You might already have a blog alongside your website, or you are considering getting one. We have all heard that we should have a blog. But here is the thing about a blog, if it’s not updated frequently it can send our potential clients the message that we are no longer in business!

So besides that, why is blogging so important as a photographer? Photography is a service and a personal one at that. Your clients are letting you into their lives, and trusting you with some pretty big moments. The more you can give them a reason to feel comfortable with hiring you, the better.

Blogging is a great tool to build that trust with prospective clients. It also lets those prospective clients see your most recent work, and can help to educate them about your photography style, and process!

Consistently blogging will also boost your SEO- that’s a fancy term for search engine optimization – basically blogging is going to help filter you to the top of the list when someone is looking for a photographer in their area!

So today, we will be going over how to create a system for creating great content that is going to get you in front of the right clients!

One of my favorite quotes from my girl Rachel Hollis is

“Hope is not a strategy”

Rachel Hollis

We can’t really just hope to blog more in the new year. We need to build a strategy that’s going to actually get it done, so I want to teach you this strategy that was actually created by Google and YouTube. I’ve reworked it just a little bit for photographers. YouTube calls it the three H’s hygiene hub and hero. You can certainly look that up if you want. See a quick little diagram of a pyramid, but I’m going to rework them a little bit and rename them to make it a little bit better and a little bit more creative for us photographers.

Start from the bottom- Help Content

So I’m calling this first one the help category, and this is the content that your clients are looking for on Google or on Pinterest. These are the things that they’re searching for.

So for a bride, it could be things along the lines of wedding planning. If it’s a mom, it could be what to wear for a family photo sessions. This is how potential clients might find you online. Whenever they’re searching for something along the lines of what you’re offering, it’s going to start to plant that little seed to get to know you as a photographer, which leads us into the next section.

Growth Content

And that’s what I’m calling the grow category. This is where you’re going to water that relationship and really that like know trust factor. This is where they’re going to fall in love with who you are as a person and who you are as a photographer. So you’ll be doing this by sharing, recent work that you’ve shot and also sharing some of your behind the scenes lifestyle and your creative process. Now we’re onto the big one and this is what I call your book content.

Booking

This is a big announcement kind of asking them to book. And you can do this one of two ways. You can ask them directly if you are launching your or opening up your dates for your family sessions or for your senior sessions for the year. Or you can do this indirectly by maybe sharing that your new, wedding magazine is out or your new family brochure is out. And those two things would be things that you’re kind of showing where your pricing is at and, kind of letting them know a little bit more about how to start booking with you.

So we’ve got these three pieces of content, right? We’ve got that, that helps stage, that growth stage and that booking stage. Now your help, one is going to be the most content that you put out. That growth stage is going to be sprinkled in there so they can start to get to know you. And then that booking one or that big big announcement, you’re only going to do a couple of times a year. So that could be when you’re announcing your mini sessions for a fall or maybe you are updating your pricing for your 2020 weddings and you’ve finished up your pricing guide and you can announce that you are ready to showcase this look book or bridal magazine to your 2020 brides. So you can kind of see how you’re going to constantly be putting out those little helps, those little seed contents. You’re going to be watering them with that grow and relationship building content. And then once they’ve really kind of been hooked on you, then you’re going to ask them to book with you.

How do we create these different types of content for our blog?

All right, so the first thing that I want to teach you guys is what I call the 60. In 60. I actually got this idea from Ashlyn, writes over at Ashlyn writes, she’s a copywriter for creatives, and I flip this a little bit from what she’s shared before, but I want to share the tool with you.

The Pinterest Scroll

So the first thing that you’re going to do is you’re going to open up Pinterest and you’re just going to start scrolling. This is what I call the Pinterest scroll. So you can search for things that your potential clients might be searching for. So if you’re a wedding photographer, what would bride’s be searching for on Pinterest? If you are a newborn photographer, what is new and expected mothers searching for on Pinterest? If you’re a family photographer, what are moms and dads searching for in relation to their photography? Also just like everyday life with their kids. All right, so what you want to do is you just want to look at the pins that come up.

