Let’s face it, everyone wants to be able to make money with videos. Unfortunately, doing what we love may not always be very profitable. If you’re a videographer and you want some creative ideas to turn your passion for video into profits, this post is for you! Let’s take a look at some simple methods for you to profit with with your video skills.
1. Lights, Camera, YouTube!
Turn your passion into profit by starting your own YouTube channel. You may think YouTube is saturated, but there’s still plenty of opportunty to profit from this platform. Take the time to study what other videographers are doing on Youtube and identify content gaps within the videography niche.
Content gaps are topics where there’s a decent amount of search traffic, but not a lot of content being generated for the topic. You can utilize tools such as Google trends or VidIQ to help identify some high volume, low competition content gaps to start with.
With YouTube, you can monetize your skills beyond just getting a couple dollars with Adsense. You can utilize your channel as an opportunity to gain affiliate revenue for equipment you’re already using. Lenses, cameras, lights, editing software, the list goes on.
Find affiliate programs, whether Amazon or the brands themselves and link to them when you talk about the equipement. The key to effectively using this strategy, is making sure that you’re honest and genuine with your audience. Let them know upfront that the links are affiliate links and they’ll benefit your channel, but the affiliate partnerships won’t skew your reviews!
Your profitablity with YouTube doesn’t just end at affiliate links though. As you create quality content around videography, you begin to show yourself as an authority in your field. You can utilize the platform to showcase examples of your work in relation to the topic you’re covering and open doors for new clients and sponsorships.
For example, if you’re talking about real estate videography, you can use some of your work as examples and add a link in the description to your website for any business inquiries. YouTube can be a powerful tool to not only make money with videos, but also to help you advertise and market your skills as a videographer!
2. Master Your Craft, Teach Your Passion
Another way to make money with videos, is to sell educational courses related to videography. Educational content has skyrocketed in popularity over the past few years. During Covid, many people took the time to learn new skills online and that comfort with remote learning has definitely stuck around. Even if you’re not a world class videographer, you still have more knowledge and expertise than the average person that’s dipping their toes into the field. You can monetize that knowledge by creating helpful, content rich courses that cover different elements of videography.
Take your time when it comes to creating your course. The mindset shouldn’t be, “How quickly can I get this up, so I can make bank!” Your attitude should be focused on how effective and practical can you make the information you’re sharing. Focus on creating a powerful and useful product and the money will take care of itself! Creating a course is another opportunity to showcase your videography skills as well. The lighting, composition and cinematography you use on your course, shows students that you’re well skilled in the things you’re teaching! It’s a total belief stealer when you watch a videography course that looks and sounds awful. Why would anyone trust what you’re teaching if you don’t apply it yourself!
There are many platforms that you can utilize to host and market your course. One of my favorite platforms for courses is Thinkific. They offer a huge collection of features for free, plus they allow you to host one course at no cost! It’s a great platform to start your educational journey on. I also recommend posting your course on popular course plarforms such as Udemy and Skillshare. These can be very helpful in giving your course more exposure.
3. Play the Stock Game
Stock footage is another way for you to make money with videos. If you’re a videographer, I can almost guarantee that you have a hard drive… or more filled with old footage. Videographers tend to hoard footage, now we can turn that footage into profit. Stock footage is a great way to make money with video by selling clips to vendors and others that may need it. My favorite approach to selling stock footage has been with Blackbox.io
Blackbox is a platform that allows you to upload your stock footage clips once and then have them distributed to multiple stock agencies. Blackbox works with multiple different agencies like Pond5 and others to expose your footage. If you’re consistant with uploading quality footage on Blackbox, you can create a decent amount of income. I’ve generated over $400 with footage that I’ve uploaded on Blackbox the past 5 years and I’ve been TERRIBLE in terms of my consistency.
So those are a few ideas on ways to make money with video. There are many more ideas out there, but these should hopefully get youb started in your journey to profit!
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