[00:00:00] Real quick here. If you're an extra 10 seconds, please, please rate the show on whatever streaming platform you're listening to. My mission is to help as many creative entrepreneurs as possible, and without your help, I won't be able to do that. If you have an extra 10 seconds, please give the show a rating.
Thank you. You only need two things to actually make money from your photography business. I spent months trying to figure out how to turn my passion into a business, and I was getting nowhere. Then it clicked. I needed an offer and I needed to get eyeballs on that offer. Now, I'm gonna explain what this all means in just a bit here, but if you can understand these two things, there's nothing stopping you from making six figures from photography this next year.
By the way, if you're new here, my name is Chris Pieta. I teach creative business. I'm a production company. All right, let's dive into this episode. 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.
You only need two things to make money from your photography or videography [00:01:00] business. You need an offer and you need eyeballs on that offer. That's it. If you do those two things well, you'll make money. Now, I know there are a million other little things that you can't be doing, but if you can narrow down your focus and really focus on what's important, what actually generates you clients and makes you money, you'll land on these two things.
So let's break down. Why mean by an offer and by eyeball? This episode is teaching you how to make money from your business, from your photography or videography passion. It's not gonna teach you how to be good at photography or videography. Making money from these creative endeavors and being good at them are mutually exclusive.
I know amazing photographers that don't make any money, and I know, okay, photographers that make a lot of money because you're listening to this episode. I'm assuming you're halfway decent already, and that's good enough. There are plenty of low budget clients that will be willing to pay for decent photography.
They can't afford the best photographers. There's room for all skill levels here. All right, so let's talk about the offer. [00:02:00] The first thing that you need is an offer. Your offer is what you're selling. It's the service that you trade for money. There are good offers and there are bad offers. Your offer is almost always going to live on your website.
This is what I'm walking through today. First, we need to answer the question of what we're selling. What kind of photographer are you? Product, photography, wedding photographer, portraits, all of the above. Well, if you answered all the above, you need to change that answer. You can't be a generalist and expect to make good money in this industry.
You need to specialize niche down into a specific category, photography, and you'll be good. I'm a Prague photographer, that's my niche, but it doesn't stop there. I'm not just a prog photographer. I'm a Prague photographer for food and beverage brands. That's it. That is all I do. I don't offer to shoot weddings.
I don't offer to shoot wallets or electronics or clothing. I can still shoot these categories and take on these clients, but I just don't offer to. If clients outside my niche approach [00:03:00] me, then I can work with them. But I'm not the one that's marketing to all these different clients. I'm not painting myself as a generalist to the world.
I'm painting myself as a specialist. And if people outside of that specialty approach me, sure I can work with them, but those photos aren't going up in my portfolio. I'm gonna maintain who I am, a Prague photographer, that's who I display publicly.
Once you have an answer to the question of what kind of photographer you are, we can continue with our offer. For today's example, we're going to go with food and beverage prog photography, because that's what my production company does.
Now that we have this first part of the offer down, we have to show it off. We accomplish this by both words and images. This is where your website comes in. Your website is your portfolio, but not just your portfolio. You can use copy in order to emphasize exactly what you do. Using both copy and photography makes your website a lot more powerful.
We accomplish this by first including a headline. The headline states how you help the niche achieve a certain [00:04:00] result. The simplest formula for a headline is, I help blank do blank with blank. For my company, this would be, I help food and beverage brands get more sales through product photography. Here you actually just stated your offer.
You clearly state who you help, how you help them, and through what mechanism you're helping them. I rarely see photography websites have a headline like this. Something like this is so powerful and helps you stand out among the masses. Apart from the headline, you can include even more text throughout your website.
For the sake for this episode, we're gonna stick with this. If you need help with website copy and your offer in Creative Biz Launch, we have a whole module devoted to your offer. It's that important wait list for Creative Biz Launch is down below. That's my program where I help creatives, photographers, videographers grow their businesses to six figures.
Wait list for that is down below.
The next part of your portfolio is your photography. The photography should be [00:05:00] specific to your niche as a food and beverage product photographer. I don't have any pictures of mountains or cities or portraits on my website. Even though I'm great at that type of photography, it doesn't help my case when I'm trying to generate new sales.
Your portfolio should be your best work and encompass a variety of brands within your niche. Make this at least 20 of your best images. More is better in this situation. So now we have our first part of our offer. We know exactly what we're selling, we know who we're selling to, and we've established a website devoted to this offer.
