Making Money with Photography: A Step-by-Step Guide

Evan Ramp explains how photographers can earn $1,000 monthly by identifying their product, targeting customers, and refining their approach.

### Making $1,000 a Month with Your Camera: A Step-by-Step Guide
* 📸 If you want to earn a thousand dollars a month with your camera, it's essential to understand that **building a creative business is a process that requires time and effort**, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
* 📝 The first step is identifying the specific product you are selling, as many people fail by trying to do too much at once; focus on **one primary offering**.
* 👥 There are three main ways to make money with a camera: working with clients, selling products, and leveraging social media, with **client work being the easiest entry point**.
* 💰 Once you know your product, the next step is to **identify your perfect customer**, ensuring you target a **specific audience** to maximize your chances of **success**.
* 📊 After identifying your customer, calculate how many clients or products you need to sell to reach your **$1,000 goal**, such as booking **four clients at $250 each**.
* 📈 The fifth step involves creating a **customer acquisition plan**, which should be tailored to **where your ideal clients spend their time** and **how you can reach them effectively**.
* 🔍 After landing your first client, evaluate what worked in your approach and refine your strategy to **secure more clients**, gradually increasing your **monthly earnings**.
* 💪 Ultimately, this process is about **repetition and refinement**; as you learn what works, you can **scale your efforts to reach and exceed your financial goals**.

So you have a camera, you want to make a thousand dollars a month, this is how you do it. Now, last time I made one of these business videos, I did it in more of a podcast style. I kept it kind of casual, and you all really seem to enjoy it, so

I'm gonna do the same thing with this one. I'm gonna go away from my normal, real structured, fast-paced speech and just sit back and relax with y'all and explain everything I know about this topic of making a thousand dollars a month, especially going into next year. I

think this is going to be a goal that is relevant for a lot of people. So, if you enjoy the video, hit the thumbs up button for me. It lets me know the audience gets something out of this, and if you don't like these types of videos, don't hit the

thumbs up button. It lets me know that, hey, go back to what you normally do. That's what the audience wants because that's what I'm all about, bringing y'all value. So, if you don't know who I am, my name is Evan Ramp. I'm the founder of

Modern Creativemoney.com. I'm an Atlanta-based photographer. I've been doing this since really 2013-14, but my career really started to move and take off in 2015, and this YouTube channel is for photographers out there looking to explore photography

ideas, maybe make money with their camera, and live a better creative life. So, if that sounds like you, go ahead hit the Subscribe button, and thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. We will talk about them a little bit later on. So, step number one of this

This entire thing is a disclaimer that I made in the last business video like this and it's understanding that building a creative business is a process. It's not something that happens overnight. This is not a get-rich-quick thing or a get results quick thing. This is something

that actually is going to take a couple of months for you to get off the ground, which we'll explain throughout this video. And if you want instant gratification, go on Instagram, buy one of these courses that people are promoting for fifteen hundred dollars and you will

get that feeling, because that is what those people are selling. They're selling you on the feeling of doing something, not the actual action of doing something. And that's not what we're about on this channel or on Moderncreativemoney.com, and all the information I'm giving you

today is exactly what I would do if I moved to a different city and had to start from day one. I would take each one of these steps and it would take me probably a month or a couple of months to get things off the ground. So that is

kind of the step number one, the first disclaimer to this video, but the real step number one of this process is identifying the product that you are selling. All right, if you have a camera, obviously you are doing something with it, but one of the biggest mistakes that

people make is they don't identify what exactly are they selling to the world. They just want to do everything. And when it comes to making this, you know, first thousand dollars a month, you really just want to focus on one thing that you are doing. Now, realistically, there are three

