Sales and Marketing Tips for Wildlife Photographers
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half.” John Wanamaker
Bear Gills in a virtual room
Let me just say right up front that I’ve never been very good at sales and marketing. I’ve had to learn on the job, but it’s been a frustrating experience—and very hard to measure success.
Here are various tools I’ve used myself over the last couple of years. I can’t guarantee they’ll work, but at least you’ll have a few ideas…!
Website
My home page
The first and most important thing you need to do is create a website. This is your online shopfront and provides an obvious, public place where people can see your photos and learn more about you. You can even try to monetise your work by selling prints, wallpaper, books, talks, events, lessons, courses, trips…and anything else you can think of!
There are countless occasions when I meet new people and tell them I’m a wildlife photographer. If they’re interested in my work, it’s the easiest thing in the world to point them to my website. In fact, I even have my logo printed on my fleece so that people can take a picture of it for future reference!
I built my own website on Squarespace 7.0 (see above), and it wasn’t hard to do. There are lots of helpful templates to choose from, and all you generally need to do is click the + sign to add a section on a page and then drag and drop your content wherever it belongs. I’ve recently upgraded to version 7.1, and it was very easy to do. In fact, it all happened automatically once I’d pushed the button—although and I had to spend a few hours reformatting a few pages and some text did mysteriously disappear!
I have had other problems along the way with Squarespace, and certain features are hard (or impossible!) to offer with certain templates, but you can always chat with the online support staff. The same goes for most of the main site-building platforms, such as WordPress.
You can always pay someone to design and/or build a website for you, but that will obviously cost money—and that’s a pretty scarce resource for most people starting out in photography!
Purpose
The first website I built was for a travel business years ago. The internet was in its early stages, and I was just surfing around when I noticed that travel.com was available. I knew at that moment that I’d made my first million!
Sadly, when the guy at the registration company checked, it turned out that someone had bought the domain name after all—so all my hopes of wealth and glory were dashed! However, I did buy another domain (travelcalendar.com) based on an approach that I thought might work quite well.
The idea was that you could search for public events based on a range of criteria, including the location, the language spoken, the temperature and so on. I put together three databases (countries, places and events) and paid a developer a few hundred pounds to build it—and I can honestly say that seeing it up and running was one of the most satisfying moments of my professional life!
The same goes for your first photography website. If you’re just starting out and perhaps viewing photography as a source of passive income, this is a chance to do something very fulfilling and rewarding—if not financially!
Before you start designing or building anything, the first thing to do is to set your goals. What is the purpose of your website? Is it going to be a place for people to view your portfolio or learn about your approach to photography or actually buy your work?
The answers to those questions will determine which software platform you use and whether you need to pay someone to help you. Things are obviously a bit more complicated if you want to commercialise your art. I’ve learnt the hard way that it’s very hard to make money out of wildlife photography, so it’s important to bang on every door you can to see which ones open—and that means trying to sell whatever you can!
My website has several buttons on the home page that become tabs in the menu bar:
Prints
Videos
Courses
Lessons
Books
Talks
Events
About
Blog (Capture the Moment!)
Almost all of these represent possible sources of income—but you have to see what works and what doesn’t. In my case, for instance, I tried to sell wallpaper for iPhones, iPads and MacBooks, but I made hardly any sales, so I got rid of the page. That’s easy to do if you’re managing your own website, and it means you can freshen it up or experiment whenever you like.
Look and Feel
The other main thing you need to do is decide on the ‘look and feel’ of the site. What do you want it to say? Are you trying to project an image of being professional and reliable or a luxury provider or someone who’ll work for peanuts?!
This is all part of your ‘brand’. I use the inverted commas deliberately because the idea of a personal ‘brand’ sounds so pretentious! However, it is important to think about what your target market should be and how you can support that via your online presence.
I sell very little through my website, but I want it to show off my work and, hopefully, impress potential buyers. I price my prints at £999 and £1,999 (for medium and large versions), which means I’m at the upper end of the market. You won’t be able to buy a cheap print for 20 quid from me, but you will be able to buy a lasting memory that’ll remind you of a life-changing experience in the bush. Or that’s the theory…!
Social Media
It’s a social media jungle out there…
I once wrote an ebook for Expert Photography on Social Success Strategies for wildlife photographers. The idea was to help people navigate the maze of different platforms and turn that into more than a few likes and follows.
Platforms
Broadly, social media can be considered as a free sales and marketing tool, which is great—in theory! However, there are many different platforms, and working out how to avoid scammers and ‘beat the algorithm’ is very hard.