Right now, we've just covered the tip of the iceberg. Of the offer. We know that we're selling product photos, but how exactly are we selling these? The first thing that we need to get right is to ensure that the client feels confident, they'll achieve their dream outcome when they work with us as pride photographers.
The dream outcome of working with us is to get beautiful photography to help increase their sales and build brand awareness.
We've already demonstrated this through our portfolio and headline. If our portfolio and copy is compelling enough, they'll feel confident that the dream [00:06:00] outcome will be achieved. This is a second part of the equation, perceived likelihood of achievement. You can add extra things to your website that will help with this.
The perceived likelihood of achievement is exactly what it sounds like if the client works with us. How confident will they be that they'll get the result that they're looking for? Well, we can add things to our website to increase this perceived likelihood of achievement. Things like Google Reviews. As soon as you work with a client, ask them to add a Google Review to your page.
Google reviews will go far and boosting your credibility in your business potential. Clients see these reviews and you'll gain trust. Another great way is case studies. Remember that headline we have our photos help brands increase sales through product photography. Well, you need to ask past clients if their sales actually did increase after you worked with them.
This is how you gain credibility. These case studies prove that you do what you say you do. Okay? So adding Google reviews is great and case studies are awesome. This really helps boost your perceived likelihood of achievement. What else do we need [00:07:00] to do to have a great offer? Well, we need to reduce the time delay.
How fast are your turnaround times? How long does it take from signing the contract to getting the final photos delivered? You need to reduce this time. The faster that clients get the photos, the more you can charge for your service. This is a simple thing, but it's really hard to execute properly. But once you figure out what your turnaround times are and what you can do to reduce them, Put those times on your website so that clients know what your turnaround times are so they know exactly what they're getting when they work with you.
If your turnaround times are weeks long, well you gotta reduce those. Clients don't wanna work with you. If they have to wait a month to get their photos back. Make that a few days. And your clients, the amount of clients that you get will skyrocket. Okay, I'm gonna leave it at that for now. Let's build out what we're actually selling here.
But Chris, I thought we established that we're selling product photos. Well, yes we are, but we're adding more into it than that. We're creating a [00:08:00] offer so good that the client can't say no. How do we do this? Well, we begin to offer bonuses. Bonuses are going to be little things we add on so that clients wanna work with us even more.
These bonuses are little things that don't cost, cost us much, but still provide massive value to the client. A perfect example of this in photography is licensing. A lot of photographers charge for licensing. They're nitpicky with the terms, and honestly, it's really confusing and expensive for many, many clients.
A lot of deals are lost because photographers won't budge on licensing. Licensing increases the effort required by the client, and that's a bad thing. Throwing in free licensing is actually a great way to eliminate all their effort and build goodwill with that client. That Goodwill compounds. You get retainers, you get referrals, you get good reviews, and it makes up for the lost money and the licensing.
It doesn't cost you anything, but provides your client massive value here. If you normally charge a lot for licensing, well then price it into your offer. Price [00:09:00] it into your free, but offer it as a free bonus. Keep it priced into that main package, but then present it as a free bonus and your sales will go up.
There are dozens of different bonuses you can also throw in. Really anything that isn't the main set of photos counts as a bonus. If you create mood boards for clients, that's a bonus. Photoshop retouching, that's a bonus. Do you have a lot of props that you shoot with? Do you have a lot of backdrops that you can offer to clients?
Well, you can say that you throw in an unlimited amount of prop styling in your shoots. This is a section where you have to think of everything that you can offer, and then you include those as free bonuses. Remember, we're trying to create a really compelling offer here. Now, we've got some really good stuff so far.
We have social credibility, we have case studies, fast turnaround times. Uh, we reduce the effort by the client, and we have a lot of good bonuses. This sounds like a really good offer, and it sounds like it should be expensive, so let's make it expensive. The easiest way to make something like this expensive is [00:10:00] to increase the photos that we offer.
We're still a food and beverage pro photographer. What do we do before we have this offer? Well, we probably sold individual photos and we let the client choose how many they wanted. We are eliminating this. Oftentimes clients would only choose five photos for a few hundred bucks a piece. That's a love f for our end, for onboarding this client and delivering all these photos for not that much return.
Let's increase the minimum number of photos that we need from clients. I'd say the minimum here should be at least 10 photos. Uh, it's really gonna be up to you and up to your niche and what clients you serve. I mean, if you're only serving Amazon sellers and they probably only want three to five photos, so maybe throw in video options as well so we could increase that high uh, price point of our offer here.
