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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.

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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