Episode 123 – Pivot & Shift with Alternative Revenue Streams

Transcription was done by Rev.com, using their AI (artificial intellegence) generated transcript. The transcript may contain spelling, grammar, and other errors, and is not a substitute for watching the video or listening to the episode.

Welcome to episode 123. My name is Scott Wyden. Kivowitz today is another pivot and shift episode. But instead of talking to a guest, I thought I would share some of my advice about what you could do. If you are a photographer in a situation where you just aren't getting clients right now, where you're not getting the photography work that you would normally get in-person because of everything going on. Now, of course the vaccines scenes are out there slowly dripping out to the world. And eventually a lot of the population of the world will be vaccined hopefully of course there's always going to be people who are anti-vaccine, but that's a whole nother ball game. So things are slowly getting back to normal or some sort of normalcy. I mean, we're seeing restaurants reopened in all of these different things. Schools are starting to reopen in person.

Now I want to get to this topic though, because it's, it's hard, you know, as photographers, we rely on looking through a camera, pushing that button, editing those photos and delivering them to clients in other print or digital form or whatever. But we need to start looking at alternative revenue streams. So I want to share some things that you could consider for yourself, photography business. And of course, hopefully this inspires you to find something that might work more, you know, more suitable to your needs depending on your Gianna photography, your niche, things like that, that, so the first would be private lessons to customers, for example, either virtually or in person, but distant. If you're in person, you could provide tutorials, lessons, you know, private one on one sessions where you're offering advice and teaching your clients. Let's say parents, for example, to make better photos of their kids, this is something you can easily do through zoom.

This is something you can easily do that through FaceTime or Skype or a Facebook room or whatever. It doesn't make a difference. You could do it in person. But, but yeah, that's, that's one thing you can do. Another would be private lessons again, but on photo album or photo book creation, Shutterfly to create a book. And of course this isn't something that you would probably use for your own photography business, but it's a consumer friendly model that you can offer advice on layouts and what works best and you know, which photos should you use with the other photos on the page and things like that. Another might be photo scanning. Now you could do this with you camera. You can get a you know, set up a station and scan photos for your clients. Of course, if you have the technology you could also, you could also do you know, scanning and you could even do a eight millimeter fill a, you know, reels of video, you know, old footage.

You can, you could scan that and digitize that rather, but photo scanning you could do with your camera. And if you want to use your phone, there's even a fantastic app called photo mine. That's M Y any photo mine. And they have a great app, a great system for digitally scanning photos with your phone and it even restores it and can even colorize old photos. So that's another great service that you could offer and photo mine does charge, but if you're charging your clients for this service, you're going to pay that back very fast. Another would be family, tree creation. A lot of families want to have a family tree, and you could do that. You could assist them with that process. And in fact, this sort of ties into photo scanning because you could actually include that, bundle that in to a, to a service and, and, you know, scan old photos and, and create a family tree.

And again, photo mine has a great family tree app. That is really good. Really impressive. Probably the most impressive family tree app I've seen anywhere. So there's that. And by the way, if you are going to be scanning photos for clients, quarantine, the photos for let's say four or five days before you actually, you know, touch them. So like bring them into your house or your studio, wherever, leave them in whatever box that it's in for, for even a week and then work on it a week later, the next thing would be doing now, if you're, if your clients are business people, if you do headshots, if you do personal branding is to do branding advice to do business advice for your client, right? So for example, you could eat in there, zoom calls. They are now doing zoom meetings, like you're doing zoom meetings.

So you can aid in that process and help them lay out the room, which you could even do virtually, by the way, you don't actually have to go there. You could aid in that process, or you can charge extra to actually go in and do it for them, including lighting and things like that. And you just obviously have to mask up and, and wear PPE gear wherever you can, and even request that you're the only one in the room and in that kind of stuff. So that's another thing you can do is use your skills as a photographer, as a videographer someone who is an expert in lighting and in cameras, and to make your clients look good on camera. Now, something else is something like what I'm doing right now. And that is photographer education. You, as a photographer have knowledge, you have expertise, you have skills and something that you could teach to newcomers to the industry.

So you could use your skills to teach photographers about photography and the photography business. You can do this through courses on your website, through private lessons or resume or whatever through books e-books and through videos, you can put it on YouTube. You can make them private videos, whatever it is, the last alternative revenue stream I want to talk about is stock photography. Now some photographers, stock photography is that our business. So you don't really have to worry about this as much, but for photographers who are still struggling to use their camera to make revenue, there is stock photography, and you could do this and put it up on high stock or Getty or wherever, Stocksy, places like that, and, and earn money you could, if you want to go the alternative route and make it free stock, that you then try to upsell let's say like a personal license you can up sell to a commercial license, something like that.

Or you could just try selling stock on your own and nextgen gallery next to pro products that we at Imagely make is actually perfect for selling stock on your WordPress website. So if you want to sell stock photography on WordPress, check out nextgen pro, you could do that quite easily. Actually. Now I want to hear from you, if you have an alternative revenue stream that you would like to share, please go to imagely.com/podcast/123, and share with us, leave a comment and share your suggestions for alternative revenue streams that photographers can do right now to make more money in their business. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you in the next episode.