Monetizing Photography Skills Without Social Media Presence

Simone reveals how to monetize photography without relying on social media, emphasizing strategic connections and diverse revenue streams.

### Monetizing Photography: Strategies for Success Without Social Media
* 📸 If you're looking to monetize your photography skills but dislike social media, there are effective strategies to **grow your business without a large following**.
* 🖼 Two primary ways to earn money in photography are through **products**, such as prints and calendars, and offering photography as a **service** for events like weddings or corporate headshots.
* 💵 When pricing prints, a good starting point is to **charge three to four times the cost of production**, ensuring a balance between **affordability and profit**.
* 🤝 To gain exposure, collaborate with individuals or organizations with a **strong social media presence**, offering your services in exchange for **credit and visibility**.
* 🎉 Working for free at events can also be beneficial, as it allows you to **make connections**, **gain experience**, and potentially **secure future clients**.
* 🌐 Having an online presence is crucial; a professional website **showcases your work and builds credibility**, making it easier for potential clients to **find you**.
* 🖼 Consider offering your photography products to local businesses, such as coffee shops or libraries, which may need **wall art** and are often willing to **collaborate**.
* 🌟 Lastly, differentiate yourself by adding personal touches to your work, like **story cards or certificates of authenticity**, to make your photography **stand out in a competitive market**.

This video is brought to you by Squarespace. If you need a website or domain, check out squarespace.com. Hey everyone and welcome back to a new video. Are you starting to get good at developing your photography skills and would like to monetize your skill but

absolutely hate using social media or have a negligible following? In this video, I'll share with you what I would do if I was starting in professional photography today and wanted to monetize my photography even without a large social media following. And even if you

happen to use social media, these tips will supercharge your photography business with even more exposure and selling techniques. If you stay till the end, I'll give you a critical piece of advice that will differentiate you from the crowd, especially in a world of artificial intelligence and make people

buy your work over someone else's. My name is Simone and I'm a professional nature and wildlife photographer living in Eastern Canada. I make weekly videos giving you photo tips or taking you behind the scenes for nature photography. Subscribe if you want to see more.

Shut your mouth. [Music] Sometimes [Music] First, we need to quickly break down the different types of ways to make money with photography, especially for someone starting out. One is products and one is photography as a service. By products, I mean physical products that you can sell

and ship to clients. The easiest one of these is making calendars or prints. The barrier to entry for these is really low with almost no startup costs. You can print yourself or there are many websites that offer this service, or you can go with your local print lab for

prints you can find a local photo lab that will ship the prints to your clients under what's called 'White Label' meaning the print shop's logo isn't on the envelope so it could have come directly from you. For this approach, you need to have a good relationship with

your lab and be very confident of the product quality. If it's going to your clients without you seeing it first, order some test prints to make sure the quality is up to your standards. How do you price your prints when you're starting out? It's easiest to price them

as a multiple of your costs, like three times or four times. So, in the three times example in the beginning, you could ask 75 dollars for a print that cost twenty five dollars to print and ship. When your reputation grows, go to four times. For example, in the long run you

want to price them based on what they're worth, not what they cost, but cost-based is easiest when starting out. There are also calendars. This is usually done in bulk as custom orders, so you order a box of these from your printer and sell and ship them as the orders come in. There

are usually discounts from your printer for large orders, so you may pay twenty dollars to print one calendar but ten dollars each for a box of fifty. When your confidence grows that you can sell more, you can order in larger numbers and increase your profit margin. Photography

products favor the genres of photography that people want to hang on their walls, like landscapes, macro, flowers, wildlife, often genres without people in them, but there are always exceptions. Now, photography as a service is a bit different. In this case, you're taking photos on a custom basis, often with the

A client telling you what they want and you're delivering the product. Weddings, fashion, car, corporate headshots, pets, and products are examples for pricing these. The easiest way to start is to pick an hourly rate plus expenses like travel. What's your time worth? Fifty dollars an

hour, 100 an hour. Note that the hourly rate again isn't the best model for higher-end work. Once you're established, it limits how much you can charge. You want to migrate over time to fixed prices for a final product, like 'My price is two thousand dollars, regardless of

the time commitment.' That way, as your reputation grows, you can just charge more. So now we have the products and services nailed down. How do we promote and grow this business without social media? Here are some strategies. Tip number one is to provide photo services to other people who themselves have

social media reach. I mention reach because that's what social media gets you. So if you don't have that, how will you be seen by wider audiences? But this one needs to be used strategically. What are you getting in return? Are you getting access to a new market? Are you

getting exposure in the right areas? Is the person you're providing the services to influential themselves? The goal here is to get the benefit of social media reach without doing the social media work yourself. Find influential people on social media and provide a service for them in return for exposure and credit.

