[00:00:00] Hey guys, so you know I don't run any ads on the show, so I don't make any money from this podcast. I do it to help other creatives out there. My only ask of you is to, one, share this with a friend or creative in your life, and two, drop the show a rating. Now let's move on to the episode. Being good at photography or videography won't make you money.
Just because you can take awesome photos doesn't mean you're going to get paid for it. You need to acquire other skills in order to actually monetize your craft. In this episode, I'm teaching you the skills you need, and we're talking about the concept of skill stacking so you can make the most of your photography or videography business.
Let's get into it. Welcome to the Creative Biz Launch Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures. Whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here. What we're talking about here isn't a new idea. If you're really good at cooking, it doesn't mean you'll be good at running a successful restaurant.
And if you're good at photography, you're not guaranteed to make money just because you're good. By the way, if this is your first time [00:01:00] here, my name is Chris Pieta. I run a product photography company and teach creative business online to photographers and videographers. My mission is to enable.
Creatives to start and scale their own businesses. Okay? So just because you're great with a camera doesn't mean clients will pay you. But the good thing here is that the reverse is also true. You don't need to be that good in order to make money from photography. You can be pretty decent and with another set of skills like sales and marketing, people will pay you for your work.
I know so many incredible photographers out there that struggle to get clients. I also know a lot of mediocre photographers that are able to land client after client. So what's the differentiating factor here? Well, first, let's get our priorities straight. Since you're listening to me, I. I'm assuming you're more interested in photography business rather than the photography as an art form.
If you are mainly doing photography to produce great art, then this episode probably isn't for you. If your priority is to make it the best art possible, then you should 100% focus on your photography skills. [00:02:00] Get into that top 1% of photographers, spend 10,000 hours on your craft and become a master. Now, for all the other photographers listening here, I'm trying to teach you how to actually make a business.
You don't need to get into the top 1%. You don't even need to get into the top 10% photographers. In fact, if you put all your effort into getting into the top 1%, it'll actually take away from your business and serve as a distraction. Instead of focusing that time on getting better at photography, we're going to be developing different skills that complement and stack on top of each other.
All these skills together will make you a successful creative business owner. So what are these skills we're looking to learn? Lemme tell you a story. As creatives and photographers and videographers, we all start somewhere. Some of us have a natural talent and we don't need to work that hard to get better at it.
Others, like me had very little photography talent and had to work on their craft in order to improve it. We all start at the same place though. The first skill we learn is how to use a camera. We're handed this instrument that has all [00:03:00] these buttons and and dials and it's completely foreign to us. We need to learn how to set the aperture, how to adjust iso, how charter speed affects the final exposure.
How do we use out of focus, right? All these things we need to learn. These are the technical aspects of just taking a photo. Then when we learn that we need to learn other things, just because we know how to use a camera doesn't make us good photographers.
After we learn how to use a camera, we need to develop other skills in order to actually take a decent picture. We learn all about lighting principles. We learn about harsh light, soft light, where to position your subject relative to the light. Then we learn all about composition. Where is the subject going to be in the frame?
How do we balance the frame with different elements? How close are we to our subject? We need to learn all these things. We're stacking our skills here. We're learning how to use the camera, how to learn lighting, how to do composition. We need to learn how to direct people, how to pose our models. How are we gonna style scene if we're doing food or product photography.
[00:04:00] Now, once we learn all these skills, When we now do, we start coloring ourselves good photographers. We've developed all these skills. We learned how to use a camera. We learned composition and lighting and all these skills begin to stack in order for us to become that great photographer. Now that we understand this principle of skill stacking, what skills do we need to go from great photographer to great photography business owner?
Photography and photography business are two very different things. What are the next skills that we need to learn as photographers so that our businesses will be successful? Well, going back to the beginning of this episode, I said that just because you're a really good photographer doesn't mean you'll make any money from it.
The first new skill we need to learn is sales. Now, I'm not talking about becoming a door-to-door salesman. I'm not talking about becoming the wolf of Wall Street. That's not what selling is actually about. When I first learned that sales was the key to having a successful creative business, I was kind of turned off by the idea.
I'm an introverted guy. I [00:05:00] don't like being loud. I don't like being the center of attention. I just wanna do my own thing. But the more I learned about sales, the more I started to like it. Sales isn't about pushing your photography down people's throats. Sales is all about matchmaking. It's about identifying the potential clients that you can see benefiting from your service.
