If you want to starting a photography business from home than you gonna love for what I did here! Hi this is Bima and thank you for stopping by, I work from home as a destination wedding photographer and serve pre wedding and wedding for worldwide awesome couple. It might not be the easiest way but it’s worth it to do.
Having my own job and working from home than close to my wife and kids is a dream that I had since I got study in a college. I graduate from architecture major in 2008 and helping my uncle to design maternity and baby kids hospital in Tangerang Indonesia. During 6 months after the graduation day I sent over than a hundreds applicants to architecture firm in Dubai, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur but no one invite me to do the interview till today. In past condition I remember that I can’t wait for longer time cause my mom had a stroke and diabetic disease so what I thought is looking for money immediately to my mom.
Starting a photography business from home is my decision cause being a 9-5 employee in architecture firm in Jakarta only gave me USD150/month and I believe I can’t cover a monthly diabetic medicine for my mom. July 2010 I decide to join an internet marketing workshop from a Singaporean known as Fabian Lim in Jakarta that made me bankrupt. His workshop is costs around USD600 for 2 days and I only know about 20% from the all curriculum when the workshop ended. Fabian just told me that even 10% of knowledge is more than enough to change my life cause the other 90% is just “Action”. I’m truly shock about it cause before joined this workshop I already spend USD400 to developed my website and got only 1 couple from the internet to do pre wedding photo shoot.
All of my friends who develop their photography business are rich and have enough money to built a studio to do a retail photography business by shooting for graduation which become a common industry in my city. I don’t want to do that cause I only falling in love in wedding photography niche and serving a photo shoot outside my city, even more I want to be hired my someone to take me other country to shooting a wedding.
5 Steps to Starting a Photography Business from Home
1 – Lets learn more about Internet Marketing for Photography
Through this condition I just sit back and read all the tutorials that Fabian has just gave me and develop my own photography blog by my self. I bought my own studio domain, buy a hosting, designed my photography blog with a free theme, and optimize all post that I made with an SEO skill (Search Engine Optimization). Within several months of hard work and determination I got my first couple from internet who ask me to shoot a pre wedding in Yogyakarta. This story is still keep rolling till today and I still feeling blessed to choose wedding photography as my job cause I developed it with my passion in it. I will keep share all my journey both sad and happy untold story that I had during this 8 years in wedding photography. I will also love to tell you how I grow my business from grabbing the USD10 for my first wedding till become a destination wedding which is serve a worldwide couple in many wonderful places like Singapore, Bali, Hong Kong, Maldives, and still counting to the other destination, just follow your passion, do what you love and love what you do!
2 – Built a simple WordPress blog and post your art works
Built a WordPress blog is really simple and cost small money for sure, by sign up and set your WordPress blog on Bluehost than you can own a website within less than US$100/year.
It’s not about how cool your blog is but it’s about how you promote your photography services using a blog. You can buy your photography themes but for sure you also can use free themes that provided by WordPress, they were cool and you gonna love them!
3 – Write a good article that containing photography works
Now the right time to promote your art works,
Take your time to describe more about your previous work, you can start to tell your readers about what kind of photo shoot that you’ve made, who is your couple and where do they come from. In the same time I also tell my readers about how I met my couple at the first time and share some good photo experience with them.
Put some photos that belong to your favourite or it could be a complete photo series from your previous photo session
4 – Buy some cool photography gears, it can be used gears for sure!
Photography gears are quite expensive and will cost a lot of money to provide it but make sure that you don’t need to buy the new one cause on Amazon you even buy great used photography cameras and accessories.
5 – Learn more about post production
Living in a digital era mean you need to know more about how to retouch your photos, you can use Photoshop or Lightroom to do post production steps.
I could said that using Lightroom will be the easiest one cause you can simply drag your images and use any kind of wedding lightroom presets and enhance it for little bit.