How I Monetised a Following Without Brand Deals, AdSense or the Creator Program
Stephanomics vol. 1 - 20 weeks in: the Financial BTS of my Photography Content Creation
April 30th, 2026 9 am Toronto time: I launch my teaching materials, no planning, no strategy, just a PDF with 9 settings for my Sony ZV-1 Camera.
Why I Started to Monetise After 16 Months of Creating
I had just spent the previous month in France and Spain, capturing photos I was so incredibly excited to share but hitting the dilemma that most Canadian creators who find long-form YouTube is a bit too much for their current time constraints run itno: I’m posting for the love of the game, but I’d love to be paid… or at least cover my SD cards, film development costs and maybe a new camera… small things, small things. The other side of this coin, the awkward one, is that my full-time job has been massively impacted by US import tariffs (Section 232 if you want to be precise about it) and I knew that my stable 9-5 income was in jeopardy.
Here’s what I had at 9am on the 30th: about 10k combined TikTok followers, a dead IG (it is still mostly dead tbh), no funnel, no IP moat and no ladder. Yikes.
Here is what I did have: a comment section full of people asking me for my settings and more help. A camera roll full of travel photos I love. And the unshakeable delusion of a jet-lagged woman who had been waking up at 5am for the last week.
Where it All Started
Jan 3rd, 2025: my first and really only massively viral post goes live.
Based on my current conversion rates, by not laddering up when this post went viral, I estimate I lost out on tens of thousands of dollars ouch
From January to June 2025 my carousel travel photo account was booming. I was posting comparisons and results with great success, but nothing has ever reached the same reach as that first viral post.
April 4th, 2025: I start my tutorial account.
From the first viral post to monetization with my Sony ZV-1 guide, I spent 13 months posting free content. Answering all the questions I received, sharing my settings publicly. At the time, I didn’t have a plan to ladder my following into even an email list. I don’t regret being so laissez-faire but I’m definitely more strategic now.
The Canadian Conundrum of Monetisation
As a Canadian, we don’t have the same access to monetisation as some other countries. We have brand deals, but they definitely take a lot longer to filter in and the ones that do come through need verification that the company is working with Canadians on the campaign and they don’t think we’re from the US:our accents are similar so I get it is easy to confuse us. Think of it like the difference between a New Zealand Accent and an Australian accent to the untuned ear , kind of hard to tell apart unless you are attuned to the differences. Brand deals are also inconsistent, it takes time to build up enough volume and a high enough rate to cover living expenses.
We also don’t have programs like the TikTok creator fund so the bar for monetization is higher.
I wanted to create something in my control.
The Business “Plan”
From the first guide, I made a plan to create and release a new product on a weekly schedule. I launched 19 products in 20 weeks. Three camera brands, multiple models, and general photography guides.
The first priority of my build was “build once, sell forever”… at least sell until the model is no longer popular. Capitalise on my audience searching for these models, coming to me for answers and ladder them up the monetisation rungs.
Month 1 went way better than expected. Month 2 doubled. Month 3 grew again, and then Month 4 crashed. Houston, we have a problem.
20 weeks later, I’m still working on the problem, but first what went well.
Months 1 to 3: What Worked and Why
My highest converting guide category is flash photography. Any model that I published flash settings for out performed combined or no-flash guides. Flash has a set of diagnosable problems that can be fixed with repeatable settings.
Model specificity was the winner: terrible for evergreen sales, incredible for short term discoverability.
How-to videos, even though they didn’t contain any IP moats against AI, were incredibly successful at building authority and trust.
The surprising conversion winner was a viral before-and-after post. Terrible photos I took, and then I found one setting that completely changed everything. Terrible photos became gorgeous photos, the rest is history.
Cross-brand funnels was a huge winner for me in Month 2 and 3. “How to get the G7X look on your Sony” was a hook that landed.
Month 3: I Stopped Taking a Salary from my 9-5
All of this put together made months 2 and 3, really solid side-hustle income. But in Month 3 I officially stopped taking a salary from my 9-5, and that side-hustle income needed to replace my salary ASAP. And then the Month 4 crash happened.
