Flying a drone is one of the most enjoyable and exhilarating things to do, apart from flying a traditional aircraft yourself, with drones, you can capture unbelievable aerial footage and pictures, do cool tricks like flips, and spend quality time outdoors with your friends. There are many avenues for turning your drone hobby into a profitable drone business.
To make money with a drone, you will need to invest in the right equipment for the job, and get the training and experience required for the work you are planning to do. You will also need to get licensed with the FAA (Part 107) for commercial drone piloting.
There are several ways to make money with a drone, but really you only need to be unlimited by your own creativity. Keep in mind with most of these ways of making money with your drone that there will be a learning curve and hard work involved not instant success, and with some you will need to invest a good bit of time, money, or both to make a business succeed. Below are a few guides to making $5000 monthly doing with your drone:
Sell Your Drone Photography and Videography
By putting photography and videography in its own category, what you might think as a classic photographer the artist who is just out finding, creating, capturing beautiful photos and videos for the sheer love of it, with a vague hope that someone will want to buy the pieces they are creating. A photographer with a drone is just continuing their love for creative expression with a camera, just a bit higher up.
Drone photography is so in demand because it allows people to use high-quality photographs for their websites, commercials, and much more. As with drone videography, you need to know how to take great pictures, and you also need a high-quality camera with great resolution. Few ways to make money from drone photography:
- By selling your work, your creative expression to interested parties by marketing yourself and your work.
- By marketing your services as a photographer to be commissioned for specific projects, start by building your portfolio and your reputation as a drone photographer.
If you are already a photographer who has gotten into drones, marketing will not be too demanding, it would just be adding on to what you already have.
- Put up your best aerial shots or videos up for prospective buyers to see, get them into your store whether it’s an online establishment or brick and mortar.
Alternatively, you can offer videography services. In a nutshell, drone videography involves taking high-quality video footage using your drone from above key points or landmarks. Of course, you need to have a good eye to capture excellent aerial videos. You also need to know how to pilot your drone carefully and stably. The best aerial video footage is calming and detailed. The better a camera you can mount on your drone, the more your video footage may be in demand by clients.
In any case, videography services can net you a quick payout if you know where to capture good drone footage. Sometimes, you can capture good custom aerial footage while simply experimenting with your drone and having a great time. Then you can use freelance websites or other resources to advertise your drone videos to anyone who may want it for their video projects.
Teach Others How to Fly a Drone
The drone industry continues to expand each year, which means that more and more aspirin drone pilots are looking to develop their skills. If you have a few years of flight experience under your belt. And especially if you have learned drones’ skills related to specific industries, you have something to teach novice, or even more experienced drone pilots.
Many areas have drone clubs to meet other enthusiasts and learn from each other. This is a great venue for offering a course for beginners, or possibly a more specialized course for advanced pilots wanting to learn a specific skill. Another way to use your expertise as a teaching tool is through creating an online course. This could be through creating your own website and building your own brand, or you could start out with a course marketed through another platform such as udemy.
Sell Your Drone Images as Stock Photo and Video
If you’re working as an aerial photographer, whether you’re selling prints or taking contracts for projects or events, another way to boost your income is by signing up for a stock photography account or two. Most sites will review your work before offering you an account, but once you have an account with photos available for download, you will be paid a royalty for each download. Not all stock photo or video sites are created equal, so look for a few that have high quality images and offer a good royalty arrangement such as Shutterstock, iStock/Getty, Alamy, or Adobe Stock.
To get an account with stock photo sites that prioritize quality over quantity, you are going to have to submit some really good quality photos, so take the time to work on building up your image library.
If you do have events or other projects that you are working on, take a few images just for yourself to use for stock sites. Or take the time to dedicate a few flights a month just to getting images for your stock photo accounts.
The reality is that selling photos and videos on stock sites is never going to make you rich, and it probably won’t even earn you a living. But once you’ve been approved for a couple stock photo accounts and keep adding images every so often, you should get a nice passive side income that takes relatively little time or effort on your part.
