Travel Photography: Becoming a Professional Travel Photographer

1. Introduction: I think for many of us, becoming a professional travel photographer is the ultimate dream. Getting paid to travel the world and do one of the things that we loved most, take photos, is absolutely amazing. I also think that most people don't believe that that's a reality. But from experience, I can tell you that it is. My name is Sean Dalton and I'm a professional travel and lifestyle photographer from San Francisco, California. I spent 335 days of the year outside my home country, traveling to places that inspire me and places that I've always wanted to visit and I get paid to do this. But I didn't always have this life. Three years ago I finished my master's degree in a field that I was passionate about and that I loved. But at the end of the day, it wasn't my ultimate dream. I had put photography on the side during my studies. But traveling again reignited that passion within me. I just couldn't put my camera down. I fell into the role as a travel photographer. It just happened and I was traveling and I wanted to continue traveling and I needed a way to make money. I figured it out and I taught myself how to monetize my photography so I can continue traveling the world like I do today. Today in this course, I'm going to share those things that I've learned over the years, so that you can follow in my footsteps and become a professional travel photographer as well. In this course we're going to talk about the steps you can take to becoming a professional travel photographer. I'm going to discuss several ways to generate income while abroad and help you navigate the process for starting your career as a professional travel photographer, is it easy? No. Is it life changing? Absolutely. I know for a fact that if you take this course, you can do it. This course is basically for anybody that has an interest in traveling the world and taking photos for a living. Maybe you've always dreamed of becoming a professional travel photographer, but you just didn't know how to do it or maybe this is your first time ever hearing about it and you're just intrigued. At the end of the day, no matter who you are, this course is going to help you think outside the box so you can start working for yourself, traveling the world and doing one of the things that you love to do most, taking photos. With that said guys, I really hope you take the time to enroll in this course. We have a lot of stuff we're going to talk about. I think you will find it valuable. With that said, let's get into it. 2. What is a travel photographer?: Let me start off by saying, thank you for taking the time to enroll in this course guys, I am so excited about this one. I've been teaching online for a while, but I think this course is the one that I'm most passionate about because this is who I am, this is what I do, and I'm so excited to teach this to you. All right, so what is travel photography? I think for a lot of us when we think of travel photography we think of landscapes, and epic cliff side photos of you standing on the edge of a waterfall or something really cool and really epic like that, and yes, 100 percent, this is travel photography, and if you become a professional travel photographer you can, and you will be able to take photos like this. But with that said, oftentimes these types of photos, what we originally think of as travel photos don't necessarily bring in money, unless you have a massive social media following, it's really hard to monetize this style of photography, and why is that? Well, at the end of the day the reason is because these types of photos don't really make money for other people, and at the end of the day, as a photographer, that's what you're doing you are taking photos to help other businesses make more money. This idea is a little bit more complex, so I want you to keep this in your mind for the rest of the course because we are going to be using it as an example in future lessons and we're going to break it down as we go on. Because of that, I define travel photography as any form of photography done while you're abroad, and done with the purpose of allowing you to continue to travel and live abroad and just have an overall more free life. Sometimes travel photography will be as sexy as taking those epic cliff side landscape photos, or taking really a moody an emotional street photography, but sometimes it won't. But at the end of the day, all the money-making methods I mentioned in this course will allow you to live abroad and do whatever you want, so even if you're not getting paid to take those epic cliff side photos, you can do it while you're not working. No matter what, you're going to be able to do whatever style of photography that you like to do, because you're going to have the freedom to travel and engage in any artistic process that you want. I want you to keep this in mind for the rest of the course, and evaluate how each of the money-making methods I mentioned align with your experiences, your style of photography, your mindset, and your goals. 3. Is it a reality for you?: In the introduction to this course, I mentioned that this isn't particularly an easy process. A lot of us have significant others. We have jobs, we have school, we have pets, we can't just necessarily get up and leave, and I 100 percent understand that, but there's always a way. In my situation, I got a job working for an NGO abroad. I was working for them and while I was working for them, I was able to develop a lot of connections in the city that I was in. So when I finally did leave that job after my contract ended, I had clients lined up for me to shoot with. At first, it wasn't a lot, but I didn't need that much in the beginning because I was okay with living on the bare minimum and just being able to travel because at the end of the day that was the most important thing for me, is making enough money to sustain my travels. Which at the end of the day really isn't that expensive if you go to the right places. For a lot of you watching this course, you're probably thinking, okay, it's not easy for me to just do this, Sean. Yes, I understand that and I think it's going to be very difficult if you try to do this full time in the beginning 24/7 but you don't need to become a full time travel photographer. This is something that you can do part-time. So maybe when you have time off from your job, you can go travel and make money that way. Instead of just going to travel and spending money, you can actually go and earn money. Then as time goes on, you can transition into this role as a traveling photographer. It doesn't need to happen right now. It doesn't mean you just leave your job and become a full-time professional travel photographer. It takes time to build up but once you do, you will have all the freedom you can ever dream of. You can start small, you don't need to jump into right away. We're going to talk about some ways you can actually earn money as a travel photographer in your home country before you even leave your country to start traveling and when you do finally plan your trips, wherever that may be, wherever you want to go in the world, you'll understand how you can make money while you're in those locations. One thing I want to say is, you might not make a lot of money early on and this is especially true if you don't have a background in photography but if you're a successful photographer now and you're earning a lot of money wherever you are, you have the opportunity to make just as much money as you are doing now while traveling, and it's actually not that hard. But if you're not, don't worry there's ways to get there and there's no rush. Going off of that, you don't really need to make a lot of money especially early on. A lot of people think that traveling is so expensive and if you're going to be going to Western Europe, in Australia or more expensive countries, then yeah, it's going to be more of an expensive thing. But there're so many interesting and amazing countries around the world that aren't that expensive. Places in Southeast Asia, Central and South America, Eastern Europe. These locations are so affordable and even if you're only earning a few thousand dollars a month, you have complete freedom and you can go anywhere you want and you can use that time to continue to build, build, and build your portfolio and get more clients and eventually make more and more money. Like any career, travel photography takes time to develop, so don't be in a rush. You can get there. 4. Course Overview: Now it's the time you guys have all been waiting for. We're going to chat about the ways you can make money as a travel photographer. In this section, we're just going to overview everything. I want you to have an idea before we just jump into everything. In this section, we're going to talk about everything upfront. In short, I've organized these money-making methods based on the effectiveness of their potential to make money. We're going to start with techniques that typically don't make as much money and then we're going to end with techniques that do make more money. A lot of which that I use to sustain myself while I'm abroad. With that said, some people make money exclusively with the first few things on the list. It's not like those aren't viable methods, they just haven't been as viable for me or for the masses in general. But there are people that just make a killing doing the first few things on this list. Also know that this list is not exhaustive. There's a lot of ways you can make money as a travel photographer. My hope is that this list will help you think outside the box and allow you to think of more ideas, generate income abroad, but this is going to be a great starting point. These are techniques that I use and a lot of my friends used to make money as travel photographers. One more thing I want to know before we jump into it is that most traveler photographers utilize many of the techniques on this list, not just one. Sure some people will utilize one or two, but most people utilize all of them because as a travel photographer, having multiple streams of income is more beneficial for you. Even if each stream of income is really small, $500-1,000, it all adds up. If one of those things falls through, you have backups. If one of those things falls through, it's okay because the other forms