Main ways to make money with a camera. This is something I talk in depth about on Modern Creativemoney.com. The first is clients, the second is products, and the third is social media. So let's go through each one of these real quick. When it comes to clients, clients is the

easiest way to make money with a camera. The reason it's so easy is because there's little to no barrier to entry. You can just have a camera, know some people, and start saying, 'Hey, I'm doing photo shoots if anyone needs it. Here's

my rate.' You just can kind of jump into it, and that's the reason why so many creative businesses start in a client-driven environment. That's where I started, that's where most of my friends started, and that's probably where you're going to start as well. Now, if you were

more of an artist type, which I understand some of you are, and you're not interested in working with clients, you just want to make things, products is going to be the second way that you can make money. Now, products is a little bit more difficult than clients because

there is some barrier to entry. You have to have a little bit of business savvy to get a product-based business off the ground. So, the types of products that you can sell as an artist with a camera are things like digital products, presets, LUTs for video, maybe editing tutorials,

if you're really good at Photoshop, maybe you're selling like brush packs for Photoshop or something like that. There's a lot of different options out there, transition packs, or maybe you want to sell physical products like prints or faux photo books. That's what I've done.

In the past, if you're doing either of these things, the barrier to entry is one: figuring out where to sell them. You have to either build a website, you have to figure out your payment processing, you have to go meet somebody who has a gallery. It's just an extra step, and

obviously, you got to learn the skills necessary to run some type of internet business, and you also need to understand margins if you're selling physical products. There's just extra steps as opposed to just grabbing a camera, walking out into the world and trying to

book clients. Now, the third way to make money with a camera is pretty irrelevant to this video, but I wanted to include it just for the sake of the information being out there, and that is social media. Now, social media is a great way to make money if you're an influencer. You can

get paid for views, you can get paid for subscriptions, you can get paid for sponsorships and working with brands and creating for them. But in my experience, what I've found is most people getting paid from social media are getting paid because they use their social media as a

way to promote their product business or their client business, and as their social media grew, those opportunities started to present themselves. And the reason it's irrelevant to today's video is there's not a really actionable path that people will say there is, but there's a little

bit of luck involved when it comes to growing on social media, and there's also some savvy when it comes to working with people and understanding what people want, understanding the internet. It's just not something that you can grow necessarily in a couple months. Some

People might, but it might take some people years of promoting their client business or their product business to get their social media to the point where they can make money for it. So for the rest of the video, let's ignore social media, but I wanted to include it

just for the sake of covering, you know, the entire spectrum of how you can make money with a camera. The second step to this process once you identify the product you're selling is identify who your customer is. What's your perfect customer? Now this is a big mistake like

I already mentioned that a lot of artists and photographers and videographers make is they want to do everything to start out. And if your goal is to make money, you need to be hyper-specific about who you're trying to target with the product that you're

selling. So let's say that you're someone who wants to do a client-based business and you feel that family photography is something that you can excel at. You feel like you're pretty good at portraits, you feel like you already know a lot of families, maybe it's something you've

already done in the past and you think this is your perfect customer, that's great. Maybe you're someone who likes car photography, your perfect customer would maybe be someone who's trying to grow their social media with their car that they have or something like that. I

don't know. Or maybe you're selling digital products, you're selling presets. You know your presets look really good on street photography, so your perfect customer is someone who wants to edit their street photos similar to you. Just sit down and think to yourself, who is the one buying this product that I'm

creating with my camera and something that I recommend on modern creativemoney.com is for you to get a notebook and sit down and actually write all this out. Doing it in your head is just going to take up a lot of like mental energy, whereas if you just put it

on paper and sit down and visually see it, this whole process runs a little bit easier, especially as you're going through the steps in this video to plan out this foundation and base of your business. So that is Step number two is figure out your perfect customer now.

Step number three is doing the math of your business. So you have your product, you have your customer, how many customers do you need with your product to make a thousand dollars a month? So let's say you're that family portrait photographer and the package you're

planning on selling is 250 dollars for 15 photos, two looks and two hours of photos plus the editing time. I feel like that's a pretty good package to start out with. The math on that works out to four of these perfect clients every single month to get to a thousand

dollars, which seems pretty reasonable honestly if you're just putting in a little bit of extra work, even if you have a job or something like that, it doesn't sound too hard to book four clients a month at that price point. So that's what you would have to do to get

to that thousand dollar number. Now, like I said, if you're someone in the product sector of this video, there might be a little bit more math involved in this. If you're selling physical products like you make prints, maybe your prints cost twenty-five dollars so you want to make