Do Aerial Wedding and Event Photography
Most professional photographers would love to make a living entirely off their creative expressions but put the bread on the table with commissioned projects. A great way to make money with a drone is by specializing in weddings and events. It’s becoming increasingly popular to get aerial shots and footage of weddings or other large family events, so it’s a great time to get into this market.
Wedding photographers may be thick on the ground, depending on your area, but with a drone you can partner up with a few of them to do aerial shots for events that they are booked for, and begin gaining your own reputation and brand.
It’s a good idea to start building your portfolio of aerial wedding shots, to showcase your skills to potential customers, or even to wedding photographers that you would like to partner with. You can do this by staging some wedding scenes or going along on some photo shoots as a second or third photographer to build your skills and get some images for your own brand building.
Most professional photographers would love to make a living entirely off their creative expressions but put the bread on the table with commissioned projects. A great way to make money with a drone is by specializing in weddings and events. It’s becoming increasingly popular to get aerial shots and footage of weddings or other large family events, so it’s a great time to get into this market.
Wedding photographers may be thick on the ground, depending on your area, but with a drone you can partner up with a few of them to do aerial shots for events that they are booked for, and begin gaining your own reputation and brand.
It’s a good idea to start building your portfolio of aerial wedding shots, to showcase your skills to potential customers, or even to wedding photographers that you would like to partner with. You can do this by staging some wedding scenes or going along on some photo shoots as a second or third photographer to build your skills and get some images for your own brand building.
Real Estate Photography
Selling properties is big business, and especially with high-end homes, a listing is almost expected these days to have a fly-through type video to showcase the exterior of the property. The best way to create aerial videos of real estate properties is obviously with a drone, and they can also easily snap still photos from an aerial perspective to show off the best angles of the home for sale.
While some real estate agents are jumping on the drone bandwagon and doing the photo shoots themselves, many are not ready to go buy and fly one for themselves and would much rather hire someone to do the flying and get the photos and videos for them. It’s a great opportunity to use your drone and your skills to make some money selling drone photography services to realtors.
To start developing your skills in filming and taking aerial photos of houses, practice flying around your own house (or neighbors’ houses, with permission), looking for the best angles for stills, and practicing flight modes that best highlight the features of a house. In addition to simply developing your camera and drone flight skills, you can use images from these practice sessions to create a portfolio.
Once you have a good portfolio of aerial home photos and videos, you can investigate getting hired by a few local real estate agencies to do photo shoots of any of their more luxurious properties that would benefit from the extra cost.
Don’t forget about the commercial property market either. Commercial properties are usually bigger sales deals, and larger properties can benefit even more from having an aerial perspective to showcase the size of the property and highlight all the different aspects that might not be easily seen from the ground. Aerial photography also provides the opportunity for informative overlays of key features of a property, and with a little bit of work on Photoshop or Premiere Pro, join the big leagues with your drone real estate photography.
Fly Drone for Roof and Building Inspections
There are a few industries that hire drone operators to perform roof or building inspections. These could be insurance companies, utility or service companies, or construction firms.
To be hired by these types of industries, you’re going to have to prove your skill both as a drone pilot and a camera operator, as it requires technical expertise to get the angles and shots needed for specific data. A good approach if you want to get into flying a drone for inspections is to learn a little bit about the specific industry you are interested in and what their needs are for inspections.
For example, if you are interested in doing building inspections for insurance companies, you will need to know what types of information they are most interested in: possible water leakage areas, recent improvements, insulation quality, etc. To use your drone effectively to get this kind of information, you most likely will need to use thermal imaging, which requires specialized camera sensors.
An entry level drone with thermal sensors begins at around $3,500, so it may be a bit of an investment to get started, but the payoffs are also bigger, as the industries hiring drone operators for inspections expect to pay more for your specialized skills and equipment.
If it seems intimidating to learn how to fly and what you need for doing inspections with a drone, consider taking an online course to get you headed on the right track. These will tend to be industry specific, so focus on one specific industry, and if you want to expand to others later, it won’t be too hard to transfer your skills and experience to another area.
Specialized equipment: Thermal imaging camera such as the Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual.
