A Photographer’s Guide to Building a Blog

The dreaded 4 letter word most photographers at one point or another in their career…blog.

But why do we as creatives tend to struggle with creating a blog and then updating it with new content on a regular basis? It can be as simple as not knowing where to start or it may also be a block in your mindset that needs work. Whether you are looking to start your portrait business blog or maybe you need to dust off the cobwebs in that corner of your website, there are a few actions you can take towards building a photographer’s blog.

First, let’s break down what the purpose of a blog is for your portrait business and why it is something you should consider adding to your workflow.

• Educate Potential & Current Portrait Clients
• Share Your Past Sessions & Work
• Present Yourself as an Expert
• Boost your SEO

But how can you start building a blog for your photography brand today and maintain your content as you continue to grow? Start with past clients, brain dump topics relative to what you do, consider your client experience, search keywords and decide how you can better serve your clients in creating this blog.

Past Client Sessions

One of the easiest methods to guarantee you have inspiration flowing into your blog’s future is your past clients and their sessions with you. Sending a questionnaire to clients is a simple way to obtain tons of content for your blog like where their session took place, specific details about their session that you can backlink and learning what made your client’s portraits stand out.

The best part about past clients is that you can still write a blog from their session even if they don’t fill out their questionnaire. Instead, you can focus on the location of their portraits, details that you remember, or highlight a quick how-to guide for potential clients to read.

Client Experience

Beyond highlighting your past sessions and showing off a few of your favorite images, you can also add informative blogs about your client experience to the roster. If you haven’t already, take the time to write out what your client experience includes and how it is unique to your business versus other photographers. You can break your client experience up into multiple blogs instead of building a novel on your page, pick a specific piece of your experience to highlight and build value in what you do for your clients.

Pro Tip: Keep potential client on your page by backlinking to older blogs related to your experience!

Brain Dump Topics Relative to Your Business

No matter what your portrait business’ specializes in, there are tons of golden topics you can feature on your blog to help educate clients and present you as the expert in your field. Think about frequent topics and discussions related to your business and start building a blog showcasing your expertise in your field. This could be topics such as a how-to guide, favorite locations, or maybe your tips & tricks. The key is to show yourself as the expert you are.

Keywords & Problem Solving

The last piece to building a blog for your photography business is doing the research in what keywords your potential clients are using to find your website and how you can incorporate those keywords and alt text to make the most of your blogs. This means you should be intentional about how you title blogs, where you use certain words and building interest to continue reading. Another incredibly helpful tool photographers can use to build a list of topics for their blog is writing out potential problems your clients have and how your services will solve those problems without having to be asked.

Pro Tip: Adding a SEO plug like Yoast can help assist you along the way as well as familiarizing yourself with Google Search Console to find real time keywords clients use to find your website.

Blogs do not have to be as scary as we may have made them out to be in our minds, especially for photographers trying to build or nurture a blog on their websites. The best part about adding blogging to your business workflow is the endless opportunities you will have to turn the content from your blog into social captions, email newsletters or resources for clients in the future.

Did you find this blog helpful for your portrait business but want to gain deeper insight into building a photography blog and the many other resources you can use to market to potential clients? We have a few incredible resources available for photographers at every level to help build their portrait business game and make money doing it!