The year 2022 is an excellent time for all you talented individuals and aspiring entrepreneurs to start their own businesses. If you are into photography, you can start offering your photography services as a full-fledged photography business.
There is no need to feel overwhelmed at the thought, even if you have never run a business before. As we approach the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us have realized that we need more financial freedom in our careers and profession. Some of us started side hustles during the lockdown, while others started working as freelancers or remote workers. These activities have opened paths for new ideas and opportunities to make money for most of us.
It is now time to capitalize on all the new skills learned, new means to make money, and new business structures. What can be more interesting than making money by practicing what you are most passionate about?
If you are passionate about photography, this is the time to start a photography business. This is the kind of business where your capital budget expenditure will be at the bare minimum. If you have already worked as a photographer, you would definitely have all the basic equipment required to do professional photography. That’s why the cost to start a photography business is very low.
To turn your photography career into a photography business, you would not need to invest in anything further than the necessary equipment you already possess, at least not initially. All you need to do is start marketing your services and try to get a few good clients.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Once your initiative starts turning into a successful photography business, you could consider opening an office, buying more exclusive equipment, upgrading your camera, and promoting your services through paid ads. But in the beginning, you could choose to keep things low-key. Starting a photography business does not have to be a big deal in the digitized world we live in nowadays. As long as you can build an online presence to market your photography business organically, you could be on the go.
This article is like a photography business guide that you can use to start a photography business. We will go through the step-by-step process of building a photography business from scratch. Make sure to read until the end so that you would know how simple the process is.
6 Steps to Start a Photography Business
Here are the 6 simple steps you need to take for starting a photography business in this day and age.
1. Discover Your Specialty
What kind of photography are you interested in? Even within the field of running a photography business, you need to identify your particular niche. Do you like doing lifestyle photography or event photography? Do you want to take pictures of people, or do you enjoy animal photography?
If you are already a professional photographer, you would already know which genre of photography you want to pursue as a business. You can also choose multiple genres, as long as they are related to each other. The niche that you select will be the direction in which you will build your personal brand.
2. Prepare a Business Plan
You need to look into the important starting points before investing full time in your photography business initiative. Find out how much is the estimated cost to start a photography business. Calculate how much your initial capital expenditure would be, and confirm if you have the means to get that kind of funding. Even if it requires you the bare minimum to start your initiative as an online business, you still need to make sure that the necessary funds are available.
Prepare a simple draft of your marketing plan. Estimate roughly how much you want to allocate for paid advertising in the first few months and how much traffic you want to gain organically. Your sales funnel would determine how accurately you target your audience.
3. Get the Basic Equipment Ready
If you are a professional photographer, you would most likely not need to invest in any extra equipment than what you already possess. However, sometimes it is a good idea to upgrade your equipment, perhaps by buying a new camera, to get into the feel of starting your new photography business. You wouldn’t need any more equipment to begin besides a good quality camera, a tripod, a lightbox, and a simple photo editing tool.
4. Build Your Portfolio
Gather up all the quality photographs you have taken as your passion or during your photography career. Use them to showcase as your portfolio to market your photography business. You might even want to take some new photographs as part of this step. Make sure your portfolio is neatly organized, has a variety of photography, and displays high-quality pictures taken from a good camera and edited professionally if required.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
5. Develop a Photography Website
One of the most important things for anybody starting a business in this day and age is to create a professional website. Your website will serve as a one-stop platform for you to showcase your photography business. You will upload your portfolio on the site, and promote it to get traffic to it to get the word out about your services.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
When you are just starting off, you need a basic website with an appealing and user-friendly design that doesn’t cost you much to build. The best thing to do is use a website builder to create your website on your own.
Strikingly allows you to build your own website and launch it within a couple of hours without writing any code at all. Our easy-to-use interface enables you to add content to your web pages using our drag-and-drop feature. You can add different sections to the site to upload as many photographs as you want, integrate the site with your social media pages, build a contact form, attach a blog, and do more such interesting things.
Image taken from Strikingly
The quality of your online presence will make a big difference to the success of your photography business. That’s why you need to make sure that your website is top-notch, and makes you stand out from the competition.
6. Market Your Photography Business
Once your website is ready, your main focus should be on digital marketing for your photography business. Keep posting fresh photographs on your social media pages to update your portfolio regularly.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you are into writing, you can add a blog section to your website and write a few articles to demonstrate your expertise in the photography field. Content marketing is a great organic way of establishing your authority in the respective industry.
As you grow your business, you might want to consider running paid ads to enhance your brand awareness and get more clients.
How to Create a Photography Website on Strikingly?
Strikingly is a website-building platform that allows aspiring entrepreneurs to develop fantastic websites to promote their business initiatives. We have many users across the globe who have successfully launched a complete website on our platform within just a few hours. Follow these steps to build an awesome website for your photography business on Strikingly.
- Visit our landing page and sign up for your free Strikingly account.
- You will be taken to your dashboard. Click ‘Create New Site’ to access our website templates.
- Select the template that you want to use. You will now be able to access your Strikingly editor.
- Insert any text that you want your website to have. Talk about your background, your expertise, the kind of photography you do, any clients you have served in the past, your contact details.
- Upload your portfolio in the form of images.
- Publish your website to make it go live.
The best part about building your website on our platform is that you can edit and update your site’s content any time you like, without having to request a web developer to do it for you.
As you grow your business, you can add more sections to your website. If you want to sell your services and accept payments online, you can add a simple store section to the site. Choose from the payment gateways available on Strikingly and sell your photography directly from your website.
If you face any trouble using any of our tools, you can get in touch with us with your inquiry through our live chat customer support. Our support staff is available 24/7 to assist you with any technical matters regarding your website.
Our objective at Strikingly is to provide our users smooth-flowing websites that are attractive and easy to navigate for your prospects. When your website looks good, it builds a good brand reputation. If your site is optimized for search engines, you will not face much difficulty in attracting clients for your photography business.
