Keeping Your Photography Business Alive With Your Blog

​by Skip Cohen

I started the Food Friday Series over two years ago, hoping a weekly short post covering one aspect of marketing would help many of you stay focused on the importance of building a more substantial business. From the SCU Diner, with help from an occasional guest "chef," we shared a lot of great ideas.

Well, nine months into the pandemic, with many areas of the country going back into lockdown, it's time to bring a few of the critical topics back to the table!

Here's my point: Social media has become your number one vehicle to keep in touch with your target audience. That means your blog is more important than ever. It's your best way to maintain brand awareness, but it needs to be done right!

You've got something you've never had before, too - TIME! 

I'm sharing tips from my experience as well as my good buddy, Scott Bourne's. Obviously, you need to stay healthy and safe, but there's simply no excuse for hunkering down from your business! 

1. "Mom" Appeal: For most of you, your target audience is "Mom." Women make 98% of the purchase decisions to hire a professional photographer in the portrait/social categories. That means your content needs to have appeal to Mom, but so does the look and feel of your blog. Your content needs to be relatable to your readership.
2. Gift Ideas: It's the holiday season, so share ideas on things to do with photographs. From frames to albums to canvas and prints, technology has made the choices to suggest virtually unlimited. I've written this before - photography is the perfect gift idea in the pandemic! A family portrait is an ideal gift for grandma this year because it's her family she misses most!
3. Making Your Audience Better Artists: There are things you do every day as a photographer that you take for granted. Help your audience do a better job of capturing images of their family - even if it's just with a cell phone. Share ideas on composition, lighting, fill-flash, and storytelling and help your readers get better results.
4. Throwback Thursday: Use your throwback images to remind your audience how fast the kids are growing up, and their family is changing. It's like the old "Subliminal Man" on Saturday Night Live - you've got to plant the seed for an updated family portrait this holiday season.
5. Be Consistent: Consistency is crucial in building readership, and if you find yourself blogging every full moon, you're better off to shut off the blog entirely and come back when you can make the commitment it deserves.
6. Build a Stash: Every post doesn't have to be done in real-time. If you look back at a previous Fast Food Friday special on blog ideas, they can be written in advance. Build a stash of posts you can use, and then don't relaunch your blog until you've got 12-15 posts ready to go and in the pipeline. Then alternate between posts in your stash and something fresh each week. 
7. Guest Posts: Sharing and exchanging content with other blogs helps you build stronger awareness. Look for partnerships where you swap material with other photographers and groups within your community.
8. Support Your Community: Writing about upcoming community events gives you more traction in terms of giving back. It also helps define your role better as somebody who's helpful. You're likely to find the sponsoring associations for each event you help publicize, sharing your information and helping you build more awareness. And just because we're in a pandemic and live events aren't happening very often doesn't mean your local nonprofits don't still need help!

In today's post, including five tips from Scott Bourne below, you've got 13 ideas with a minimal overlap. Your blog has never been more important than today when live interaction is so limited with your clients and target audience.

Can you survive without a blog? Maybe, but here's why it's so important. Your website is about what you sell. Your blog is about what's in your heart. The two work together, just like publicity and advertising to help you establish a stronger brand.

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Building Traffic for Your Blog - Five Primary Tips

 by Scott Bourne
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If you're attempting to become (or already are) a professional photographer, in my opinion you need a blog. But not just any blog will do. Your blog needs to be an extension of you. It needs to show off your work for sure, but it also needs to show off your personality.

Once you build a blog, it won't do you much good if people coming to it don't stick around, because you aren't giving them a reason. So here are five ways to increase your blog's audience.

1. Avoid too many ads, too much sales talk, too many banners and too many commercials on your blog. Make sure there is a nice content to marketing ratio. Read your blog as if you were someone else and ask yourself, would I find this blog to contain enough helpful, valuable information to put up with "X" amount of marketing.

2. Publish your blog on a dependable and regular schedule. While publishing new posts every single day will get you a bigger audience faster, it's not a requirement. What is important however, is publishing with consistent frequency. Publish every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for instance and let your audience know the schedule. Whatever day(s) you promise to publish, stick with it so people know there's a reason to come back and more importantly, so they don't forget your message.

3. Tell stories. Be engaging. Talk more about your subject expertise or your clients than yourself. Make sure your content solves a problem for someone else, not for you. Narrative is a powerful form of communication. Use it.

4. Be yourself. You can't make a blog work unless it's honest, transparent and truthful. It has to be written from your very own true perspective, NOT the perspective you THINK people want to hear. It's way too hard to be someone else and to keep it going. Just be yourself. Not everyone will like what you do. Don't worry about that. There's a big world out there. You only need to reach the people who DO like what you do - the rest can head on down the road to find someone or something else. Life goes on.

5. Be helpful. Make sure every blog post provides the possibility of help to your audience. Your content has to be useful, or nobody will care about it. The more targeted, and niche oriented, the better. The more problem solving the better. 

Blogging isn't about publishing as much as you can.
​It's about publishing as smart as you can!
Jon Morrow