The big key here is don’t even open up the pin to read the article. Just take a look at the name of the article, the name of the pin, and see if that kind of gives you any ideas. You’ll know that it’s something that you could write on when you look at a pin and you think I’ve got something to say about that. You can also use what I call Madlibs. So if you see a pin that says mistakes to avoid when wedding planning you could mad live that. So mistakes to avoid when packing your hospital bag. mistakes to avoid when picking out outfits for family sessions. So that can give you a lot of great ideas. What you’re going to want to do with all that is just to kind of create topics or even blog posts names based off of those ideas.

So remember you don’t want to open up the article and copy them. You don’t want to copy them word for word. You want to come up with it your own way cause I know that you would never plagiarize. Right.

Personal Reflection

Okay. So the next section here is called personal reflection. So this is kind of like your personal category. Photography is such a personal aspect, you are a part of some really big moments in people’s lives. So you really have to let your potential clients into your life a little bit to just kind of let them get to know you and also to build that trust with you. So some things that you could be creating a post on are things that are important to you. So maybe it is traveling, maybe you and your husband travel and you could do, say you went to Savannah, Georgia, you could write, you know, five things to see in Savannah, Georgia, and habit in a category under like travels or something along those lines.

It could be crafts that you did with your kids or you could even feature, artwork that your kids have done over the years. It could be family vacations where you talk about what you did, share some pictures. anything that you would do differently. Maybe it was a great restaurant that you guys went to. You could also do like a seasonal update of where you are with your life and your families or what goals you have for the year. You could share maybe a pet, maybe you have a dog or a cat that is always by your side. I’ve got my trusty dog Cooper right underneath my toes right now. So he makes appearances every once in a while on Instagram. And you could also share about maybe a hobby that you are super interested in or that you’re starting or maybe even your fitness journey.

A really neat personal one that I have seen is the pink slip files by Amy and Jordan. So Amy and Jordan decided that they to write down all these little memories that they wanted to not forget later on in life. so they have started these little blog series called the pink slip files. And on there you’ll find their first memory of when Amy shot her very first wedding. they’ve got a post that is talking about how they had to clip coupons for those first few years of marriage. And then there’s a recent one where Jordan was started coaching soccer and the kind of talks about, you know, how that’s going and how that went.

Round-ups!

So now that we’ve gotten some personal ideas down, let’s go ahead and think of some roundups. So roundups could be, they’re really simple posts to write. It could be gift ideas for your fiance or, the five things to pack in your hospital bag or ideas for mother’s day, that type of thing. You could do five wedding vendors, give their best advice on planning a boho wedding. So you could actually interview other vendors and have them write up a little blurb. So they’re kind of actually writing your blog posts for you in that matter. The idea is just kind of around up. So it’s like a list sort of thing.

Listen to the People

All right, the next thing is to listen to the people. And this is where you’re going to write out blog posts on maybe frequently asked questions. So maybe you get questions in your client process, you know, it’s bread, you’re trying to decide. should we do a first look? Should we not do a first look? What time should I set my ceremony for?

Another idea here is to check out some Facebook groups. If you have your own Facebook groups for your own photography clients, you can ask in there if anyone has any questions for you. if not, you can go ahead and go look at some local bride groups or local mommy groups on Facebook or even comments on Instagram of other photographers and see what questions are people asking. This type of blog post takes a little bit more work. This is kind of the grunt work. It’s not quite as easy as some of the other things, but it’s going to answer those questions that people have that aren’t quite as relevant as you would think they would be.

Time to organize these topic ideas into categories

So for a wedding photographer, there are a few different categories that I would suggest and you kinda want to think of like what stages that your clients are going through. So for weddings, you have like the engagement stage, you have the wedding day stage and you have your post-wedding stage. So those three things could be stages, but I could also add on the categories of vendors. And I also am going to for sure add on a category of the personal right I want to infuse my personality into my blog and really let them get to know who I am as a person. Right? So the categories that I use as a wedding photographer are engagement vendors, wedding day, post wedding and personal. So in my engagement stage that is where they are either planning their engagement session or in like the wedding planning stages. So blog posts that are right on that are you know, what to wear to your engagement session, how to address wedding envelopes, the types of dresses and like the cuts of the tops of them.

