How to Stay Relevant in an Oversaturated Industry

If you’re not friends with me on Facebook, you may have missed this post earlier today, so I really wanted to reiterate this idea & the way it relates to relevance.

The secret to having it all is already knowing you do.

This idea can be taken many ways, but the way it really played into my life is what I laid out in my Facebook status earlier today… Recently a friend mentioned the key to staying relevant as a photographer is shooting top models daily (for social media) and pulling from top designers to shoot editorials for “top” magazines (rather small magazines that are top for our level) and my instant response was “Well then I’m barely relevant then.”

Do you ever feel like that? Whether you’re a photographer, an artist, a model, a real estate agent, a student, etc, there’s been a point in your life where you worried about your relevance; it may even be happening right now.

Now if we are going by the above standard, like I said, I’m barely relevant. I haven’t put together a full editorial in probably 3-4 months. Sure I’ve shot with some top models recently, but definitely not daily. Let’s take a look at my Instagram for a second. The below screenshots are from August 2015 and fall 2015 when I was shooting models daily, but even then a lot of it was hanging out with friends and I happened to grab an iPhone shot.

So here’s the deal…

Not everything on social media is real. Some of those #relationshipgoals couples are paid to act like they love each other when it reality all they do is fight all day long.

Word of mouth is where it’s at! 

As a photographer, you can shoot all the top models in the world (yes some people may get to the top by doing this, but they burn out because it’s too much to handle), but at the end of the day no one really cares unless those models are talking about you and your photography.

The key to staying relevant is quality of service which leads to word of mouth.