, [00:00:00] if you want more clients and to make more money from your photo. This episode is the answer. Photographers are leaving money on the table, and this podcast is breaking down how I went from struggling to land a single client to running a six figure photography business. The craziest part of all this is that I did this by offering less.
There's one fundamental thing you need to get right. Your niche. This episode is teaching you how to zero in on your niche and go from a jack of all trades. To a master of one clients will perceive you as the expert, and because of that you'll be able to charge a lot more money.
My name is Chris Pieta, and I teach creative business and run a product photography company. And yes, I have a single niche. My product photography company only offers food and beverage product photography. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale to six figures.
Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. Okay, so why do we even need a niche in the first [00:01:00] place? And once we find one, how can we quickly narrow down our focus and become an expert in a category, even if we're pretty new to that category? Story time. When I was learning how to make money with photography, I tried pretty much everything.
My photography background was landscapes and street photography, and that's how I learned photography, and that's the kind of photos my Instagram was. All of my friends and family all thought my work was really good. They would tell me they loved my photos, so I figured it won't be that hard to make money from them.
Right wrong. Having great photos and making money from your photos are two very different things. You can post incredible photos on Instagram and get thousands of likes, but that doesn't mean you'll make any money from those photos. I was good at landscape photography and when I tried selling my prints, a few people actually bought them.
But when I did the math, I quickly learned that I would need to sell a lot more prints to make a living from it, and I didn't think that was possible. So I started looking at other niches out there. I tried portrait [00:02:00] photography. That was fun and I made some money with it, but the whole cost of renting this whole studio, that didn't really sound appealing to me at the time.
I did lifestyle photos of models all around Chicago, but I couldn't figure out how to monetize that. I considered doing real estate photos and I. I ended up scrapping the idea because Covid was just starting. I refused to do weddings because that seemed to be what every other photographer was doing, and that just wasn't for me.
Eventually, I stumbled across prag photography. Something really clicked and I started to really like prag photography. I want to work with clients. A coffee shop that I was actually selling my prints in was beginning to let people pre-order their coffee online. So I approached the store and I saw this opportunity and I talked to the owner.
I talked to the owner and told him that I thought my photos could help increase sales for their coffee. People could see what they were actually ordering online, and they would get more and more sales. I didn't actually realize this at the time. That was a perfect pitch. [00:03:00] I identified a problem and I provided a solution to that problem.
People didn't know what they were ordering, and with photos, they could easily. What type of coffee they were ordering. I did the shoot in the coffee shop, and that was the start of my proc photography career. I remember that first shoot. I charged like $10 a photo, which is dirt cheap looking back at it.
But I got my first client and I was stoked. I kind of accidentally stumbled upon this niche. At the time. I was trying out everything. I was seeing what I liked and what clicked for me and what could generate money. This is actually my first piece of advice. It's to try a bunch of different things for a decent amount of time, maybe a month or two, and see what sticks, what actually generates you $1.
After that first photo shoot, I realized that product photography ticked a lot of boxes for me. So I began building out my portfolio. I just photographed products I had around the house. They were all food and beverage products. I liked product photography and everyone said to niche down. So I decided to just niche down on C B G Food and [00:04:00] Product.
I didn't really think much about it. I just followed the advice of successful people that came before me. I also chose this snitch because of that coffee photo shoot. I already had photos of coffee, so I could just use it on my website. I was being lazy here.
At the time, I was also working in the food industry. I have a chemistry degree, so I was just doing regulatory work in the food space. So I did know a decent amount about the industry. So there was my niche. I was going to make money with this niche. I was determined to do that. My niche was going to be.
Food and beverage product photography. So what lessons can you draw for my story? If you want to find your niche, you need to try a bunch of things out. Be radically open-minded to trying new things because the more things that you try, the more opportunities you'll have to finding something you really like.
The funny thing is my niche didn't stop there. When I was starting out in pro photography, I actually specialized in action, food and beverage prog photography for the longest. I would do things like throw water at bottles and have these awesome splashes. In my [00:05:00] photos, I would throw coffee beans into a scene, so it looked like it was raining coffee.
This was a highly technical type of pro photography. I needed the perfect settings, the perfect timing, and I was having a blast capturing these photos. I'm a very technical person, so this was again, the perfect fit for. I found a way to bring my personality into my niche. That is really important as well here if, if you can have fun with your niche, you're gonna have way more success there.
Let's talk about why I actually niche down so heavily. I did start as a product photographer, but I wasn't just a product photographer. After I niched down a few more steps, I was a food and beverage product photographer, but it didn't stop there. I was an action food and beverage photographer, so we niched down two more times inside of product photography.
That was my niche action, food and beverage product photos.
I niche down super heavily so that I could pretty much get rid of my competition. This was my strategy here. How many product photographers have you seen on [00:06:00] Instagram? There's hundreds or thousands. How many action food and beverage pro photographers do you see? Maybe just a handful. That's why it's so important early on in your career to niche down, you need to stand out.
If you can become the expert in a very narrow niche, working with clients will become way easier. One thing I hear a lot from people saying that they don't wanna niche down is because it will eliminate clients that they want to work with, and that is true. It will eliminate clients that you want to work with, but no clients would work with you anyways, so you might as well niche down to actually get a chance of working with a.