of money-making methods will just carry you up so you can still live the life that you want to live. The first money-making method we're going to talk about is traditional journalism travel photography. Think about pitching a story to a magazine or a newspaper and going somewhere in the world to cover that story with your camera. This type of work can be super cool and you can really get immersed in different cultures around the world because you're on the ground level and you're doing photojournalism up-close and personal. It's also for the most adventurous people that want to go out and see how other people live their lives and really get a taste of a different culture. But unless you have a really extensive portfolio and you've been doing this for a while, this can be a tough way to make money, especially beginning. You're going to find that you're pitching stories most of the time and a lot of the time they're going to get rejected. But this is a viable method that I want to mention in this course. The second money-making method is stock photography. No matter who you are and no matter what methods you decide to pursue, in this course, you should be doing stock photography. Stock photography is essentially allowing other people online to purchase your photos. A lot of businesses around the world, they want stock photos because they will use them for their business endeavors, they put them on their website, in their magazines, etc. This is great because you can pretty much put any photo on stock. Somebody out there is going to be interested in your photos. No matter if it's coffee, or landscapes, or portraits, or business style photos, it doesn't matter what it is, somebody out there has a use for it. Stock photography is also great because it has the opportunity to become very passive. If you have a big portfolio of images and you put those on and a lot of people are purchasing them, that is a monthly stream of income that doesn't really stop as long as those photos keep traction and you pretty much don't do a thing. The third money-making method is the one that I use to make most of my money and that is direct client work. This can be in the form of shooting for businesses, local businesses, hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, or any local business that just needs photos. It can also be in the form of shooting for consumers, like shooting for families, shooting portraits, shooting couples, etc. One thing I want to know is that photography style is often very different depending on where you go in the world. For example, the style here in Thailand is a lot different than the style on the West Coast of California. Your style might be really appealing to another culture and you might stand out more than some of the local photographers. That's something to think about. The next money-making method is one that you probably haven't thought about and that is online teaching. Basically what I'm doing right now and that's teaching you something online. Everyone wants to learn something and the Internet is an incredibly powerful tool to earn money because there's millions of people out there. Even if you don't think that you're the best photographer, you are better than somebody else and you have something to teach. I know what you're thinking, Sean, online teaching is not travel photography. Yes, you're right, it is not technically travel photography, but it gives you the freedom to continue to travel and live anywhere you want to live. Even though it's not travel photography, it gives you the freedom to do travel photography on the side. Yeah, you shoot your course in the morning and in the afternoon, you go out you hit the beach, you climb a mountain, you go on an epic hike and you have your camera with you, and you take those travel photos because you have the freedom to do that. That's why, I think, this is one of those techniques that I couldn't leave out of the course because it's just so valuable. Online teaching has become a massive industry in recent years. It's just completely exploded and some people are making insane amounts of money teaching online. Whether you're a food photographer and you want to teach how to take epic food photos or you're a portrait photographer, or maybe you shoot something extremely niche. Maybe you're a newborn photographer, whatever, you know something more than somebody else and you have something to share. If you aren't comfortable teaching photography, teach something else, teach about writing, teach about cooking, teach about exercise. There is something that you're good at and there's something that you can teach. Even if your first language isn't English, some of the best courses I've taken were from people with strong accents and people that their first language wasn't English, but they still presented content in a really good way. Another great method that I highly recommend is travel blogging. This can be writing for your own blog or it can be writing for another person's blog as a guest writer and I'm going to teach you how to do that. You could be writing about photography, you could be writing about motherhood, you could be writing about cooking, you could be writing about fashion. It doesn't really matter. All of these things are going to give you the freedom to be a travel photographer. When I first started as a travel photographer, I earned a lot of my supplementary income through travel blogging, writing for other larger photography blogs. The reason for that is because these blogs need writers so they can publish more content that help their blogs earn more money, so they might sell digital products or things like that. There's always people out there willing to pay you to write for them. After I got developed as a writer and I developed my own blog and now I just write for my own blog. My blog earns money through things like preset cells, etc. Blogging is a super viable method and it's one of those things that you can start doing now before you actually leave your country. Even if you're not really comfortable writing about photography, like I said, you can write about anything that you are comfortable writing about. Whether that's, like I said, cooking or pretty much anything that you can think of, there's a blog for it. The last technique I want to mention is something that you're all familiar with and that is leveraging your social media following to help you earn money while you're abroad. This can be incredibly powerful. There's no limit to how much money you can make as an influencer. This can be a following you have on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter. It doesn't really matter what your social media is, if you have a following, there is a way to monetize it. At the end of the day, the traveler photographers that are making the most money have a ton of followers on Instagram or on YouTube because they are not only working for clients and getting paid that way, which they can charge more because they have an extensive portfolio, but also because they can leverage income from their following as well and there's nothing wrong with that. People have been doing that for hundreds of years. YouTube is arguably the best because you can create a really strong connection with your followers, but Instagram, Facebook, etc., those are all really close behind. It doesn't really matter what form of social media you're using, you can leverage that to generate more income for yourself, for your traveling blog. Those are just really quick overview, guys, and we're going to dive into each one of these. Before you start skipping around, I really want you to pay attention to each one of these lessons because they're viable for everybody. Just because I introduced it, you don't think it's for you. There's a lot of reasons as to why it might be for you. Watch every lesson. You're going to find them all very useful. 5. Course Project: For the class project, I want you guys to select two money-making methods in this course that you think are most relevant to you and write a few sentences about each one and how it fits into your business, your goals, your lifestyle, etc. Try to think outside the box here, so imagine you're doing that job. How would you do it? How does it fit into your goals, and what is your plan there? I also want to see if you guys have any extra suggestion. If you think that there's something that's even more relevant for you that I don't mention in this course, please, I would love to hear your suggestions on money-making methods outside of the things I mentioned in this course. Those are the two things you can do for the class project. I'll be taking a look at each one because this is super interesting and I want to give not only feed back, but I want to see what you guys say and I want to start a discussion around these different projects. Please, take the time to submit a course project. I'm really excited to see what you guys come up with. With that said, let's move on to the next section. 