a thousand dollars so you know if you sell 10 of them at 125 you'll make a thousand because you got to subtract the 25 off of that so your profit is a hundred a hundred times ten is a thousand dollars it's still pretty basic

math so I'm sure most of you can figure it out but once again products is just a little bit stickier than you know just saying all right I have four 250 dollar photo shoots a month this is going to be easy so figure out the math of your

business to get to that thousand dollar point now step number four in this process is planning your acquisition of your customers now here's how you do this it's imperfect all right there's no set in stone way to acquire your customers every person watching this video is going to have a little bit of a

different plan based on all the tools that they have at their disposal so let's say you're that family portrait example photographer that we've already talked about if you're one of these people and you already know a bunch of families out there your strategy for

capturing clients might be to do a bunch of free photo shoots for the people that you already know with families and make a deal with them saying hey you can get the photos for free just promote me on your social media when you post them save photos by so-and-so photographer

Evan rampfamily photo business whatever your handle is and just promote me so I can start booking clients that way and I can get some social proof that way but let's say you're someone who maybe only knows one family you could do that strategy with them but maybe you need to

go on Facebook and start getting into Facebook groups and maybe making posts there or maybe figuring out a way to promote your services to schools or graduation shoots or something like that maybe you need to expand out into an area where your perfect customer hangs out and that is the easiest way to think

about this that's something that I got from Russell Brunson's book Dot Com Secrets think about where your perfect customer congregates so if you're someone who is doing car photography for example you probably want to go to car meets car shows you want to be in the areas where

people who care about their cars and maybe are trying to promote their cars would be and then through that maybe you can meet people who have car shops you know I have a Toyota 4Runner and I'm sure that there are places who modify 4Runners that need photos for their

social media so maybe you can create connections that way like I said this step it's very nuanced it's not going to be something that I can spell out for you and it's probably the most difficult step of this video and that's that's why

it's so important for you to pick a product and pick a customer that you already have an advantage in like me for example I don't know anyone who drives like an exotic car I don't know a single well I know like one person who's owned

a Lamborghini before but that one person is not going to get me enough access to the car world to where I can be a car photographer and make that my business but I do know a lot of people with kids and families a lot of my friends have

had kids so maybe that's a lane that makes more sense to me because I have an advantage you want to give yourself every advantage that you can possibly have I've used this or talked about this example before when I was a kid one of my first photography jobs and

experiences that I had was working with my dad you see my dad always volunteered with the church he was very active in the church and every year they would do this lunch with Santa thing so my dad was the photographer for this it was a way for him to make extra money at the

end of the year and my responsibility was to make sure I organized all the folders that came in with people marking their orders and I would track the file numbers with each order this is super old school stuff but this was a really cool experience for me because it taught

me that my dad was taking advantage of a situation that made sense for him it was advantageous to him he was already a face in the church he was already volunteering people knew who he was so he had that trust there and was able to

get that job very easily whereas if he was just an outsider with no relation with this community they probably wouldn't have hired him for this job they probably would have found somebody who was more in that community and that's a very important thing to remember is that social proof is a huge

part of businesses like this that are driven on person-to-person relationships you want to look like or at least be known in the community that you're trying to serve with the product that you're selling to this perfect customer so now that you've figured out your plan

of acquisition, we can talk really quick about the sponsor on today's video, Squarespace, because Squarespace could help you out in acquiring these customers. So, let's say you're someone who wants to book clients, Squarespace is something that I've used for years to

get in contact with potential clients. Years ago, I would just give out my phone number, give out my email to random people on the street. That's a huge mistake now. On Squarespace, on my website, there is a contact me button on the home page. You can click that and it will take

you to my appointments page. Now, this is for more one-on-one help, now, but I also have a page that says contact me and from there you can give me your name, your email, and what it is that you want to know and I can email you that way, but

now Squarespace has a great tool called scheduling that allows you to set appointments so you can take this client booking a step farther and actually book clients through your site. So, a client goes to your site, they click that contact me button, they go to a page

where they now have dates listed out for them. They can pick a time slot and they can pay a deposit right up front. It's an awesome tool, tool from Squarespace. And maybe you're someone who is more in that product-based business, you're trying to

