“The Photography Business Secret Nobody Teaches You”

If you want to make money with your camera in 2026, be very, very careful, because the truth is that most photographers are broke and only those who follow the right formula make good money. And the crazy part is the right formula has nothing to do with being the best photographer. And I say that from personal experience. My name is Eli Jones, and I built a photography business called Norman & Young that serves the Fort Worth, Texas area, and has made over $5 million in revenue as someone who started with and still has pretty basic photography skills. And not only that, since then my team and I have been paid over $10,000 each by over a thousand people to be coached by us. Here's some of them on the stage winning six figure a year business awards at our annual meetup for our clients. We even had a group win seven figure awards from their photography business. And the reason I tell you this is because I've seen a lot and I can help you avoid a lot of the mistakes that I made when I was first starting that really messed me up and that most new photographers make. And I can do that by giving you an overview of the same formula that we teach to our students that allows them to be successful in an industry where so many people struggle. I mean, it's not a secret that photography can be a tough industry to make money in. And the crazy thing is despite this, this formula works so well that we actually guarantee those who follow our program in detail will hit at least a $5,000 a month within six months working with us. And after 12 months working with us at least a $10,000 a month, or we give them their money back. And a lot of people then wonder how are you able to do that when most photographers never make much money? I mean, I said it at the start of this training, wouldn't we be basically be giving everybody their money back? And the answer is no, because we use a formula that helps our students stack the odds in their favor to help take them from their first shoot to 100K business. And for those who choose to scale and work to grow their business, wherever they wanna take it from there and that formula is what I'm going to show you today. Now it's important to say because building a business does take work and simply watching a video is not gonna do that work for you. You're not yet one of our photography students. And so you shouldn't expect to make any money from watching this or a photography business in general, but what I can tell you is that this information, if I knew this, it would have saved me a lot of pain. I would have been able to grow much more quickly, avoid a lot of the mistakes I made and that's what I wanna help you with today. So if your goal is to make money with your camera in 2026 and you're the type of person that's willing to put in the work and isn't looking for a magic trick to get you there, this training is absolutely for you. And I wanna start with why is it that most photographers don't make any money? Because if we know why people mess up, that's part of the way to helping us not mess up and the truth is there are many reasons. I mean, number one is these phones are getting better and better every year and I know they don't literally have that many lenses, but who knows, five years from now they might and that's taking a lot of business from photographers. And on top of that, more and more people every year try to make money with their camera. Life's getting more expensive, people are looking for ways to make extra money and that means that more and more people are fighting for a smaller and smaller chunk of business and many of them are just trying it on their own, they're not really following any formula, they're just sort of starting and seeing what works. And the problem is this really leads to race to the bottom pricing like we see in the photography industry in a lot of areas and worse than that, that results in a lot of people quitting their dream or quitting something that would have been really helpful for them and their families and then they just blame the industry and the real problem was their lack of strategy, right? And it's not that there's anything they did wrong, it's just we aren't given this, right? There's no, well, except for this, right? There's not a lot of videos saying, hey, do this, do this, do this, they give you an actual roadmap and so how do we help the people we work with? How do the people we work with avoid this and how do they compete in a competitive market even without being an experienced photographer or even a good photographer? And the truth is, the secret is they don't, they don't compete. In my opinion, most of them really couldn't compete, it'd be unreasonable to expect them to be successful competing with people who've been photographers for 20 plus years because most of our students are new to photography and on top of that, they have full-time jobs. I think Ruby's a great example of that. I interviewed Ruby on my YouTube channel recently. Ruby was a full-time teacher and with us built a 20K a month real estate photography business. She wasn't a photography teacher either. She wasn't someone who traditionally should have been able to make money in photography, let alone how fast she did it within a year and I wanna show you that formula because Ruby used it, we taught Ruby that formula and all of our students use this formula to help stack the odds in their favor and not only stack the odds in their favor so they can make money, but also make money doing something that people are grateful for their help with. I mean, these are wins from our community of people hitting 100 five-star reviews and 