So for vendors, I like to actually highlight different vendors that I either have worked with in the past or that I want to work with. I’ve actually reached out to vendors that I want to work with in the future and ask them to do interviews with me and just kind of get to know a little bit more about their business so that I can highlight them as a vendor to move potential brides or to my current brides who are in the planning stages of their wedding. So for wedding day, this is where I talk about all the little things that are going to actually happen on the wedding day. So I shared posts on family formals and the first look how to do a sparkler exit, that type of thing. All right. And then for post wedding category, I don’t do this one quite as much because it’s not really attracting, my clients, but it does keep others engaged.

And that is, where I’d share things like what to pack on your honeymoon or the three books that have really benefited my own marriage. And then of course, my personal lens. And this is where that I have shared, struggles about my husband’s heart surgeries, updates on my kids, the pictures from my daughter’s Christmas concert. All of that kind of go gone into my personal category. So if you’re a newborn photographer, you could have different categories that are along the lines of, you know, first, second or third trimester, the actual birthday, your postpartum and your personal category as well. I just want to really emphasize that you want to make sure that personal is its own category! So now that we’ve got all those categories, we’re going to take all of those topic ideas, those blog post ideas, and we’re going to filter them into those categories, right?

So for a wedding photographer, we might have your engagement, your vendors, your wedding day, your posts, wedding, and your personal, right? We’re going to take all of the lists of those blog posts we have and categorize them under what category they fall under. Okay?

Start Scheduling

So the next thing now is to start filling our calendars to go ahead and get a calendar out. You can do this on a Google calendar. You could do this on Trello, you could do this on pen and paper, whatever, whatever you want to do, right? And the first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to fill in any of our book blog posts, right? So if we have any big announcements, right? And that could look like when you were going to put out your, pricing guide for weddings or when, if you’re planning to relaunch your website or if you are opening up dates for mini sessions or for family sessions for the season, right?

What to schedule first

• Big Booking posts first- not too many
• Posts for any sessions you have booked (growth content)
• A mix of help and growth content (what are they searching for, and personal posts) – the most amount of content!

Or even if you’re opening up, this month’s or this season’s senior session dates. Okay? So you’re going to fill those in first. We have the big important ones in first, and then you’re going to go ahead and fill in blog posts after your sessions. So whatever you have sessions already scheduled, go ahead and put in either a week after, a couple of days after that session when you’re going to blog, that session that you shot or that wedding that you shot. Okay? So we’ve got those big things in right now, all those empty spaces. We’re going to start rotating through those categories that we picked out and just pulling the topics, one topic from each of the categories that we chose. Okay. So let’s say I’m looking at my calendar and I have a wedding on. I’m going to blog once every five days. You need to decide how often you want to blog.

We’ve already filled in those dates, which are when you’re going to bring those big announcements and when you have session dates, those ones are kind of set already based on when you’re shooting when those big things are coming up right now, we need to decide how often we want to show up on our blog. I think it would be a great goal to show up once a week. Okay. Because that gives you things to talk about on social media every week and really isn’t a little, isn’t too overwhelming when it really comes to blogging. So I’m looking at my calendar and I’m going to start filling this in and I want to blog one day a week and I’ve got a wedding on the first and a session on the 14th. Okay. So I’ve got those filled in. So on the third I’m going to blog that wedding and on the 16th, I am going to blog that session, right?

So I’ve got those written in and now I need to come up with three more blog posts. So I’m going to go over to my categories and I will just pick the first category, which for me is engagement. So I need to pick one of the topics that are in that engagement category and let’s put in three dresses to wear to your engagement session. And we’ll put that one just on Wednesday of the following week after that wedding. So that’s going to be on the eighth, right? So I’ll put it in there just right into your calendar engagement dresses. And then the next week we have that session. So we don’t need to blog. Then the following week, let’s say we’re going to blog on Wednesday, the next week we can go to our vendors category and maybe we want to highlight a florist that we worked with, put that in their name of the floral.

And then the next Wednesday we’ll go down to wedding day. And for this one let’s talk about first looks. So we’re talking about in this month of January, we’ve got five blog posts and we’ve got one on the wedding. We’ve got one talking about the engagement session, we’ve got the session itself, and then we’ve got the vendor highlight and the wedding day. So we’ve got the florist and we’ve got the first look. So then you just kind of go through and you rotate all those categories out. So you’re going to rotate engagement vendors, weddings, posts, weddings and personal. You can sprinkle in a few more personals if you need to. If you have some things that are coming up that are kind of time-sensitive, if you’re doing like a monthly Roundup of what your family did, you can go ahead and put those in right away. I hope that you guys are kind of understanding this.