6. Photo Journalism & Documentary Photography: All right. So now it's time to really dive into these different topics we've mentioned in the previous sections. The first one is your traditional photo journalist or documentary photographer. So these are your traditional travel photographers. They work for NGOs, they were for magazines, they work for news agencies, basically anybody that wants photos on the ground wherever stuff is happening. This type of work is super, super cool because you get to really immerse yourself in different cultures around the world, and you get to go to some of the most remote areas on the planet to cover these really interesting stories that other people wouldn't ever get the chance to talk about, or to experience. A photojournalist are often tasked with covering different stories around the world. Maybe there's a natural disaster, they might get flown out to cover those stories. They might be covering political events. They might be covering anything big happening in the world that news agencies want to cover. I know a photographer that was working for Getty Images and he was flown out to Bangkok, Thailand to cover the King's death. After the king passed away, he was there on the ground taking photos at the funeral and the people there, and stuff like that. These photographers can also get contracted by websites like Getty Images, and they're basically paid a monthly stipend to stay within a region such as Southeast Asia and cover any story that comes up. They're paid maybe a couple $1000 a month to provide maybe 10 or 100 photos per month for this company. This is also incredibly difficult to get into, and you really have to have an extensive portfolio to get those monthly contracts. But it is much easier to get a onetime contract and you don't have to have a crazy portfolio for that. One of my first jobs as a travel photographer, I was contracted to visit a very small community in rural Vietnam with a team of researchers, and to basically capture the lives of these people in this community. Specifically, the older people in this community who are struggling with chronic diseases and stuff like that. We were focusing on revamping the health care system for Vietnam. My job was to go in and capture these people at the local level, and really rural area of Northern Vietnam, and to just depict how they lived their lives. It was amazing because we had a translator. We could speak with these people who not many people get to speak with. We've got to hear about their lives, their stories. We knew their age. We knew where they were from. We knew what they worked as growing up and we knew everything about their lives because we had that translator. This made it so special because we really got to connect with these people and learn so much more than we would if we were just standing there taking photos of them. Every photo that I took during this trip has a backstory. I know so much about the people in the photos and that's so much more meaningful than just taking a beautiful portrait. But if you can know a lot about the person in the portrait, I think it's much more meaningful, much more impactful. One of the women that we met on this trip, she was 97 years old and she told us how her husband had died in the war against the US. Her children had abandoned her because they were just too poor to take care of her and how she was relying on the community to take care of her. She seemed like a sad lady and it was very heartbreaking to hear her story. But it helps me decide how to depict her when we did do a portrait with her. To this day that was one of my most favorite portraits I've ever taken in my life because there's such beautiful backstory to it. It says a lot about who she is and who she was as a person. The photos from this project were super impactful because not only were my photos used in social media to raise awareness about these issues in the rural Vietnam. But it was also used on high-level publications that were sent to policymakers and things like that. These photos actually played a very significant role in creating change and bringing help to these people. I think that's where the power of this type of documentary photography really comes in is there is so much emotion behind it. It can really spark so much social change that can make the lives of a lot of people around the world much improved. If you start small with these smaller contract jobs like I did, working for these NGOs, the pay wasn't great but you're getting this really cool experience. You got it to develop an insanely good portfolio that you can use in the future for getting even higher contractor jobs. For getting contracts with Getty Images or contract with other big stock photography providers, with websites. You really get a portfolio that you can utilize for the rest of your career. That leads me into how do you get these type of jobs? Well, the first thing is like I said, you need a portfolio. If you have documentary style photos, put those in there. I don't recommend putting in any random portraiture or couple work. It must be related to the type of job that you're going to be applying for or searching for. I really recommend including some information in your portfolio. For this type of photography, they're not just looking for beautiful photos but they want to know that you are also telling a story. If you can have a beautiful image of a person in a documentary style, make sure that you also include some information about them on why you were there photographing them. If you have a series, include all of the photos and then have a small paragraph at the end explaining who they were, why you were there, what story you're covering, did a spark in any social change, etc. Like a glorified image caption. I actually scored my first two jobs as a documentary photographer basically just from my street photos that I had in China and I didn't really have a lot of information about those people. I just had really cool street photos of people in rural China. But I showed it that I had the ability to go into these communities and not be shy and take photos, and try my best to connect with them in a way to get them to show their true personality etc. My portfolio was not great for those first two jobs, but after I took those first few jobs it was much, much easier for me to get higher paying jobs with other NGOs in the future. After you've developed a portfolio, no matter how small, there's essentially three things you can do to find these jobs. The first thing you can do is to go on Google and do some research on the locations that you're looking to go. Find local NGOs and local news agencies that are in that location that you think you might have the potential to work with. Say you want to go to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You can type in NGOs in Rio de Janeiro. You can find NGOs, those are probably your best bets for finding those first few jobs and then you can also find news agencies within those areas, news agencies in Rio de Janeiro etc. You can play around with those keywords and how to find more businesses. Your job is to basically send them emails. Send as many e-mails as you can telling them who you are, what you want to do, and how you can benefit their cause. The reason why you're sending emails and not applying to jobs is because oftentimes these jobs are not highly publicized. The last thing on these people's minds is to find a photographer for work that they're doing. It is a great benefit for them but it's not always their main priority. You need to take the initiative to them. You need to contact them. Tell them who you are, and what you're about. Even if these don't turn into job right away, these are absolutely invaluable connections that you can utilize for the rest of your career as a travel photographer. Just those first few emails introducing yourself in a very way saying, "Do you guys have any positions open? As I'm a photographer. Do you have any positions open for photographers? I would love to join you on one of your campaigns or something like that." This especially works for NGOs. If they say "Yes," then you can continue talking about that. If they say "Yes, we don't have a budget for that, but we are accepting volunteers," that is something you can explore if you have the means to go out there, and work for them for free, that is a great way to develop that portfolio, like I said. Then you will get noticed by other NGOs in the area and you can really make a name for yourself. Mostly these jobs, yeah, they're going to be volunteer, or they're going to be short contracted jobs. They're going to be just a few days, one project, and you're going in there and fulfilling the needs of the contract, which maybe it's a 100, maybe it's 200 photos, and then you're pretty much done. But this is probably the most common way you're going to get into this type of photography, and it's the best way to find jobs; sending direct emails to these businesses. The second thing you could do, which I really don't recommend and it's more of like a traditional job searching method, is to go online to sites like indeed.com, upwork.com, any other sites that are hosting job postings from different companies around the world, and applying to jobs on those sites. But the chances of you finding jobs there as a photographer are rare. I don't really recommend using those websites to find jobs. The third thing you can do to find these jobs is to pitch stories to editorial magazines or news agencies. To do this, you need not only a really good idea, so having a good story that you could tell that will benefit this magazine or to this news agency in some way. But you really need a very strong portfolio that not only has beautiful images, but stories attached to those images as well. But what's so cool about this is that, if you do have a good portfolio, you have shot with a lot of smaller NGOs, then they will actually pay you. If you pitch a good enough story, they will fly you out to that location and let you cover that story on your own. That is really cool. Some of the best photojournalists, that's what they do. They get flown all around the world to cover these stories and depict it in a way that they want to depict it. This is great, but from my experience, from what I've heard from photographers that are doing this full time is, unless you know you're very popular, you're spending most of your time pitching stories. That can be a drain, that can be hard, trying to identify stories that you can cover around the world, and then finding the right magazines to pitch it to. I think this is something that comes along later in your career and it's not one of those things you should be focusing on now. But I didn't want to leave it out of the course because I think it is viable for some people. But like I said, this is the first thing on the list: Traditional photojournalism or documentary photography is the first thing on the list because I don't think it's the most powerful money-making method, but it is viable. But some of the next things we're going to cover in this course are going to be much more relevant to you and I think you'll find them much more useful. 