and you’re not just Willy nilly reaching out like, Ooh, this might be a great idea. But you’re actually putting forethought and effort into creating a portfolio. I think that is such a good recommendation. Honestly, I don’t know many food bloggers, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe food bloggers do this, but I’m not aware that a ton actually do. I would love for someone to prove me wrong on that. But do you find that most food bloggers are, or aren’t doing that? 

Chris Pieta: From what I’ve seen and I’m no expert, but I’ve noticed that food bloggers aren’t doing that. That’s why I recommended to my girlfriend last week, that she can put herself out there and separate herself from the other food bloggers and have that. Having that kind of portfolio will help separate you from the rest of everyone who’s reaching out to clients because you will have that portfolio where you have those examples of what you can do. Maybe even case studies of how you’ve helped other companies. When brands see that, like you mentioned, they will see that you actually really care and that you’re serious about this kind of stuff. 

Megan Porta: It’s almost like a separate business. You are creating a space to offer different things from your recipes on your blog, which I think is really smart. You use this term, which I love, you’re separating yourself from the rest who are maybe not doing that. So anything you can do to stand out and to show that you’ve put extra energy and effort into acquiring these clients, I think is only going to be in your favor.

Chris Pieta: Definitely. Definitely. Even if you have any past clients, you can ask them to do reviews or testimonials of yourself and you can put those on there as well to further give yourself social credibility. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Oh, that’s a great idea too. Little testimonial portions of it. Oh, okay. What else are we missing? What else do food bloggers need to know if they are listening and they are just really interested in this. 

Chris Pieta: One thing, if you’ve listened to this and you’re really excited about getting clients. It’s a long process to actually get the clients. Most companies already have established photographers and stuff like that. Unfortunately, you’re going to get a lot of rejections early on, and that’s just the nature of this kind of thing. A lot of people are reaching out to brands. So brands only have so much that they can spend with photographers or bloggers or recipe developers. But know that there are clients out there that want to work with you. You’re probably going to go through a lot of rejection, but you just have to keep on going and get through all the nos until you start getting yeses. So it’s going to be a very long process, but now everyone goes through this. You’re going to get a lot of no’s, but eventually the yeses will come.

Megan Porta: Yeah. If you apply enough pressure, eventually you’re going to find those people who align with you. Who really value your work and truly want to work with you and partner with you. But I’m glad that you mentioned the rejection because that can be hard if you don’t expect it. Wait a second. I did not expect to get rejected 10 times in a row. But that is the nature of the game. You are just starting out. You don’t know what is a good fit yet. So while you’re exploring that, just go in expecting that. 

Chris Pieta: Yep. Exactly. If your expectation is that they’re going to say no, when they say no, you’re not going to be disappointed. So any yeses that you get, you’ll be really excited about. 

Megan Porta: I was trying to remember where I heard this from, but I heard recently somebody saying If you’re trying to get clients in whatever capacity, try the opposite. Try to get nos. It kind of messes with your mind or your mental strategy. But if you say, I aim to get 10 nos this week or something like that, then you’re expecting the 10 nos. Then it also encourages you, encourages you to keep going. Then when you get a yes, it’s like off putting, but it’s oh, I got a yes. So I love that. I’ve never tried that before, but I liked that kind of mental shift.

Chris Pieta: Yeah. I like that a lot too. For me, something that’s helped is always just to focus on the process. So instead of saying, I want to get two clients this month. Instead, I’m going to send 50 emails this month. So you know that’s something you can control. You can control how many emails you send, but you can’t control who’s going to respond or who is going to say yes, cause that’s based on luck and other factors that you can’t control. So really just focusing on what you can control will be great for your mental health. 

Megan Porta: One last question about when you’re reaching out to clients. How frequently do you follow up with them, if you don’t hear anything back initially.

Chris Pieta: Two things here. So with cold reaching out, I’ve never talked to them before, I’ll usually send one email and then follow up with them, probably around four or five days afterwards. Then if they didn’t respond to that, I’ll usually drop it. If it’s a client that I’ve been talking to and I’ve sent them a proposal to work together and I haven’t heard back from them, in that case, I’m just going to keep following up until they tell me to not talk to them. Because the worst thing they’ll say is no, but on the upside they’ll say yes. A lot of the time with follow-up too, you might feel like you’re bothering them. But usually when I’m following up, often people will actually thank me for being persistent with this. You’re not actually bothering them. They will tell you if you are. But most of the time they just thanked me for being persistent and that I’m still thinking about them. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Okay. I lied. I do have one more question. Do you have somewhere where you keep track of all of the clients that you reach out to? Do you have a Google sheet or something along those lines?

