Let’s face it… it’s been proven time after time that blogging can impact your business in incredible ways as a photographer. Not only does blogging help with your SEO and your rankings on Google, but it also allows you to connect with your clients, it allows you to share valuable knowledge with your readers, and it is one of the best ways to share photos with the world… from your clients to potential clients! Let’s dive into these 5 tips to help you consistently blog as a photographer!
Yet, so many photographers have yet to take the plunge and start blogging. We have heard the top reasons many photographers don’t blog over and over… can you relate to any of them?
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I hate to write.
It takes too much time.
I have no idea what to blog about.
Today, we’re going throw those excuses out the window and help you guys learn how to make blogging a realistic, simple part of your workflow! Are you ready? It’s time to make a good blogging SYSTEM so that you can reap all of the amazing benefits of blogging! Here are our top 5 tips to consistently blog as a photographer.
1. Create a schedule
The first tip to consistently blog is to create a schedule! I’ll be totally honest with y’all and say that we did not start small when it came to blogging! In fact, we did the exact opposite. One day, we literally decided to blog every single day for the rest of the year… and except for one day (I believe it was a holiday!), we did. I would not recommend this strategy unless you’re super motivated AND love to write, but I CAN tell you that blogging frequently worked wonders for our business when we had hardly any leads coming in!
Instead, what we’d recommend is starting small.
Blogging is all about consistency. Whether you’re blogging once a year or once a day, it is vital that your blog readers know when they can consistently expect to see a post from you. For you, maybe that looks like blogging 1 time per week or just 1 time every other week to start. Maybe that looks like blogging 3 times per week. Maybe you want to try blogging every day. Whatever it is, decide what your schedule will be and decide to stick with it!
A month or two in advance, we sit down and write out a detailed calendar of all the posts we plan to share within that month or two. Seeing all these posts written out ensures we are balancing how much content we share within each of our post categories so that we don’t schedule posts for certain audiences too close together. (For example, we try not to post two personal posts back to back!)
The first things on our blogging calendar are the posts for shoots and weddings we have scheduled that month. During our busy season, those types of posts take up a lot of our blogging schedule, and we fill in the rest with educational and personal posts for our readers! So… decide on how often you will blog, and create a calendar accordingly!
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2. Find good programs
The next tip to consistently blog is to find good programs! One of the biggest ways to save time while blogging is to invest in some good programs that will make your life easier. And who doesn’t want that?! 😉
We adore BlogStomp for putting together posts with a lot of images and for a lot of SEO-related tasks, and BlogLovin is very useful for automatically sharing your blog posts on social media! We utilize Photoshop to create blog post graphics that we have pre-created templates for, as well. Do everything you can to make the process of blogging as streamlined as you can! This saves so much time.
3. Set aside a day to blog
Another way to save time while blogging is to block schedule your time… work smarter, not harder, guys! 🙂 I, Caitlin, write 90% of our blog posts, and I typically set aside a day or an afternoon to write all the blog posts for the next week and schedule them in advance. This is what a typical block scheduling time for blogging looks like for me:
1. Write content
2. Proofread and edit content
3. Create images for the post OR use BlogStomp to put together images (if I’m blogging a wedding or a shoot)
4. Write and schedule all associated social media for the post, including captions, tagging clients, and locations
5. Schedule post!
If you’re starting with blogging once a week, you could literally set aside half of a workday and write at least two posts for your month in that time period. Also, learn what time of the day you write best; for me, that’s morning… I could pound out WAY more blog posts at 7:30 am than I could at 2:00 pm!
4. Keep a running list of post ideas on your phone
How did we blog for over six months, daily, and never run out of ideas?! We keep a running list of blog post ideas that we are constantly updating whenever we have a new idea.
We have organized this document with headers of our various post categories, and our post ideas are sorted beneath those. My list syncs to my laptop from my phone and vice versa, so it’s continuously updated! We recommend deciding on 3-5 unique categories of posts and starting a document just like this one.
Get creative, and never think that what you’re blogging about is something that would bore people to read. You’d be SO surprised what tiny, seemingly unimportant bits of our life we’ve referenced in blog posts that BRIDES bring up later on! People do care and they do pay attention… we promise. There are also lots of amazing
There are also lots of amazing articles and posts out there FULL of ideas for blog posts, so be sure to take advantage of those. However, don’t blog about something just because someone else did… you will quickly learn the hard way the business owners blog for a reason, so what works for their audience won’t work the exact same way for your audience!
5. Do your research
I know, I know… a lot of you hate to write. And that’s totally okay! Did you know that blog posts only have to be about 300 words long in order to technically have the potential for good SEO? Of course, the higher the word count is, the better your SEO typically is, but your goal is just 300 words. And we know you can do that! Just to give you a frame of reference, this post is about 1200 words, so you only need 1/4 of this post for your average one!
We also think that it is SO important to be professional when you blog! Remember… your future brides, your past clients, and random people who want to learn from you are all reading your posts. Remember that there are real people on the other side of the screen, so don’t blog just for the sake of blogging, and check your spelling and your grammar before hitting “publish!” 😉 To this day, Luke still will sometimes catch a typo in my posts, and I’m grateful he notices it before anyone else does… ha!
If you break down the concept of blogging into a realistic and simple routine and start SMALL, you’ll be on your way in no time! Anyone can write 300 words, blogging doesn’t have to take forever, and you do have things to write about!
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