40 five-star reviews and it's just nice to make money doing something that people really appreciate you for. So first things first, here's the formula. Number one is they don't pick everything to shoot. They don't shoot weddings and portraits and real estate and events. They pick a niche, they don't just shoot everything. For example, at my photography business, Norman and Young, you might have seen this on that slide, but we only shoot real estate photos, nothing else and this allows us to get good at one thing instead of trying to do 10 things at once well which continues to help us get the odds into our favor and all of the wins that you're gonna see in this video, all these student wins are from people who only shoot one thing. So in fact, most of our clients only shoot real estate. We have some wedding and portrait and event photographers but they're working with us to transition out of that to shooting real estate specifically. But here's the reality of it, you have to pick a niche but picking a niche on its own is not enough to completely stack the odds in your favor. The second thing our students do is they pick the right niche. Now I sort of gave it away and I said they shoot real estate but that's specifically what I teach. It doesn't mean that real estate is the only way to make money as a photographer but I do think picking the right niche is really important. So for example, a lot of people think of wedding photography. Wedding photographers can make great money but it requires lots of skill, it's high competition and honestly, it's pretty stressful. Like it's not a good niche for a new photographer, right? And that's why we have people like Emmaus who I also interviewed on YouTube who switched from a successful wedding photography business he was doing over 20K a month to building a $26,000 a month real estate photography business in nine months. Portrait photography is another niche but it's being killed by the iPhone and it's now low pay and high competition. And so what makes for a good niche? There's a formula I call the three R's to help you rate a niche and help determine if it could be worth doing that you can use right now to help you dial in on a niche that makes sense for you. So the first R is repeat business, the second R is required work and the third R is referral growth. If you pick a niche that has all three of these, you have a much higher chance of success. I kind of look at it like a table with three legs or two legs. Like if you have a table with only two legs because you only picked two out of three or you picked a niche that only had two out of three R's, the table's gonna fall over. So two out of three sounds like a lot but really you're starting 33% behind. And so here's how these apply to various photo niches and I'll talk about the niche that I do real estate photography specifically but I'll also compare other niches to it. So required work. With real estate photography, real estate agents, they aren't like legally required to hire a photographer but as of last year, 70% of listings in the United States were shot by a professional photographer. Not an agent taking their own photos, not cell phone photos, not an amateur, like a professional photographer shot 70% of the listings because real estate agents know that if they hire a professional, they will make more money. And the reason for this is like back in the day, so to speak, so back in 1995, when you went to buy a house, the first thing you would do as you can see here is on the top left, you go to a real estate agent, that real estate agent looks at a list of homes for sale, matches a home to your preference, shows you some homes, then you end up buying a home. Well, today it's a lot different, right? Like if you think about the last time you went to look at a house, rent a house, buy a house, whatever, you probably went to Zillow first. And then based upon the pictures, you found a home you liked and then you called the agent that was listing that home. So the agents know, hey, if I have good pictures of a home, I'm gonna get more calls. Even if I don't sell that person that exact house, they become a lead that I can show other houses to and potentially make a commission. And so that's why real estate photography is required. And you see this in the types of houses that we shoot. So here are three examples from my photo business. On the left, the top and bottom left, you have a pretty cheap house. You know, that'd be kind of the cheaper side of things we shoot. You can see it's like a little one bedroom duplex. Then in the middle is a more average house. Then on the right is the more expensive house. But what you don't see is a lot of super luxurious homes here, right? A lot of people think agents only pay for luxury homes, but that's just not true. And so, yes, it's a required job. Real estate is required, right? But it's also a yes for wedding photography. However, I'd say it's a no for portraits because the iPhone, right? You're not required to hire a wedding photographer these days. So let's move on to the second R, repeat business. Real estate is a repeat business, right? Because an agent, they don't just list one house and then they're done being a real estate agent. Every time they get another house for sale, they call us. So my photo business, for example, my first client's name is Anne. She's still a client of mine over 12 years later. Whenever she has a listing, she calls me and pays me. So I get to work with the same clients over and over. And that's the cool thing is like, this is why you don't need to be in a big city or it'll still work in a small town to shoot real estate because 70% of listings had professional