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A Solo $1.2K/Month Blog Site For Photographers

A Solo $1.2K/Month Blog Site For Photographers

Indie Hustle
October 01, 2023

A Solo $1.2K/Month Blog Site For Indian Photographers

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hello, my name is Manthan Gajjar, I’m 26 years old and I am the founder of Pewdoc (https://photographywith.com). I’m from Ahmedabad, Gujarat India.

I’m full time developer and part time photography blogger.

Using my blogging platform I'm helping young ( or you can say beginner ) photographers to learn something about photography in their day-to-day life.

In this photography industry, my main product is the content that I write and publish. It is mostly regarding trending photography stuff like tips and tricks or gear reviews. Most of my customers are those newbies who just started learning photography and planning to adopt photography as their main source of income.

Like covering any new camera’s feature or for example, informing my readers how they can sell their images online for free and earn some serious money.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

So initially I started my journey by creating a Youtube channel on a random topic and back in 2018 you don’t need 4000 hours of watch time + 1000 subs to show advertise on youtube if you’re a content creator.

So I started publishing some random videos like a song with lyrics, top 10 songs, etc…, I earned a couple of bucks but due to copyright strikes I wasn’t able to get more out of it and I know that’s not a valid way to start earning some passive income.

At that time I was using Lumia 520 and that smartphone comes with some good in-built camera quality. So I started capturing some micro photos and published some on Instagram, I was getting a couple of likes and recognition. Now the question was, how can I earn some passive income with my photography skills because every day I was trying something new whole day to get some good photos. Then I got familiar with blogging stuff.

At that time, I wasn’t aware of SEO or even how to write blogs or what platform to use.

So initially I started with a blogger (a free platform ) then I prepared content 2-3 months in advance by doing some hard research.

Then I bought the domain ( photographywith.com ), at that time I was aware of Adsense and other platforms. Using those platforms I can place some ads in my blogs to earn some dollars.

How did you get your first initial customers?

I started blogging back in 2016. So in 2017, my main focus was on publishing some super good content. I did some good keyword research. Got on 1st page of Google for a couple of articles.

So for me, that’s the pick movement that brought so many active readers and customers.

So that’s the organic way to get a genuine audience. I spend two to three weeks understanding the concepts of SEO and WordPress, like how to use WordPress to publish content in a valid way, there needs so some hand-picked plugins we need to use to improve site speed and SEO stuff.

And if you're a developer then that's a plus point because you know how to improve site performance so I did some implementation at the initial level to improve website speed performance.

Apart from that, I tried Facebook ads once, but due to lake of research, I wasn't able to gain the result that I expected.

So the pro tip is if you want to invest some money then do enough research or ask some expert then do it in a valid way to see a better outcome.

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Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

I'm focusing mostly on keyword research and how to write genuine content which helps beginner photographers to understand the concepts of photography easily.

The other thing (especially my one and favorite marketing strategy) is link building ( via cold emails or meetings ), if you know a bit of SEO then you know the power of link building and making connections with influencers or a person who knows this industry better.

I also like to reach out to new bloggers every week in this community to grow my audience and learn new stuff.

Lastly, one of my favorite methods to gain good traffic via any social media ad campaign is this:

I’d reviewed a couple of videos on marketing like how to get traffic with less money from doing Facebook or Instagram, or Google ads, I used a couple of important tools to get the right keywords, which are easy to rank and contain no or less competition.

Then I published 2-3 in-depth articles on those specific content. In 2020 I got one keyword “sell photos online in India”, I published this article with all the valid information. Then I started one week of a Facebook ad campaign.

I spent around 50-70$ for that campaign and the article was ranking number 4 on Google India ( that single article was ranked number one position for 6-8 months in India). Right now that single piece of content is ranking for more than hundreds of keywords on Google.

The only logic I applied was researching a low-competition keyword with a valid niche + targeted country, there are a couple of free tools available to do keyword researching but I chose paid one and I got the result. It’s 2023, I’m updating the content of that article regularly so other user finds the latest content.

How does your business make money?

As of now, I’m using Google Adsense to show ads on my blogs and generate a small amount of revenue.

To be honest, I don’t like to show ads every time any reader comes straight from the Google search to my blogs.

But mostly I earn more money using affiliate links and promotional content.

So for promotional content, I’m changing from 100-300$ based on the requirement.

I’m making $1.2-1.5K per month currently from the site, and to run my blog I’m using a dedicated server which costs around 17-20$ a month, then a yearly subscription for the domain (30$ around).