Aerial Surveying and Mapping
Surveying and mapping with a drone are another area that is not going to be picked up without a bit of time and money investment at the outset. Surveying with a drone involves flying over a specified land area and collecting photos of the entire area to be stitched together using mapping software such as Pix4D or Sim Active. These aerial images can also be used to create 3D models and reconstructions. Don’t think of this as a complicated panorama – it’s more like building a miniature model.
While photos taken by almost any average camera drone can be made into maps, drones with higher resolution are obviously going to provide better detail for more accurate maps. For industries such as construction and mining, your average GPS capabilities are not going to be specific enough in terms of geo-location and measurement. A construction company wants to know, down to a centimeter, where to start excavating for a building foundation. To get this level of location accuracy, you will need a drone with more precise geo-location data attached to each image.
An entry level drone for surveying starts around $1,600.
To learn how to do aerial surveying, your best bet again is to find some online training courses to get you started. You will also need to learn how to use mapping software services to do something with the photos you collect with your drone.
Considering the initial investment of a surveying level drone and the training courses to get you qualified, the payoffs are pretty good, as an experienced aerial surveyor can expect to make a decent income. With the right equipment set up. Drones can carry out detailed, thorough topographic surveys. These offer the exact quality as measurements collected by other methods in the field. Aerial surveys are useful for:
- Knowing where to build
- Determining whether a given plot of land is safe
- Knowing more about water tables
- Planning out how land will be divided into parcels
Fly Drone for Public Safety and Emergency Services
Fire and police departments are increasingly using drones for a variety of uses, including search and rescue operations, fire scene monitoring, crowd surveillance and more.
Depending on your area, your local fire department may have its own drone fleet and operators to carry out missions, or they may choose to outsource this work to certified and experienced drone operators.
In many rural areas where fire departments are primarily volunteer based, it doesn’t promise to pay much to fly drone missions in the service of your community. In suburban and urban areas, you can check with your local police and fire departments to see what their procedures are for, including drone operations, and whether they outsource. If you happen to be employed with a public safety agency already, adding drone operations to your skill set could get you a pay raise.
To fly drone missions as a contractor with a public safety agency, you will need to have all the required certifications, and quite a bit of experience under your belt. Take some courses, log lots of flight hours, volunteer if necessary to get in with the agency you are interested in flying for.
Use Your Drone for Precision Agriculture
Farming, believe it or not, is a high-tech business, and is increasingly using drone technology to optimize yields. There’s room here for drone operators who are not farmers themselves, as many farmers are simply too busy to learn the ins and outs of drone operations but would like to have access to the data they can provide.
Drones are the perfect tool for covering large areas of land (have you seen modern farm fields?) and getting detailed images of every corner of the land they cover. These images are used to scout for pest damage, evaluate growth rates, monitor irrigation systems, and even evaluate soil health. Sometimes these images are simple RGB photos, but more often they make use of different spectrum wavelengths with specialized sensors that gather data not visible to the naked eye (or standard camera image).
Learning how to use these sensors and make sense of the data they offer up is the steepest learning curve in flying a drone for precision agriculture.
The actual drone flight can typically be automated by setting a flight path mission through the controller settings. To be successful as a precision agriculture drone pilot, your piloting skills are not as important as your knowledge of NDVI sensors and their related software systems.
Start a Drone YouTube Channel
The YouTube market is booming. Now more than ever, it’s possible to make a profit on YouTube and similar video-sharing platforms by starting a channel and getting enough of the following that you show advertisements during or between your videos.
YouTube makes it even easier to make money. Once you get 1000 subscribers, you can start showing ads on your videos and turn a profit for each ad shown. This will take time, however, so don’t start a drone YouTube channel expecting to make money quickly. You can make a drone YouTube channel for the following topics and more:
- Drone education, such as how to repair a drone or how to fly a drone safely
- Drone tricks, like flips or spirals
- Advanced drone education, which is great for drone enthusiasts who want to fly like the pros
You can essentially make a drone YouTube channel about anything you like! So long as it relates to drones, you can use your own drone video footage and showcase your favorite drone products.
If your YouTube channel becomes popular enough, you’ll make more money through advertisements and regular subscribers. Then you can build a platform off your popularity and:
- Potentially make money on platforms like Patreon
- Potentially make money through deals with drone companies and more.
