how to blog for a photography business

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But that doesn’t mean that photography businesses get off the hook when it comes to content marketing. 😉 Today, everyone that has a business presence needs to blog. Blogging is essential in the current digital landscape, and photographers have a unique opportunity to harness the power of blogging for their benefit and online reach will fall behind. Fortunately, you can take proactive steps to learn how to blog for a photography business successfully and enjoy a more lucrative business, as a result. Here’s how. How to Blog for a Photography Business: Why Should I Blog? If you’re thinking, “Come on. I run a photography business! Why does blogging matter to me?” you’re not alone. Today, lots of companies are confused about how and why blogging has become so critical to a good online presence. The answer, however, is simple: blogging is the most efficient way to communicate with customers online, right now. What’s more, it’s seriously lucrative. Here are a few quick stats about how blogging impacts your ROI and bottom line, from Impact Branding and Design: Websites that blog have an average of 434% more indexed pages than websites that don’t blog. 47% of customers view 3-5 pieces of content before ever talking to a salesperson. Companies that prioritize blogging are 13x as likely as their competitors to enjoy a positive ROI. Compared to outbound leads, which have a close rate of 1.7%, inbound and blogging-focused leads have a close rate of 14.6%. Businesses that blog earn 97% more inbound links to their site. As many as 80% of customers ignore the paid ads at the top of Google’s results (this is a BIG deal for photo businesses!) and only focus on organic results. Blogs are currently the web’s 5th most trusted source of online information. We ourselves at Express Writers rely on consistent content creation to generate our inbound leads. (Here’s a case study on that.) As you can see, effective blogging has a massive impact not only on your company’s visibility on the web but also on the way people perceive your brand. If you’re bypassing blogging for paid advertising or (worse) no digital strategy at all, you’re missing out! How to Blog for a Photography Business: An Example of Success Jasmine Star is a great example of a Google success as a photography blogger. She writes a lot of posts and even offers tips that appeal to a typical photography buyer, but aren’t necessarily photography related. Her target clientele is marketers and those who need beautiful professional photography, and she blogs in a wide sphere of topics that will get the attention of her target clientele. How to Get Your Social Media Posts Seen By More People is one of her blog topics, for example. Are you sitting down for this? Her blog ranks in the top 3-4 organic results of Google for the highly competitive keyword photography blog. Jasmine’s consistent, awesome blogging has won her a top spot in Google’s organic results. And for a HUGE keyword. To find out just how huge, I took that keyword to my favorite SEO tool, KWFinder, and found that this keyword brings in 22,200 monthly visitors.  Jasmine’s blog gets an estimated large chunk of that volume. Keep in mind this is traffic fueled by Jasmine’s blog, fully organic, without a paid advertisement. She gained this incredible keyword spot solely through her blogging chops! Take inspiration: your one time investment per blog, as long as it’s quality and matches what your readers would expect to read (and will love and share), can last for years! 5 Reasons Blogging Matters for Photographers, Specifically There are more reasons than the tremendous value in SEO traffic, although that’s pretty huge alone. While it’s true that blogging is critical for all brands, everywhere, it has some unique benefits for photographers. Let’s break it down: 1. Blogging Lets You Show Your Customers Who You Are For people outside the photography business, it might seem like all photographers are the same.  Of course, you know this isn’t true! While all photographers take pictures, each has their own individual style, focus, and strengths. Luckily, blogging helps you showcase these. By using a blog, you can show your customers what’s important to you and what you value as a professional. This, in turn, helps you connect with the most valuable, relevant clients and build a sense of recognition on the web. 2. Blogging Allows You To Showcase Your Work Today, it can be tough for working photographers to find a way to display their recent photographs. After all, few photographers have physical galleries, and, even the ones who do don’t get tons of foot traffic to them. Fortunately, blogging solves this problem by giving you a centralized location to display your newest work and update your customers. This helps you keep your portfolio fresh and ensures that your clients always see your latest and best images. 3. Blogging Boosts Your SEO in a Way Portfolio Sites Never Could Some photographers address the issue listed in the point above by creating an online portfolio. And while this is a smart idea, it’s not a super effective approach when it comes to SEO. The reason being that portfolio sites don’t do much in the way of including keywords, offering indexable pages, or providing valuable, customer-focused content. They just exist. They seldom get lots of traffic, and they certainly don’t do much to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). Blogs, on the other hand, are much more symbiotic – as we saw in Jasmine’s example. Designed to allow you to communicate directly with customers, blogs make it easy to target relevant keywords, keep your content fresh, and answer the biggest questions your customers have about your services, different photographic methods, and the industry as a whole. 4. Blogging Makes Your Content Shareable Imagine this: you shoot a wedding or maternity shoot. You post the photos on your blog and share them on social media (with your customers’ permission, of course). The customer sees them, loves them, and shares the … Read more