I’m going to have a few visuals up on the show notes here to kind of show you guys what it is that I am talking about. So if you’re having a hard time understanding what I’m saying and you’re wanting to see what I’m doing, go ahead and check out the show notes below to see exactly how I am organizing all of this. All right, so now that we have filled in the name of the blog posts that we’re going to blog each week, we need to start actually writing them. Now there are two ways to write your blog posts. One, you can just write them every week. So you’re going to start on Monday and you’re going to write that blog post, schedule it and promote it throughout the week, right? Or you can do what I do and what I think a ton of successful bloggers do and that is called batch writing.

So for me, I set aside one day a month and I write out all the posts that I have chosen to share that month. And I read them all out. I start, I schedule them into WordPress, and then I go to the next month and I pick out all of the topics for the following month. I don’t write them out, I just pick up the topics so that way when the first rolls around next month I can dive into the topics that I’ve already chosen to write on and kind of get going. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel at all. One of my favorite tools for writing out blog posts is the tool called Grammarly. And this is a web browser extension that checks your spelling. Make sure that you’re using a wide variety of words and vocabulary that you’re not using like a million times. it’s a really, really awesome tool. It is free. There is a premium option as well. but I definitely suggest that you check out Grammarly, for all of your writing needs. For sure.

There’s basically three parts to any great speech and I think it also works for blog posts pretty well, and it is to tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them whatever it is you’re telling them, and then tell them what you told them. So basically there’s the introduction, the middle and the end, but you’re kind of doing the same thing. So you’re introducing what it is you’re going to talk to them about, tell them what it is, and then finish it up. Blog posts don’t need to be super long. They can be just bullet points with pictures. Just make sure that you are using some good SEO practices. So that brings us to the next little section of this and that is SEO or search engine optimization. So there’s a few key things that I want to make sure that I am pointing out to you guys and that you guys are doing an each and every blog post.

I’m also going to have a download link with a checklist of all of these things to make sure that you are harnessing the full potential of each and every one of your blog posts. So the first thing that I like to do is make sure that I’m renaming all of my images to include some type of key word or whatever it is that I’m talking about in the blog post. So for photographers, we will oftentimes name our photos, Johnson’s September 8th, 2012. Well that’s great for like keeping them organized for your clients, but I don’t know anyone that’s searching for a Johnson session in 2012 right? That doesn’t make sense. But if you renamed it to family session Fargo, North Dakota winter Oak park. Okay, so you’re kind of saying where it is. We’ve got the state and the park that it’s in, you’re a family session and when it is, so it’s in wintertime, right?

So that is renaming all of your images. The next thing is to try and link to other posts within your block. So if you are, have been talking about other wedding planning, we’ll have posts you can link to those, kind of weave that into your content so that you can link back to it. So the idea is to kind of keep people clicking from one post to the next post, around all centers around the, the topics that you’re kind of talking about, right? The next thing that you want to do when you’re working on your SEO is to customize your slug. So the slug is part of the, website address that your blog post has. So for me it would be Chelsea wise.com forward slash and then you want to make sure that the, whatever that is behind that forward slash makes sense for what it is you’re writing about.

So I’m writing about, what to where for engagement sessions. It could be, what to wear. Engagement sessions. Wilson, North Dakota. Okay. So I’m including a little bit more SEO in that besides just in catchment sessions because maybe it’s specific to my area, right? That’s pulling in a few more keywords. All right. Another thing that you want to make sure that you are checking off before you hit publish is customizing your SEO title. So this is the title that Google is going to show of whatever your page is or when someone shares it to Facebook. So you could have the name of your post could be, Megan Jessie’s wedding, that’s great. But if you have your SEO title as Badlands wedding, boho, Chelsea wise photography, Watford city, North Dakota, those are things that people are going to be searching for. a boho wedding or a photographer in Watford city, that type of thing, right?

