Photography!!!
It all starts with passion, creativity, and that fire to make the best of all your previous versions. With the increase in your craze, you will seriously start imagining everything around you in the frame. You can think about all the creativity that you can put to let your photographs tell their stories.
If you are one of those out-of-mind shutterbugs, you must count on your passion for turning it to the profession.
We all know that it can be challenging, as you have to dedicate all of your time and energy to create your dream business. But, when you have a craze for something, there is no track of time, and you totally enjoy doing it. The best thing about hobby business is you can start at any time.
In this blog, we will be guiding you through all the steps that you will be taking to kickstart your hobby business.
Step: 1 Interrogate with yourself
Before you think any further, we want to mention some of the questions that you must answer for yourself to begin your entrepreneurial journey. With this interrogation, you will be able to know the photographer inside you at its best.
What interests you as a photographer?
Yeah, we know that you are interested in photography, but we want to know about the niche of photography that attracts you the most. Even if you don’t have much experience in different niches, you can try experimenting with the different types of photography like food photography, nature and other species, portrait photography, architecture or event photography, videography, and so on. In this way, you will be learning about different photography niches and able to figure out the one that grabs your interest.
What are your strengths and weaknesses?
It’s time to do the SWOT analysis of yourself.
Unlike following the hobby, now you have to seek an attitude of a perfectionist as you are working on your venture. As you have to market yourself, you must know your strengths, weaknesses, the opportunities that you can discover and threats that you have in your mind about the business. You need not worry if you have one or two points only. Maybe you are good at lighting, cameras, scene creation, or you have fair social media following.
If you are more into nature, food, or product photography, you may not be people’s person. You can count these things as your weaknesses as you have to be interactive to conduct your business. The opportunist people have a good chance of discovering new things, and inconsistent income is a viable threat in the hobby business.
This analysis will surely help you understand the points that you can market for your photography business. Further, you will be able to decide the people you need to hire on your team to assist you.
What are your business goals? How much time would you like to invest?
Think about the goals that you like to accomplish from your photography business. Like, you want just to create some side income with your hobby business, want to go ahead professionally, like to take full-time projects. Do you have an existing job? If yes, think about the time that you can commit in a week or on a daily basis. Don’t imagine a lot; you have to be realistic and think about the actual time and money investment that you can make. With sensible goals, you will be able to attain them easily, and it will surely motivate you to take your business to the next level.
Step 2: What’s your take on earning from photography skills?
Earning from photography can happen in many ways, and you can choose the ideas that best suit you. You can count on either of the below-listed ideas:
- Capture images of your clients: As a professional photographer, you can create your package plans for your target audience and take photos for your clients. You can work as a freelancer, established business as well try your hands on ghost photography.To establish yourself as an event photographer, you can collaborate with the event organizer groups. If you like to indulge in the ecommerce business as a product photographer, you can register yourself as a service business on ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon. Also, you can collaborate with e-commerce platforms that allow selling of services like Builderfly does. If money is the motivating force for you, you can uncover amazing opportunities as a ghost photographer.
- Start your photography tutorials: Every photographer has some unique tactics of photography. You may have learned some of the tips and tricks online, and created some of these tactics while experimenting on your own. You can teach those photographs hacks, photo-editing skills, and everything to be a professional photographer, right from nowhere.To be a professional instructor, you can start teaching on social media for initial days. As soon as you develop your user base, you can register yourself on online teaching platforms like Udemy, SkillShare, and sell your photography courses. Later, you can also create your website and launch your courses there.
- Sell your clicks: There is no fixed money that you can make by selling your photographs. But, you can check this idea for sure to create an extra income. The competition is kind of really tough in the market. However, the requirement of professional photographs for businesses and websites is increasing, and this makes you count on online photo selling sites. Here are some of the sites on which you can register to sell your photographs:
Step 3: Get your business plan done.
As we have mentioned about the SWOT analysis, you can jot down all of your points to create a business plan for a photography business. The term ‘Business Plan’ can be intriguing to so many people out there, but you have to go ahead and set the professional terms now.
Plan your investment
If you are planning to start your online tutorials, you don’t have to worry much about the budget. You already have your camera; you need another backup camera to shoot your tutorials. In that case, you will need a sound internet connection to let you update the content without any hurdle.
But, if you are planning to take a toll on your service-based photography business, you will have to make an investment in a lot of things. The first and foremost requirement is that of your photo studio. You have to manage the rent of the place, the tools and advanced photography gadgets that you will be needing, team assistance, salary, etc. To keep your business running until your first project comes, you need to make an arrangement for your investments and cash flow for other business activities.
Create your buyer persona
In the first step, we told you to decide your target industry. Based on your choice, now, you have to create the buyer persona. When you know your target audience, you will have more ideas about marketing demographics, and you can cut off marketing costs while creating the budget. The process of creating a buyer persona will help you decide low-budget ways to market your services.
Competitor analysis:
As of now, you were a hobbyist, to jump into the market as a professional photographer, you must know your competitors well. If you are planning to sell services, you have to check on with local photographers and explore their profiles. The research and analysis will help you gain an understanding of the rates for different levels of photographers in the market, the trends in the industry, set your business goals, decide your budget, select the platform, compare the plans, and seek marketing ideas. It will be easier for you to start your business and work on your end goals.
You can take the reference of this image by a professional photographer; this can help you set your budget. This can be a lot for you, but you need not worry. This is simply an example; you can create the one depending upon your initial requirements of the business.
