How To Earn 6 Figures In An Obscure Niche With Clever SEO And Expert Copywriting | Sean Oblizalo

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 172

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood, and I am here with a wonderful guest today, a guest that I'm excited to dive into his business because he has a very unique business model and one that I have not seen before, and one that when you hear about it, will make a whole lot of sense of why it's been so successful in the last years, just because of what everything's going on with the pandemic and everything. But this is our guest, Sean, and I'm going to try to get your last name right, Sean Oblizalo, is that correct?

Sean Oblizalo (0:48)

Yeah, yeah, you nailed it. You know it.

Good job.

Brian Hood (0:51)

Yeah, thanks for coming on the podcast, man. So really quick, Sean, can you tell our audience what exactly you do? Like what's your elevator pitch? Cause I know you have one, right?

Sean Oblizalo (0:59)

Yeah, I mean, I hope so. So I basically do like adventure elopements. So couples who like their whole relationship is generally built and formed like doing stuff outside together. So we connect and go off to the mountains and get married. So it's like, it's exactly how it sounds. An adventure elopement, it just doesn't have like the preconceived like connotation of like an elopement, like running off to Vegas with like Elvis.

Brian Hood (1:25)

So just to clarify, you're doing photography and is it videography as well as are just photography?

Sean Oblizalo (1:30)

I do photography, then I kind of, I'm a self-proclaimed elopement ninja.

So I got the ninja phrase from like, I used to work in a restaurant, so we'd call like OGs like ninjas. So like, you just know how to like navigate everything. So I call myself an elopement ninja. So I basically help with all the planning, permits, logistics on the front end. And then I basically like hang out with couples and take pictures and picnic and smoke weed and drink beers on their wedding day.

Brian Hood (1:57)

So again, just so everyone's on the same page here.

Sean takes people out into nature, helps plan everything, all the logistics.

And if I went to your website, which is valsandpeaks.com, it's like hilarious. It's actually almost like the juxtaposition of seeing a bride in her beautiful white wedding dress hiking through the mountains. So this is the kind of experience that you provide people. And it makes a lot of sense because with 2020 and even first part of 2021, there were either no weddings at all or it was really hard to get a venue and plan all the stuff around it. So a lot of people were just saying, screw it. We're just gonna go out in the nature with someone like Sean, an elopement ninja, and get hitched out in the woods or in the mountains somewhere with a beautiful surrounding, either with a very small group of people or just with Sean and the two people and maybe an officiant. I don't know if you can actually, are you wedding people yourself? I guess you're not, because you need to take the photos of it.

And then people are saying, that's what we're gonna do instead of the big, huge wedding where we have hundreds of people in attendance. So that's what you've been up to, which is a really cool, it's a really cool, I guess offer you would call it. It's like just a cool service that you offer people. So Sean, whenever you applied to come on the show, you mentioned some stuff. You said that you had 2020 despite, was it 2020 was one of your best years ever, despite obviously the terrible stuff that happened with the whole wedding industry, and you were able to still pull in six figures. Was this a pivot in your business, or was this the thing you set out to do from the very start as a photographer?

Sean Oblizalo (3:17)

You know, dude, it's really weird. I felt like I was one of the few people who benefited off the pandemic, while there was a lot of people suffering. But I'm in such a niche market that it was kind of just right place, right time. Because I was already doing a lot of this before COVID happened.