7. Stock Photography: Stock photography. Chances are you've heard of it, and chances are you've seen stock photos. Actually, there's no doubt that you have some stock photos because stock photos are absolutely everywhere. A lot of the photos you've seen, advertisements, a lot of the photos that you see online, those are stock photos that were taken from a photographer that has nothing to do with the company that is shown in that image. Stock photography is really amazing because it has the potential to become completely passive. If you can upload a certain amount of photos that are really catching traction in various communities, they can get thousands and thousands of downloads generating you monthly income that is completely passive. You can be earning money when you're sitting on the beach drinking a margarita. That sounds pretty cool to me. As I said before, stock photography is basically selling your rights to your photos to other people online. They might be used in advertisements, they might be used for businesses, and they can also be used in things like blog posts. There are a ton of stock photography websites that you can sell on, but they really fall into two different categories. There's Microstock and Macrostock. Microstock websites, or also known as Royalty Free stock photography websites, is probably the easiest form of stock photography to get into. Essentially, you're paid based on how many downloads your photo gets. You'll get paid a lot less per image than you'll with macrostock, but the cool thing about microstock is you can sell on pretty much as many websites as you want. There's so many stock photography websites that you can sell on. Every time somebody downloads your photo, you might get $0.25 or $0.50 or whatever. These downloads can really add up over time. If your photo is going for $0.25 and it gets downloaded 1000 times, which isn't that unrealistic if it's a really good photo, that's $250 and that can scale as high as you want to go. If you have 1000 photos, and they're all getting downloaded 1000 times at $0.25, I'm not a mathematician, but I think that's a pretty decent amount of money. Macrostock websites are the other side of the equation, and it's also known as Rights Managed. Essentially, the only people that can use your photo are the ones that purchase it. Your photo will sell for a lot more on these sites because you're having less buyers. Whereas like on microstock, 1000 people can download your image, on macrostock maybe only one person has the right to buy that image and then after they buy that image nobody else can buy it. You could sell your image for $50 or $100, and then some people even sold their images for thousands of $, just because that image is so valuable for that company. With that said, it can be a lot harder to make a sale when it comes to macrostock. It's also a lot harder to get accepted to macrostock websites. For example, getty images you have to have a really good portfolio just to get accepted to sell on their website. Microstock might be better for you if you shoot certain things like landscapes, but at the end of the day, I don't think it's for most people. In this course we're going to be focusing more on microstock because it's the easiest one to get into and you can start making money today. As I said before, microstock allows you to sell on as many websites as you want. Why that's great is because if you publish one photo to ten or 20 websites, you have a much higher chance of that photo getting seen whereas if you only have it on one website. But with that said, it can be difficult to upload them all because first, you have to register to each site, you have to upload the photo, you have to add the keywords, and then you have to make sure it gets accepted and then after it gets accepted, you have to wait and see how long it takes for that photo to catch traction. But there are tools to make it easier. I am going to mention them later on in this section, but I do want to say in the beginning it's okay to just use maybe one or two microstock websites because it can be tough to publish all of them at the same time. When it comes to stock photography, you can pretty much put anything online, like absolutely anything. If you have a picture of a cat, I guarantee you somebody out there wants that picture of that cat to put on their cat blog or maybe they're selling cat products, and they need images of cats. Whatever. It can be absolutely anything. For example, a lot of my photos you guys will see in my Instagram is coffee. I started uploading those coffee photos to stock photography websites like Shutterstock. I was surprised because they started to get downloads, and after they get more downloads, they get ranked higher on the site, and then they get more and more and more downloads and compounds so you earn more and more money. Maybe you shoot landscapes, maybe you shoot still life, maybe you shoot family or portraits or weddings, whatever. Those photos can be used by somebody else online. The best part about stock photography is that you can do it right now. You're watching this course because you're a photographer and you have images sitting on your hard drive that maybe you shared on Instagram, on Facebook, six months ago, but now they're just siting there. What are you waiting for? Now is the best time to start because if this catches on, you can have that financial freedom to go travel and do whatever else you want to do. I recommend going through and finding your best photos. Maybe it's only ten photos, maybe it's 50, maybe it's 100, maybe you've been a photographer for 20 years and you have 10,000 photos. Well, that's great because the more photos you can get onto our stock photography website, the better chances you have of making money. It might be slow at first, but that's okay. It takes time to develop, but the more photos you have, the better they'll do. The most important thing when it comes to stock photography is workflow. The reason for that is because every time you upload a photo to a website, a stock photography website, you have to add keywords to that photo. After you've submitted the photo, you have to wait for it to get approved by whatever stock photography website you upload it to. There are several reasons why they will not approve your photo, but I digress because that is something else we can talk about later. The most important thing is workflow, uploading those photos and getting those keywords in. Luckily, I'm going to share my workflow with you guys. I found this incredibly awesome tool that allows me to upload one photo to a Dropbox folder and it gets Instantly uploaded to every stock photography website that I'm signed up to. This is called dropstock.io. There's a link in the description of this course that you guys can click it and check it out. Essentially, what you do is it creates a folder in your Dropbox account so when you upload a photo to that folder, it automatically gets sent out to all of the stock photography websites that you're registered to. Then all you have to do is go into those websites and hit submit. Then it will automatically go in for review. If you didn't use it to read like this, you would have to go in and manually upload to every single stock photography website that you're signed up to. That might not be a big deal if you're just uploading to one or two, but if you do more than that, you need this tool because it's just going to take you way too much time if you didn't. But workflow aside, there are a few things that I really think you should focus on when you're doing stock photography. The first thing is quality over quantity. If you have 10,000 photos that are really not that good, the chances of them getting downloaded are very low. But if you have 1,000 photos that are very good, there's a much higher chance of those photos getting downloaded. Think about it like this on Instagram. If there is an account that has 5,000 photos, but the photos are just garbage, they might not have a lot of followers because why would somebody follow them? Their content is not good. Whereas if there's a photographer that has absolutely stunning photos and it looks amazing and they only have 200 photos, who's going to have more followers? The person with the better content because quality over quantity, at the end of the day, that is the most important thing when it comes to stock photography. The more better images you can have, the better you're going to do on the website. The second tip I have for you is to have a wide variety of subject matter. Maybe you shoot a lot of different things. Maybe you shoot weddings, you shoot food, you shoot portraits, upload all of that. Because the more photos you have on the website, the higher chance you get of succeeding. If you're a food photographer and you only shoot food, while maybe food is just really not that hot right now for stock photography. It's good to have a variety because you can be able to see which type of photos are doing better and then you can start to focus on those more and more. Say you upload some food photos, you upload some portraits, you upload some landscape photos, you can kind of evaluate which ones are doing the best. Then you can kind of start focusing on that more and more when you taking photos. You can upload more of that content to the stock photography website. It'll really maximize your income. The third thing is keywording. Keywords are really important because there's no other way for people to find your photo unless you have good keywords. Really make sure you take the time to get the best keyword you can. Some keywords that you might want to add are based around the location that you're shooting in. If it's like a landscape photo, or exterior, interior photo, other location, at anything that is descriptive. Is it dark? Is it light? Are there are a lot of colors? Is it saturated? Et cetera. Really descriptive words. Any moods or emotions? Is it a happy photo? Is it a sad photo? Is it dark? Is it scary? Those are all really good keywords because those are words that people use to describe your photo. Basically, any word that you would use to describe your photo, no matter how far-fetched that is, add that into the keywords. When it comes to keywording, I have a really good tip that you should use. You can actually add keywords in Lightroom or capture one. Right when you export the photo directly to the draft stock folder, all those keywords are in the metadata of the photo. When it gets uploaded to the website, you don't have to add any keywords because they're all right there. It's pretty simple. In Lightroom, all you do is go to the library tab and then go to keywording, and then you can enter the keywords there. You could also create presets of keywords. If, for example, you shoot one specific thing quite often and you're often uploading photos of that similar content, you can just add a preset and it automatically adds all of those preset keywords to the image so it just