MAKE MONEY with Landscape Photography - Things I Wish I Knew Sooner!!

so if you are new to this channel i have a real quick story for you that i think will kind of better set the stage for this week's video about two years ago now my 17-year career in the corporate world had come to an end and at that time i had decided to enter into what would be a 12-month experiment into becoming a full-time landscape photographer and i documented this entire 12-month journey in a four-part series that i'll link below if you're interested in checking that out and the reason that i call this an experiment is because i gave myself a firm 12-month timeline to create real progress to show enough momentum in order to proceed an additional 12 months and if that momentum wasn't there then at that time i would just be forced to to polish up my resume and start looking for a new job in a financial marketing space but at least i would have given it a shot and i wouldn't have to live with the regret of never giving full time photography and a chance to to work for me now fast forward an additional 12 months i am very happy to report that after a total of 24 months now i am still a full-time landscape photographer and that feels absolutely tremendous to say and now that my first two years are behind me i can honestly say that landscape photography it might be the most difficult genre photography to to make a full-time living out of so for instance wedding photographers a wedding photographer can always rely on people reaching out to them to photograph weddings a portrait photographer can always rely on people reaching out to them to photograph portraits a real estate photographer can always rely on people reaching out to them to photograph real estate but when's the last time you heard of someone reaching out to a landscape photographer it doesn't happen near as often so it's a slightly different business model and i think this next statement really sums it up the best i personally don't know of one great landscape photographer that is not also a great educator now that doesn't mean that you have to become a professional teacher to make a career out of photography i think that if you're passionate about something then you automatically have this innate ability to translate that passion into value for someone else and i think that's what it's all about it's all about creating value for others and in this video i want to share with you kind of the mistakes that i made in my first two years what worked for me what didn't work for me along with my specific financial results and just the real truth behind becoming a full-time landscape photographer in hopes that this could help motivate some folks that are possibly on the fence as to whether or not a career in photography is right for them now much like all of my videos i'd like to keep them very organized and very fluid so i broke this one down into three parts that i simply call the boat the oars and the anchor so to jump right into it i'm going for this whole kind of like nautical theme on this week's video but to jump right into the boat section i look at this as kind of the foundation of what i'm trying to build the boat cannot move by itself all the boat does is float and when i first started out on this uh my 12 month experiment i i think i looked at revenue or income a little bit differently i looked at it as what what are the things that i can sell always be closing to start generating money because i was so fixated on i got to generate money in order to make this work and that's very important of course but i think shifting your mindset a little bit more towards how do i create value and i ask myself this almost every single day now how am i going to provide value for others today and i ask myself that constantly and it's a good reminder as to not get so fixated on what am i going to sell to generate money because i think if you focus on the value the money will come so something that took me a little while to really put enough emphasis on is my website and i cannot overstate the importance of a website i looked at a website initially it's just a place to store my portfolio and it has become so much more than that your website really becomes kind of your headquarters yes you can distribute products you can sell products to your website but you most importantly you distribute value to other people via your website so it's tremendously important and here's a good good graph of my first 12 months so 2018 to 2019 this is the the number of unique visitors that visited my website 18 and a half thousand and right around here is when i really started to focus on my website heavily so 18 and a half thousand unique visitors in my first year in my second year that number has risen to 50 almost 59 000 visitors and you can see that it continues to go up so focusing on your website i think that it you you can't focus on it too much honestly there's just a lot of power in and really cultivating what you want to distribute via your website so things like blogs and i know when you hear a blog article or when you hear writing a blog that seems like a ton of work and you might think you're not a great writer well honestly i i don't think i'm a great writer either and i don't write a lot of blogs i write one blog at the end of every month and i post it on my website but i'm very consistent with it and still to this day now if you actually just google the generic term landscape photography blog my blog is the very first one that pops up which is absolutely crazy to me but being consistent with the blog and just creating more value has driven more people to my website which is evident by this chart and i think that's that that's a good representation of just creating that value for others you create the value the people will come an email subscriber list i think is imperative for someone who's looking to get into photography it's one of the number one regrets that i hear new businesses speak about is that they didn't start an email subscriber list soon enough and starting an email subscriber list is just another great way to connect with people you know you provide some type of free value to them maybe it's an ebook you wrote or maybe it's an article that you wrote or maybe it's a video you wrote