capture customers through social media, maybe you're selling presets. Squarespace allows you to do that as well. I sell my presets on Squarespace. I sell my photo books, my prints on Squarespace and their e-commerce tools are so easy to get

started with you don't need any web design experience at all and if you need some help setting up your website, you can go to the links in the description on this video. I have multiple videos breaking down how to set up Squarespace sites. There's one where you can copy the

exact template and setup that I use. There's one about just setting up a basic online store, or maybe you're someone out there who's just trying to get their work out there. You can check out one of the videos about setting up your site as a portfolio page, whatever

you're using Squarespace for, it makes sense for every photography business out there because it's one of the easiest things you can do to make yourself appear more professional to potential customers and clients. So Squarespace is hooking up the entire channel with 10

off, just go to squarespace.com. You can start a free trial using that and then use code 'Ed and Ramp' when you check out to save 10. So that's squarespace.com, start a free trial, watch one of those tutorials, and when you're

ready to send your site live, you can use code 'Evan Ramp' to save 10. Big thing into Squarespace for sponsoring today's video. So now we're on to step number five of making a thousand dollars with your camera, and this is personally my favorite step. It's the most exciting of

all this, and it's taking your plan of action, boiling it down to one customer. Okay, and real quick, I should note one really important tactic to use in your client acquisition plan is making sure the odds are in your favor, all right? So let's say you need four clients every

single month to get to that one thousand dollar goal if you only talk to four people every month and you only expose your business to four potential customers every month you need a 100% success rate whereas if you expose your brand, what you're creating, to a hundred

people every month the odds are more in your favor that's why it's important to think critically about where your perfect customer hangs out now that I got that out of the way let's actually get to step number five which like I said is my favorite step of this entire

process my favorite step of growing a creative business and that is going all in to get your first client you know the product you know the perfect customer you know the package you have to set up the price you have to set up to get to your thousand dollar goal you have the

plan of acquiring this customer now put it into action to just get one customer and do whatever you have to do maybe you need to sweeten up your deal a little bit maybe you need to say hey I'm running a sale right now and my presets

are 10% off do whatever you got to do to get that first customer maybe you post on Facebook that you're doing family portraits in a group maybe say you're running a holiday special you know it's the end of the year right now people are

trying to get Christmas photos done maybe you say you'll do three looks 20 photos and a three hour photo shoot for the same price that you normally would you know for $250 whatever that package was that we talked about earlier I'm like my brain is scrambled at this point

I've talked about so many numbers and examples, but yeah, do whatever you got to do to sweeten the deal and get that first customer. And this is why it's so important to just get one under your belt: it's going to allow you to see

the errors in your process. So let's say your plan that you laid out takes you, I don't know, two months to get that first customer. After you get that first customer, you can look at your plan and say, okay, I did X, Y, and Z, and only Z

worked. That's what landed me this first customer, and then you can double down on Z in step number six. This is just, I guess, kind of research and development of your business, and that's why I said it takes a little bit of time to figure this thing out. You know, you don't know

necessarily what's going to work, and that's why that plan step is so nuanced. You might have an idea that seems great on paper, and then in reality, it makes zero cents; it makes zero results. So let's say, once again, you're that car photographer person. Maybe your first

plan of action is to post on car Facebook pages, and you realize that's not working. You're not getting any clients that way. So you go to the second step of your plan, which is to photograph the only exotic car friend that you have. So you photograph their car for free

and now you set up a portfolio page on your website. And then you go to a car show. You show people these photos that you created and say, 'Hey, I'm offering up the same thing. I'll help your social media. I'll do photos for you. Feel free

to contact me here's my email we can talk and you say this to a hundred people and one person contacts you that is your indication that this is the step that works this is what you need to do you need to have an actual physical example of what you're creating so you

can showcase the value that you're doing to your potential customer and maybe you're someone selling products maybe you start out by just going to a car coffee shop and hanging up your prints on the wall and you're not getting any sales and you start thinking all right

this isn't working it's been over a month I haven't sold anything clearly my perfect customer isn't hanging out here so instead you build a website and then maybe you run a couple ads through Facebook ads or Instagram ads targeting the specific area that you're

photographing maybe you do city photos I've talked about this before I started with a lot of Atlanta photos maybe I make some Atlanta prints set up a website with my prints on there and I create some ads and I target only the Atlanta area and I also maybe I don't

know post every single day or create reels and add the location as Atlanta I take steps that seem like they'll make sense and then eventually once I get that first sale I can go back and look at my plan and realize hey this sale came from an ad that I ran this is what