cuts your workflow in half. The longer you do stock photography, the more preset profiles you build up so you can just upload those keyword presets, export the photo, and you're good to go. The next thing I want to talk about is if your photos are going to get accepted or rejected. You know what? A lot of the photos you're going to post are going to get rejected, especially if there's any dust in the photos, if they're blurry, if there's a lot of grain, but that's okay. If your photo gets denied, that's okay. It's not the end of the world. You have other photos you can add and you'll learn what they're looking for as you go on. You can eliminate some of those things that you were rejected for in the past. But don't get discouraged when you're getting rejected at first, it's going to happen and it's just part of the process. The next thing I want to mention is that every stock photography website, every stock photography library is different. They all focus on different things. Websites like Shutterstock or fotolia and istock are the ones that I recommend because they cover a lot of different things. But if you're shooting something very specific, there are very specific libraries for specific types of photos. Go online and just search microstock websites and you can find some really, really good ones. If you are interested in macrostock, I suggest a little bit more research and that's one of those things that's, like I said, it's a lot harder to get into, but it can be rewarding. But when it comes to stock photography, like I said, I recommend you guys get into it now. It's a fantastic way to earn some extra income, and it's one of those things that I've really enjoyed doing. I haven't been doing it for long, but it's been really rewarding for me even over the past few months. It's one of those things that I have to recommend to every photographer out there. 8. Client Work: Now we're going to talk about client work. As I mentioned in the overview section, this is the type of photography that earns me the most money every single month. I think this is probably going to be most relevant for you as well. A client working can entail many different things. Product photography, portrait, commercial shoots, food, wedding. It can also entail being contracted out by somebody that's not local. Maybe somebody's paying, a couple of 100 or a couple $1,000 a month to give them a specific amount of photos every month. That could be related to product photography. For example, some brands will send me their gear and I will shoot it no matter where I am and I'll send them the photo. Even though we're not talking directly, they're paying me and I'm working for them even though we're across the world from each other. If you have a particular photographic skill set, it is relevant no matter where you are in the world. For example, some of my friends are wedding photographers that specialize in allotments or travel destination weddings. Their clients, essentially pay them to travel to these amazing locations just to shoot their wedding. That is super cool. If you're a wedding photographer, you have the ability to do that as well. Plus, wedding photographers can really charge a premium and people that are willing to pay you to fly across the world to do a wedding, they have the means to pay you some big bucks. These photographers can make a ton of money. Most of my income comes from things like portrait work, professional portraits and food photography or menus. You've probably seen that on my website. These are just the things that I specialize in. Most of my clients nowadays come through word of mouth and through social media. When I first started out, like I said, it was slow. I had a few clients, but I built up my name in my community and I started to become recognized as a photographer that people could trust. Just like it is in your community, it works the same way everywhere else. This can take time to develop, but it's still not that difficult to find clients early on and I'm going to teach you how to do that. This is a topic area that I discussed quite heavily in my other course, becoming a professional photographer through portrait photography, and it's a course that I highly recommend taking if you are looking to expand your client work. But I do want to mention some of the things I talked about in that course, in this course because of the same principles for finding clients no matter where you are in the world. The first thing you need to have to find clients abroad is a good portfolio. The portfolio needs to be specific. For example, if you want to shoot food and menus and you want to contact hotels and restaurants to shoot their menus, you better have a good portfolio showing some of the food photos that you have taken for other businesses. At the same time, if you want to shoot portraits and stuff, you need to have a separate portfolio for that. Don't combine the two portfolios, make sure that every portfolio is separated. If you go on my website, you'll see that I have a portfolio for portraits, I have a portfolio for fashion, I have a portfolio for food, etc. If I want to send my portfolio to a specific business, I will send them the one that's most relevant to them. Okay, the next step is to make connections and basically find clients. One of the biggest tips I can give you for doing this, for making these connections, is what we talked about earlier. Go on and find local businesses that you think you could work with on Google and send them e-mails. That's a fantastic way to make connections. Even if it's just introducing yourself and saying, hey, this is me, this is my portfolio, I'd love to hear your guys thoughts if you want to work together, I would love to do something like that. Send as many e-mails as you can because these are connections that will be valuable no matter what. Even if they say no, which is going to happen 99 percent of the time, they will then know your name, they see your portfolio, and if they do need a photographer later down the line, "Hey I remember that guy send us that e-mail and his photos were gorgeous." Boom, your name comes up and you're ready to go. Another tip I have is to go on Facebook and join as many local groups as you can. I'm not talking just photography groups. I'm talking, expert groups, business groups, whatever. If you shoot newborns join a mothers' group in that area, join whatever group you're potential clientele is in. This is an absolutely fantastic place to find jobs because when you do shoot for those people, guess what they're going to do, they're going to go into those communities and share the photos that you took. That's something you can ask them to do as well. Then boom, so many more clients come through word of mouth. This is a technique that you can implement in the city that you're in now or in any city around the world. If you don't think that you're ready to start charging for those services, you can do it for free. You can go into those groups and say, "Hey guys, I'm doing a few shoots for free. The first five people to contact me, I'd love to shoot with you." Or you can just contact people one and one, and say, "Can I shoot with you?" That is a fantastic way to meet people in those communities in different cities across the world. That's a great way to make connections. It's a great way to get your name spread throughout those communities or that city so that you can get hired for future jobs. Building off of that, I really recommend shooting events for free. Go on Facebook and find different events or on meetup.com or whatever. Maybe you see a poster on city, contact the leader of that group and say, "Hey, I was wondering if I could drop by and take some photos of the event. Just free. I want to get to know the community a little bit and I just ask that you share the photos after with my watermark on it. That's all I ask." People are not going to say no to that. Why? Because they want free photos. You can go in and go to these free meetups and take photos for people and meet people and pass your business cards. You just made so many valuable connections. People are going to be talking to you if you have a camera. People always talk to me when I'm holding my camera. I don't know if it's an authority thing or whatever. People always want to talk to the photographer. So go be friendly, have a smile on your face, and shoot these communities. It's a great way to build connections, lasting connections that we'll score you more clients in the future. The next thing I want to talk about is Instagram. We've talked about Facebook, but for me, Instagram has been one of the biggest ways for me to get clients. The reason for that is because it's so easy to find local businesses through Instagram. Pretty much every business has an Instagram nowadays, whether it's a corporate business with an office building, or a restaurant, or a cafe, or a daycare center. Everyone has an Instagram nowadays. What's great about it, is that you can contact somebody and they can instantly see your portfolio. If you have a relevant portfolio, you can contact any business that is relevant to your work and say, "Hey, I love your work. I don't know if you guys are looking for a photographer. But if you are, I just want to let you know that I'm in your city and I'm willing to work with you guys" etc. You might be thinking, Sean I don't have a lot of followers, that's okay. The most important thing is to have quality photos that are relevant to the businesses that you want to shoot for. For example, I have friends that shoot very high-fashion in China, in Paris. One of my friends is from Peru who shoots high-fashion in China. He makes a ton of money shooting for these brands. He has like 1000 followers on Instagram. That is not how he gets his clients, but he has a beautiful collection of photos on his Instagram. So if he did contact somebody through his Instagram, they can automatically see his portfolio right there. It doesn't matter how many followers you have, it matters about the quality of the photos on your page. I have a few tips before we move on. The first one is to start now, start doing research on potential industries that you can shoot for in different places. Say you want to go to Eastern Europe or Europe. Well, find industries that you think you are qualified to shoot for in those areas and join Facebook groups that are revolving around those