If you're a specialist, you'll be able to land clients much more easier. If you're a generalist, the chances of landing a client are very, very slim.
The goal is to become an expert in a field of very few people, and you can do that pretty easily. All you need to do is keep nicheing down. You don't even have to be an incredible photographer. I certainly am not. You can be good, and because you own your niche, you can become the best option for clients to work with.
[00:07:00] How powerful is that?
This next section of this podcast is walking you through step by step, how to actually find your own.
So what makes a perfect niche? All throughout business history, there have been three broad categories of niches that have existed and have been wildly profitable. The three niches are health, wealth, and relationships all around you. There are companies in these niches health, for example, lose 10 pounds in 10 weeks with our supplements, join our gym membership and get shredded.
Eat these foods to look lean wealth. Learn how to make thousands in the stock market. Get your real estate license and make money on the side. Start our YouTube channel to make money from ads relationships. Download our app with 10,000 single people on it. Come to our bar to meet people. Have a wedding at our venue.
You get the idea here. You've probably heard of each of these business models I've outlined above because they've always existed in some form or. What we're going to be doing here is taking our genre of photography and applying it to one of these three bubbles. [00:08:00] Let's keep these three in mind while I introduce the next part of what makes a perfect niche.
A perfect niche has four more criteria that we should strive to meet. Number one, it's in pain. There's a pain point, whether it's physical pain, emotional pain, financial pain. There's some sort of pain. Point number two, they have purchasing power. They have might actually buy your service. Number three, they're easy to.
Can you identify who your leads are or are they a very vague category? Number four, it's a growing market. You might as well make your job easy and choose an industry that's growing and not shrinking. All right, so we have the main categories, which are health, wealth, and relationships. And within that we need a niche with a pain point, purchasing power.
Easy at target and it's growing. That might sound like a lot, but it's actually easier than you think. Before we go on, if you're trying to stray from these categories, let me ask you this, do you wanna make this your full-time income or do you want your business to just be a side project? If you're fine doing it as a [00:09:00] side passion project and maybe making a few bucks, then ignore this niche advice.
But if you actually want this to be something that you can make money from, then follow these. I'm a food and beverage product photographer. How do I fall into these categories? Am I health, wealth, or relationships? At first glance, you might not think I'm in any of these, but if you think about it for a little bit, I'm in the wealth category.
Product photos exist so that they can make other people money. When someone improves a pro photography of their new iced coffee brand, their sales go up, they increase their wealth. Now, what's the pain point of my target audience? The pain is that they have bad photos and they aren't generating sales and aren't increasing their brand awareness.
Do they have purchasing power? Well, it depends on the size of the company, but generally these big CPG brands have a marketing budget to spend. They realize the value of a good photo. and they're constantly competing with other people that have great photos, so they need money to spend on their marketing.
Are they easy at Target? Yeah. Just Google food and beverage brands and you'll find [00:10:00] thousands. And are they growing? Well, the direct-to-consumer market has been exploding the past few years with e-commerce, so I'd say yes, this one as well.
And that's how you walk through this little exercise to see how your niche falls in line. If your niche doesn't check all the boxes, that's okay too, but the more it checks, the easier it'll be to make money from it. Make this easy on yourself and try and check as many of these boxes as you can early on so that the client acquisition process becomes a breeze.
I'm gonna walk through one more example here. A niche ala you're into. But first, this whole section of this podcast is inspired by the book, a hundred Billion Dollar Offers by Alex from Mosey. If you want better, understand this whole process of picking a niche. Definitely read that book. Okay. I know a lot of you are head chef photographers out there.
Does a headshot photographer fall into health, wealth or relationships? Well, it depends who you target. If you target actors and business people, then your headshot makes them money because your headshot helps them land jobs. If you target single people on dating apps, your headshot [00:11:00] solves their relationship issue by making them stand out more on the platform and letting more dates.
Let's run with the second example here. What's the pain point of a single person on a dating? Most likely they're lonely and they wanna get rid of that pain. Do they have purchasing power? Well, this depends on the age group that you target. If you're working with 18 to 24 year olds, you won't get paid that much.
But if you target 50 year old divorce dudes, they've got deep pockets for your photography. , are they easy at target? Well, this one's a bit trickier for headshot photographers, but you can run ads on Facebook and target by relationship status age city. So if you run ads, this will be super easy. And are they a growing market?
Well, more and more people are using online dating apps these days, so yes, they are. Okay. So there we just took a boring old headshot photographer and turned them into a headshot photographer for 50 year old online dating profiles. This is way more profitable because we're niched down in a profitable niche In a growing market that's easy to target.
You can start to see how this can apply [00:12:00] to your own niche. This was just one example here, but this can apply to almost any photography. Filmmaking or creative niche out there. It takes a lot of thinking to get the right niche and you have to experiment with different niches and do this exercise over and over again.
It might take a few tries, but eventually you'll land on something that sticks.
That's all I got today for you. This is the Creative Biz Launch Podcast. If you have an extra 15 seconds, please rate this on whatever platform you're streaming it on. My name is Chris Pata, and I'll talk to you next time.
