Building a Great Blog – Part I

Intro by Skip Cohen

“Don’t focus on having a great blog.
Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.”
Brian Clark

While you can be in business today without a blog, there’s no question that a good website combined with the power of an interesting blog is going to help you build a stronger brand, accelerate your marketing, and in general build a more consistent business.

Your website is about what you sell, and your blog is about your heart. The two components work together to help build your brand. Your blog, when done right, allows you to enhance the message you’re trying to convey on your site.

In this two-part episode of Marathon’s Marketing Moments, Mark Weber and I talk about what you need to build your blog and why it’s so important.  Too many of you launched a blog that’s become a burden to building your business. Instead of helping, you’re essentially tearing it down with inconsistent postings and irrelevant/inappropriate topics.
The good news is nothing is cast in concrete! There’s time to change what you’re doing and develop great content, but it takes patience and a strategy.

Your Blog Strategy: Most of you just knew you should have a blog, but you never thought about the commitment it meant. So many photographers have a blog where they post random thoughts at even more random intervals. You need to think through what you want to present. Start with this tip I got from a terrific marketing consultant, Ed Foreman, many years ago:

“If I can see the world through my client’s eyes, then I can sell my client, what my client buys!”

You must think like your target audience and literally, work to see the world through their eyes. Recognize what’s important to your readership. Provide them with helpful, interesting information. They’re also looking for more details about you, not the technical things, but how you think. Do you have the same values they do? Can they trust you to capture the images and memories they want to savor?

You have to decide what your message is going to be. Make sure the message on your site is appropriate to your target audience. If you’re looking to reach wedding clients, then write about relevant topics to that audience. You won’t hook a bridal client by talking about how you got a landscape or commercial product shot.

In the same respect, if your target is the business community and you’re looking to build a commercial reputation, showing wedding shots or children/family portraiture and talking about a family you photographed last weekend will send potential commercial clients running from your site!

Think about what you’re trying to accomplish. Why do you have a blog? What do you want people to know most about you, your business, and your dedication/love for imaging?

Consistency: You’ve got to post on a regular basis. Personally, I believe photographers should post at least twice a week or more. If you can’t post twice a week, then put your blog on hold until you’ve built up a stash of content.

Good content is king! As you hook your readers they’re going to be coming back for more information. You’ve got to be there on the same days and same time each week. And ALWAYS with content that’s relevant.

Now, we hope you’ll enjoy the podcast and tune in to the next post where we’ll hit more ideas on what to write about. Most important of all is being helpful with every post. Yes, it’s really that simple, but everything you share has to be from your heart. That doesn’t mean you have to get personal or sappy, just be honest in what you share. Enjoy the podcast – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjYGUYDN_O8

“Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is in many ways, writing out loud.”

Andrew Sullivan