industries or those communities. Start sending e-mails, go on Instagram and make sure that you're uploading photos that are relevant to the industry that you want to shoot in and start building up that connection database so that when you do start going out and contacting clients, you automatically have credibility and you have knowledge about their business and you can help them grow their business by taking photos for them. So send DMs on Instagram, send private messages on Facebook, join groups, comment on photos, comment on posts, whatever it is. Just get out there and get your name out there. If you don't have a portfolio, that's totally fine. You can build one now. Just find something you want to focus on and shoot for free in whatever industry you want to do. Say it's portraiture, shoot with your friends, shoot with your family. Shoot their friends, shoot their family, and just get a general portfolio that you can utilize for finding clients later on. The next thing is to be prepared for rejection. A lot of places around the world don't necessarily hire foreigners. It's not within their cultures. So you need to make sure that whatever culture you are looking to explore and get to know, you need to make sure that it's okay for you to go there and take photos. For example, if you don't speak the language that might be a problem. Just know that English is a very powerful language and you can utilize it in a lot of different places around the world. English is a must-have unless you speak the local language. But don't get discouraged. You are going to get rejected, but don't get discouraged. There's always a way. That is one of the things I want to highlight in this course. Culture is a very important part of this. No matter what community you're working with, you need to make sure that you're being culturally appropriate for them. Do your research on the communities that you're looking to explore, and make sure that whatever country you're going to, you know about the people, about their cultures and their customs, know a few words of their language. Just make sure that you are being respectful to any of the cultures that you are going to visit around the world. So yes, client work is probably one of those things that is going to earn you the most money starting out. I mean, it's one of those things that I highly recommend getting into. I hope you guys take the time to talk about this one specifically in the class project. I think it's relevant for you and I want to know which area you are going to focus on the most. Whether it be portrait, food, hotels, etc. 9. Photography & Travel Blogging: Alright, so now we're going to talk about travel photography blogging. This is another great way to make money while abroad and it actually goes hand in hand with teaching. Photography blogging or travel blogging or pretty much blogging anything, can be a fantastic way to make some money while you're abroad. I know some travel bloggers here in Thailand that are making a killing through their blogs. It's amazing how much money they're making every month, just through their blogs. As I mentioned in the overview section, there are essentially two ways you can become a travel blogger. The first one is to have your own blog and the benefits of that is the more blog posts you have, the more you'll show up on Google. So when somebody searches something, they go to your website, they read your blog posts and then you have products there that you can sell them. So presets or e-books or online courses et cetera. Essentially, the more traffic you have in your website, the more opportunity you have to make money. With that said that takes time to develop. It's not like you're going to be able to build a successful blog overnight. So what I recommend doing first is the second thing that I want to talk about and that is blogging for other blogs on the internet. There are so many photography websites or any website that have blogs that need writers. The reason why they pay writers is because they need content for the website. It's essentially the more blog posts they have, the more traffic they get to their websites and the more products they can sell and that's why as some of the biggest blogs on the internet will pay you hundreds of dollars for single blog post because they need more traffic. It's a pretty cool concept, right? It's one that I didn't really know about until I got into travel photography and writing. Actually this really isn't that hard to get into. The most important thing, just like the other things that we've talked about is to have a portfolio. Have a compilation of blog posts that are relevant to the content that you want to write about, the blogs that you want to write about. If it's photography, makes sure that you have some articles that other people might be interested in reading, other photographers might be interested in reading. So it's important to choose a topic that you're knowledgeable about already. So if you're a photographer, you're knowledgeable about photography. You can write about that. If you're a painter, you can write about painting. If you're construction worker, you can read about construction working. I don't know. There's pretty much anything. There's a blog for everything. So make sure that your knowledgeable about that content area. Make sure that you have a portfolio of relevant blog posts that fit that content area. If you've never written for any blog before and you don't have your own blog. That's totally fine. You can create your own blog, your own fake blog posts. You can create a website for super cheap or free. Then you can add your own blog posts in that website. Make sure that even if the blog posts are fake, your formatting them with images, they are comprehensive, I think 1,500 to 2,500 words are the best blog posts. The more words, the better. So make sure you're really taking the time to write quality blog posts. If you need help formatting those first few blog posts, you can just go online and search blog posts template. There are so many ways you can write a blog post, but a lot of people have figured out what the best blog posts are doing the templates for the best blog posts. You can go online and find that. You can write those first few blog posts on your own blog to kind of develop a portfolio that you can share with other blogs that will eventually pay you to write for them. You can take a look at my blog as well. I have a few blog posts that are performing pretty well. For example, my article on prime lenses. You guys can check that out. There's a link below and I think this is a really good example of a blog post that's doing well. You can see it's very comprehensive. It's formatted well, has good pictures et cetera. So next thing you wanna do is try to find these blog writing jobs. There are essentially two ways you can do it. You can contact the blogs directly. So if you go and you find blogs that you like, that you think you're qualified to write for, you can contact them and say, "I'm interested in writing for you guys. Do you pay your writers?" If they do, you can write for them, you can become a writer. But even an even better way to do it is to go online, go to upwork.com, and search blog writer for whatever industry you're in. So if you want to find somebody that's hiring photography bloggers. You can type in photography blog writer and that will show up all the jobs or somebody who's hiring somebody to write blogs on photography. So I just want to upwork.com and I search for blog writer and it came up with over 3,500 different positions that people are hiring for. There are so many people out there that are hiring blog writers and you can get paid some pretty good money if you're a good writer. You can go in there and refine that Search, type in whatever industry you're in and search for people that are hiring for your niche. That's a great way to find people to pay you for writing blog posts. You can also find these jobs in Facebook groups in different communities online. So make sure you do your research, write-it is a good way as well. Just go online and get your name out there and kind of do your research. There are a lot of people hiring blow writers. So there are a lot of opportunities for you to excel and make some money through this. Like every other section in this course, I do have a few tips for blogging you should keep in mind. The first one is be prepared for rejection. Like everything in this course, you're going to have rejection, you're going to face rejection. It's a part of the process and that's totally fine. Take it in stride and just move onto the next one. The next thing is to focus on content when you're writing these blog posts, just like when we were talking about online teaching, make sure that the content is really dialed in. So, you're presenting as much content as possible, as much value to the reader as possible. The next tip I have for you is to write efficiently. The best blog writers know how to write efficiently. They can pump out some really good blog posts in a matter of hours or in a day. Don't spend too much time on one blog post. In the beginning, that's okay, that's what it's going to take. When doing your research, you're going to kind of learn what works for you. In the beginning, it's going to take awhile, but over time, if you want to do this as a career. You need to learn how to write efficiently. The last tip I have for you is. No matter what, make sure that you have your own blog, even if you're writing for other blogs, makes sure that you have your own blog that people can visit. Not only does it serve as a good portfolio, but over time that blog is going to grow and it's going to be self-sustaining. So you're not going to have to write for anybody else anymore. You can use your blog to generate income instead of writing for other blogs. So that's a tip that I really cannot highlight enough. Make sure you have your own blog and if you don't have one, get started now. 10. Online Teaching with Skillshare: Now, it's time to talk about what I'm doing right now, online teaching. A few years ago it would have never even crossed my mind that I could be an online teacher. I've always been confident my photography skills, but I never thought that I was good enough to teach it to somebody else. I think everyone has that little person inside of them that says, "No, you're not good