You know, you take good photos, you know that good photos will help your business. Assuming these, these two things are true, it's now your job to help as many businesses as possible. But the problem is that businesses don't know you exist. Your job becomes reaching out to these businesses and showing them how you can actually help them.
You reach out to the business, you show them what your service is. You mention how your service has helped similar businesses in the past, and you ask for a phone call. You talk over these specific problems that they're facing, and after addressing their concerns, you can send over a proposal and close that deal.
And that's selling in a nutshell. Identify people that can benefit from your service. Make yourself known to them and then show how you can help them. [00:06:00] Now we can stack this new skill of sales on top of our photography skillset. We know we take good photos and we know how to sell our photos. If you're a headshot photographer, your photos help people land jobs, or they help them land dates.
If you're a pro photographer, your photos help businesses sell more products and make more money. And by learning one extra skill, you can take your photography skillset and monetize it and actually make a living from it. You didn't have to get way, way, way better at photography. You just had to learn a bit about sales.
Now, just knowing sales, you'll be able to make enough money to live a comfortable life. You can easily make up to a hundred K a year just by learning sales. But if you wanna push that income up even more, all we need to do is stack on some new skills. Now, at this point, what we learn depends on what you actually like to do.
If you like the business side of things, you can learn about marketing and business operations. By learning marketing, you'll be able to attract more clients to you. Photographers can market themselves in a lot of [00:07:00] different ways. The easiest way to market yourself is to create social channels for your business and post consistently on there.
Make sure that these posts are targeted towards your dream co customer too. If you're selling product photography as a service. Don't post your nature photos, only post your product photos on there. Another way to market yourself is to utilize email marketing. You can create a lead magnet to collect emails, and from there you can send it to your email list and market emails to them every single week as a newsletter.
If you have no idea what a lead magnet is, you can actually go check out mine. Go to my website, put in your email address, and you'll get a free guide on how to start your creative business in 30 days. I provide you with the value of the checklist, and you provide me with the value of your email address.
Link to my website is in the show notes. Now, if you don't wanna learn marketing, that's fine. What other skills can we learn to increase our income? Well, if you're already good at photography and you understand lighting and composition, You can begin to learn video, learn the basics of video, and begin to offer 10 to 15 second videos for [00:08:00] clients as well.
By adding this new high value skillset to your product offering, you'll be able to charge way more for your packages. What's another skill we can learn? What about business operations? We can build out systems within our business that makes things run more efficiently. We can utilize softwares that save us time.
We can even begin to hire on contractors. Contractors will be able to form those mundane tasks. Like editing or searching for clients and at this point you can start to see how stacking all these skills is a lot more valuable than just getting better at photography. We went from a photographer that knows how to use one skillset, their photography to a full fledge creative business with multiple skill sets.
The photographer. Now knows photography. They know sales, they know marketing, they know video. They know business operations, and at each of these new levels of knowledge, their income goes up. Just being a photographer, you weren't earning much money, but then we stacked on sales and you were able to get a hundred K a year.
Then we stacked on marketing, business operations, video. And that a hundred [00:09:00] K can turn into 200 k plus. All by learning these new skills that complement each other, we're able to increase our market cap, our our income cap by a lot. Now at this point, assuming you've been able to grow your own social media accounts, you can even begin to offer a social media management for brands you work with.
You create all the content, manage their accounts, and for this, you charge a lot of money. You've stacked all these skills on top of each other, and you're able to form an agency that's bigger than just you. And because of this, you offer a lot of value. All that value translates to you being able to charge a lot more money.
And the best part of this approach is that you don't need to be that good at any of these skills. If you can become pretty decent at sales, pretty decent marketing, you'll be way more successful than if you put all your time trying to perfect your photography instead of trying to be the 99th percentile of one thing.
Try and get into the 90th or 80th percentile for multiple things. Remember, there are a lot of broke photographers out there that think they aren't good enough at photography. They don't realize they need to learn [00:10:00] new skills in order to actually make money. I want you to make money doing something you love.
That's my mission. That's why I do what I do. That's why I teach creatives. I made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I don't want you to make them as well. So if you found any value in this, I have a free workshop that walks you through the steps you have to take. It's in the show notes, 60 minutes full of value on how I get your first client.
I'll see you in there and I'll catch you in the next episode.