In my experience, Facebook and YouTube have provided me with the greatest reach—especially through daily posting on dozens of Facebook groups, but I’m on all the major platforms. Here are my social media accounts and a few performance metrics (as of January 2025):
500px is more of a stock agency than a social media site, but it does enable users to leave comments (263 followers, 128.7k photo likes, 5.8m photo impressions)
Facebook is the original, all-singing, all-dancing platform that allows you to post text, images, videos and much more (5.1k followers, 136.7k interactions, 424.5k reach, 1.3m views in last 28 days), admin of Wildlife Photographers group (300.2k members)
Flickr is a photo-sharing site that has some social media features, such as the ability to follow or like (11 followers)
Instagram was designed as a photo-sharing app, but the upload function is limited to certain aspect ratios and often unreliable (223 accounts engaged, 4.8k accounts reached, 16.7k followers in last 30 days)
LinkedIn does allow the sharing of content, but it’s mostly designed as a platform for making professional connections (1.3k connections, 2.6k followers, 2.0k engagements, 6.3k members reached, 32.8k post impressions in last 28 days), Nick Dale Safari & Wildlife Photography company page (60 followers, 106 post impressions), Wildlife Photography group (148 members and 1.0k active members)
Pinterest has the usual social media features, but its unique selling point is that you can ‘pin’ images anywhere on the web that you can then save and/or share (587 followers, 2.7k engaged audience, 3.5k engagements, 56k total audience, 78k impressions in last 30 days)
Threads is an offshoot of Twitter/X with similar functionality (653 followers)
TikTok is an increasingly popular video-sharing platform (169 followers, 10.6k likes, 17.8k reached audience and 19.8k video views in last four weeks)
Vero is similar to Instagram with better functionality but much lower reach (4 followers)
X used to be Twitter and allows you to share images, video and up to 280 characters of text for free users (54 followers)
YouTube is a popular video-sharing channel (370.6 hours watch time, 51.2k subscribers, 58.1k views in last 28 days)
My experience with social media is that it’s very unpredictable and hard to monetise. Yes, I’ve had some content that went viral (including seven videos of four male lions taking down a buffalo that all had more than a million views on YouTube!), but the monetisation rules meant I didn’t make a penny! In addition, every offer to buy my work (either as a print or an NFT) has fallen through. There are an awful lot of scammers out there…
As you can see from the statistics, the performance of the different platforms has been extremely variable. How is it possible that I can manage to get over 50,000 subscribers on YouTube but only four followers on Vero?! I have no idea…
I’m especially bewildered by my failure to develop a following on Instagram. I see other photographers who get hundreds of likes with run-of-the-mill photos (I’m being generous here!), but mine struggle to get more than a handful!
Years ago, I used an online agency to ‘buy’ 10,000 Instagram followers to meet the old threshold for posting links on my posts. I have a feeling I must’ve been ‘shadow-banned’ for that. I’ve thought about setting up a new account, but I’d have to use a new name, which wouldn’t work. Hey, ho…
Metrics
All the major social media sites make it easy to track your performance in terms of likes, followers, subscribers and so on, and this can provide a nice ego boost every now and again. When a post does well, you get the feeling that you’re achieving recognition for your work, and that provides a sense of validation.
However, your success won’t just be down to the quality of your photos. To take one example, Instagram is trying to prioritise video content, so you’ll get far fewer likes and follows if you stick to stills—and I’ve seen it myself…
The other problem is that all these analytical tools don’t help you with what really matters (if you’re trying to sell your work), which is your commercial performance. You can’t deposit likes and follows in your bank account, so how are you supposed to make money if all your subscribers ever do is look at your pictures?!
And even if you do make a sale, how do you know where it came from? Where did the buyer first see your work? How many ‘views’ did it take to convert a ‘lead’? How do the different platforms compare?
Sadly, it’s very hard (ie impossible!) to find most of that information. All you can do is try to build your brand in every way you can and hope that word gets to the right people in the end…
If you’d like more detailed advice, please read my article on Social Media for Photographers. This will tell you how much it’ll cost, how hard it’ll be to master, how you measure success, how long it will take and how likely it’ll be to work.
Business Cards
My V1CE card
There’s a reason why almost everyone has business cards: they’re just a very convenient way to show who you are and how you can be reached. These days, of course, a lot of communication is electronic rather than verbal or in person, but that doesn’t matter. You still need something to advertise your brand and make it easy for someone to take the appropriate next steps, whether that’s buying a print, booking a talk or just seeing your work.