enough to do that, you can't do that." Luckily, I had friends that really pushed me to do it. They said, "Sean, you're friendly, you are outgoing, you have amazing photos, just do it." So I did and I was shy at first and my first course was not great. But you know what? I've come a long way since then, and now I absolutely love being an online teacher and I'm so glad that I took the step to do it because it's been incredibly rewarding for me. It can be incredibly rewarding for you too, and that's why I added it into this course because if I can do it, then you can certainly do it too. You can teach anything nowadays. This course is on travel photography, and that's what I teach. I'm a photographer teacher and a lot of my friends are photography teachers as well. But if you don't feel confident teaching photography, like I said before, you can teach absolutely anything. Maybe you're teaching meditation or time management or organization, or you're teaching how to draw or paint. Whatever, it doesn't matter what you're teaching, there's somebody out there that wants to learn from you. Before we get into structuring your class and the steps that you need to take to actually publish your course and earn money from it. I want to talk about the different options you have for various online teaching platforms. Of course, on the top of the list is skillshare.com. I'm sure you're probably familiar with it because you're watching my course right now on skillshare.com. The reason why I recommend Skillshare so much is because it's incredibly easy to upload a course. The support is very good, and you don't necessarily need to have a crazy extensive course for it to do well. Because of the fact that people pay monthly to be subscribed to the website, as long as your content is covering a decent amount of stuff, it's okay. People aren't expecting insane amounts of content in every one of your courses. The most difficult part about teaching is actually not creating the course, it's not coming up with content, it's just getting started. Like I said, everyone has that person in their head that's saying, No, you cannot teach, you have nothing to teach. You're not better than anybody else, but you are, I guarantee you, you are. There's something you can teach to somebody else. My job in this course is to make it easier for you. If you follow the steps that I'm about to talk about, you can have a course online in less than a month and you can start earning money, I guarantee it. The first thing to do is to select a topic area, and a few questions you could ask yourself when selecting your topic is, what are you good at, have you taught anything before, do any of your friends ever asked you questions on anything, what are you good at? What could you teach to somebody else? Because there is something that you have to teach. The second thing you're going are going do is select a platform. Like I said before, I recommend Skillshare. By the way, if you guys are interested in teaching on Skillshare, Let me know in the course project because I have some really good resources for you, and I will actually critique your course outline and your course topic in the course projects. Make sure you take the time to do that. The third thing you have to do is create a basic outline and a script. I made it easy for you because I'm going to give you the template that I use for all of my courses. You can download this template on my website in the description of this course, but I'm going to share it with you right now as well. Part 1 is the introduction, basically you're talking about what your course is, what it's about, who it's for? The second video is going to be on class concepts, class definition, just an overview of what you're going to talk about. The third video is going to be a short 1-2 minute video on the class project, outlining the project and the requirements and what you hope the students will do. The fourth, fifth, and sixth videos are going to be concept videos. For example, if you guys have seen my smartphone photography course, one of the concept videos is shooting fashion, the other one is shooting food, and the other one is shooting ambiance. I have three videos that are the body videos where I'm presenting most of the content in that course. After that, your next video is going to be an activity or resource, maybe you're clarifying something, If it's a photography course, maybe it's the editing section, anything, supplementary material that you want to add to the course. Then the last video is going to be a conclusion, where you're summing everything up and hitting home some of those last points that you really want to make sure your student remembers. In a way, it's almost like writing an essay, and that's how I structure mine. I really recommend going on my website and downloading the template. You can find a link in the course description, I mean it has basically everything you need to know about publishing your first course. All you have to do is just go in and fill in the blanks with your content information and you're basically ready to shoot your first course. I just use bullet point talking points that I can talk off of and I keep it rough and fluid because it allows me to be more open and more flexible with you guys when I'm presenting. So I'm not reading a script word for word and it just sounds unnatural. But the template that I've included in this course is basically the template that I use for all of my courses, and you guys will see that pattern if you go back and look at any of my courses or even if you look at this one, they're all in that same format. After you've done your outline in your script, the hard part is over. Now, you just have to shoot it, and that's actually the easiest part. You can ask a friend or you can do it by yourself, like me, I shoot all my courses by myself now. Even with two cameras I do it all by myself. You don't need an expensive camera, you can use your smartphone because smartphones are insane nowadays. Just find a nice desk that you can sit on with a window, for example, this is a window to my right here, nothing fancy going on. I just made my desk behind me look nice. Usually it's messy I'm not going to lie, but it looks okay right now. I'm just going to just have one camera and I'm shooting myself directly. Everything is fine about a smart phone; you don't need to worry about having inexpensive cameras a smartphone is fine, the most important thing is that you're capturing the content. Video and audio quality is not nearly as important as the content. A few tips I have for you are to not focus on everything. You know, the best courses are 20 minutes to an hour long. So make sure that you're not straying too far off the point. Focus on one thing and present that information in the best way you can. Make sure that it's very clear. You don't need to present a ton of information, just make sure that the information that you do present is clear and easy to understand. The next tip I have for you is don't over think it, it doesn't have to be perfect. Like I said, a smartphone is fine. You can do a screen grab for your course. Some of the best courses I've watched on Skillshare are just screen grabs of somebody's computer screen, and they're just doing a PowerPoint presentation and they're recording it. That's fine because the most important thing like I said, is the content, not the production quality. The next tip I have for you is to don't over scripts, over scripting makes it so you don't sound natural. It makes it seem like you're just reading off a teleprompter and it doesn't sound natural. Just use bullet points and use those as talking points because that will allow you to sound natural and just come off in a really easy going way so people will want to watch you. That's the best tip I can give when it comes to scripting your course, just don't over script it. The next tip I have for you is ask for help. Feel free to reach out to me. Like I said, utilize the course project to post your outline, I'll critique it and reach out to Skillshare as well if you're going to teach with them, That's a great way to get some feedback on your course. They love helping their teachers. Don't be shy, go ahead and ask for help. We're all here to help you in your journey of becoming a travel photographer. 11. Leveraging Your Online Following: All right, guys and last but not least, certainly not least. In fact, this is the most important thing out of all of the things we've talked about in this course and that is leveraging your online following. In other words, it's being an influencer. The reason I'm talking about this last is because if you have a larger online following, everything else on this list becomes easier. It becomes so much easier to find clients, it becomes so much easier to contact news agencies to work as a travel photographer or a photo journalist, it becomes incredibly easy to find people to write blog posts for. It just opens up so many doors and I can really not highlight this one enough. It is the ultimate tool for finding work and getting paid while abroad as a travel photographer and essentially the larger the following you have, the more money you can make. This money comes through brand deals, sponsored posts. It can come through client work. It can come through selling your own digital products or your own physical products and so much more as well. A lot of instagrammers and YouTubers and bloggers essentially get paid to go visit hotels or restaurants around the world. The reason for that is because these businesses are utilizing the followings of these influencers to help spread their name, to help get more customers to come into the businesses and spend money. This is just one of the ways influencers can earn money. So for example, I have at this time about 47,000 followers on Instagram and all of the time people are hitting me up to review their products, to visit their restaurants, to come stay in their hotels and the reason for that is because they want my followers to go and stay in those hotels as well. This started for me after I hit about 5,000 followers. That's it. It depends on your following, your follower base and what content you're posting. But if you guys have taken my course on becoming an Instagram influencer, I talk about how you can utilize Instagram to get brand deals to become an influencer essentially, and how to