The next thing underneath that you want to do is what’s called your meta data. And that is like the description that shows alongside the page on Google. So whatever that little description is, and that is about 150 to 200 characters. And that you can just go ahead and put in a few keywords in there and kinda tell your reader what they can expect about this page. All right. Finally, you also want to make sure that you are utilizing your blogging categories and some blog. So for categories on my website, you will find weddings, wedding planning, engagements, family, and the wise photographer podcast. So if you click on wise photographer podcast over on my page, it’s going to show you just all of the episodes of the podcast, right? Blog tags are really handy if someone is searching for something in particular. So this could be you that you’re tagging them with the florists that are in the wedding or the colors that were highlighted or maybe the hospital that you did the birth photography in.

You also want to make sure that you are creating a featured image for your blog post and this in WordPress’s over on the right hand side. And that is the image that’s going to show whenever someone is sharing this link on Facebook. So this is that first image that kind of shows what it is. this blog post is about if you don’t set a future image, it just pulls the very first image that loads on your site and that could just be a background image on your website, in your header or maybe it’s your profile picture or something along those lines. Whatever the first thing, the way, however your website is formatted, whatever the very first picture is, that’s the one that’s going to pull. If you don’t go back and set the featured image to begin with. Now, if this list sounds a little bit crazy, a little over your head, and how would you ever keep it all straight?

I have two tools for you. First is a download with a checklist of all of these SEO things that you can download over at the show notes. And number two is the tool called Yoast, and this is my favorite tool. It’s a plugin for WordPress and it kind of makes sure that you’re checking all those boxes. It has a little progress bar on the top that goes from red to yellow to green based on the number of things that you are completing for each blog post before you hit publish. All right, so now that we have come up with all the ideas, we’ve put them into categories, we’ve scheduled them into our calendar and then we’ve started writing them out and we’ve hit publish. Then what? It’s time to share these blog posts. Now if you just post them and never share them anywhere else, I mean people might find them on Google here and there or if they’re kind of browsing your website, but that’s not really putting, these blog posts that you’ve worked so hard to create using them to their fullest potential.

So where can you share if these blog posts, first off, you can share them to the obvious? You can share them on Facebook, you can talk about them in an Instagram post and link them in your bio. You could talk about them on Instagram stories or Facebook stories. So you want to do all that kind of like the day that you posted them or maybe the day after you post them, right? If you are sharing a blog post of a client session or wedding, you can tag them in the post that you’re tenant sharing about this blog posts for, right? You also can share these in your email newsletter. So say you’re sending out a weekly newsletter, you could do a round up or a monthly newsletter. You could do a Roundup of all these posts that you’ve shared, right? That’s going to kind of let your current clients and past clients see what you’ve been up to, what you’ve got going on, and kind of keep them engaged, right?

You can also share these things later on. So your blog posts that your clients are consistently searching for. So things like wedding planning or what to wear to a session or what to pack in your hospital bag. These are what the marketing world calls evergreen content. So these are, blog posts that are going to be relevant to like this year’s brides and next year’s brides share some, things might change here and there as far as style goes. But the, the core of the blog post is going to stay relevant for a long time. And these are the kinds of posts that you want to share over and over again on social media because you’re constantly going to be getting new people following you on Instagram and on Facebook. So being able to share those posts again and again are going to help serve that new audience over and over again.

It’s also gonna serve, your audience later on cause maybe someone started following you when they weren’t quite engaged or maybe they weren’t expecting just yet and they don’t need to find out if they should do a first look or not. when they first started following you when you first shared it, but maybe they get engaged six months down the road and they’re planning a wedding in two and a half months and you share it again. that information is going to benefit them later on, even though they’ve seen it beforehand. Maybe they weren’t ready to take in that content beforehand, but they are the second time you share it. So don’t be afraid to share your post over and over again because really you are serving your clients. All of these posts are not jabbing things down their throat. You are educating them on what it’s like to be a bride and plan a wedding or helping them to enrich their families with, different ideas on how to celebrate the holidays or different craft ideas or what to wear at a session, right?

For newborn photographers, maybe you’re talking about what to pack in your hospital bag or nursery, the top three gifts to give at a baby shower, right? those are things that are helping to enrich their lives. So don’t feel guilty about sharing those. Those are good things. Those are things people want to learn more about and to re read about and get to know you about. Right. So you can schedule these once you share or your post goes live, you can go into Facebook and you can schedule posts to go up later on. Another tool that I absolutely love is the tool called CoSchedule, which will actually automatically, once you write out a blog post we’ll say, okay we’re going to share this in a week and we’re going to share it in a month. But this content is also evergreen green so we can share this maybe once a month or once every season or kind of fill it in.