So if you have a cousin that loves your pets and has 20,000 followers, offer a pet photo shoot for free in return for a post from her on her Instagram giving you the credit. Or maybe someone locally has a large Facebook following because of her cooking channel. Offer some food

photography that he or she can show on their Facebook page with photo credits, of course. Or do you know of organizations that have a strong social media presence? Not-for-profits are often looking for free help and sometimes have a great following themselves. Maybe the local wildlife rehab organization or

local cat rescue. If you dream of photographing wildlife or pets, maybe there's a not-for-profit that helps put nice clothes on people before going for job interviews – great for an aspiring fashion photographer. Look in your neighborhood and find an organization that needs photography

services and can give you the credit on social media. You'll get exposure and practice at the same time. Don't forget the practice – this is so important in all of this early in your career. Don't forget you need to get good at your art, and practice and experience are the best

things you can do to get there. The next strategy is to work for free at events in return for contacts and experience. Let's say there's a surfing contest in a couple of months where you live. Offer to be the official photographer of the contest for the organizers for free, and

you will give them free photos for their use, but you're allowed to make connections at the contest and arrange custom photo shoots afterwards with contest participants without conditions. That way you get exposure, make contacts, and find clients. Have business cards for when people come up and ask, 'Hey, can I

hire you to come take some photos?' In this arrangement, organizers get a valuable service – they get free photos for promotional use – and guess what? You get tons of practice of the real thing. Don't forget to negotiate in there that you can use the event photos for your

for their own promotional purposes. Also, these event organizers are often influential in their sectors, great folks to give you referrals when someone asks them for a prominent person in their genre for the name of a capable photographer. Other examples are a dog show if you hope to photograph pets, or an equestrian event

if you hope to photograph horses, or a boat show, or an Arts competition, or a car show if you want to be an automotive photographer. There are tons of these out there. Approach organizations hosting events and arrange to be their official photographer. With time, you can even

charge them for this service and still get the contacts. Now I don't recommend the strategy of using events haphazardly. This is a strategic choice if you're not using social media. You need to find a way, a more physical way of connecting with your clients. Events that bring your

target audience together physically in targeted sectors and genres are perfect for this. Don't forget that you don't need to limit yourself to your favorite genre when picking events or organizations. If you have long lenses and a camera with a good autofocus system for wildlife, you're perfectly

placed gear-wise to shoot an air show, a track meet, and a motocross race. Pick the sectors that you can shoot, not just those you aspire to. You can even negotiate things to your advantage, like if they post photos on social media and someone wants to buy a print of that

particular photo, they can refer them to you. You'll sell them a print or digital copy, and you and the organization can share the profits 50/50. This is a good time to thank the sponsor of this video, Squarespace. I use Squarespace to make my

very own website and it was really easy. They have lots of templates to choose from or you can customize pages with easy drag and drop sections for photos, clickable buttons, text or links. When I recently added tours to Botswana to my offerings, it was easy to add a new page

to my website with photos, videos and give it some profile on my web page with links right to my home page. You can even get people to subscribe to your newsletter and offer them a free download in return if you wish. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial and

when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com/Simon to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Now, while in-person connections are great, if you're not using social media as a place to display your work, you absolutely need an online

presence. When you give people a business card or someone asks, 'Where can I see your work?', you need a presence where they can see your best. That's where a website comes in. You need a place to post your best and most compelling images and make a professional impression. Websites bring

credibility, can drive traffic and can eventually be a platform for sales of services and physical products. Strategy number four is to offer your photography products to people who need wall art. Coffee shops, restaurants, convention centers, building lobbies, libraries, dentists' offices are places that people

want to make attractive and inviting. They often need to purchase wall art with their own money, but you can help them avoid that by providing prints and art for free. This is often a very attractive offer, especially for places like coffee shops that really want to add a nice local touch or public

buildings like libraries, note that this will involve some startup costs on your behalf because you'll need to frame some prints and photos. One sweet spot for nailing this down is new startups. If a coffee shop has been around for 10 years and already has prints and paintings on the wall, they're less likely to find this attractive. Get these businesses or organizations at the startup phase, walk in with a print and say, "Do you need some wall art? I can provide some for free."

The other sweet spot is public institutions like libraries, city-owned buildings, publicly owned sports centers, and community buildings. These are very strategic choices because many of these have a built-in mandate to help support and grow their communities. As such, supporting local artists is something they're more likely to want to do. A third sweet spot, especially for landscape photographers, are restaurants and other places frequented by tourists, especially close to border crossings.

As people leave that destination, they have the iconic sites of the region on the wall and people love to pick one up on the way home, which is usually more attractive than at the start of a vacation. Make sure you get the iconic sights, famous lighthouses, mountains, and views are what people want to remember their trips. But how will this work? There are a few different ways. One is that you just place your work on the wall permanently, but leave prices and business cards next to the photos. And if someone wants to get one, they just take a card and call you.