Chris Pieta: So I actually have a few different types of softwares for this. That could be a whole nother podcast episode, honestly. But Google sheets is a great place to just keep track of clients because you can just make a column for first name, last name, job title, company, and email. Then you can check off how many times you followed up with them.

I also use a software called apollo.io. It’s a really powerful tool to help you one, find email addresses and to keep track of who’s responded and who hasn’t responded. But that’s pretty expensive every month. It’s definitely not necessary, but it’s a nice software to have.

Megan Porta: Okay. But having somewhere where you keep track, I think is good. Because otherwise I can just see it being like, oh wait, I think I contacted them last week, but just to have it set in stone and certain, so you can log anytime you want to follow up or anything like that. Dates too, when you’ve contacted them, et cetera.

Chris Pieta: Yeah, exactly. Organization is key on this kind of stuff. 

Megan Porta: Exactly. Yes. Organization is key for food bloggers, no matter what we’re talking about. Whether it’s client work or content, I feel like we all need just places to store all of that stuff. All of that information. Do you have a main takeaway that you want to leave us with Chris along the lines of this topic?

Chris Pieta: Yeah, I think if you’ve never thought about client acquisition before or gaining clients to supplement your income, it could be a great way to help you make the switch to being a full-time blogger. You can supplement your nine to five income with client work or even just pure client work until your blog is ready to be monetized. So it’s just a fantastic way to supplement your income. Maybe you’ll even find out that you prefer the client work over the blogging work and you’ll have fun doing both of those. 

Megan Porta: I like that. I liked that you ended with that because you never know. You could be in this rut of just being on track to get your ads on your blog. Then you venture out into this new field in order to find clients and then find that you really love it. That could change the whole direction of your business. So why not? Why not explore new territory. You never know what you’re going to end up loving. So, love that you ended that way. Thank you so much for being here, Chris. This was so valuable. 

Chris Pieta: Of course, this was a really great conversation. Thanks for having me. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. So do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to share with us?

Chris Pieta: “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. At the hundred and first blow, it will split in two, and I know that was not the blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” So I like this quote just because it talks about the process of building a blog and how you’re going to be putting a lot of hours in. It’s going to seem like nothing is working and your numbers might not be going up, but when you do finally make it, it’s not an overnight success. It’s what you’ve done all the way up until that point. Just the hundreds of hours that you put in until that point. 

Megan Porta: Oh, I love that. It’s like you could come up with so many different analogies or not analogies, but visuals for that, like the planting of a seed and how you put it in the ground and you have to wait and you have to do the right things and keep going. Then eventually it’s going to grow. It doesn’t mean that it’s not there when it’s not growing. It just means that it’s working underneath and it’s that same thing. Yeah, so I absolutely love that. I think that aligns with our topic, but also just being a food blogger and just continuing on the path, even when it feels like nothing’s working; the traffic isn’t going anywhere, all of the above, et cetera, et cetera. So thank you for sharing. So we will put together a show notes for you, and we’ll put everything that we’ve talked about today inside of the show notes. So you can find those at eatblogtalk.com/pietaproductions. So why don’t you share where everyone can find you. If you have any resources that people can grab from you, where you are on social media, all of the above.

Chris Pieta: Yeah, of course. So if you’re really interested in client acquisition, I have a free 20 minute training on my website. It just goes through what we talked about here in more detail, that’s a great resource. That’s just at chrispieta.Com. I’m on YouTube. There I do long form videos, talking about what we did here today. I do client acquisition, scaling your business, the whole creative business journey that everyone goes on. I do a very similar thing on Instagram. It’s just short form content. So I’m pretty big on Reels right now. So almost every day, I’m posting a 30 second clip teaching you the creative business.

Megan Porta: Awesome. Everybody go check Chris out. Thank you again so much, Chris, for joining me and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro: We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.