How to start earning good money from photography website
Learn all necessary steps to start creating handsome revenue and make good profits from your photography website.
World has changed and so does the ways to make money, especially since we have online stores of almost everything. If you are photographer, making some money out of your passion can be fantastic. In this blog, I have listed down all the necessary steps for any photographer, who has a website but doesn’t know how to start generating revenue out of it.
I promise you, if you can achieve 70% of what written below, your photography website will start performing at least above average, leaving you with good revenue.
Find your niche in photography
Every photographer has a niche. You are either good at portrait, wedding or corporate photography. If you don’t know your niche in photography, ask yourself or analyse your past work. It will pop up automatically and naturally in your head. Focus on that niche because thats what is going to drive your clients and earning in the future.
There is another way to find your niche in photography. Explore social media and pitch for small freelance photography jobs. Show them your work and negotiate on the rates work for you. This approach will not just let you decide on what photography services you should be offering but also in creating some small pipeline of revenue for your photography business.
Fill your photography website with content
Only uploading photos and creating photo gallery online wouldn’t work, You need to post more than that. There are many related topics to photography and you need to start sharing your thoughts on all of them. It can be a blog post on photography gear you use, you recommnedation on camera bodies and lenses, the tripod you think is best for videography etc. Everything that comes under the umbrella of photography, should be listed in blog posts and articles of your website.
Why content is important? Remember ! your photography website will be ranked by the Google (or similar search engines like DuckDuckGo, Bing etc.) before it will appear in front of the local audience in your area. Google check what kind of content you are posting, its legitmacy and interactions. More and more people should vsiit your website so it will be ranked higher and will appear on the first page whenever someone will look for a photographer in your city.
If you don’t know how to write blog posts for your photography website, get a freelancer from Fiverr or UpWork.
Travel and share stories
In order to create more organic reach, you need to travel and share stories in the form of your photography work. Everyone in this world loves to travel and people are interested in getting deatils to make plans ahead of their journeys. Thats where your website content will appear.
When you will write blog posts on places and subjects from around the world, those articles and posts will appear in organic search whcih will create traffic for your website. Remember, we need traffic so search engines like Google will not burry our webiste under nillions of content already available.
Create photography services page
Once you have found your niche in photography and there is at least some or enough content for people to search through Google, you need then to add a photography services page on your website. Ideally, add up to three or four services because thats how you can cover good portion of the market. One kind of work will not be consistent so you need to offer more services. You can always add services whcih can be done by your fellow photographers and you can keep a commission for either to refer them or as a job holder.
Showcase your clients and work
Don’t forget ! there are so many photographers in the world and they just jump at any opportunity offered or shared by anyone. The only chance you have is to not look like an unprofessional one. Amateur, hobbyist or unprofessional photographers can be identified by a prospective client very easily, because they are always jumpy, very cheap compare to the professional photohgraphers and woudln’t stick to longterm commitments.
If you have a good gallery page which shows the work done by you in the past along with a page of your past and ongoing clients, it will leave a very nice impact on new visitors of your website. So create a good first impression on anyone who visits your photography website.
If you don’t have any past jobs to showcase, I recommend using Stock Photos rather using someone else’s amateur photography work. Use stock photos till you have your own work to showcase.
Create an online shop
Being a photographer, you can sell many things apart from the services you offer to general public and corporate clients. Adding an online shop or an E-Commerce platform is one of them and can be very productive of your photography business. Through an online shop, you can sell your photography prints, work modules in the shape of post processing presets, digital downloads of your photography work, online paid lectures, memerships and photography related mearchandise.
Don’t foget, it wouldn’t be a piece of cake to create such E-Commerce platform for your website but its doable. You might need help of a developer to assist you but having an online store opens up so many opportunities.
You can even let people hire you automatically from such E-Commerce platforms.
Add Google AdSense on your website
Google AdSense can be a great source of income if you have good organic reach and visits on your website, but if your photography website’s reach is low, this source wouldn’t add much into your revenue.
Google AdSense works on how many Google Ads impressions were made to the visitors of your website and what percentage of those visitors actually clicked on those ads. Ideally you need around 25,000 impressions and a good amount of those vsistors clicking on the ads to generate USD100 as an income. This must look small but having a thousand dollar in your pocket just through ads someone else is handling, isn’t bad I think.
I still recommend Google AdSense, even if your website isn’t getting much organic reach. This will create a kind of habit in your daily routine to work on your website and try to reach more people. Such attitude is really helpful on a longer run.
This is how my website was performing on Google AdSense during early days
Don’t over complicate things on your website
No one likes over complicated things, espcially when it comes to online appearances. Remember ! your photography website user isn’t sitting in in front of you, if he/she doesn’t like your website, he/she will leave immediately and that will be noticed by Google which will impact your website adversely.
Work on user journey. Think like a user and check your content and see if everything makes sense. Think of the things which will make them stay on your website longer. The longer they stay, more the chances are they will end up buying something or press “contact me” tab and you are hired.
Collaborate with brands
Don’t forget that the competition is very stiff and if people around your own region/area doesn’t know you as a photographer, it will be very hard to make your photography business successful.
One way to achieve more attention and reach within your region/area is to collaborate with Camera brands. Camera brans like Nikon, Canon, Sony or any other famous name already has in-house reach due to their reputation. If you collaborate for workshops, photowalks, online seminars or through in person lectures, people will know you more. Not just the photographers’ community but when these brands will publish content being delivered/addressed by you, the trust level among the prospective clients will go up automatically. Remember ! they might not follow you but they always do check secretly.
Connect social media accounts
Social media platforms can make a huge difference. Make sure you have FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, Vero and if needed, TikTok accounts. They are not only for showcasing your photography work but also to interact with prospective clients and people in your area.
There are bunch of great social media groups where people share small to big size jobs and you can easily reach the buyer and pitch. Its like a free marketing for your photography business. Make sure you bring them all to your website, let them share their requirements through your website’s “Hire Me” page.
Get a custom “professional” email address
I wish if i could write a separate blog on this topic. A photographer should never ever use an unprofessional (free) email to approach clients. It makes you look so bad and tiny in front of a client who might have huge budget but now they think of your services differently. Most of the times, email sent from normal accounts are automatically labled as spam by the recipient’s server so no one would even read it.
Once you have a website, getting email is piece of cake. If you don’t know how to do it, simply go to Microsoft365 and create an account. You will be paying around USD7.00 per month for a custom email address which will refelect your business more professinally.
Do SEO for your photography website
SEO is the Spine of your photography website. Without SEO, your website will get burried under so much of data already available on internet. I hope there is no need to explain what SEO is but those who are not aware of this beautiful yet techincial mechanism, let me explain that it is a system of letting Search Engines know, understand and rank your website content online. If the search engines can understand it, they will start showing your content to the people searching for similar topics.
If I search today “wedding photographers in New York”, Google will show me options based on the content available in that particular area. Make sure your photography website has similar “tags”, “Categories” and “key words” so it will be shorlisted and added into the pool of results shown by the Google or any other search engine.
SEO is a technical part of your website. Majority of the photographers and not web coders so if your website is built on Word Press or similar platform, you will be needing an expert to do complete SEO but if your website is built on platforms like SquareSpace, doing SEO would be quite different and can be done by you too.
Summary
The only aim of this article is to share the key methods to support your photography business through your own website. Websites are one of the great tools to attract more clients, especially in photography industry. I hope this article will help you get more business from website. Feel free to share if I have missed or overlooked any aspect. Your views and thoughts are always welcome on my channel.