Another way to do this is on a consignment basis. You leave the prints at the place of business, and if someone wants one, the business sells your physical print and you pay them a

commission. This can be as little as 10 or as much as 30 percent. You need to negotiate a good deal. Then they let you know that the print is sold, you come and replace it, and they pay you your cut and keep the balance. Strategy number

five is for you to sell your products at physical events where people gather. This can either be physical products like prints, or you can bring a few products for display purposes and a personal computer or a tablet that shows more examples of your work that you can take

orders to fill later. Set it up like a slideshow to reveal more pieces. Trade shows, farmers markets, street vendor locations and events like a dog show or maybe a car rally. Some of these you may need to pay for, but some of them like farmers markets can often be had for

nominal fees or even for free. Just think about your target demographic and interests and pick events with the highest likelihood that your customer will be there. Selling photos of flowers at a farm market or selling photos of automobiles at a car show are great

examples. If you've ever tried to sell framed prints, you know how hard it is to handle and transport framed prints with glass. It's a pain in the butt. Also, handling actual paper prints can be a real pain too. Keeping them from getting punctured or the corners damaged is

really difficult. But here's an idea: put your prints in mats and sell them matted, where the buyer can choose their own framing glass to put it in later. In this way, they're easy to transport, easy to show off in an event, and easy for your

for the customer to take home plus you can choose a matte color that accentuates your photo You can buy these mats online at a price that's not too onerous and if you buy in bulk you get a better deal And I promised you a bonus tip and

that's to ask yourself what's my value added here's an example You go into a store to buy candles for when the power goes out There are two choices They look the same They have the same price One is a sticker saying made in some foreign

country the other has a tag that says this candle was Handmade by Marjorie from just down the street It has 10 layers all hand dipped She uses the same technique taught to her by her grandmother wax from our own bees and infuses the smell of daffodils from her

own garden Which are you going to buy I think it's pretty obvious Most of us would even pay more for Marjorie's candle So when your potential customer has the choice between buying your work some AI generated digital art which is happening right now as we speak by the

way or some other photo they can get online for a quarter of your price why will they choose you What are you bringing to the table that will make you stand out Can you put little story cards with your prints when you hang them in the coffee shop Can you include a photo

of yourself taking photos on the back of your prints Can you include a link to your website on the back of your prints that shows where and how the photo was taken Can you include a certificate of authenticity with every print While photographic skill alone and amazing

Photos are helpful in adding value where people can buy not only your photo, but your brand and your story at the same time. It's a great asset if you hiked 20 kilometers up a mountain to get a shot; let people know you did that. Now, once

you've established your brand, lots of other opportunities become available: selling digital downloads, presets, photo retouching, education, and tutoring. Remember, the best way to grow a photography business is to have a portfolio of revenue from several sources. It leaves you less vulnerable to market and technology shifts and lets

you earn passive income opportunities where you don't even need to work to have money coming in. But I don't recommend you start there. Practice your craft, become an icon in your community, the go-to person everyone will recommend when asked. Then, take on the world. If you

found this video deserving, give it a like and consider subscribing to my channel for even more photography tips. If there's enough interest, I can even make more videos about the business of photography. I hope you can go use this advice to go out there and start your

own photography business, even if social media isn't your cup of tea. I know you can do it.

Make money as a photographer WITHOUT SOCIAL MEDIA!

My name is Simon d'Entremont and I'm a professional nature, astrophotography and wildlife photographer living in Nova Scotia, Canada.  I’m a photographer first, YouTuber second, and my mission is to lift the knowledge, skills, and spirits of the people around me so they can be at their best, whatever they want that to be.  My favorite saying is « I know you can do it! ». 

Remember, it’s not a competition!

Reach me at simon@simondentremont.com 

Simon d'Entremont

Introduction and Monetizing Photography Without Social Media

Focus on monetizing photography skills without relying heavily on social media.

Tips to enhance photography business exposure and sales.

Monetization Methods: Products vs. Services

Explanation of selling physical products (calendars, prints).

Low barrier to entry for print sales; various printing options.

Pricing strategies for prints (multiple of cost).

Selling calendars, bulk ordering for discounts.

Photography as a service: custom photo shoots (weddings, portraits, etc.).

Pricing strategies for services (hourly rate, fixed price).

Strategies for Promotion Without Social Media

Providing services to those with social media reach for exposure.

Working for free at events for experience and networking.

Strategic event selection to reach target audiences.

Importance of an online presence (website).

Additional Strategies: Offering Prints to Businesses and Events

Offering photography products to businesses needing wall art (coffee shops, restaurants, etc.).

Selling products at physical events (trade shows, farmers markets).

Tips for selling prints (mats instead of frames).

Highlighting the value proposition of your work compared to AI-generated content or cheaper alternatives.

Storytelling through accompanying cards, website links, or certificates of authenticity.

Expanding opportunities after establishing brand (digital downloads, presets, etc.).

Encouragement to start a photography business and potential for future videos.