Often Ambitious: A Photography & Business Podcast
Often Ambitious is for photographers, creatives, and entrepreneurs who want to work less, make more, and build a business that actually supports their life, not one that runs it.
Hosted by business strategist Alora Rachelle, this show is grounded in lived experience. Alora built a six-figure wedding photography business while raising kids, then went on to help wedding photographers generate over $3 million in collective revenue through Wedding Atelier. She’s done the work, questioned the rules, and helped others stop overworking for underwhelming results.
Each episode cuts through the noise with conversations about profitable pricing, boundaries without apology, authority without hustle, and growth that leaves room for creativity, rest, and a life you don’t need a vacation from.
If you’re ambitious but done with burnout, performative busywork, and chasing success that costs you everything else, Often Ambitious is for you.
Often Ambitious: A Photography & Business Podcast
243. Why Posting More Isn't Getting You More Bookings (And What Actually Does)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on why I built the Double Your Inquiries Sprint and what I kept seeing happen with photographers who were doing "all the right things" and still stuck in the spiral.
IN THIS EPISODE:
- The pattern I kept seeing in photographers who were posting consistently but getting zero traction
- Why effort alone isn't the problem (and what actually is)
- What the Double Your Inquiries Sprint is and why I built it as the on-ramp to InDemand
Doors are open now. The sprint kicks off April 20th and this is your sign to stop waiting before the price goes up.
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Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Okay. I need to talk to you about something that I have been sitting on for a while. But we launched a membership and I talked about it briefly on a couple of episodes here and there. I've been building so much behind the scenes that I have not been able to be on top of episodes that I normally am every single week. But it's been so exciting to see this all come together. So let me talk a little bit about what's going on. In February, I launched this membership called In Demand. Okay. It's an Instagram marketing membership for photographers to book clients, get more inquiries, all that jazz, promote visibility in their business. And so this idea came to me December 31st. I'm actually gonna be sharing behind the scenes of me building that in public. I have the audios that I recorded, like step by step. I was listening to them the other day and I was like, oh my gosh, I was so excited about this to come into fruition. And here it is. We launched it in February. We've built out the membership, we've added things to it, and here we are in April and I'm opening the doors for only a couple of days for you guys to come into the membership and dive head first into our first big sprint, which is the Double Your Inquiries challenge. Every single year in wedding at we do a Instagram challenge for 14 days, sometimes 30 days, where they post every single day and they're given like a theme to post around, but then they're open to doing whatever. This year we gave them like a caption prompt just to test what the membership would look like, and they got insane results. Insane results, and you can see it the link in my show notes all the testimonials from that 14 day challenge while we're doing that exact same copy and paste challenge on April 20th, and the doors are currently open for only a couple of days for you to hop in and we can all jump in together live get that engagement, get your doubled inquiries and promote visibility, and also just get you in the habit of posting again on Instagram. And so I have been playing around with trial reels we have this channel called What's Hot right now. And I, every single month I will drop what's working, what. Is going viral, what people are responding to, but also like how posting has changed for the wedding industry. And to be honest with you, it's way less. Intense than it used to be. I feel like the grid used to be a place where everything was perfect and like the aesthetic was perfect. Perfect. Matching fonts, matching colors match. I'm still stuck in this and I'm trying to actually get out of it because I'm a millennial. Okay. Sumi. But I'm noticing that mixing in, like having an overall aesthetic, but without it being perfect, it's like imperfectly fitting together. That's where things are going. We have been testing and I've had students who have been putting out educational content and getting tons and tons of views, tons and tons of inquiries, and I'm like, okay, that's your angle. It seems like when you educate your clients on your on your process, throwing a little spicy take here and there. They seem to respond to that because you're standing for something and not just like blending in and posting pretty pictures. You're doing something different. And so we're gonna be doing a lot of that in this challenge. And then actually after this challenge is over the following month, we're gonna be doing a trial reels challenge where we're posting reels every single day, but they're going out to people who don't follow us and who don't know us from. And who don't know who and are going to other people, it's where you post a reel that does not go to your initial audience. It just goes everywhere. And so I think this year for Instagram, it's gonna be about having fun. And I'm really excited for that. It's taking the pressure off. We're giving you a weekly Instagram playbook of what to post. We're giving you a monthly trend predictions and what's hot, overview. And then there will be challenges every single month. I didn't think I was gonna do one every month. I thought people would get tired of it, but I'm like, you know what, why not? let's do a challenge every single month. That way you can get off the hamster wheel. Stop wondering what you're gonna post, when you're gonna post it. Everybody, we're all doing this together. This is what you're gonna do, and I want you to post your results. So that's what that's gonna look like. Eventually, we'll sprinkle in prizes because one thing about y'all is y'all love