1. Why Affiliate Marketing? Why Now?
The pandemic was a harsh wake-up call for a lot of photographers. Stuck at home and being unable to shoot, many panicked as they watched their income completely stop.
Some people were able to pivot quickly and launch courses or education offerings, but even then, selling to an industry of out-of-work photographers was a challenge for many. Others supplemented their income via other means, even by getting part-time jobs.
But the lessons learned were clear – having all your income coming from one income stream and service is fine when things are going well. But if you can’t do that one thing, the income stops. And many people vowed that post-pandemic, they would diversify their income so that if they couldn’t do that one thing (aka photographing people in-person), they had other ways of making money set up too.
And with all the instability and uncertainty happening in the world right now, having a diverse set of income streams isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.
Common Ways Photographers Diversify Their Income
The most popular ways photographers diversify their income outside of their main niche of photography are:
- Creating an online course
- Mentoring other photographers
- Teaching photography
- Selling presets, Photoshop actions, or templates
- Branching out into other areas of photography
- Stock photography
All of these income diversification streams can work really well. But when I hear them being described as “passive income”, I have to strongly disagree.
Creating any new offering can take a lot of time. Many people overlook how many hours it takes to create an online course or other digital products. And it’s not just creating the product itself. You also have to market it. And there’s no guarantee that people will buy it. Lots of photographers are lured into a false sense of security when their network tells them they will buy a course if they launch one, but when it comes to people putting their money where their mouth is, the reality can often be a different story.
Even moving into a new area of photography can take time to show results. If you want to move from weddings into corporate event photography, there’s going to be a period of time where you’re marketing and networking to create a new client list.
Affiliate Marketing – The Closest To Passive Income You Can Get?
I think the power of affiliate marketing is often overlooked by photographers. It’s often associated with social media influencers or YouTubers who promote products on their channels or bloggers who only publish product reviews.
But affiliate marketing can be a way to add in additional income through your existing brand, content, and workflows in a way that adds value to your audience. You don’t have to create extra content you wouldn’t be creating anyway. It can work seamlessly with how many photographers already are serving their existing audiences. And I don’t understand why more people don’t fully embrace it.
So I want this course to change that!
My Journey with Affiliate Marketing
I started to integrate affiliate links into my existing strategy in late 2019, just in a small way to start with. It started with Amazon links and grew from there.
When weddings in Europe came to a complete stop during the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, I was glad I’d already done some groundwork. I continued to build on what I’d already done, and after a couple of months, I was earning €200-300 a month from affiliate commissions, and in some months, over €1000.
It worked for me because I understand the following:
- Who my target audience is & what they are searching for
- How to use affiliate marketing in a way that focuses on delivering value and being of service to my audience as the primary focus
- SEO, keyword & topic research to give my post a better chance of ranking for a wider audience
In this course, I want to teach you how I did this for my business and how you can do the same for your audience too.
The first step is to look more closely at what affiliate marketing is and how it works…