So CoSchedule is this amazing, amazing tool for scheduling out your posts for Facebook and on Instagram and blogs. I don’t use it as much for Instagram because I like D C a visual side. I will share a different tool later on that I use for Instagram. But I’ve love it for sharing my blogging content. And they have a company is based in North Dakota. So I have to give a little shout out there cause there’s not a lot of us out there right now that we have kind of talked about all this. kind of giving us a little bit of a conclusion on what this podcast was all about. Remember we have those three types of content. We have the help content, which is kind of planting that seed, getting people to kind of find you online. You have your grow content, which is really watering in that relationship and fostering it.

So it’s, you’re sharing stuff about your life and your personal stuff, but you’re also sharing your most recent work. I’m really growing and fostering that relationship, right? And then you have that book content, that big announcement where you’re either releasing your family dates for the season or your mini sessions or you just put together your pricing guide for your 2020 weddings or your 2022 weddings, whatever it is, right? So those are those three types of content. You’re helping your grow, you’re going to have the most of and your book content. That big announcement is just a few times a year. That’s when you’re asking them to spend money with you, invest with you. Right. All right. Then we have our idea generation, right? We have the Pinterest scroll where we’re just kind of scrolling through. I’m getting different ideas based on the titles. We’re not clicking through to copy any of the text. We are mad libbing, so you can use that mad living where it’s like, you know, 10 things to avoid when this or taking a title and kind of reworking it based on whatever it is that you do. Right. The mad libbing is great to do on Pinterest. You can also do it on magazines or on headlines of new stuff. You’ve got your personal categories for your idea generation.

You also have your Roundup ideas, your lists, and listening to your people. So checking out those Facebook groups or serving your current clients.

All right. After we have generated some ideas, it’s time to categorize those ideas into our categories. Members, some ideas for categories for wedding photographers could be your engagement, your vendors, your wedding day, your personal, and your post wedding. Right for a newborn photographers, you could maybe do get pregnant, your pregnancy, the birthday postpartum, and then your personal, remember with all of your categories, you want to make sure that personal is one of your categories. Finally, we’re going to fill out our calendar. So the first thing that we put on our calendar is going to be our book content. so those big things where we are either going to be opening up dates for sessions or when we plan on having our new pricing guides available for wedding photographers and that type of thing. And then you’re going to fill in when you have your sessions booked and you’re going to blog those sessions after you complete them, then you’re going to start rotating through those categories.

So your engagements, your vendors, your wedding day, your post wedding day, your personal, your engagements, your wedding day, your post wedding day, your personal right. So you’re just going to go through all those and pull one topic from each of those categories in fill in your calendar. Once you filled in your calendar, it is time to batch write your blog posts. So pick a day each month. Write out all your blog posts on that day, schedule them, use Grammarly and let those posts go up automatically. Remember, you can also use CoSchedule if you would like to make sure that you’re scheduling them later on. When it comes to the anatomy of a good blog post, you want to make sure that you are using your blogging categories and good SEO practices. Remember, you can head to the show notes in this episode and grab the download for the checklist of all of the SEO things that you need to make sure that you are doing for each and every blog post to really throw some fuel on the fire and let these blog posts really start to take off.

And don’t forget that you don’t want to just post it and forget it. Make sure you’re sharing these blog posts. People you have worked so hard on it, so share them on Facebook. Put them on Instagram, Pinterest, your newsletter. Remember checkouts, CoSchedule. If you want to make sure that you’re kind of automating this a little bit so it goes up automatically. You don’t have to think about it. CoSchedule is definitely something that I would suggest. Thank you guys so much for joining me on another episode of the wise photographer podcasts. I know this one was a big one. There’s so much content in it. I hope that you guys got a lot out of it. Remember at the show notes over at the wise photographer, podcast.com you can find the visuals that go along with this episode as well as links to all of the tools that I use and the download for the SEO checklist. Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I will see you next week. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to the wise photographer podcast.