photos and agents list over and over. So again, it's not like you have to be in a luxury market. Here's a screenshot of a town called Burleson that we serve at my photo business. You can see these are pretty cheap houses and they're still the vast majority of them getting professional photos. And so repeat business is a yes for real estate, but it's also a yes for portraits, right? Like if you do hire a portrait photographer, maybe you hire them when you have one kid and then you have another kid and you hire them again or like every year you have them take Christmas photos. Like it's required business, right? But it's a no for weddings. You're never gonna hire the same photographer to shoot your wedding again. At least that'd be strange. And so now on to the third R, which is referral growth. This is a yes for real estate, weddings and portraits. A lot of niches have referral potential, but I'd say it's a big yes for real estate because agents are all around other agents. One side represents the buyer and one side represents the seller. There's like 50 of them in each office. Like the joke is that real estate agents only know other real estate agents because they spend so much time around them. So it's a lot of referral potential. And so here's an overview of what this looks like in the final score, right? Weddings has two of three, referral and required. Portrait has referral and repeat. Real estate has all three, referral, repeat and required. And that's why I recommend real estate photography so much, at least if your goal is to make money. And it's the only niche that I've seen that truly has all three Rs. And that's why I've spent the last 12 years of my life going all in on real estate photography. And the best thing in my opinion about real estate photography and why I recommend it as a niche is because not only does it have the three Rs, but there are some other things that make real estate photography really good in my opinion. Because it's really about stacking the odds firmly in our favor, right? So like, if we have three, you know, it has the three Rs and other stuff, it makes an even greater opportunity. So if you're interested in real estate photography, stick around and I'm gonna go into that specifically. If not, you can now use these three Rs to help you figure out which niche is right for you. So here's the first thing with real estate photography in addition. It's a somewhat overlooked niche, at least when it compares to the demand. And I think this for a couple reasons. One is when someone's looking at a photography business, they will look at the invoices from a real estate photo shoot and be like, oh, it's only $900 or it's only $200 for a cheap shoot. Why would I do that when weddings pay like $3,000? And I think, you know, the reason that people would still do it if they did the math is because, you know, a busy wedding photographer is gonna do three or four weddings a month and put aside the fact that they have to give up every weekend shooting weddings to do that, but they're only able to shoot three or four weddings a month. So let's say they get 2000 bucks a wedding, let's call it $8,000. Real estate photography, a busy real estate photographer that's working like a truly nine to five schedule is gonna shoot about four houses a day. Now, many people will choose to work more than that and make more. Some people will choose to do it part time, but, you know, we get about a $300 average order value, which is the price of the average shoot we do. So I'll show you the math. Oh, excuse me. $300 times four is about $1,200 potential in a day. Now, plenty of real estate photographers will do more than 1,200 in a day, but just for kind of like a fully booked up baseline, $1,200 a day, you multiply that by 22 business days, that's 26,000. That's how you see these solo real estate photographers making 20 grand plus a month, because it's not so much about the invoice price, it's how much total can you make. And real estate shoots are 30 minutes to an hour in a lot of cases. And the other reason I think it's kind of overlooked is because I always make the joke that like no one when they're five years old is like, I wanna be a real estate photographer when I grow up. It's kind of like one of those under the radar niches, but it's really like everywhere. I mean, think about how often you drive around and you see homes for sale and signs in yards, like 70% of those statistically were shot by a professional photographer. The second thing is the gear needed to shoot real estate is pretty cheap. You can actually get a starting setup for under $1,000, which is big contrast compared to weddings where it's like $10,000 for a good set or maybe 5,000. So I think that's nice. The third thing is it's compared to other types of photography, it's much lower technical skill. And I don't say that as a diss. I mean, I'm a real estate photographer. I like that, right? I wanna give myself an advantage. And that's nice because when you're first starting, it's easier to learn. But also if you wanna build a team and hire people in the future, like a lot of people do in their business, eventually it's nice to have something that's easy to train somebody. Like in my photo business, we don't hire people who have photography experience. We hire people who are friendly and we teach them the photos. And the process is called HDR, but basically your camera takes three individual photos. As you can see here, a dark photo, a middle exposure and overexposed photo. And then there's a software that blends those together for you into a finished photo that looks like this. That's a very simple process to learn. And just for reference, here