Brett Garamella here. In today's video, I'm
going to give you 9 ways to make money with your drone, so let's get right into
it! alright before we get into talking about
how to make money with your drone you're gonna need the right drone so I would
recommend the Phantom 4 Pro that would be my go-to drone just the most
versatile drone has the best photo or video quality without spending more than
two thousand dollars and you're not gonna want to spend too much money if
you want to start a business right if you spend like ten thousand dollars if
you have that money great but most people don't so I would say around two
thousand dollars is a good budget to start with so you want to get the
Phantom 4 Pro you can also use it for mapping and other things now if you want
to go lighter you could go with the Mavic 2 pro although the image quality I
find is a little better right out of the box with a phantom 4 Pro Plus as a
mechanical shutter and it shoots 4k up to 60 frames per second which is a Mavic
tube Pro doesn't and if you have a little patience you could also go with
the hotel Evo 2 but I would go with the Evo 2 Pro so for right now as of this
video I would go with the phantom 4 pro now one thing about the phantom 4 pro I
will say I kind of still like my Mavic 2 pro better because it's easier to fly
the phantom 4 pro it still occasionally isn't as smooth and it's kind of like it
has a little like jerk to it and a little like idiosyncrasies that you have
to get used to it I can't really explain it but basically flying it it's easier
to get that nice cinematic smooth footage with the Mavic 2 pro than the
Phantom 4 pro however once you get used to the phantom 4 pro you can still get
equally if not better results because the image quality is better in my
opinion then the Mavic 2 pro but a lot of people
get hung up on the gear there's so many other things you need to work on to make
money with your drone and having the right drone is just one part of that
you're also going to need a commercial license if you're in the u.s.

So you're
part 107 license and you get this nice little card here you're going to need
that card if you make money with your drone so since we're in this video we're
talking about making money make sure you take your part 107 test pass it and then
you get this little I'll put a link below and basically you
can do a google search for cats and then find a testing area in your location and
it's usually at an airport or like an airport flight school that you take the
test I'll put a link in the description so you can find out more information
about that let's get into ways to make money so now you have your drone you
have your part 107 license it's time to make some money so the first way to make
money I'd recommend is doing real estate real estate photos really includes any
type of building whether that's residential or commercial so you might
want to take a second to think about your network of friends or people you
know if you're more in the commercial aspect and you have a lot of business
small business owners and people you know that you might want to start with
them if you have just a ton of friends and people who are looking to sell their
house or people would just need pictures of their house you may want to do that
however a better way to do it may be just reaching out to real estate agents
and other photographers and videographers who already do real estate
so you could contact them and say look you're doing a real estate video and I'm
a great videographer with my drone would you like to team up or you could reach
out to a photographer and tell them look I can provide you these aerial images
and we and I we could work together that way you're collaborating you're meeting
more people you're making money and you're expanding your contacts so I
think that's a good way to start out and that leads into my second way of making
money with your drone which is weddings now when it comes to real estate or
weddings people want an entire package they don't want just aerial images they
want an entire package so if you already have photography or video skills you can
sell it as an entire package if you don't then like I said you're gonna have
to reach out to a videographer or photographer and collaborate with them
so it all depends on your skill set I say always work on your skill set that
way you can sell entire package because while drone photography and videos are
nice for weddings in real estate they're gonna want ground shots they're going on
the video on the ground as well so work on your overall skill and try to sell it
as a package if you're just starting out and you have no contacts a good way to
meet people maybe get work is to go to bridal shows or to go to a trade shows
for real estate agents and architects okay just hand out your card or open up
a booth and then people will come there you can get their contact information
their emails or phone numbers and then just follow up that way all right
another way to make money with your drone is to reach out to PR houses
production houses and the Chamber of Commerce in your local city or area so
think about the city where you live go to a Chamber of Commerce meeting and out
your business card or get the contacts of people you meet and the same thing
with Public Relation places or production houses try to meet with those
people in person if you can it's going to be a lot easier to start making money
and getting jobs when you see people face to face but if you can't here's my
little secret that I have that not a lot of people are doing but I feel like it's
a good way to make some money so on your website or some other site like a free