In the old days, I used to carry a little cardboard box full of business cards, but that was very inconvenient! These days, I have a V1CE digital business card (see above). This is just a plastic card you can tap on someone’s smartphone to transfer your contact details. It creates a link, so if there isn’t a reliable Wi-Fi or mobile signal, people can simply wait until they’re in range and then download everything.
Video
Bear catching salmon at Brooks Falls, Alaska
When I bought my first film camera, at age 15, it could only take pictures. Video wasn’t even an option. How the world has changed since then…! TikTok has captured billions of fans, and you can make a tidy sum from being a social media influencer on YouTube.
Now that I have a pair of mirrorless DSLRs, I’ve started to take far more video footage, but I still have mixed feelings about it. If I happen to see a cheetah hunt, for instance, I wouldn’t dare take a video for fear of missing out on a truly sensational action shot!
I can easily imagine a ‘great’ photo, but I struggle with the idea of a ‘great’ video. What would that even look like? Yes, you might record a great moment, like a bear catching a salmon (see above), but the fact that the action was great doesn’t mean the video is!
Maybe that’s just my personal prejudice, born of the fact that I started out as a photographer, not a videographer. However, I do see the value in capturing key moments on video—and I always fear that, secretly, my friends and family would rather see video than stills when I get back from one of my trips!
Anyway, this is an article about sales and marketing, so my simple point is that video is a valuable advertising tool. The best way of showing someone what it’s like on safari is not with a photo but with a video. Moving pictures and audio give it an extra two dimensions that make it extremely powerful.
I’ve started selling stock footage via Shutterstock and Latest Sightings, but it’s not really about the money (yet!). What I’m trying to do is cover all my bases, and that’s why I’ve just added a Videos page to my website. Even though I’m not actually selling videos (yet!), I want to capture the eyeballs of people who’d rather watch a 30-second video than moon over a fine art portrait of a blue wildebeest at sunset!
Once I’ve got their attention, who knows where it might lead…?
Animal Awareness Days
Black and Blue
If you didn’t know already, yesterday (31 January) was International Zebra Day. I can’t imagine many of you ‘celebrated’ it, but I at least posted a couple of zebra images (see above) on social media with the caption ‘Happy International Zebra Day!’
It’s just a small thing, but internationally-recognised ‘animal awareness days’ are a nice excuse to showcase your work or perhaps write a post about any conservation work you happen to do. If you’d like a full list, just visit the website of World Animal Protection.
Virtual Rooms
Dustbuster in a virtual room
If you visit almost any online gallery these days, you’ll be able to see prints in so-called ‘virtual rooms’ (see above). This is a simple marketing tool to help potential buyers visualise what something will look like on their wall.
It’s also easy for you to do yourself. There are various websites offering the capability, but I use Canvy. In theory, you have to take out a monthly subscription, but I just sign up for an endless sequence of free trials!
Greeting Cards
Miss Saigon greeting card
Greeting cards are obviously a possible way to make money, and I’ve sold a couple of hundred cards through a local corner shop and café. However, they’re also a chance to build your brand.
For the last few years, I’ve used my own designs for all my Christmas cards. Most of them have had pictures of animals or birds on them rather than baubles or anything religious, but they’ve all had my logo on the back (see above)…
Flyers
Exhibition flyer
When I first became a professional photographer, I thought having my own exhibition was just a dream, but then I happened to chat to someone at a charity fair at my local tennis club who said she’d done one locally and had only had to pay the gallery £70!
That inspired me to do the same myself—at the same venue, the Norman Plastow Gallery in Wimbledon. It only cost me a couple of hundred pounds to put on, and I managed to sell around a dozen framed prints for more than £1,000!
I’ve since taken part in various group and individual exhibitions, and I was even one of the resident artists at the 508 Gallery on King’s Road in Chelsea.
But what does all that have to do with sales and marketing? Well, every time I’ve had an exhibition, I’ve printed flyers to hand out in advance and during the show. I also had a few hundred generic ones printed so that I didn’t have to throw them away because they had the ‘wrong’ details on them!
Again, it’s not a big deal, but little things like flyers can help get your message out there, whether it’s to advertise an exhibition, a talk or a workshop.
Verdict
How I look when I make a sale…!
A few months ago, I watched a video by Matt Kloskowski in which he tried to reassure people that it wasn’t just for professional wildlife photographers. “In fact,” he said, “there’s no such thing!”
It’s very hard to make money as a wildlife photographer, so it’s worthwhile using every trick in the sales and marketing handbook to give yourself a headstart. I’m not an expert by any means, but I hope a few of these ideas can help you grow your photography business.
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.
