Fast Food Friday - For Professional Photographers

​It's the Friday after Thanksgiving, and if you're an American, you're probably enjoying leftovers from yesterday's holiday dinner. So, having fun with Fast Food Friday, I ran across this post in the SCU archives from four years ago, and it's perfect for today.

Looking for new blog content? If you have a blog and said "No," you're lying! Everyone is looking for content, especially about topics to draw in readership. Well, here it is - as today's "Chef" I'm giving you one of my favorite recipes, and it's going to expand your audience, and get your community more involved. 

​A well-done blog is one of the best marketing tools you've got. The only thing that will render it useless is if you don't know what you're doing with a camera in your hands! As with everything I write about - you've got to have the skill set.

Your website is about what you sell, your products and your services. Your blog is about what's in your heart. An excellent blog gives you the opportunity to go off track a little and be involved in your community. There are very few things with this strong a potential to help you build brand awareness. This is all about working to establish yourself as the photography expert in your community. It's a soft-sell approach, without getting in anybody's face.

There's a bonus with today's Fast Food Friday Special...listen to the minute and a half "First Byte" that gives you a taste of what's coming and why it's so important!

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Blog Content That Pulls in Your Community

Hit play to hear about today's special...

The whole idea with today's post is to build terrific content using businesses in your community. So many photographers complain about not having enough material and needing things to write about. Why not start featuring all your favorite places, starting with retail establishments?

Here's a great example - everybody has a few favorite restaurants, pizza places, etc.  Start with a visit to one of your favorites and shoot an environmental portrait (wide angle) of one of the staff in the restaurant. Maybe it's the chef in the kitchen or the host/hostess, a waiter or waitress or the manager. The point is, you're going to pick somebody who's added something to your life in your community, even it's inches to your waistline!

Next, do a short write up: 50-150 words is plenty. Talk about one of your favorite dishes and include a link to the restaurant's website or if they don't have a website, give their address. This is about recognizing one of the places in your community and why you like to go there. It's about sharing your experiences.

Having trouble understanding environmental portraiture? It was one of the legendary Don Blair's favorites. He'd shoot with Hasselblad's 30mm fisheye and pull in as much of the subject's environment as he could. Here are a few examples I pulled off of Google when typing in "Environmental Portraits." Click on any image, and you can find out more about the artist and how the image was used.

Just click this collection from Google and you can wander in cyberspace looking at hundreds of examples.

Click on image for the distributor

Now, let's pull the concept together with a marketing plan.

Each time a new community profile post runs, print out a hard copy and put it into an inexpensive acrylic free-standing frame. I went online and Googled "Acrylic Frames" for the example at the right. This one is an 8x10, but depending on what you print, a 5x7 might work as well.

At the top of the image add the following text, "Community Profiles - As Seen On ______________'s Blog (_____________.com)". Drop it off as a thank you to your subject for their time to pose and contributing to your content.

​Here's one of the best benefits of community profile posts - They help establish your expertise as a photographer along with being an enthusiastic member of the community. Every establishment loves a little publicity, and you're giving them a chance at more exposure, as well as showing your appreciation for whatever role they've played in your life. Each subject is going to become one of your ambassadors. Don't under-estimate how excited they're going to be about being featured on your blog when you drop off that acrylic stand.

Here are a few more tips to help you make this more effective...

• Build a stash of profiles. You need consistency for a blog to be effective, so post at least twice a week. Getting twenty of these community posts done in advance would give you material for one day each week for almost five months. It's the perfect project to do in the upcoming "slow season" of the first quarter of 2019.
• Run one community profile a week.
• Everybody in your community has the potential for a profile. Don't forget clergy, dry-cleaners, teachers, law enforcement, bank tellers, supermarket managers, doctors, dentists, restaurants, even the Chamber of Commerce. The list goes on and on. 
• When you run out of establishments, think about other topics. For example, pets of the community have almost the same draw, just not the added exposure with the acrylic sign. You could also do "Leaders of the Community" and theme the series.
• Create your own publicity! Once you've published a half-dozen profile posts, send out a press release about the project and include a couple of images of members of the community. You never know who's going to read the release and what new doors it might open.

This is about giving back to your community using your skill set. You're looking for the community to be good to you. So, you better make sure you're good to your community!

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