version of WordPress or blogger you could create a one page post on that one
page post you're gonna create beautiful images of your city or your location and
basically let's say you have a beautiful bridge or a beautiful building in your
area let's say a beautiful bridge you could write a whole description about
this bridge take different photos or make a nice short little video about
this bridge promoting it and marketing it in a really professional manner with
high production value and you have this whole proposal written out and how you
can sell this bridge or make the site a beautiful place to come visit let's say
you're in a certain town and this bridge is this amazing everyone's gonna want to
come to see this bridge once they see that page they have the proposal all
laid out it looks very professional and it says so much more than just sending
some random photos okay it tells a story has a lot more thought and effort into
it and it shows that you're a professional so I would try to create a
one page post on your website or on a free site and send that link in your
email to that person now my next way to make money is to license your footage
now there are a lot of places out there like pond5 and other places where you
can post your footage and people will buy it and then you'll get a percentage
of that however I think a lot of these stock agencies for licensing your
footage we'll make you that much money and for
me I don't really see it as a good business model instead what I'd
recommend you do is either create your own website and work on your search
engine optimization or hire someone to do search engine optimization for you or
take places in your talent like we talked about that bridge let's say it's
a beautiful bridge or a beautiful building or a beautiful mountain or
beautiful River whatever is in your town geographically or architectural II
that's really nice take some beautiful photos and video now
it doesn't have to be many fewer is probably better you could post that on
Instagram would be a good place or on a YouTube channel that way it gets a lots
of views you can say look if you want to use this footage and for personal or
commercial use you can contact me put your email or however you want to be
contacted and then you could sell it directly to that person now I would look
up the prices I would say a good site would be pond5 because they have good
pricing you can sell your video both as a 1080 version and as a 4k version that
way you have different price categories for how it is same thing with the photos
whether they want the raw photo or they want a JPEG you get to have different
prices for how you distribute that those images in those videos but make sure you
price it high enough because you want to be on the race to the top not a race to
the bottom and when you sell your images for very cheap or let's say you're doing
a wedding or a real estate video and you price yourself really low
you're gonna devalue the entire industry so not only do you hurt yourself but you
hurt the entire industry because then that person is gonna suspect that same
rate and you really can't run a business like that so I would say for wedding and
real estate you price your stuff at about $200 of minimum per shoe and for
stock footage licensing your images I would look at pond5 they have good
pricing right there now another way to make money with your drone is to be
either a blogger or youtuber or just make youtube videos or blog videos you
don't have to have that official title but you could just make a really good
post it doesn't have to be a lot but you can focus more on quality than quantity
I think that will draw more traffic to you
because there's so many bloggers out there there's so many youtubers out
there it's hard to get the traffic if your stuff isn't really good so maybe
you could make your video or your blog post in a really good way blog posts
tend to do well if they're really long YouTube videos tend to do better if
they're a little shorter and you're saying well how do you make money well
there's two ways to make money the first way to make money is to do affiliate
marketing that's what I do so if I teach a tutorial or I show you a different
product let's say this drone behind me I have the Mavic 2 Pro and I tell you all
about the Mavic 2 Pro then I put a link either to Amazon or let's say to DGI
site and I'm a part of the DJI affiliate program I'm also a part of Amazon's
associate program which is another affiliate program so when you use the
link that I put in the description and you buy that Mavic 2 Pro I get a certain
percentage of that profit now affiliate programs you're not going to get rich
with just a few buys you have to get a lot to make some money at it so you're
gonna have to generate a lot of traffic and get a lot of people buying that
product usually you can expect a commission of anywhere from like 4 to 6%
around there and if you're consistent with it you could make some decent money
it all depends on so many other strategies so it probably wouldn't be my
first way to make money with your drone but it could be a side way or another
way that you do part-time starting out now another way to make money with your
drone if you end up getting a huge following and a lot of people subscribe
to your channel or to your website and to your blog post and then they want to
get all that new information because you're really good at that either you're
educating them or you're giving them the latest news and so forth or you just
have a great personality and you're entertaining then you could also make