an Amazon gift card, but. I am excited to see how this is gonna revolutionize everybody's, Instagram's just that 14 day challenge in January of this year alone has gotten my students so many inquiries for the year, and they booked more than half of them. So these aren't just random inquiries, they are aligned inquiries, they are aligned clients and dream weddings and dream couples. I'm really excited for what this is gonna be and what it's gonna look like. You're probably listening to this being like, yeah, I have been posting, or I'm posting, but nothing's happening. Okay, and here's what I noticed. Photographers that actually come to in demand are either exhausted or haven't posted in months to a year. And they've been in this kind of like content spiral. Post, wait, nothing, post again. Three likes a comment from a bot. Tweak the caption, try a reel, watch someone else get inquiries. Watch someone else get boosted in the algorithm and wonder what is wrong. Here's what it's like going at it alone, without a plan, without a strategy, and of course without community is nobody can sit you down and be like, Hey, here's the thing that your content is missing, but here's how we can fix that in the next two weeks, so that you are talking to the right person, you're posting the right content, you're posting your best content, and that is the gap that I built with this. Double your inquiry sprint. Okay. So once again, the sprint is 14 days starting April 20th. The doors are open from the 13th to the 17th at midnight. You basically have until Thursday night to get in here. And this is the early bird price. The membership price is going to go up because with one single booking, you have more. With one single booking, you have more than five xd your investment, which is crazy. Okay? This isn't a membership where it's just community and vibes and like an expert every month. No, this is a get it done, get to work. You will see results. You will have a transformation. Here's the playbook, plug and play. Get to work post, like this is where your post procrastination stops. This is where the clarity and your own voice and your visibility comes. And the reason why I started this challenge is I noticed that there is a huge need right now for inquiries. Tons of my students been like, Hey, the industry this year really quiet. Or, I'm booking weddings. Two months in advance, weeks in advance. It's a really strange time right now in the industry and people are like, okay, if I'm gonna book a last minute wedding, or I didn't book the amount of clients or weddings this year that I wanted to. And if I can make one post on Instagram that gets me three to five more inquiries this year worth it. And that's what I want you to do. I want you to get out of your head. I wanna give you a strategy. I wanna audit your Instagram, your bio, your posts, and your portfolio, because all of those things work together in tandem to make sure you're attracting the right client. And then we can play around and have fun and see what happens. You don't know what post is gonna go viral. You don't know which trial reel is gonna bring in a hundred new followers. You don't know which content your followers wanna see that actually end up booking you. Until you post something. So it's like you have to just put something out there and then we'll look at the data, put something out there, and we'll change the strategy. We'll change the capture, we'll change the photos. And honestly, all of this stems from you knowing your artist story, which right now, this is the only way that you can get access to my artist story messaging strategy. Which basically who you are, who you wanna attract, what you wanna do, putting that out there and letting them come and make the connection with you. Now, do you wanna put out spicy content and have a hot take? You can do that. You can create so much content from your artist story alone without even using anything else that we offer in the membership. But the point being is that there is always something you can take, turn to a piece of content. Make a post. Look at the insights, see what people are responding to, seeing what you feel aligned with what you don't wanna post, what you do wanna post, and you come up with your own methodology, your own posting system. So I've launched in demand before, but this time I want you to come in with the purpose and intentionality to jump into this challenge and get results in the next 14 days. And if you wanna do the challenge again, it's gonna be inside of the membership, and then you can dig into all the other things that are gonna keep you consistent with Instagram, get you off the post procrastination wheel, and start getting visible this year, waiting for clients to come to you isn't working anymore. There are tons of different ways that you can market in your business and you need to pick one that's quick, which is Instagram, and then you need to pick a long-term strategy, your SEO, your Google search, all that other great stuff. But it definitely starts with you just getting scrappy, getting visible, and just posting something. Okay. And that's what's gonna happen when you join us. Before the doors close, April 17th, at midnight, you're gonna hop into the sprint. You are gonna start seeing what's possible and then we're gonna give you the system so you can keep it going every single week. So consider this your full jumpstart. It's Q2. It is time to get back up, get into the swing of things and get back to work. Yes. January, February, March, we were going full swing and if you didn't fill up your calendar the way that you wanted to, now is the time to see if you can still do that. Okay? My posting every single day for 14 days straight, you can do it. I believe in you. And if you're on the fence about it, you're like, I don't even know. This is for me send me a dm, okay? Send me a dm, send me a voice DM with your questions, and I will answer back as asap as possible. Head to the link in your show notes. Hop into this challenge. The doors are open right now at the time of this episode, and I genuinely can't wait to see what shifts for you in the next 14 days with that engagement, with that consistency, and with those new inquiries. All right. Head to the link in the show notes. I'll see you inside.