grow your account to reach that phase. But being on the main stage is incredibly important nowadays. It's the 21st century and we live on social media and like I said, it's not that hard to get a following if you follow the proper steps. So when it comes to the different types of social media, you don't necessarily need to be on Instagram like I am. YouTube is a fantastic way to build really strong connection with your audience. YouTubers can make a ton of money through brand deals and sponsors and things like that. Blogging is also a fantastic way and that's because blogs have the potential to reach millions of people. Blog posts that are doing well and ranking on Google gets so much visits that businesses are willing to pay bloggers a ton of money to publish content on their blogs, another reason why I recommend getting a blog as soon as possible. But yeah, YouTube can be hard. You have to plan, you have to film, you have to edit, you have to upload all that stuff can be a barrier for some people. So don't worry if you can't produce YouTube videos. I say just focus on a few different social media platforms and really start producing quality content for those and at the end of the day, guys, it's all quality. It's not quantity, like I said before, quality, quality, quality and I really highly recommend you take my Instagram course if you do want to grow your online following. I'm specifically on Instagram. So a few tips I have for you is to start now, it takes a long time to grow your accounts. That's true for any kind of social media, especially YouTube and Instagram. But if you're producing quality content, they will grow. So start now. I'm sure you already have, but just continued to produce beautiful content and the more followers you have over time, the more brand deals you will get, you will see it's a direct correlation. The next tip I have for you is to really focus on one thing. So don't have a ton of different content. In my Instagram course, I talk about having a really cohesive theme on your page. So if you're an Instagrammer make sure that you're posting one type of thing. Don't just identify yourself as a photographer, identify yourself as an interior photographer, or a food photographer, or a fashion photographer, and only post photos related to that content. You need to have a niche to make it on social media in 2018. So you have to have very specific content, whether you're on YouTube, you're blogging or you're on Instagram, it doesn't matter, make sure you focus on one specific thing. The next tip I have for you is to work with others and I cannot highlight this enough. Reach out to local influencers in your city that you're in now, contact them, ask if you can shoot with them, ask if you can learn from them. You're going to get rejected a lot of the time, but a lot of people are going to say, "Yes." I started my journey as an influencer when I first came to Chiang Mai, Thailand, I met an amazing photographer here and I got to shoot with him and being able to shoot with him gave me so much knowledge that I needed to be a better photographer. I learned so much from him and my quality of photos improved drastically and I also learned a lot about social media following. So at the time he had about 10,000 followers and now he has 50,000 or 60,000. It's a learning process. It takes time. But that was only about a year and a half or two years ago. So you can learn a lot by working with others. So I really recommend doing that. Reach out to as many people as you can. That's probably the best tip I can give you and don't worry about figuring out how to monetize. Once you get more followers, you will learn because people will come to you. The more followers you have, the more people will approach you and it just becomes incredibly easy to make money with a larger following. 12. Start Now: All right guys, so in this section, I just really want to hammer in one of the things that I've been talking about, throughout this entire course, and that is to start now. If you want to become a travel photographer, there are steps you need to take to make that happen. You can do that no matter where you are in the world. You can do that right now. As I stated in the course project, make sure you write down a few different money-making techniques that you think are relevant to you and create a plan. Before you do anything else create a plan. If you decide that online teaching in client worker for you, well break those two concepts down based on the things that we talked about in this course and find how they're relevant to you, your goals, your ideals, your expertise, your skill-set, whatever it is, make sure that you really create a plan for you so that you can make it happen. With that said, I have a few questions that you can ask yourself to help you throughout this process. The first one is, what are the steps you need to take to make it happen?. For online teaching, what are the steps that you need to take to make it happen? For client work abroad, what are the steps that you need to take to make it happen?. Think about that question in the context of whatever money-making method you want to pursue. The next tip I have for you is, what is your timeline for going abroad? Do you want to go abroad in the next six months?, Next year, do you want to leave asap? What do you need to do to make it happen within that time period?. That feeds off the first question. What are the steps you need to take to make it happen within that specific time periods? If you want to leave in six months, that's a lot of time and you can certainly create a foundation for you to earn money abroad within that six months. The next question I have for you is, will you do this full time, and that's an important distinction to make. Because if you're doing it full time, you need to make sure that you have a really strong foundation. If you're a full-time photographer now, then you can certainly do this full time. You can certainly become a travel photographer full time. If you're not, I think you should really focus on creating a portfolio and really preparing yourself to earn in abroad because it's going to take time to build yourself up. But if you don't want to do it full time, that's great. You can travel from time to time on vacation or whatever. You can earn money on those shorter trips. You don't necessarily need to do it full time, especially in the beginning. The next question I have for you is, where do you want to go? Find a location and focus on that one location and really hone in on making connections there. Like I said, join Facebook groups, engage with the local hashtags on Instagram. Introduce yourself, do Google searches on local businesses, message them, make connections on any platform that you can. Because the more connections you have, the more success you'll have in those communities. This is a lot to think about. There's a lot to think about, but these are the questions that I want you to ask yourself, because they're incredibly important to making it happen, to taking the steps that you need to take, to become a professional travel photographer and do what you love the most. That's travel the world and take photos. 13. Summing things up: All right, guys, wow. We have talked about a lot of stuff in this course, and I really hope that it was helpful for you. As I said before, a lot of the concepts that we talked about in this course aren't technically travel photography. But they give you the freedom to do travel photography in any way that you want. I identify myself as a travel photographer and I utilize all of the techniques that I mentioned in this course, and they are relevant for everybody. One of the other things I want to highlight is that you should utilize multiple of these techniques. I utilize all of them because that allows me to have a more diverse stream of income which is beneficial in multiple different ways. But there are certainly techniques in this course that are more relevant to you than others, so if you haven't already, please take the time to go into the course project and highlight two or three of those techniques that you think are most relevant to you. I really want to hear about how you think these techniques fit in with your goals, and your experiences, and your plan for becoming a travel photographer. I will comment on that and give you guys direct feedback as well. Like I said, guys, if I can do this, then you can certainly do this too. It's the 21st century and it's never been easier to do this type of work. The introduction of the Internet has been incredible for this stuff. You can pretty much do anything you want anywhere in the world because the Internet connects us all on one central realm. That's why I really talked about social media in this course. That's why I talked about photography blogging and online courses. The Internet has opened the door for us to make money in so many different ways that weren't possible before. Take the concepts from this course, apply them into your own life, and make it happen. I know that you can, and you can start living a more open and free life, and you can travel, and you can take photos of whatever you want, and it's a lot of fun. I can tell you from experience, it is a lot of fun. I absolutely love my job, I love my life, I love being able to travel. Before when I was working in the office, it was hard. It was hard every day, and I was tired, and I hated waking up early. Now things are a lot better. I hope you guys enjoyed this course. I hope you find the content useful. If you did, please take the time to leave a review. It's really helpful for me in critiquing my course and getting better as a teacher so I can provide you guys with more value. If you guys want to connect with me, I'm totally open with that, so whether that's with the Course Project or messaging me on Instagram or through email, whatever it is, let me know. Let's chat, let's talk about your goals, and we can go from there. With that said, guys, thank you so much for watching this course. I really hope to see you in my future courses. I have a few more planned. If you haven't already, go ahead and check out my other courses. I have a lot of courses. I think they're all relevant to you in some way or another, so thank you again. I will see you in the next course. I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day, and I'll catch you later.