livebooks blog

What started in the late 1990s as a personal platform to share interests to the online public, blogs have steadily developed as trustworthy sources of information and pillars of communities whose followers may not be living in the same geographic region as the blogger, but their bond to the content creator and the rest of the members is as sturdy as they get.

Blogs come in many shapes: from the classic textual weblog, to vlogs (video blogs) or podcasts. But what emerged as an online-diary created and updated by only one individual is now becoming more obviously a very useful tool for businesses. Not only do they guarantee a constant flow of content, they are also the perfect answer to the newly-emerged question: WHO are these companies?

Trust is earned through hard work and commitment, and businesses rely on blogs more these days to assure the general public that their heart is in the right place. So they share their actions, their thoughts, their vision with everyone who would lend an ear. Whether in marketing campaigns or simple year-round content creation, businesses now turn to blogs to build better bridges.

The results? A reliable online community, an increase in brand visibility and more happy clients. If you’re not still convinced your creative business needs a blog, give this piece a thought.

Before starting a blog, you will need to take some things into consideration:

• You will need to be consistent, make a schedule and stick to it.
• You must find the topics that best suit you and your business and create your posts around them.
• You should know who your target is and adjust your writing persona to them.
• You should use an online platform that is easy to update.

We’ve already covered the top three items in a previous article, so make sure you give that a read to familiarize yourself to the process of starting a blog. So what we’re left is choosing the best platform for your followers and ultimately for yourself.

Use your website as the platform for your blog

There’s a chance you already have a website to showcase your products or services. It’s also very likely you’ve covered all the SEO bases and the website is generating valuable reach each day. So why use another platform for your blog when you can incorporate it to your website under a separate page? Think of all the perks this merger brings.

SEO
Take the SEO you already have set up for your website and add to the reach well-placed keywords within your blog posts can bring! Furthermore, think of your visitors: now they won’t have to change tabs to read your blog, instead they’ll spend more time on your website, where they can easily find your contact info and thus, making it easier for them to get in touch with you.

One platform
Adding a blog to your website means you don’t need to familiarize yourself with the functionalities of a stand-alone blog platform. This affects how you see your future blog posts: the easier it is to post them, the more likely you are to keep posting.
Choose a responsive platform that allows you to easily edit and upload your posts on the go. Once the restrains of your work-space are cut off, the limit to your possibilities goes with it.

One login
We have created tons of users and passwords for our online presence. Too many to keep track of. So why create another if you can bypass this altogether? Having your blog on the same platform as your website means you login once and all your tools are there for you to use.

Regular updates
We know updating your website is more than often postponed. If you had your website and blog on the same platform, though, every time you logged in to post something, you’ll inevitably be reminded that you need to address your website, too. Chances are you’ll find a couple of minutes to make those changes and provide your visitors with new content.

liveBooks is the website builder that allows blog incorporation on the same platform. Your posts, as well as your portfolio, are easy to update and share.

Try our responsive platform today and start your 14-day FREE trial!

With search engine optimization (SEO) becoming more important for small business owners these days, it’s no surprise so many entrepreneurs are using a blog to find new customers.

That’s right: blogs are no longer only used for publishing content about personal stories or experiences. In fact, companies who blog often are more likely to generate leads than those that don’t blog at all!

If you already know how important it is to start a blog for your business, you’re on the right track. But in case you need a little extra help to get you started, here are a few key steps to kick-off your blogging strategy!

Define Your Buyer Personas

Before you begin generating content and publishing it on the web, your first step should be to narrow your strategy.

One of the best ways to begin strategically using a company blog to market to your ideal customers is through buyer personas.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal audience(s).  What makes them great for helping you with your blog content is that they allow you to better envision the types of people you’ll be writing to.

Personas can also assist you with coming up with ideas in the first place, because you’ll have a better grasp of who your ideal customers are, what they enjoy doing, and the top challenges or questions they have. And once you obtain that knowledge, you’ll be able to tailor your content to those problems and provide useful information to them!

Need help defining your buyer personas? Head on over to Hubspot’s free Buyer Persona Template!

Compile Blog Topics and Titles

Once you have a good idea of who you’re trying to reach, use a notepad or a new Google Doc file to keep all of your blog topics in one place.

Begin listing out some of the ones you discovered while creating your buyer personas. What questions might they have? What challenges do you hear from your current clients that you can provide solutions to?

Be sure to also write down some topics that may seem a little outside of the norm. Although you want to hit on all of the major talking points, it’s great for both SEO and user experience to write about topics your competitors might be overlooking.

For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, consider writing about other issues and topics in the wedding industry, rather than just in your niche. Many photographers miss out on the SEO opportunities out there and only publish content related to their previous client sessions and weddings. But the ones that publish content that provides the most useful information on the web will win out from an SEO standpoint.

Schedule Time to Write

Now for the biggest hurdle: actually spending time putting content together!

If you’re one of the many business owners out there who juggle 10 or 15 different roles every day, you may find it hard to write on a regular basis. While you could always outsource to a fantastic freelance writer, it’s important to remember that time management is key to success in business.

Aim to set aside a couple of hours a week, or one day a month, to write blog posts in advance. Then, once they’re done, you can rest assured until your next calendar reminder for blog writing comes up.