and people will ask you to send that to them and of course they give you their email address in order to do that and an email address is a very powerful thing it means it means a lot to someone to give you their email address so starting an email subscriber list and i did it through a monthly newsletter and here is the growth of my monthly newsletter subscribers may of 2019 about one and a half thousand in about april 2020 it's actually i'm not sure why it's not showing us but it's over 6 000 subscribers right now so that growth has been exponential in a relatively short amount of time and once again you know i don't get paid for any of that none of those things generate direct income for me but it all creates values for others and i think that's one of the most important things for someone to focus on that is trying to get start a career in landscape photography is focus on the value for others first and everything else will come together now as far as the ores go i i call the oars these are revenue streams so these are the things that move the boat and each ore in the water is a different revenue stream and this is something that was really difficult my first year was that trying to determine exactly what revenue streams worked the best and i was so used to or i was so conditioned from my career in the corporate world 17 years of only having one revenue stream so when i became a photographer i immediately knew that all my income was not going to come from one single source i would have to branch out to have multiple different revenue streams but trying to determine what revenue streams work for you it's a time-consuming process you're not going to figure out in a couple weeks it took me the better part of my first year and what's difficult about it is what works for you might not work for me what works for me might not work for you but i had to end up going through and trying to cultivate a lot of revenue streams that didn't materialize for me but i'm happy to say that i now have the number dwindled down i think from 13 or 14 different revenue streams to a solid seven revenue streams that all contribute a measurable income for myself now for a frame of reference in my first year in my first 12 months i generated 14 037 dollars and i know that is not very much that's not a lot of money for an entire year's worth of work but the the encouraging part of that was the majority of that 14 000 all came in the last three months of of that year so that was really the momentum that gave me the drive to continue this experiment for one more year now i guess the way that i broke this down is that i broke it down by the revenue channels that are generating the least amount of money the least overall percentage of my overall income for the next 12 months so coming in at the very bottom and this is kind of a shocker generating only 1.5 of my total income in the last 12 months is print sales print sales i find to be very difficult i don't give it the attention that it deserves and i know i mentioned this in other videos as well that i don't market it a whole lot and i don't focus on it a whole lot mainly because it's not generating me a lot of money so i kind of have to focus my attention elsewhere but print sales are still not generating a lot of money like i said 1.5 of my total income now coming in at the the second lowest is one-to-one sessions now if you watched any of the previous videos in this series one-to-one sessions actually used to be called post-processing sessions and those are skype virtual sessions where i used to get online with someone and they would you know pay for either a one hour or two hour package and we would edit photos together those kind of post-processing sessions have now turned into kind of like one-to-one just kind of generalized consultation sessions where we talk about post-processing on-field or in-field location tips or best practices we talk about setting up a photography business setting up a website they've really morphed into anything so i changed the name from post-processing sessions to one-to-one sessions because i felt that that was a little bit more fitting but those are generating a total of four percent of my total income right now and coming in at third is partnership content which is generating a total of 10 of my total income and what partnership content is is working with additional brands that focus on outdoor photography so i have been working with visual wilderness creating visual tutorials for their website and when people purchase those tutorials i get a portion of those proceeds i also write blog articles for them as well so those are all things that are generating income and i haven't mentioned this yet but i do have another partnership that i'm entering into with outdoor photography guide which is another outdoor photography related website and much like visual wilderness creating short videos for their premium subscriber base where they uh just talking about all things related to landscape photography so partnership content generated a total of 10 of my income last year now coming in that's slightly higher was workshops at 10.5 percent of my total income i haven't done a whole lot of workshops i didn't do any of my first year my second year i did two i taught at the out of oregon landscape photography conference and i also taught at the most recent out of chicago live uh virtual landscape photography summit which was a ton of fun and that totaled a total of 10.5 percent of my overall income there and i'm planning on teaching of course a lot more workshops in the in the third 12-month cycle moving forward now coming in at 13 is youtube sponsorships so i've done three sponsorships now i've done of course with squarespace you see those seen those before i've done a sponsor a sponsored collaboration video with nissi filters i also done one with skillshare so youtube sponsorship has contributed to a total of 13 of my overall income for the second 12 month cycle now also coming in at 13 is affiliate marketing so these are are used to be things mostly like amazon affiliate where if you click on the link at the bot in the description of a youtube video and you purchase a product the the the link will generate a small commission for that for that person so it doesn't