Why You Should Dust Off Your Blog (part 1)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- marketing is like gambling. You may put in time, you may put in money. Blogging is a gamble. You don’t know if 10 inquiries will roll in or if you’ll hear crickets.
BUT- there is value in blogging, even if no one gives you a pat on the back in the form of a comment or “like”. In the age of instagram portfolios, the value of blogging has kind of been forgotten about.
Let’s think about this- what is google scrubbing for data and what ranks highest to their robots? Blogs.
This is the start of a 3 part series about why blogging can take your business to the next level.
Firstly- content is king. You don’t want google to look at your site and say “well, nothing seems to be happening here”. It should be a part of your workflow to blog weddings regularly. It not only shows google you’re active, but also your audience. This reason alone is worth blogging.
To start- we like to blog our photography work with Narrative. It’s an incredible app for squarespace that helps you lay things out quickly and generates a code for you. It’s intuitive and you can put together a blog post in 10 minutes. You can tag and keyword using Nattarative, but we’ll get to that in the next post.
Curating- Jose Villa said in talk at Yeah Field Trip a few years ago that you should only blog images you would hang on your wall. Nothing because it “should be” in there. It’s a game-changer. You are only as strong as your weakest photo.
Share What You Want to Shoot More Of- If you want to shoot elopements- maybe don’t show large, extravagant weddings on your blog (or vice versa). Someone looking for an elopement photographer may not be able to identify with photos from a large wedding.
Google- it’s a game. A game where the prize dangles right out in front of you and you will never get it. Google evolves every day and makes new rules for its bots that scour the internet. Although, search engine optimization is somewhat of it’s own ever-evolving language, there are things that do change, and things that don’t. In my opinion, the bots will always eat up backlinks like their candy and any blog post without text will fall to the bottom.
Now you know why you should blog. In the next few posts, I’ll go into how. How to create content, understand SEO a tiny bit better, and hopefully help you get the clients who’ve just been waiting to find you.
More to come.
xx,
Sidney