livebooks blog

A blog page is a great way to create content and keep your visitors engaged. We are happy to say that we offer a blog option to add to your liveBooks site. Our inline blog is a fully functional website page and works great for SEO! Follow these simple steps to start setting your blog:

Setting up your blog: 

1. Select Content from the Navigation Bar
2. Select Add New Pages

3. Select Blog and then select Add

Adding a new blog post: 

1. Select Content from the navigation bar
2. Select your Blog page and scroll down to the Posts block
3. Select Add new post

4. You can enter a Title, Date, Author. Create your blog post in Description and add any related images.

You can also add many types of additional content blocks, such as Video, Image Gallery, and Contact information .

Limiting posts per page: 

1. Select Content
2. Select the Blog page
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the posts block and click on the field labeled Posts per page
4. Select the number of posts that you would like to appear before the user has to click into the next page

• Note: If you are looking for another blog option, liveBooks offers a custom designed blog that mimics the look and feel of your site based on a version of the WordPress platform. If you are interested, please contact the support team for more information at help@livebooks.com!

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 

We just got back from 3 days in Las Vegas for the WPPI conference, and we’re still catching up on sleep. The best way to describe WPPI is that it’s three days of education, conversation, and fun – and WPPI 2015 was certainly no different!

The liveBooks team had an absolute blast in Vegas. We approached our time there with a “work-hard, play-hard” mindset, and were thrilled to see some new and familiar faces (we scanned 632 people!) at the liveBooks Booth.  (Hopefully everyone got the orange bags before they ran out!)   As always, we enjoyed seeing our clients in person — as much of our interaction is done via phone or email — and showcasing the new features liveBooks has to offer. Plus, WPPI was a great opportunity for us to hang out with our co-workers that we might not see as often as we would like.

From bags, to stickers, to sunglasses, our orange swag seems to have been a huge hit! We gave out 400 totes, 350 sunglasses, 700 lens cloths, and 100 stickers! (It certainly didn’t hurt that our colors perfectly aligned with the World Series Champions, the San Francisco Giants, as was pointed out to us by many of you.)

Check out our Senior Support Specialist, Laura, and her mom showing off their liveBooks swag!

Finally, congratulations to Heather East for posting her photo of the liveBooks sticker and winning our WPPI social media contest! Thank you again for everyone that stopped by our booth and participated in our contest. We can’t wait to see you all next year!

@heathereastphoto

Editor’s note: Dan’s words of advice were featured in liveBooks latest report, “8 Blogging Truths for Creative Professionals.” More of Dan’s honest and heartfelt narratives can be found on his blog at http://smogranch.wordpress.com.

My earliest memory of writing is from elementary school. In a small, spiral bound notebook, I managed to compile hundreds of pages about a group of mushroom people.

I was convinced of its brilliance. Then I promptly lost the notebook. Note to us all: backup your work. I didn’t write for the next twenty years, but as I began my photography career, something changed in me and writing on a daily basis became a part of my life. But let me be painfully clear. This was not a choice I made. This was something I had to do.

There was something inside of me that needed to come out and photography was not enough, still isn’t enough. I remember my first, adult journal, or diary, or whatever you want to call it. One of those black and white speckled jobs from the supermarket, a “composition book,” I think they call it.

I began to fill them.

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