Supercharge your creative business.

Hi, I’m Matt Walter. You might have seen my photography work published in TIME, Washington Post, VICE or somewhere else. Or you might listen to bands I photograph, like Violent Soho, Clowns or Dune Rats. Check out this photo I took of Cat Stevens (yeah, the guy who wrote Matthew and Son).

But before I got to that stage, I drowned in the confusion.

What I tried

I worked hard for years to build my name as a music photographer.

I did all the usual stuff:

• took every opportunity that came my way
• photographed every band that allowed me to
• bought tickets for shows just to photograph bands
• charged $0 for work I put countless hours into

But I never made a dollar. 

I was a crab in the barrel over saturating the market with free services that devalued my creative arts niche.

I was even afraid to ask for money for what I knew had a value.

Waking up one day, I had a moment of realisation.

I was thinking as a hobbyist and not as a professional – I wasn’t thinking as the owner of a creative business.

I was thinking like a photographer instead of a business owner.

Having every potential client know that I do music photography wasn’t turning my photos into dollars.

My competitors laughed at me for taking my brand seriously.

Now they don’t photograph music and I fly around the world photographing bands on tours.

Being successful in the creative industry is about so much more than the art that you make.

I needed to be:

• top 3 on Google
• presenting a website that looked as professional as my photos were
• where my competitors weren’t
• on as many different platforms as possible

But how could I achieve all of that, easily?

I had no idea where to start.

Normally, I would have had had to sift through endless webpages, YouTube videos and articles to find something that is even similar to what I was trying to achieve. It would have been frustrating.

Luckily, I have an advantage that most people don’t have – I am a digital marketer by day, photographer by night.

That means I work with brands to maximise their exposure to their product through digital platforms.

So I got to work putting that knowledge into my photography work.

Within a couple of weeks, I started to see results for important keywords, like ‘music photographer’:

That’s position one and position two on Google showing my website. 

What about the results for another of my keywords, ‘music photography’:

I started teaching music photography, so I targeted ‘Learn music photography’:

Number two on the first page – not bad.

Having my website show up in the top three for important keywords was the reason I started getting paid work.

New clients were finding my work and they offered money for the work because I never had set an expectation that I would do it for free.