Month 4: The Crash
Sales dropped off dramatically. No matter how much I posted or how many new followers I was gaining each day, I wasn’t seeing the growth that I had expected to see in Month 4.
I had spent over a year answering settings questions for free. Anyone who wanted the answer already had it, for nothing. Everyone who came after that, I had to justify a paywall to.
The Diagnosis
Issues I had already run into after only 3 months:
Super high churn rate: one-time products have no rentention
Low AOV (average order value): the volume required to make this sustainable was beyond my current reach
Maxed out audience-driven demand
Low product-market fit
More volume than I could feasibly drive was required to maintain sales volume
My big-ticket course did not convert, but already had a student so I can’t abandon the project.
IG still dead
Substack: had a subscriber… lost that subscriber. The MRR play was a struggle.
Social proof… 404 not found. Review requests opened and ignored. Hundreds of PDFs delivered, hundreds of Camera Recs shipped… less than a half dozen comments about how great my work is. Uh oh.
The Saviour:
My Personal Camera Recommendation Service. I launched this really early in month 1 as a mechanism to build audience trust. Low cost, high value, short-cutting the days or weeks of research they would need to do themselves.
This stream alone has made up about a tenth of my total revenue on my website, and it has consistently converted without me needing to justify the value.
My goal is the build that one-on-one relationship at the very beginning of my followers’ digi cam journey, so when they go to purchase a camera they come to me, and from there they move into a settings guide, a course, or even one-on-one classes.
The Contradiction
I thought in the beginning that catalogue growth was this master downstream lever. More products = more SEO opportunities, more Pinterest pin destinations, more choice. But as Month 4 hit, I realised that I had built a one-step ladder, with nowhere for my hard-earned leads to go. No broader value proposition. While I was growing my sales volume by adding products , I was going to run through my pool of interested buyers sooner rather than later.
I had a theoretical ladder: quick start guide —> settings guide —> general photography guide or specialty guide —> long-form course. The problem was each “step” of my ladder was a different buyer and they only needed the one step they jumped on.
Instead of charging down the catalogue volume path, I took a step back and began to focus on a few key points:
Get social proof. Genuinely, this is impossible. I received on review on my actual site, and it was someone who had bought the wrong product for what they wanted, they hadn’t read the product description and then trashed me. So I offered to send them the right product for free… crickets. Oh, and they didn’t take down the reivew or amend it. This is the way of e-commerce in 2026.
Product market fit. My dearly beloved partner firmly believes that if my products answered a dire, irreplaceable need, that they would be flying off the shelf. So I began to really look at what I was selling and if I could improve or create something with higher PMF. How I know I don’t have PMF is simple: low repeat buyers and cold traffic that barely converts. If my products were the holy grail to my customer I’d have a higher repeat purchase rate AND cold traffic would be flooding in and converting.
Culture. I have become obsessed with what my content is saying, to whom, and how. And how my content makes my followers feel. Creating cultural insiders, a highly loyal following who consume everything I create. I want my followers to be so confident in their photography that they could pick up any camera model and quickly learn it in short order. I want my followers to know beautiful SOOC JPEGs are possible: straight out of camera, no editing, no rescue in post.
The Purpose of Stephanomics
This series is equal parts post-mortem for myself and a how-to for you. A realistic look at the hypothesis I’m running each month, the questions I’m trying to answer and how it’s going.
I’m undecided on full number transparancy in front of the paywall so for now, I’m leaving it paywalled. If you want a full accounting, it’ll be in the companion post to this where we’ll look through the actual numbers behind my first $10,000 of sales.
This is likely to be a monthly series: my primary focus stays on photography and marketing contentm so this is truly a post-mortem rather than the main event.
The Final Roll.
So here is where we are as of mid-September.
MMR: through a commitment to posting weekly (at minimum) on my blog & Substack I hope to build a floor or monthly recurring revenue.
Trialling a few different approaches to my exist PDF content, that has a broader, more evergreen approach. This will ideally also reveal what is PMF for my audience.
Reduce friction where possible. Batch filming, batch editing, batch writing and time-blocking are my new besties.
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xo Steph
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