Earn Cash With Your Camera – 3 Easy Steps!

If photography is your passion, if you dream at night of lighting patterns and poses, if you spend all your spare time studying techniques, shutter speeds, aperture settings then clearly working as a paid professional photographer would be a dream job. So, why aren’t you? For most of us, we just don’t know where or how to begin.

Every time someone we know gets married, they hound us to “take a few shots”. Whenever one of our friends needs a portrait done, we are the first one they turn to. So, we know we have talent and we’re starting to get tired of working for free. Especially when we see professionals making thousands of dollars for work that isn’t as good as ours!

We don’t really want to work as a photographer in one of the mall portrait studios – we’d feel like a clown if we had to wear one of those beanies with a propeller on top. Plus, they don’t seem to value creativity. The lighting is the same on every session – and so are the poses. And who can live on minimum wage?

What should we do? If we take a mall job at least we’d be working as a photographer but our dreams will atrophy and die a slow agonizing death. We could get a job as an underpaid assistant or unpaid intern and work for another photographer. Of course we would spend all day lugging around equipment and never getting to even look through the lens of the camera. But, maybe someday

Or, we could cut through all the baloney and start our own photography business.

Starting our own photo business is not difficult. At first, all we really need to understand are the basic poses and lighting patterns. Watching the mall shooters taught us that! Most of our customers have never been offered more than that. And, if our friends really ARE after us to do their photos, it proves we already know the basics!

So, as long as we include them in every session, we can be sure of making sales. Then we’re free to get creative and include our own style and vision. This is what will separate us from the crowd, give us the career of our dreams and by cutting out all the corporate middlemen we’ll be making a pretty good living too.

So, of the three steps to a career of our fantasies, the first step is the hardest. We need to dig down deep and find the courage to get started.

A lot of photographers try to skip step #2 but don’t. It can and will get you into a lot of trouble down the road and it’s easier to just get it out of the way in the beginning. Step #2 is to set up the mechanical side of the business. Your business license, bookkeeping records (any accountant can show you what you need) a business checking account, business cards and look into getting an account so you can accept credit/debit cards. True it’s all a huge pain in the patootie but if you get it out of the way, you can rest easy and avoid future problems.

The third step is generating customers. Worrying about this one is what stops most of us from going ahead.

Hooray! Step three is actually the easiest and most fun of the three! Once you stop to consider how large your market is, you will see opportunity EVERYWHERE. There’re family portraits, headshots, Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, weddings, schools, dance recitals and the list goes on and on.

So, finding paying customers is no problem. Plus – at least in my experience – the general public are turning to professionals for their photographic needs more and more all the time. It’s a growth industry.

Finding an inexpensive way to locate potential clients and have them clamoring for your services is where I come in. Teaching you how to do that is my specialty and by clicking the link in the author bio box, you will be sent to my FREE photo marketing newsletter. Plus you get a free ebook. You can be cashing checks – for YOUR photography – in as little as two weeks. Give it a shot, there’s nothing to lose.

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