Dig more streams is a saying I got from David Du Chemin’s excellent book, Visionmongers. (If you haven’t read Visionmongers please see here for a short review.) Dig more streams refers to creating more income streams for your photography business.

The principle here is to critically evaluate your photography business and examine whether you can generate a greater financial return by offering different products or packages.

What are some examples?

If you are a wedding photographer – can you create more products for your clients to purchase? If you normally do electronic images and prints, can you do albums as well? If you are shooting family portraits, can you expand your product range to offer canvas prints as well? or other print products? Or can you restructure your package offerings to provide more value for your client and more margin for your business? If you are an experienced industry professional, can you write and sell a book or an e-book? Can you expand your current business by selling prints to a worldwide market via online portals? Can you use your spare time to build a stock photo portfolio? Can you teach a beginners course on how to use a digital camera?

These are just a few of many, many examples. What are the opportunities for you and your business?

What are the advantages of being able to dig more streams?

By adopting the ‘dig more streams’ approach you will be able to:

• generate additional income from your existing activities (e.g. by adding albums and prints to your wedding photography service)
• create new income streams (e.g. selling prints online)
• generate repeat business (e.g. selling a first anniversary package to your wedding clients)
• add more value to your existing clients (e.g. if you specialize in new born images, keep a note of the babies birth dates and follow up with a 1 year old special offer, then a 2 year old special offer, then … you get the idea!)
• capitalize on the growing number of professional and semi professional photographers by meeting their education needs (e.g. writing an e-book about how to shoot weddings)

One example from my own photography business is that I often am asked about my experience as a stock photographer. That leads to photographers asking me what they can do to build a stock photography portfolio themselves. The repetition of those questions lead me to write an e-book called Build A Five Figure Income in Your Spare Time which covers my own experience plus advice to people starting out in stock photography. If you would like to check it out, please see here. If you’ve got a digital camera, a computer, determination to keep improving, and some perseverance – then financial success as a stock photographer is possible for you.

Thanks for reading Dig More Streams. Has it prompted you to think about more streams which are possible for you and your business?