money with Adsense so you could run ads on your website or on YouTube something
called Adsense you could use that basically the commercial that came on
before this video I get a couple cents every time someone clicks on it and
stuff like that so it's very small in Adsense really like I said is only a
part-time thing especially when starting out you really have to get millions of
views to make it substantial but it's a good way to make a little side income
while you grow your drone business now another way to make money with your
drone is do inspections so you're gonna need a good
thermal camera I would recommend a FLIR camera and then you're gonna need a
drone like a mitrice 200 or you could also use the Maverick to enterprise or
even the inspire one you can use a thermal camera on that
so all those drones will basically allow you to inspect things like roofs like
pipelines things like that that people normally had to do by hand but now you
can do it quicker and it's much safer with a drone and that's a huge growing
industry although getting the jobs might be difficult I don't have too much
expertise in that but I know it's a way that some people make really good money
and I like to explore that myself but I haven't done so but that's a way you can
make money with your drones so if you're interested in that you want more
information about that you want me to make another video I will do my research
reach out to some people I know and I could make that just leave a comment
below and I can do that for you alright next way to make money with your drone I
would say is doing working with contractors or construction sites
there's so many ways that you can make money and just like you license your
money like on pond5 or any of these stock websites or your YouTube channel
or Instagram where you're selling the footage to people who want to use it you
can do the same thing with construction sites or basically real estate too for
that matter because there's so many people involved all right you have the
contractor you have the architect the electrical persons the carpenter this
person that person and so many more people so you can reach out and sell
your videos whether that be a time lapse video an aerial video and Weiss a time
lapse what I mean is you could take a picture overhead of the roof being built
the entire building being built over the course of six months you just
would have to go there maybe once a week and get that same picture ok so it could
take time but you have those photos and like I said you're not just selling it
to one person but you can sell those to a bunch of people now all depends on the
quality and what you have you can make that look good it helps with everything
I've talked about so quality over quantity and my opinion always is more
important alright guys so I'm gonna give you one bonus way to make money with
your drone and that's mapping now the best mapping drone right now as of this
you know that everyone is kind of like the go to mapping drone is a phantom for
pro DJI phantom4 Pro and I recommend you get the RTK now if you have a big budget
you could also go with a mitrice 200 series the RTK with that because it's
even more accurate and you can do so much more with that because it has like
the base station and everything so does the Phantom 4 but the mitrice is a more
sophisticated unit that you can use with software like drawn deploy picks 4d so
the mapping industry is growing and basically you can take pictures of a
construction site that's going to be built
agriculture there's so many things you can do with mapping so personally I
would like to get involved in mapping I haven't done it yet but something I'd
like to get involved with in the future if you'd like to see more videos about
that leaving in the comments below I know it's outside the realm of normal
photography and videography that's why I kind of left it down there till the end
and I'm not sure if you guys want me to make videos like that that are more like
enterprise solutions types of videos are you guys more interested in just your
traditional photography and videography let me know in the comments below
alright guys so there's so many options to make money with your drone and you
may be a little bit overwhelmed by the end of this video so I would say
concentrate on one thing at a time think about both what you're interested in and
what's relevant where where you live for example if you live in Charleston South
Carolina then weddings would be huge or that you
live in New York City yeah there are tons of weddings there's tons of wedding
photographers videographers that you could collaborate with same thing with
Charleston South Carolina if you live there weddings would be great if you
live in South Florida or you live in Miami it could be real estate because
real estate is growing so do some research in your town or maybe you
already know your town really well and find out what the demand is and then
figure out what you need now if you're in a totally remote location then you're
gonna have to do other things like work online and educate people start a
YouTube channel start a blog and find ways to make money licensing your
footage online that sort of thing alright guys I hope you enjoyed this
video and found it helpful if it was share it with a friend and give it a
thumbs up also before I go if you haven't done so
download my free drone gear guide which shows you all my favorite gear software
applications accessories etc you can download that free guide by clicking
right over there.

I'm Brett Garamella, the drone pilot pro, and remember, Siempre Pa'lante, Nunca Pa'tra!.