Your photography hobby has a potential to become a side hustle earning you money. Thousands of businesses, content creators, publishers, and artists need high-quality photos for their projects, campaigns, and resources.
You don’t even need to be a world-class photographer, either!
A keen eye for your topic, a bit of outreach, and a twinge of marketing can land you clients and sales. This post will share a path to creating a side hustle using photography.
Part 1: Get Your Skills Up to Par
Digital photography is cheap leading many amateur photographers snapping hundreds of pictures in one go. The selection, subject, editing, and knowing your audience will be the difference in sharing images for free and charging for them.
- Selection — Refine your offering by picking only the best photos from the session as this creates quality over quantity.
- Subject — Choose great subjects evoking powerful emotions and interest as many photos in digital/print are meant to capture their readers.
- Editing — Follow courses like How to Use Lightroom or get a mentor helping you understand the fine tweaks you can make to make the photo impactful.
- The audience — Research your targeted clientele to deliver the exact photos they’ll want to use in their projects.
This puts your activities on course for professionalism. From here, it’s a matter of getting found…
Part 2: Create a Portfolio Site to Show Your Talents
There’s no better way to share your talent and attract potential customers and clients than using a portfolio website. This website becomes your showroom and sales pitch.
Try creating one with online tools like Wix or Squarespace. Or, set up a site of your own by buying a domain and hosting. Then, installing WordPress and theme.
What do you do once the site is up?
- Create and share engaging photo-heavy blog posts
- Promote your services pages when interacting on social
- Optimize for your local search queries to get found in Google
Look at how AHappyHippyMom covers topics and neat subjects but set photography as the subject. This gets people exploring your skills and creativity eventually leading to a sales inquiry!
Part 3: Reach Out to Interested Parties
There’s beauty in selling your photos directly as art. But, let’s get real for a moment… because you’ll likely need to take the business route when you’re getting into the side hustle.
This means:
- You’re promoting your services (not just the photos)
- You’re connecting with businesses to offer desired media
- You’re commercializing parts of your efforts to succeed
Does this go against why you started photography? That’s up to you, but starting a side hustle could be what lets you further explore your love for photography since you’re getting paid.
Get uncomfortable — outside your “box” — and reach out:
- Contact businesses with crappy photos and offer to take better shots for their website and business materials
- Research and fulfill a photography service in your area like capturing weddings, events, or parties
- Consider stock photography tapping your extensive library of photos selling them to publishers for their projects
- Creating scrapbooks and photo journals using your editing skills or offering print services as an upsell
In time, you’ll build a client list willing to pay for your service because you’re underpromising and overdelivering!
Which leads you to…
Part 4: Creating a Referral System
The hardest part of turning photography into a side hustle is getting people willing to pay for your efforts. A lot of people and businesses devalue photography citing “everyone has a camera…”.
If this was the case then why didn’t they take great photos?!
Put a value on your work and use that to build a brand and authority in your market. This perception creates the initial chain of referrals with business owners and individuals passing your name along to other interested parties.
You can encourage referrals through:
- Offering discounts on backend services
- Using referral apps and tracking with incentives
- Asking for referrals from prior contacts
You won’t know until you ask. Make it a point to send a follow-up with every person you’re working with. This goes the same anytime purchases your photos as stock. Or, if you’ve contributed photos to an open source project.
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What do you think about turning your love for photography into a side hustle? Is it something you’d want to explore? Why/why not?