Final Blog Tips for Business Owners

Just a few last tidbits of advice as you venture into this new form of digital marketing:

• Don’t be afraid to delegate. If you don’t have time or the energy, it’s okay to hand the job to someone else you trust.
• Be yourself and utilize your personality. The last thing your clients will want to read is a post that sounds like a computer wrote it. Add in some flair! Write as if you were talking to your clients or friends out loud.
• Proofread! This one can’t be emphasized enough. Although mistakes do happen, if you have several typos throughout one post, you could do more harm than good by publishing it.

Tell Your Story with an Impactful Website

liveBooks offers stunning, customizable website templates for wedding industry professionals and creatives.

Impress your potential clients with a visually stunning website that is ready for search engines and looks great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free today!

If online visibility for your website is what you want, proper SEO is what you need

Your website is relevant, your portfolios are updated, your photography is flawless; so how come so few come to visit? It all comes down to that super popular fellow who only listens to bits of your story, but is excited to share all info it has on you to whomever will ask – the search engine.

Yes, it’s definitely your friend, as long as it gets to know you. Introducing SEO, the one thing every photography website owner knows they need, but not too many actually accommodate it. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the information laid out for the algorithms that skim through each published page, indexing them. They go from link to link and figure out what each website is about, how reliable it is and thus, how relevant it is for the online seeker.

According to what keywords you’ve used in the SEO fields, it will determine a ranking for your website. You already have a great photography website, but does the SEO formula agree? There are a few things you can do to put your foot in google search’s door and say “Alright, I’m here!”

It’s SEO Everything™ time!

The liveBooks websites are all about ease of access to your content, and SEO fits right in the whole scenario. It’s a platform used mainly by photography professionals, a career that stresses on the visual advantage over linguistics, which usually makes indexing a little harder, but we have many ways to go around that. It’s called SEO Everything and it truly is everything you need to get your photography website running at the speed of SEO. (There’s no such measurement unit, but we figure it’s fast. Superfast.)

First things first: check that your website will be indexed by search engines. This feature is automatically turned on, but we’ll go ahead and double-check just in case.

1. Go to settings, then click on the SEO tab.
2. While we’re here, let’s make sure that your website title and description are filled in. We’re determined to make the title visible for search engines, so our advice is to make it easy to read: business name + the keyword that describes your field of work (“Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” is a great example, even though we’re positive it wasn’t intentional). What you write in the description is up to you. This is the place where keywords are not important and it’s the only place where you don’t need to worry about google’s piercing scanners. The description appears under your website name in search results. (http://goo.gl/3HBg5R)
3. We can now proceed to the reason why we’re here: the first field in the search settings field. You want your website to be found, so the first option should be turned on. (http://goo.gl/cENHbu)
4. Finally, scroll down to the last field, Schema.org, and choose the appropriate organization type to be featured by this tool in indexing your website. (http://goo.gl/HkQJAU)

SEO for your pages

Now we’re ready to take on the great adventure of page and image SEO. This is an important journey to make, since we’re dealing with a photography website where written content is usually scarce. To give an overall perspective, the SEO algorithms behave best in a page containing around 600 words, so we’ll have to make up for it if you choose to let your photography do the talking without inserting text blocks to your galleries. Still, a few words are in order here, a few well written and descriptive words which will serve as your copy-paste material for the keywords field and will never again be seen on your website.

Before you move any further, get writing! Remember, capitalization is unimportant here, but spacing and spelling is. The recipe for a proper keyword sequence is keyword comma space keyword comma space and so on. (ex. wedding photography, engagement photography, ceremony photography in AZ, etc.)

In your content area click on a page and you’ll see a SEO & Settings dropdown field on the right side. This is where you stunning copy-paste skills will come in handy. Fill in these blocks with the keywords and description you’ve set. Do this for all pages. It’s tedious, we know, but you only do it once. Okay, you do it every time you create a new page or item, but trust us, it matters.

SEO for your photos

Now, we’ve said SEO Everything and we mean it! Don’t think we forgot the most important actors in your show: the photographs. In your image library click on the eye icon that appears when you hover over with your mouse and you’ll see a pop-up with the image info. We’ll focus on the first two fields: the title and the description. liveBooks allows google to index this info even if you choose not to show it on your website with the image info on hover option. This is a great feature that not all photography platforms can take pride in having, so we’re boosting over here.

1. Fill in the title first; it should be descriptive (sunset wedding on Cape cod, floral arrangement at reception, newly weds take wows, etc.).
   Notice how the examples we’ve given contain more words connected to your business, not just photography. That’s because as much as you want people to find you for their specific need, you also wouldn’t mind to have a prospective client bump into your work while googling for a flower arrangement and finding a great photographer to capture the spirit of their big event. and coming back to our buddy google and its power to validate your website, this is a great way to convince it that you are a proper professional who understands the entire ensemble of your work field.
2. The description, on the other hand, can differ from image to image and it is up to you to make it as detailed as you want to give an even bigger picture.

Extra tips

• You should have one website for your business so that google doesn’t get mislead
• If you’re doing a blog, use your website as the platform for it instead of an external page. Feel free to use outside links to projects.
• Keeping track of your ranking and optimal keywords is a must when reaching for a greater audience. The liveBooks professional plan includes real-time analytics, so you won’t have to bother with 3rd party tools.
• Changes won’t happen straight away, it takes time for the algorithms to find your updates and index them.

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