Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2019; the platforms and practices it describes, such as Vero, Flickr and Instagram as portfolios, Facebook Ads, YouTube ad revenue and Amazon affiliate commissions, and its prices of 30 to 1,000 euros per session reflect that time.
The market for making money from photography is quite broad. Even so, many photographers can’t find a way to do business in this field. They may not be making proper use of new technologies, or they may not be applying the advice we usually give to professionals and freelancers: whether we are talking about photography or consulting, the advice is practically the same. That is why we are going to share some business ideas for making money from photography.
First piece of advice
There are a lot of photographers out there today, so competition is fierce. You will need to find any way you can to stand out, to offer something different and, above all, to add a lot of value to your work. Acquire as many skills as possible and, of course, get plenty of practice. That may be the difference between photographers who charge 30 euros for a session and others who charge more than 1,000 euros.
The biggest difficulty for a photographer starting out
You may be an excellent photographer. You may be tremendously good at editing. You may be simply magnificent, and still find it hard to find clients willing to pay for your work.
In this sense, the more people see your work, the more likely it is that someone will want to hire you because they like what you do and how you do it. This is very obvious, but many people make the mistake of thinking that because they are good at what they do, they will earn more money than others who are not as good. That is almost never the case. As a rule, the one who earns more is the one who knows how to sell themselves better and uses different strategies to do it. Photography is no exception.
Essential first steps to earn a living as a photographer
- Create a website or blog as a portfolio that brings together the very best of your work. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you there.
- Create an Instagram account. You can also open an account on Vero, and on Flickr. With a public profile, obviously. We don’t want your work to be private, do we?
- If you photograph people and you are just starting out, you will very likely need an initial win-win strategy (photographers have another name for it) in which you offer some models a free session so you can get your first pieces of work. Think of it as an investment in advertising.
See also: How to start your own business selling T-shirts on Amazon
Business ideas for making money from photography
1. Stock photography
Shutterstock is one of the many image banks where you can buy photographs, and where photographers can sell them to make money.
It will probably take work and patience, but it is a way for a photographer to earn income that keeps paying over time. Many people upload their photos to the platforms where media outlets usually buy them. Clearly your photos need to be of very high quality here. For every photo sold on the platform, you get a percentage of the sale price. So the more photos you upload and the better their quality, the more likely your income is to take off.
I should also point out that, although we are focusing on photography, there is a very large niche for video on image and video banks too.
2. Have your own YouTube channel
You have several options for the channel. You can focus on showing only your work, or you can record videos about how you do it, or teach others to do it directly. This brings several benefits. First, you get advertising income from the views on your channel, which can vary a lot, although in some cases it is profitable.
Second, you increase your visibility to the public. In other words, more people will find you, more people will see you and, therefore, there is more chance that they end up hiring you.
And finally, you can use that visibility to sell other kinds of products, which takes us to the next business idea, and this one is more profitable.
3. Selling tutorials
If you can put together a good photography course, you could save new photographers a lot of time learning and solving certain problems. You can sell this course through your YouTube channel, through your own website and through your Instagram account.
What’s more, another way to make yourself known is to use Facebook Ads to sell these courses. Not only will you sell more courses, but those who don’t buy may become subscribers to your channel or followers on Instagram. To do this, as we always advise, you need a good landing page.
4. Affiliate products, one of the most common ways to earn income from photography
This is a business model widely used by photographers. Whenever you talk about photography, you can add affiliate links to Amazon for the products you are showing. As you probably know, for every purchase made through the link, you get a commission not only on that product but also on any other products the person adds to their basket.
5. Advertisers
Once you have good exposure or a large community of followers, advertisers will soon come along. I don’t think this business needs explaining. You recommend a product on your YouTube channel or Instagram and the advertiser pays you the agreed amount.
And all of this adds to the traditional photography business
Everything mentioned in the points above sometimes accounts for 80% of photographers’ income today, far ahead of the traditional in-person session, although it also increases the chances of finding more clients.
It goes without saying that photographing weddings, baptisms, first communions, models and so on is still a profitable business.
Final advice: value your work if you want to make a living from photography
The problem for most photographers starting out is that they don’t know how much to charge for a photo session. Many factors come into play here.
First, to know how much to charge for your work or photo session, you need to calculate roughly how much time you will need for the whole job. That is, photo session plus editing.
If you want to become a professional photographer, you need to add to your working hours the cost of the self-employed contribution (the monthly social security fee paid by the self-employed in Spain) and other related costs. It is a different matter if you only want to earn some extra money on top of another activity. In that case, of course you can charge 30 or 60 euros for a photo session. A professional photographer knows that 60 euros per session is not enough to make a living from photography.
As we said, at the beginning you can make many exceptions, such as working for free or charging very little, especially when you are just starting out. But once you want to make photography your main business, you need to set the price of a session at a level where the activity is profitable for you.
When the time comes, it is better to turn down certain low-paying jobs and focus specifically on those where you will charge a price in line with your work and effort. In other words, earn more by doing less, because doing the opposite can burn you out and turn that passion of yours into disappointment.
Featured image: anoldent, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