cost any more for you but it creates a tiny bit of commission for me that uh you know it slowly adds up over time but i'm now a affiliate with amazon with adorama b h and moment so kind of diversifying the different types of affiliate of affiliate networks just that way i'm not hinged solely on amazon because if you pay attention to that kind of stuff amazon just slashed the amount of affiliate revenue or affiliate commissions that they were paying people so diversification with affiliate marketing is very very critical now coming in at 48 almost half of my income for the second 12 month cycle has come from from you all the the youtube ad revenue and i am super super gracious for the for the momentum that i've been able to to create on youtube over the last two years and like i mentioned youtube ad revenue came in at 48 exactly and here's another interesting chart here this is the first 12 month cycle that my youtube channel had so 1.2 million views the first 12 months generating 4 dollars and here is the second twelve months three point eight million views generating a total of just over twenty four thousand dollars so that is a substantial increase from here my views went up three times but my revenue actually went up five times so that's a that's a big jump in the in the second year and all of that totaled a grand total of hundred and 49 two dollars that's the exact dollar amount that i made in my second year as a full-time landscape photographer and that represents over a 350 percent increase over my first year as a full-time landscape photographer so that was absolutely tremendous very exciting to see i cannot wait to see what the next three or next 12 month cycle or my third year has in store so i'm really looking forward to kind of growing and expanding everything so those are kind of the things that have worked for me now the things that have not worked for me i call these things the anchors these are the things that are stopping my boat from moving or things that are slowing the boat down so things like stock photography i had mentioned earlier about when you first start out you have to try and figure out what revenue channels work for you stock photography is something that i spent a solid six to eight months on trying to get that to work for me it never materialized for me so that's something that i wish i really never would have worked on or spent as much time focusing on but it's one of those things you don't know it until you try uh the other thing that was kind of an anchor was that i looked at social media as a revenue stream now i don't consider youtube social media i consider social media things like instagram facebook and twitter and when i first started out i tried to figure out a way to to make money off of those platforms and i never made one penny off of any of them but i now look at social media as a little bit different as a way to kind of distribute things distribute value that i'm trying to create so if i create a new blog article i'll post it on facebook or on twitter on instagram to notify people that i posted a new blog article or if i send out my monthly newsletter i'll post something on those various social media platforms just notifying people that hey my new newsletter just went out if you're not signed up you can sign up for it shameless plug above here and so just using social media is a means to kind of just promote other things drive traffic elsewhere is the kind of the way that i look at it now and last and certainly not least is probably the thing that i spent the most time on that generated the least amount of money which is zero dollars and it's reaching out to tourism boards i spent a ton of time basically cold calling and emailing tourism boards all over the world trying to solicit my work to them in hopes that they might you know purchase some type of service for me on some type of upcoming campaign that they were going to be running for their their local area and they might hire me to go take those photos or create video content for them spent a ton of time doing it i didn't generate anything so those were kind of the three anchors that i felt were kind of slowing my boat down if i could do things over i wouldn't have focused the way i focused on any of those three things because it would have freed up a lot of time for me in my very first year so that is what worked for me that's what didn't work for me and that's kind of my second year update from a financial perspective as to what revenue streams were creating what proportion of my overall income in the second year and if you're looking to get into photography i really hope this video can maybe steer you in the right direction or help give you the motivation to definitely try because it is absolutely possible to become a full-time land landscape photographer in 2020 and beyond you just got to have to kind of look at it a little bit differently than other genres of photography but it's absolutely possible so i do hope you enjoyed this week's video as always if you did enjoy it if you could give it that thumbs up definitely helps the channel perform better subscribe to the channel if you're not subscribed already and ring the little bell notification too there's some new um youtube analytics that i was looking at and i never mentioned the bell in any of my videos before i think that was the first time but um yeah if you want to be notified whenever i do upload it you can ring the bell notification and that'll uh make sure that you are automatically notified as soon as a video goes live so as always i really do appreciate you watching this week's video and i will see you all next week bye

Channel: Mark Denney

Views: 97,993

Rating: 4.9711385 out of 5

Keywords: how to make money as a landscape photographer, how to earn money as a landscape photographer, making money as a landscape photographer, make money with landscape photography, how to make money with photography, how to make money with photography online, how to become a full time landscape photographer, full time landscape photographer, full time photographer, how to make a career out of photography, landscape photography, landscape, photography, tips, mark denney, make money online

Id: MGxgby547B4

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020