21 Ways to Make Money as a Landscape Photographer
Landscape photography is a notoriously competitive and difficult niche to make a living in. As a landscape photographer, it pays to be flexible and diversify your income stream, there’s certainly no reason to limit yourself to selling just prints. My day job before becoming interested in landscape photography was as a digital business coach working with business owners from all over the world. To succeed, I quickly recognised that people can sell: Their time, Their products (or other people’s products), and Their knowledge. Ideally all 3! And photographers are no different.
Breakdown of Revenue Opportunities
In this post, you’ll find an in-depth breakdown of 21 of the best ways to make money as a landscape photographer. Check it out:
- Sell your prints online (the right way)
- Earn big money as an affiliate
- Sell your work as an NFT (or not?)
- Sell a photo-subscription service
- Earn money as an influencer
- Sell your work in a gallery
- Sell your work in a market
- Put on an exhibition
- Run a workshop or course
- Run a photo tour adventure
- Mentor another photographer
- Run an online masterclass
- Get a salaried photography job
- Get published!
- Become a product ambassador
- Make money from your stock photos
- Earn ad revenue from YouTube
- Get paying patrons with Patreon
- Expand your range of merchandise
- Sell your own digital products
- Sell your own online course
Selling Your Prints Online
Show me a landscape photographer who DOESN’T sell prints? Okay, so there is Peter McKinnon. Peter McKinnon, landscape photographer, makes $2m a year, sells zero prints. Not surprisingly, however, this is a huge revenue stream for most landscape photographers. It’s easy to sell the odd print online, but much more difficult to make a living from it. Selling online is both an art and a science.
Anyone can set up a website with a shop these days, put some prints on it and wait for customers to turn up, but that’s like printing a business card and never handing it out to anyone! I’ve seen people spend thousands on website design only to leave it at that and then wait for customers to turn up! Another name for this approach is ‘Hope Marketing’ - hoping customers will discover them.
The Secret to Success: Run Regular Campaigns
The secret to selling online therefore is not how good your website looks. It’s much more to do with how many campaigns you run to drive potential customers (known as traffic) to it with a strong reason to BUY. Whatever campaign you run, it needs three things:
- A start date
- An end date
- A budget (even if it’s zero)
The benefit of running a campaign this way is you can go back and measure how it performed. If you’ve got a large social media following then that definitely helps, but that’s not the complete answer either.
Implementing a Professional Sales Funnel
The next thing you need to sell prints from your website is a sales funnel. You can imagine a sales funnel as an inverted triangle, with high numbers of followers at the top representing your social media and social video (YouTube) followers. Followed by an email list of potential leads in the middle. And finally, a smaller number of customers at the bottom who purchase on your website.
The key steps of my online sales funnel are as follows:
- Grow my social media follower base
- Make offers to my social media followers to encourage the keenest to join my email list
- Send sales messages to my email list with a reason to buy on my website
Around 97% of your social media followers will never be customers. A staggering 95% of people who visit your website will never return! It pays to understand that not everyone is ready to buy from you yet.
The Creative Industry Context
The creative sector includes artists, musicians, writers and performers, as well as makers of all kinds, including photographers. The sector is dominated by freelancers and small businesses. Employees with diverse specialisms are needed, and the creative sector is growing fast and has seen significant investment in recent years.