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As a photographer you are providing an extremely valuable service to your clients. Whether you’re capturing once-in-a-lifetime moments like weddings, births, or graduations, snapping stunning landscapes, or creating powerful imagery for editorial campaigns, your photography is an expression of who you are as a creative. Blogging is a key aspect of developing and maintaining your brand and voice as a photographer, and there are numerous benefits to blogging regularly for your business. Below we’ve compiled some of the benefits of blogging, some quick and easy tips for getting started with a blog, and how to leverage your blog effectively for your business.

Benefits of Blogging

While your website is extremely important to showcase your business, work, and experience, a blog is a less formal way to showcase who you are, why you’re a photographer, and the type of value you can provide a prospective client. Since a blog should be updated much more frequently than a website, it allows you to showcase all your work in a more real-time fashion, plus you don’t have to be so concerned about picking and choosing your absolute best photos and can have more flexibility in showing off a variety of your work.

Blogs do wonders for your search engine optimization (SEO). Since good blogs are frequently updated with lots of interesting content, Google is constantly having to come back to your blog and catalog that content. A well-maintained and frequently updated blog can immensely improve your rankings with search engines – especially if your blog is connected to your website!

Additionally, a blog is an extremely effective way to establish your personal brand as a photographer. You can develop a unique voice thanks to the narrative style that blogging allows that will be easily recognizable by your clients.

Tips for Blogging

• Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Starting and maintaining a blog is definitely a lot of work, especially for busy creatives. Make sure that you have a plan of action when you start up your blog so that you can post frequently. A blog that is never updated is worse than a non-existent blog.
• Create an editorial calendar. Before you launch yourself into blogging, it would be great to brainstorm some ideas of what you will be writing about in the coming weeks and months – and even drafting up your first few posts. That way, when life inevitably gets busy you already have a plan of attack for your blog.
• Before you launch your blog, make sure to write out clear objectives about you your audience is, what you hope to achieve with your blog, and how you will measure your “success.” Are you simply trying to hone your unique voice? Gain more traffic to your website and ultimately get more business? Improve your SEO rankings? Knowing the reasons why you are starting your blog in the first place will help keep your posts consistent and on the right track.
• If you’re ever stuck on what to write about, maybe start with some of these basic ideas: your recent work, your most interesting work, your personal journey as a photographer, a behind-the-scenes look at one of your shoots. The key is to be authentic and engaging with your audience so that they want to keep coming back to read your new content.

Blogging for Your Business

Once you’re ready and prepared to start up your blog, make sure that you have all the measures in place for it to effectively boost your business. Setup some sort of tracking metric, such as Google Analytics, so that you can track your blog analytics just like you would with your website. This will give you good insight into which posts generate buzz and are most popular with your audience. Utilize your social media channels to cross-promote your new blog posts. No one will know about it unless you tell them, plus this is also an additional way for you to track which posts seem to get shared most often. Don’t forget to optimize your blog for Google just as you would with your website – with descriptive, meaningful titles that actually describe the content of your post. Lastly, have an RSS feed so that your readers can subscribe to your blog and stay on top of your new content.

There’s no doubt that in this day and age having a blog for any type of business is extremely important. And because blogs are so heavily image-centric, it is especially relevant for photographers. What are some of your best practices for blogging? Do you have any unique tips that you’ve learned over the years?

Additional Resources:

How to Start a Photography Blog in 2018

The Secrets of Successful Photography Blogging

Blogging for Photographers 

Photographer and world traveler Karl Nielsen develops dynamic images that showcase his high energy and fearless approach to photography – and his website exhibits all those same qualities.

We are really excited to have him as our featured website this week – read on to find out more about his site and see more at: www.karlnielsenphotography.com.

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

KN: Personal, Eclectic, Rough and Tumble.

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

KN: I struggle with this all the time, portfolio consultants always tell me I should focus my portfolio in one genre. But in all honesty I have a broad set of interests and I really feel passionate about most of the projects I take on, which is good because when I started my business in 2007/2008 the economy was horrible and I was desperate to find any kind of work as long as it paid money. So from the beginning I was delving into every subject and genre I could all at once. Luckily, all of my clients have stuck with me and each client has introduced me to more clients and through word-of-mouth my business has grown in all sorts of directions. Because the type of work I do is so diverse so is my portfolio, which makes it difficult to decide what to show in it.