are three photographers at my photo business. I've blurred their face so I don't blast them out all over the internet. But the point I wanted to make was it takes us about two to three weeks to take somebody with zero photo experience and have them be able to do everything at my photo business. Photos, 3D tours, videos, floor plans, drone photos, we teach them everything in two to three weeks. And all of our company policies and everything they need to know to work with us, that's fast. And that's really important for you if you're just starting because you can learn it more quickly if you're not very experienced as a photographer. But also like I said, as you grow your business. And here's a fun one from someone in our community named Rochelle that I think is hilarious. Like my favorite win of all time. But they had done their first photo shoot and the agent texted back and referred them to a magazine publisher to have those photos published. I just think that's funny. Like a magazine doesn't mean anything, it doesn't do anything for your business. But it's just funny to have your very first shoot featured in a magazine. And that just goes to show that it's like a fairly simple process to learn. Obviously with Rochelle, we were able to like show her how to do it from day one, but still. Number four, and this one's really important, is the clients are easy to find. And that matters because the most important thing when you're first starting is figuring out how to get people to pay you. And if you don't even know who could pay you, it's kind of tough. And with real estate, they want to be found. Like real estate agents job is to be found, right? And so they're really easy to find. We teach a strategy, we call the Instagram method to our clients. And don't worry, this doesn't, you don't have to become like an influencer, right? Or even know how to do social media well. We just use Instagram as a tool to message agents. And you can see here's people, for example, booked a $600 video shoot just starting the Instagram method, got their first shoot, little over three months into their first $1,700 a day. Someone's hitting a $10,000 a month mark. First paying customer, like these are all coming from the Instagram method. And the Instagram method that we teach wouldn't be possible if agents weren't easy to find. And here's a fun thing. The Instagram method is kind of like fishing. Like most of the time when you're fishing, you catch like small fish. Sometimes you catch a huge one, right? This person said they closed a deal to be a brokerage's exclusive photographer. They said they average 100 shoots a month. Only offered this because I offered a first shoot to agents on Instagram under Eli's direction. Just for reference, the average real estate photo shoot, if you set your business up correctly, will be about $300. That includes like $150 base shoots and then full packages like averaged together. But just for reference, so $300 times 100, that's potentially $30,000 a month in recurring revenue that this person got from an Instagram message. So that's not gonna happen when you send the first few messages, but it's just one of those things. Like you put in enough time. My business, we got big deals and the people we work with, they put in enough time to doing it. That happens occasionally and it's just cool. And the last one is it's flexible around your life when you're first starting, especially in long-term and you can use it to facilitate your goals. And so I mean a couple things. One, you can start on the side. I do not recommend people quit their jobs and then try to do this. I think you should start on the side and work to replace your income. And then if you feel comfortable and you want to at that point, quit your job and go all in and then scale if you want. But I also mean, there's different reasons people do this. Like some people just wanna make money. Someone getting 100K a year and 213K, $3,500 second month. There's a screenshot, one of my favorite ones, is someone who hit their first million dollar year and first 100K, first 200K. From Joshua Public Review, that's why it's not blurred. He said, I joined rep coaching in June of 2024 in our launch program, which is for people just starting. He grew from zero to $6,700 a month. And then he started working with us in our more advanced program and grew to 21,500 a month. So some people are just here to make money. I mean, all of us need to. But some people wanna have this as a family business. So here's a bunch of fun wins from the one on the right is one of my favorites. It's a great guy named Jerry in our program who started a business, was successful. His grandfather noticed and he started helping his grandpa build a business and people's spouses are working with them full time. I think some people are like, I don't wanna work with my spouse. Some people do and you get to decide. And I think it's a fun thing to do if you spend a lot of your time working. Might as well do it with people you enjoy. Some people just wanna prove to themselves they can do something they've always wanted to do. For me, when I grew up, I don't know why I had this fear, but I always worried about how I was gonna make money. And so for me, just like seeing that happen and seeing my business start working, I didn't start it as a business, right? It was just a service I provided on the side and then it started to grow. And yeah, built a lot of confidence in me as a person. I think that part of it's been really rewarding. Somewhat more time flexibility. We had a great one on the left here. One of our clients built an amazing business and went to Italy for a month and their business kept