Okay. Once you decide on your minimum and what you'll be willing to work for, we'll make that our base package. So let's say our base package here would be a thousand bucks for 10 photos and all these [00:11:00] bonuses and things like that that we include here. Next, we can throw in a premium tier. So this could be 25 photos for 2200 bucks.
You got the idea. Adjust your pricing accordingly based on whatever you're charging. Now, just make it so if you charge a hundred bucks a photo, 10 photos are now a thousand dollars package. If you're charging 500 bucks a photo, price it accordingly. Okay, now you get the idea here. One thing that you should not do is put that price on your landing page on your website.
You can add everything you want from this package, but don't include the pricing just yet. When someone visits our site, they'll see the offer. They'll love the bonuses they see, the faster turnaround times they see, and all the credibility that we have on there. The price is something that will bring up with them later on the sales call.
All right. So now we have two packages. One is a thousand bucks, one is 2200. Let's start making money with these. In order to make money with these packages, we need to get eyeballs on this offer. You can have the best offer in the world, but if no one knows [00:12:00] about it, no one will buy it. This is a trap that a law photographers fallen too.
They have a beautiful portfolio. And they expect clients to come to them, but clients aren't coming. It's your job to tell as many people as possible about this offer, but not just everyone. Not just anyone. You want people within the niche you're targeting to learn about this offer. Those are prospects.
Those are leads. How do we get these eyeballs? Well, we tell people about the offer and then we direct them to our website. Cold outreach is a great way to do this. Social media is another solid plan. You can also run ads on Facebook and Instagram and utilize paid media. Google AdWords is another one example.
There are a lot of different channels you can focus on to get those eyeballs. Today I'm gonna talk about my favorite. And that's cold outreach. Cold outreach is fantastic because you get to handpick who is learning about your offer. Maybe you're scrolling Instagram and came across a company with photos that are similar to your style, but they could be a lot better.
This is a perfect [00:13:00] opportunity to DM them, talk through your credibility and see how you can help them. If you're a pro photographer like me, I love using Amazon to find companies to reach out to. I'll go through a pro category on Amazon, write down all the companies, get their email addresses, and then send a cold email.
By the way, if you wanna learn how to automate this, check out, create a biz launch down below. We have a whole module dedicated to just doing this. All right, so my cold emails always look like this. They have a hook with a personalized message. They have a credibility statement that talks about brands.
I've helped, and they have an ask, so I usually ask for a 10 minute discovery call at the end of every single email. From there, I follow up two or three times, and then I move on to the next company. Super straightforward here. It's the numbers game. All right? Cold reach is simple. It's not easy. Most of the emails that you send won't get a response, and that's okay.
Recognize that this is a numbers game. The better offer that you have though, the more likely it is that you'll get a response. The recipient of the email clicks on the email, reads it, checks out your website, and then if you have a great offer, they decide to respond to you. And if [00:14:00] you have a bad offer, you're not gonna get a response here.
All right. If you have that Grand Slam offer on your website, then you're gonna get a lot of responses here. The other ways of getting eyeballs I talked about are paid media, social media. Social media is great because you can build up your brand organically. This is really good for building trust, but it takes a very, very long time.
And if you're just starting out, then it probably won't be where you're gonna get your first clients from. Your first clients will probably come from cold outreach. That's where mine came from. That's where most of my new business comes from. Cold outreach is great for those first clients, but you should also be building up that social media on the backend.
Every single client that you work with, all the new content that you get, you can post that onto your own page as well. This will pay off a year or maybe two years down the road. Not in that first year as a freelancer. Finally, let's talk about paid ads. I've tried these and they work, but they're pretty expensive.
Uh, unless you have a few thousand dollars to test with, I would [00:15:00] not go down this road to start. Cost of acquisition here is expensive, and if you don't know your cost of acquisition, you're gonna blow a lot of money. Cost of acquisition is pretty much how much did it cost to get one customer? So if your packages cost 2000 a piece and you know you have to spend $500 on ads just to get one customer, that means your cost of acquisition is 500 bucks, and then you profit 1500 from there.
Feel free to play around with these, but honestly, I would just focus your time on one channel and at the start, cold outreach is the best one in my opinion. Once you have people respond to your cold outreach saying they're interested, it's time to hop on a discovery call, send a proposal, negotiate the deal, and make a lot of money.
I have entire videos to devoted to all these things. Check those out on my YouTube channel, Chris Pieta, and also. As you know, create Biz Launch walks you through step by step how to do everything here and as guarantee that's down below in the show notes. That's all I got today. My name is Chris Preta.
Thank you so much for listening and I'll talk to you later.