I guess the simple rules I stick with are as follows:

1) Strongest work

2) Most recent work

3) The type of work I want to do more of

4) Consistent galleries within the portfolio.

After I follow the listed guidelines it’s a lot of trial and error, adding photos, removing photos, and moving photos around until the portfolio has a good feel. My website never really feels finished to me, just constantly evolving.

Q: How often do you update your website?

KN: Probably every 2-3 months or whenever I build a new body of work that I want to show off to the world. It’s a good feeling when you are working on a project and you know you shot something better than anything else in your portfolio.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

KN: The scaling features and the mobile-friendly version of the site. It’s nice to be able to pull up my website on my phone while I’m talking to someone.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

KN: A great website does not happen overnight, keep working on it.

Follow Karl’s adventures and see more of his awesome photos on Instagram – @kidcalifornia.

Have a website you’ d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

Robin Layton, an award-winning photojournalist, renowned artist, and filmmaker is our featured website this week. We just love the clean, fresh look of her site and how gracefully it pulls the user in, making them want to stay for hours!

Check out the full site here – www.robinlayton.com – and don’t forget to read below to see what she has to say about her site’s creation!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

RL: Art, Fresh, Clean

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

RL: I choose the ones in each category that I feel are the strongest ones, the ones that will hopefully get someone’s attention and make them want to look at that portfolio.

Q: How often do you update your website?

RL: It depends; I try and add new images when I shoot them. But overall, I try to update my website once or twice a year.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

RL: That you can easily edit or update your images/content yourself and that it’s so simple to use!

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

RL: Design your website to reflect who YOU are. Make it different than everyone else’s. Once of my favorite quotes: “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.

Gary Kordan – an extremely talented Art Director and Production Designer for television – has a website unlike any we’ve ever seen before. His utilization of graphics, video, and imagery keeps users supremely engaged and wanting to click to each new section.

We are honored for his site to be our featured website this week – so read on because you’re in for a treat!

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

GK: Dynamic, Bold, Edgy

Q: How do you choose the photos/videos that display on your homepage?

GK: As a production designer for television, I try to choose my most recent recognizable project to display on my homepage. A big, bright set design featuring well-known talent like Key & Peele or the cast of Workaholics helps potential clients to get excited about my work. Finding the right image that showcases set design, set decoration, and overall aesthetic of the TV show I designed is important because my website audience is extremely busy and may only spend 30 seconds on a site. First impressions are important!

Q: How often do you update your website?

GK: I update the order of my galleries and blog often. Especially when I’m up for a show that is searching for a specific type of look. If the project is a single camera comedy I’ll feature these images first. If it’s a variety or sketch show, I’ll move those to the beginning of the gallery. Same with the most recent blog post. I am always assuming that people have only 15 seconds to look at my site and blog so I don’t want to bury the stuff I think they want to see. I’m pretty sure all television producers have ADD. One recent exception to this happened when I booked a show after a great meeting (in Hollywood interviews are “meetings”) and the star of the show said that my website was the best she had ever seen. She spent an hour on it reading and looking at everything!

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

GK: My favorite feature is my video homepage that changes each time it’s refreshed. I have black and white video edited to look like silent movies. To me it serves as a premium and warm-up to the full color and bold images in the galleries. Black is my favorite color and very much a part of my brand. The look of my site and the homepage video preview has an edge that matches my daily wardrobe.

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone who is designing their website?

GK: My best advice to someone designing their website is to ask someone to objectively be their editor. Are there too many photos? Are the names of the galleries too confusing? Typos in the bio? Is their homepage too busy to navigate? I feel like less is more and no one really cares about a project from 20 years ago unless it’s in a specifically named gallery. Ask a friend or a family member to look at the website before it launches. Sit beside them and notice if they start to get bored or if the images seen redundant. A website should play like a great movie or rock concert. It should draw people in and leave them wanting more. The minute they are confused by the navigation or losing interest in the photographs it’s time for an edit!

Head on over to www.garykordan.com to see more (our post really doesn’t do his site justice!)

Have a website that you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.