livebooks blog

Photographer Christina Kiffney brings creativity and a fresh, artistic approach to each and every assignment. Her work is highly compelling and authentic – and we think her website absolutely exudes all of these same qualities.

Check out her full site here: www.christinakiffney.com and read on to see just why we chose her as our featured website this week!

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

CK: Narrative, Genuine, Creative.

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

CK: I work with a consultant at Agency Access to choose a portfolio that reflects my core style, while still displaying the breadth of my work.

Q: How often do you update your website?

CK: I update my website annually.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

CK: The ability to upload private, customize-able Lightroom galleries for client viewing and selection.

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

CK: Work with a consultant to make sure your website appeals to the clients you want to book, rather than just being a representation of the jobs you do.

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

Photographer David Wilder dabbled in portrait, wedding, and commercial photography before he landed on his true calling – photographing the great outdoors. Now, David spends his time capturing the beautiful Alberta landscape and exploring around the world. His website is a true reflection of his love for nature – and reflects a clean and crisp look that we are so excited to feature this week.

Check out his full site – www.davidwilder.ca – and read on for what he had to say about his site’s creation!

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

DW: Clean, Simple, Sleek. For someone like myself who is always about presenting my work with less distractions, that’s what drew my attention to this design.

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

DW: I was always taught that your handshake says a lot about you. My homepage is my handshake, it is often the first thing people see and where they start to learn about me. I choose images for the homepage that speak to my character, what I value, and who I am as a person. It is with these images the visitor can become captivated and drive them to want to see more.

Q: How often do you update your website?

DW: The most challenging thing for any creative is to stay current and relevant. Before I found liveBooks, it was so hard to keep updating my site. But with liveBooks the system is now so easy to make changes on the fly. I tend to make updates to my website once a month. I feel it gives a balance between my visitors getting a chance to see what I have recently been working on but not rush their favorite images out the door too soon.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

DW: Hands down it is the Admin Portal. Time is so important to everyone. The less time I have to dedicate to making changes means the more time I can focus on my craft. My heart always wants to be behind the camera taking the next photograph and the way the Admin Portal makes updating my site so efficient it allows me to be out there finding my next shot.

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

DW: My advice would be design something that speaks to you, as this will achieve a number of things. A website speaks on your behalf, it represents you. You want visitors to get to know you by viewing it and feel like they have already met you. You also want to be happy with its aesthetics; it needs to be captivating and engaging to your audience, otherwise you will constantly be trying to change it and using up precious time that you could be using to create more of your art.

Follow more of David’s work and adventures on Instagram – @dw_photo_ca

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

Emmy-award winning destination wedding photographers Chris+Lynn travel all over the world taking gorgeous, colorful, and highly expressive images. Their website is so unique and romantic that we absolutely had to feature it this week.

Check out their full site – www.chrispluslynn.com because we absolutely love it – and we’re sure you will too!

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

C+L: Emotive, bold, and handcrafted.

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

C+L: Our clients are couples headed on the literal and emotional journey of having a destination wedding, so our photography is about capturing that – the true adventure of love! We choose images that reflect the authenticity of travel, adventure, and love.

Q: How often do you update your website?

C+L: We try to update galleries with fresh images every two months.

Q: What is your favorite feature that liveBooks offers?

C+L: The ease of updating in the editSuite is great and we love the incredible customer service.

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

C+L: For us, designing a website is a constant work in progress! Understanding this and having a platform where you can continually and easily update and tweak the site is important. Another tip we found valuable was to aim for maximum impact when choosing your images – and design your site to heighten that impact.

Keep up with their destination weddings and adventures on Instagram @chrispluslynn & Twitter @chrispluslynn.

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