running. I'm not saying you're gonna do that from day one, but it's just cool to be able to build something that facilitates whatever your goals are in life. And one of my favorite ones, and we celebrate this hard in our community, but is when people finally quit their job. Like I said, I recommend replacing your income before you quit. Just a safer way to do it. And you can do it with real estate photography. It's one of the cool things. Like if you work a nine to five, you can do shoots on the weekend or after hours. Agents are totally cool with that. And then once you go full time, if you never wanna shoot another weekend shoot again, you get to decide that. Agents will also let you do it during the weekdays. So it's kind of flexible. And for that reason, I recommend replacing your income on the side first. We actually sent on the left, you can see this. We send people, we call it a quitter plaque, but our students who quit their job get one of these in the mail. And it's just a fun way to celebrate. You can see some other ones here, clocking out for the last time, starting their business in August 2024 on the top right, eventually hitting a 10K month in March 2025, 12K in July, 20K in August, quit their job full time in this. I just think that's really cool because that's like a big unlock to be able to support yourself fully on your own. And a lot of other businesses and just like ways of trying to support yourself require you to like take a big risk and quit and try to make it happen. A lot of people fail and go back to their job. And I just, I like with real estate that you can do it slowly and carefully on the side. Some people wanna scale and build a team, right? Usually you don't start with this. You have to start solo and build it up. But I think scaling is something that you don't see in a lot of other niches, in photography at least, because it's just kind of tough. Like it requires a lot of skill or there's high competition or something like that. But you see a lot of people. I mean, we've literally worked with 100 plus people who have teams in real estate photography in our Forward program. And I just think that's cool because scaling is not for everyone, but it's nice in the future if your goal is to build a business that can truly run without you. If you put in the work and you make it happen, it's a possibility and people have done it. And the good news is you don't have to decide your end goal now. You just have to take the first step towards starting on the side. And my advice, it comes from the mistakes I made a lot of times and especially so in this case, but like find someone to learn from. Don't try to do it on your own. They say a lot of business owners start businesses to solve problems they had. And that's really what I did with Real Estate Photographer Pro, which is what this is here. It's my business where I help train other photographers, like I mentioned at the start and like all these wins you've seen. And most know us as just the rep team. You may have heard of us as that. And that's what rep was created to do because I wasted five years by not finding someone to learn from. And I specifically think one of the most expensive parts was the damage that I did accidentally to my reputation just by not knowing things. Like I messed up at shoots and I did things wrong. And good word travels fast in real estate photography because agents always talk to each other. The problem is so does doing it wrong. And so in my opinion, the cost of doing it on your own far surpasses the cost of doing it with help. It's just slower and it's more expensive. And an example of this is like, if I asked you what camera settings to use, what would you say? And the reality is you could totally figure it out, but it would take a little bit of time. Maybe a lot of time. It took me a lot of time at least. Maybe you'll do it faster than me. And so maybe it takes you a while or worse, you think you have it right, but it's actually wrong. And here's where the real problem is. You multiply this by the 1,000 little things you have to figure out to make this work and you can see why it takes so long on your own. And so the nice thing is if you work with us, you kind of have two paths unless you just don't do the work. Number one is you do the work and you get the five to 10K plus per month result. Or number two is you do the work, don't get the result, and we give you all of the money that you paid us back. And I wanted to give you a little bit of insight into what rep coaching looks like, specifically the launch program, which is where you'd be as someone just starting out as a real estate photographer. And here's what it includes. Number one is you get our full business in a box training. So this is all of the things that you need to know to start a real estate media business. How to shoot photos, camera gear, camera settings, software, editing software recommendations. Going back to that slide, those thousand little details, that's in here in the exact order I'd recommend doing it in. You also get a really cool thing. If you just ask ChatGPT how to build a real estate media business, it'll give you some good advice sometimes, but the problem with it sometimes is it just pulls different things from all over the internet and there's some really bad advice in real estate photography on the internet. And some people just like take that, like chat will take that and blend it together and you like don't know what you're getting. AI Eli is an AI model that we only gave the stuff my team and I have created. So all of our course videos and checklists and processes and coaching calls, and it only references that and you can use