Soft-sell Marketing on Your Blog

Intro by Skip Cohen

As the fourth quarter approaches, it seems timely to get you thinking about another aspect of using your blog for marketing, but with an incredibly soft-sell approach.

Take the time to read this post from Mary Marantz. While it’s over three years old, the message is timeless. She’s saying goodbye to the previous year, but not without sharing the highlights and thirteen images that defined the previous year.

Each image is outstanding and includes a short narrative. I chose one of my favorites for this post, but there were a dozen more.

I know it’s still summer time but think about that first post of 2018. How are you going to create a little buzz on your blog and share some of your very best images? What are some of the best images of 2017 you’ve captured so far? How about a folder on your desktop to put them until you’re ready to do a highlight 2017 blog post?

Remember, your website is about what you sell, but your blog is about what’s in your heart! However, they both support each other and together are an unbeatable marketing tool!

By Justin & Mary Marantz

It’s 2014. A good week and a half into 2014 actually.

And there is this big beautiful blank slate looking out ahead of us of everything that this year might be. Of all the things we hope to accomplish. Of the better version of ourselves, we want to be. Of dreams that have not yet been chased, and fears that have not yet been leaned in to. See this year and the three-hundred-fifty-some chances that it holds to be the person we’ve been meaning to be, well… it seems like the prize we just can’t wait to step in to. And many ways it will be. There are big, beautiful things ahead friends, I have no doubt.

But there is this tendency when one year ends & another begins, to want to slam the door shut on it. To put it behind you and never look back. To wipe your proverbial brow and say, “Whew. Thank GOD that’s over.”

But the truth of it is, the real gift doesn’t just lie in wherever it is that we’re going. In the tender, tentative steps we have yet to take.

The gift lies behind us too.

It lives and breathes in the giant strides and leaps we have already taken. In the places on our foreheads still bruised & a little battered from the falling on our faces. It’s in the scar we now bear that has somehow only made us stronger. It’s in the fights and the hugs and the laughter and the salty, stinging tears that stitched up the three-hundred-and-sixty-odd-some days that made up this last year.

Because the fact is, the gift in any journey is two fold. It’s in the looking forward at the horizon and believing, even for a whisper of a second that you might one day actually get there. That there are miles left in you that no one has even begun to really see yet. And… it’s in the pausing before you step forward to look back just one more time, wind whipping against a new winter’s wind, to be amazed- truly amazed– at how far you’ve already come. Farther than anyone ever thought you would.

So today, for just a little longer, we look back. At the 13 images that defined our 2013.

And we take time to be thankful for the gift it really was.
M:)

1. Sailor in the Snow. Technically this image was actually taken at the very end of December ’12. But it started off our 2013 in the most incredible way possible when it took us completely by surprise and went kind of mini-viral on Facebook, getting over 15,000 likes, thousands of comments & hundreds of shares. From this one image, I can’t tell you how many countless amazing people it has brought in to our lives in the form of emails from complete strangers, new clients, and photographers who saw this online and then we got to meet them at conferences & workshops throughout the year. Plus, it just set the standard for where we want our work to go. And serves as an incredible reminder that sometimes what we might see as our biggest weakness or hindrance (hey, it’s dark outside in New England with the snow pouring, why can’t WE have California light) can turn in to the very thing that makes you remarkable.