Step 4: Uptight your photography kit
We know that this photography kit will make you go, WOW!
But, that’s impossible to have all the possible tools with you for now. Don’t worry. You can plan the must-have things depending upon your niche business and add them progressively with the passage of time.
To start your business, your camera and skills will be fine. However, if you have larger goals like coverage of events, namely wedding functions, birthdays, and others, you will need a crew. Also, you will need some new lenses, lights, backdrops, and tools to create sets for portrait shoots. To improve the touch of lightning, reflectors, and diffraction tools can be a lot more helpful.
Don’t spend all of your earnings in purchasing some awe-inspiring tools; you can take a toll on jugadu ideas as well as rent the high budget photography tools for the events whenever you need them.
Product Insurance
The cameras, lenses, and tools that can redefine the quality of your photography are too costly. For the security of these, you must get them insured. It’s not enough to walk with the warranty period; insurance companies can cover a lot more than mere warranty.
Step 5: Time to create your portfolio and website
You must be very excited about creating your portfolio. But, wait a while.
Have you decided on the name of your business?
If not, take this task on a priority. Don’t be in a hurry; you can spend some time here. To let your customers not deter from your business, you can’t change the name for every now and then.
- Make a list of all the names that come to your mind.
- Find the synonyms of the photographic elements and tools.
- Don’t try the combination of more than two words.
- Select and add catchy names only.
- Search for specific keywords and phrases relating to photography business like shutterbug, snapshot, etc. They will be easier to relate to the niche business.
- If you want to continue with your niche business only, you can choose the business name that closely resembles your business.
If you are confused between two-three names, you can reach out to your friends with the selection. You can also make an online poll and ask your fans about it.
Create your portfolio:
When there are so many experts and professional photographers, you have to showcase your ideas. With your portfolio, you can share the best of your work. Now that you chose your business name, you can move ahead with your plan of creating your profile. For a portfolio, you can count on free platforms like Behance, Dunk, Coroflot, Portfoliobox, and many others.
Step 6: Design your website
To design a website for your business, buy yourself a domain:
Once you are done with deciding your business name, go straight to the domain selling sites (namely Godaddy, Namecheap, and many others), register your account, and purchase a domain name for your business. You can check the hosting plans along with it. Some of the hosting plans offer a free domain name and security certification (free SSL).
Create your website
You can leverage the open-source free-to-use CMS platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and many others to create your website. You can customize your website to every extent, and with the plugins, you can add those features that you are thinking for. Here, you need to look for some technicalities, but it won’t be a tough job if you learn HTML and CSS tricks.
If you hate all that technical stuff and still like to create an ecommerce website to sell your stunning images and photography plans, you can rely on Builderfly. With our niche-based themes, you can choose the best look of your website and create your portfolio and promote all three types of business ideas together.
It’s not rocket science, you can register yourself at Builderfly, and you will get free access to all the features for creating your store. While registering yourself, choose photography as your business niche, you will get a fully-functional store ready within minutes. You don’t have to seek hosting services distinctly; Now, you can navigate to the dashboard click on Online store builder to customize your store.
To list the photos, you like to sell
You can put your photographs on sale by selecting the ‘virtual product.’ Internally you can update and change all the settings of your product detail pages. Using ready-to-implement templates, you can change and update the layout of internal sections of each of the web pages.
Sell your photography plans
To sell your photography plans and create your portfolio, you can add a new blank page to your site and choose the design of the page as per your choice. You can mention the layout of the content to be displayed and mention your photography plans. For ease and further discussion, you can navigate your customers to contact us page. With our intuitive design layout editor, you can easily customize each section of your site and add a personal touch to your website. Thus, you will not be losing your prospective customers and visitors anyway.
Step 7: Put acceleration mode on your marketing efforts
Congratulations on getting your live website!
Now, the actual war of bringing the quality customers will begin. You might already have the social handles to promote your photography business. If not, build one and if you already have it, use the analytics section to understand how your followers are interacting on the social handles.
Optimize your site:
Site optimization is beneficial for any business in the long run. It will not help you improve the organic reach of your website but refine loading speed and improve customer’s experience. You can check for the functionality or add plugins to help you with the optimization of on-page of your site. This builds the authenticity of your site and business.
Social media marketing
Add a link to your website and tell you the story of starting your photography business on the ‘About page section.’ Connect with the like minds in community forums, groups, and interact with more businesses like yours. You can tag some of the other renowned pages, or share your work with others. Further, you can promote your social media pages to promote your content. The paid promotions can be costlier for you in the beginning, but it will help you bring traction to your site.
Collaborate with other photographers
When you connect with the community, you will improve the reach as well as the chances to make your business live. You can collaborate with numerous others like you and together explore the opportunities for growth.
Play with Referrals
You are working for your clients, and when you are dealing with professional businesses, you have unlimited opportunities for you. Referrals work well in all the cases, and that’s why you better not take a chance on any of the clients. When you recommend businesses for their services, people will refer you to their clients. It works in bi-directional mode, and you can uncover a lot of opportunities this way.
That’s a whole lot of information!
Wait for a while, relax and turn your head to where it all started.
Yes, we are talking about your passion and willingness to experiment and try something new. The one thing that you must not leave in this setup thing is practice and more of a practice!
Learn new things and widen your boundaries.
All the best for your hobby business!