it unlimited access in the program, which is really cool for fast answers. And of course you get access to our Facebook group, not just when you're in the program, but once you've graduated as well, you stay in that community and all the people you're seeing, all those wins you've seen in this are people that are in that community. Number two, knowing what to do next is really, really important. So how we've structured the program is in a checklist format. It starts with a four week launch checklist that literally tells you every single thing you need to do in order. It'll be like, hey, watch this video, do this, practice this, send this to your coach. And it goes through the exact order that I recommend building your real estate media business in. Not just based upon building my business, but also the thousand plus people that we've worked with. We've constantly refined this. And so this checklist is literally what I would do if I started over. I think it's really, you know, knowing what to do is important and also knowing what not to do is really important. And so you're just able to not even think about that and follow that checklist, which I think is really cool. Third, I don't believe in just an online course. I think a lot of what's needed comes from having somebody that you can be accountable to and that is accountable to you to coach you one-on-one. So you get paired with an experienced coach that has helped many people build six-figure photo businesses on our team that is gonna work with you one-on-one. They get on Zoom calls with you and they message you between those Zoom calls. And so they're your person on our team that helps you do this. And I think that's really important. And they're actually incentivized based upon your success in the program. That's how we do it on our team. And a lot of them are people who are past students who have built successful real estate media businesses. And it's just a great person to have on your side as you build your business. Then lastly, we wanna make sure you're always supported and able to sort of immerse yourself in the industry just like you would if you wanted to learn a new language the most effectively. So every business day, we have two or three Zoom group coaching calls that are happening. And the best part about these is, yeah, of course, if you have a question, you can jump on and get your question answered. But the really cool part is getting to listen to other people's questions and what they're working on. Because a lot of them will be past the level you're at. So you get to sort of hear those things and really immerse yourself. And that builds the skills on here because I think about it like, you know, whether it's learning a new language or if you wanna learn baseball, for example, what better way to learn baseball than hanging around a bunch of pro baseball players? Like you're gonna pick up a lot of stuff, right? And those group call hosts, I mean, I host one, people in my team host one, but also successful past students that do over 50K a month come and host those calls. And so they're just a great resource to learn from. And the cool thing is just in our in-house team, not even our students who come back and teach that are successful, there's over a hundred years of real estate media experience added up. So this program is the ultimate roadmap and support structure to build your real estate media business. And just a little bit about us for reference. Like I said, the company's called Real Estate Photographer Pro, but a lot of people just call us the Rep Team. We have over 250 five-star reviews on Trustpilot. So feel free to check those out. We actually made the Inc 5000 list for America's fastest growing private companies in 2025. That's really exciting for us because we believe that fast growth comes from people liking the products they get from us and liking the coaching and referring us. And that's what's allowed us to grow quickly. You can see in the bottom middle next to the Inc 5000, that's a picture of the portion of our team that came in person to our Rep 2025 event. That's the picture you can see of me giving a talk in front of that group. That was a group of our clients. We meet up every year, try to get as many people together as we can. It's always a great time. Here's some of our clients in the year before. We even do meetups and different events for our clients. We did a yacht mastermind a couple of times this year. It was super cool. And so here are your next steps. What I want you to do is complete the application below. And that's gonna give us a little bit more information about you. So we can do some research on your market and just get some more insight if we haven't served somebody in your specific market on exactly the things we know that are required to be in a market that makes this business work, as well as your personal schedule, what your job looks like. That way we can help craft a plan for you. And then once we do that, we will reach out with more info so that you can see if rep coaching is right for you. We'll answer any questions you have, go over different program options, and give you the information you need to make a decision. And what you'll find about our team is we're absolutely not a pushy team. I don't believe that's a long-term sustainable way to build a business. And so we'll be here to provide you as much information as you need so you can decide if working with us to start a real estate photography business is the right move for you. I hope to see you on this stage in the future, or maybe even the seven-figure-a-year stage. So go ahead and complete that application, and we look forward to talking with you.