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Four easy steps to starting a modeling career
Whether you're interested in modeling only as a parttime activity or fulltime career, there are some essential steps to getting your foot in the door, and it doesn't require spending a small fortune of your hard earned money. In fact, with the Solomodels service, you can get everything you need starting at around $8/month!.
Providing a model or photographer with all the tools they need in one easy comprehensive platform what Solomodels is all about.
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Step 1 — Get professional quality photos
 When it comes to modeling, your photos are your like your University degree, without good quality photos, applying for modeling is like applying for an engineering job without an engineering degree. Luckily, obtaining professional quality photos is very easy and can usually be obtained either for free or for perhaps just a few hundred dollars.
Here are some easy ways to obtain good quality photos:
- Place on ad on craigslist in your area offering to model for free in exchange for photos (commonly referred to as "Time for Print" or TFP) and include a snapshot photo of yourself. If you have an interesting look, chances are you'll find plenty of student photographers willing to offer a free TFP shoot.
- If you don't find a photographer you like, try a similar posting and offer $100 to $200 as payment. In all likelyhood you'll get several hundred requests and you can then choose from a large pool of very good photographers.
- If you prefer to work with an established professional and/or have a little more to spend, try searching on Solomodels for photographers in your area. Most will list their contact information on their portfolio so you can contact them directly.
- Once you obtain high quality photos, proceed to Step 2.
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Step 2 — Create a professional website
 If your photos are your University degree, then a professional website is like your printed diploma — you will want it to look sharp, clean, and on high quality paper!
Relying on a typical "myspace" page for your online resume would be a lot like taking your Harvard college degree and printing your diploma on the back of a used classified's page of your local newspaper! It might work for some, but 95% of the time, a model who applies to a casting call with just a myspace link will have their email sent straight to the trash can — we know this is what happens, since this is exactly what we at Solomodels do when we cast for various modeling jobs.
It's a myth that an attractive high quality website will cost you thousands of dollars — that was the case before Solomodels — but the Solomodels service offers professional quality and customizable flash websites starting at $8/month!
Not sure if you can afford $8/month? No problem, its not an ideal situation, but you can probably get by with these options that are 100% free.
- Sign up for a free Flickr account. You can upload up to 200 photos for free and have an okay looking page (albeit with some branding and ads), but at least your photos will be in decent quality and easy to navigate and to view by potential clients.
- Another decent option is to use Picasa by Google. Once you download their free software, you can create online photo galleries for free.
- Don't like Flickr or Picasa, you can easily find dozens of other sites offering "free" and "paid" online photo galleries if you do a search for "photo sharing" on Google.
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Step 3 — Get your own domain name
 No one wants to remember you as "member #12836" on www.modelsitexyz.com — afterall, you're not a convict in the state penitentiary where you're assigned a number and only called by your inmate number until your release! Your online website (even if using one of the free versions) should be mapped to your own domain name and that is what you should use when applying to modeling jobs.
Fortunately domain names are really cheap to obtain these days — our own Solomodels.NET service offers domain names for around $9/year and it includes free email and free domain name forwarding so it can point to whatever portfolio hosting site you choose.
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Step 4 — Start networking and apply for modeling jobs!
 This would seem obvious but believe or it not, so many models just assume that the work needs to find them and not the other way around, so they sign up for various modeling sites and sit back waiting for the jobs to come in, and when they don't, they get disappointed, blame the site or assume they just don't have what it takes!
There is a shortage for doctors, dentists, engineers, lawyers and just about every other profession, but there is NO shortage for models! We know this because even our lowest paying casting jobs for the simplest modeling projects results in thousands of qualified applicants within just a few hours of our posting! This is one reason why professional photos and a professional website are critical to finding work!
Here are some ways to network and market yourself:
- Look for postings for modeling jobs on craigslist and talentcalls and apply for the listings that match your description by emailing them your website address.
- Sign up for the various modeling sites that you feel portray the appropriate image for the kind of work you seek. Just as in social circles, you're often associated with the people you hang out with. For example, if you're not into pornography, then it doesn't make much sense to list yourself on sites that tailer to adult modeling, because like it or not, you might mistakenly be judged to be an adult style model.
- Don't limit yourself to just the modeling sites either, sites like myspace, facebook and other generic social networking sites are also good ways to market yourself to the world and point people to your own website.
- Regardless of where you find the job posting or where you are found, always point them to your own website with your own domain name — its the only way to market yourself to potential clients in a consistent manner and with an address that can remain the same for as long as you are modeling.
We'd like to thank the following photographers for contributing to this article: Dan Doyle
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Solomodels Guide to Modeling