With all of the options photographers have for marketing themselves online in 2016, how important is having a blog? We’d suggest that a blog is a crucial feature that every photographer’s business website should include, for 4 major reasons:
1. Blogs are a great place to storytell while showcasing your work.
The most successful photographers are those who focus on the experience they provide and how it is unique to the experience offered by any of their competitors.
A blog is the perfect place to highlight the experience you provide to your clients by showing a sequence of photos and describing what took place before, during, and after the shoot.
Because the blog is separate from your portfolio, you can include behind-the-scenes photos (of makeup and hair styling, “blooper” photos, etc.) and add that extra layer of personality to the post. By vividly depicting what a portrait shoot or wedding with you as the photographer is like, you can make potential clients desire that experience for themselves!
2. Blogs allow potential clients to get to know the person behind the camera.
Blogging allows you to give potential clients a glimpse into your personality and life outside of your work. Not only do session features allow your target clients to experience what booking you as a photographer would be like, but personal posts let them get to know and feel comfortable with you as an individual.
These posts could be highlights from your last vacation, the story of how you became a photographer, a memory from your childhood–be genuine and the right clients will connect with you!
3. You can provide value to your target audience through blog posts.
As we frequently repeated during our Social Media for Photographers blog series, engaging with your target clients on social media means providing valuable content to them–not just advertising your services. By posting valuable original content to your blog, you’re not only producing strong social media content but redirecting social media followers to your blog and website as well.
It is perfectly acceptable to link on social media to other websites that provide interesting and helpful information to your clients. But if you can link to the same sort of content on your own website, you are effectively playing off of your various sources of digital marketing–this is ideal!
4. Search engines love blogs.
Quite possibly the most important advantage of having a blog for your professional photography website is its benefit for search engine optimization.
A typical photographer’s website is image-focused with minimal text, as it should be. While this is preferable for potential clients visiting the site, it provides little opportunity to direct those clients to the site with content and keywords they might be searching for (photography-related or not).
The blog remedies this by allowing for text-heavy posting that doesn’t distract from the information provided by the main site.
By posting regularly on a variety of topics related to your business and community (and using carefully selected keywords), you can increase the chances that someone in your target market will see your website in their search results.