I need to continue to do forget about coffee shops we're not going to put any more effort into that we're putting all of our effort into what works and that leads us to step number six which is implementing what worked into getting your second client so now you want to

move to your goal being two clients a month at that price that we talked about in the math section of this video so now that you got one you know that works try to refine the process down to get to two a month that should be your next goal and

this is pretty simple you know you just do what worked with number one and try to get two in a month and once you get two in a month go back and refine your process once again figure out what things did I do that worked to acquire me these two perfect customers and then

from there repeat step number six and that is just what you do over time until you get to that thousand dollar number it's relatively simple and it's extremely nuanced you know I can't tell you exactly how to do this but that is how I would do it and eventually you're

going to find a process that allows you to get four customers a month to get that thousand dollar number or you're going to define a process that allows you to sell the amount of products that you're trying to sell every single month there's no guarantees to this who knows

it could take some of you a year to get to that thousand dollar number but I don't think it will if you have a little bit of smarts and you're not just banging your head against the wall when you swing and you miss that's an

indication that something is not working and when you swing and get a foul ball that lets you know hey maybe it's time for me to look into this a little bit more and refine whatever process I'm doing and when you swing and hit a home run

run that lets you know hey I figured it out all that other stuff let's forget about it let's focus on this one thing that is the process that's what I would do to get to a thousand dollars a month with a camera in 2023 if I had to start

all over again hope this video helped you out you know it's not something I can sugarcoat I can't give you the exact plan to do it but that's a pretty easy breakdown of actionable steps that you can take to get to your point where you

reach the goals that you have and what's cool about this process is that's step number six that you just keep repeating over and over again once you get to the point where you're making a thousand dollars a month you can figure out how to take those actions double down on

those and get to two thousand three thousand maybe it requires you hiring someone to help you maybe it requires you uh quitting your job maybe it requires you buying a different camera to increase the quality of your work so your prices can go higher maybe it requires you to take a course to

understand more about marketing whatever it is once you figure out what works you can start doubling down the process to begin growing a creative business so that's the video like I said if you like more of these long-form chill talks let me know by hitting the thumbs up button

drop a comment let me know your thoughts on this video and I will catch y'all in the next one

How To Make $1000 a Month With a Camera | A Realistic NO-BS Guide

Evan Ranft

The video aims to explain how to make $1000/month with a camera.

The video will adopt a casual, relaxed style.

Viewers are encouraged to like the video if they find it helpful.

The speaker introduces himself as Evan Ramp, founder of Modern Creativemoney.com.

The YouTube channel is for photographers seeking to make money and improve their creative life.

Building a Creative Business: Disclaimers and Initial Steps

Building a creative business is a process, not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Step one is identifying the product being sold.

A common mistake is trying to do everything instead of focusing on one thing.

Three main ways to make money with a camera are clients, products, and social media.

Clients: Easiest way, low barrier to entry.

Products: More difficult, requires business savvy; examples include digital products, presets, and physical prints.

Social media: Reliant on influence and often used to promote client or product businesses.

Step two: Identify the perfect customer; be hyper-specific.

Step three: Calculate how many customers are needed to reach the $1000/month goal.

The math is simpler for client-based businesses than product-based ones.

Customer Acquisition and Squarespace Sponsorship

Step four: Plan customer acquisition; this is highly individualized.

Squarespace is highlighted as a tool for client acquisition and selling products.

Squarespace offers easy-to-use e-commerce tools and website templates.

A 10% discount code for Squarespace is provided.

Actionable Steps and Iterative Refinement

Step five: Focus on getting the first client; this helps identify what works.

Analyze the process after getting the first client to identify effective strategies.

Step six: Implement what worked to acquire more clients, iteratively increasing the number.

The process is repeatable to achieve higher income goals.