Learn the Secrets About Blogging! Why it’s an awesome marketing tool and super important for your photography website.

Hey everyone and welcome to the Studio Ninja blog. I’m super excited as this is our first post out of many more to come and I’ve got HEAPS of awesome proven photography marketing ideas to share with you.

My mission for Studio Ninja is the same as my mission for this blog, to help photographers grow their business. Although, the software focuses on helping you with the admin side of things, the Studio Ninja blog is all about providing marketing tips and ideas to help you get more customers!

So, let’s get straight into it…

As this is my first blog post and I know how important blogging is, I want the first topic of conversation to be about ‘blogging’! It doesn’t matter if you shoot weddings, portraits or any other type of photography, in my opinion your website MUST have a blog! So check out these 3 reasons why blogging is super important for your photography business!

1) It really helps with your SEO!

Google is always changing it algorithms and no one knows what they are going to pull out of the hat next, BUT, in the history of Google, there are two SEO techniques that have stood the test of time, quality unique content and quality backlinks from industry related high ranking websites. We’ll talk about backlinks another day, today is about blogging (creating quality unique content) and why it’s so important for your business.

Speaking from personal experience, my wedding photography business, Epic Photography, has been up and running for about 5 years and I have never ranked on google.

Well, I was so far away from page 1 that I couldn’t even find myself! So I started doing my homework and read everything I could about Search Engine Optimisation. There is a LOT of information out there, but in general everything I read gave the same two pieces of advice:

1. Have heaps of relevant unique content
2. Get as many industry related websites to link back to your website

So based on the first criteria, I finally decided to create a blog about 12 weeks ago (from the time of writing this), posting about all the weddings I photographed, one wedding per post.

I wrote about the couple, about what locations we went too, some experiences I had during the wedding, some really cool things that happened and lastly I would add some images from the wedding. Easy! It required a bit of work, but after a doing a couple I got in the swing of things and could create a new post in about 45 minutes.

Then amazing things started happening! My website went from not existing on google, to fluctuating between page 3 and 4!!

I then applied backlinking techniques (which I’ll discuss in a later post) and BANG!! My website started bouncing around page 1 and 2 and enquiries went from 2-3 per week to 2-3 per day!!

**QUICK TIP** Make sure you put your keywords in your blog posts. For example I wanted to rank for ‘Melbourne Wedding Photographer’, so I added that keyword a couple of times per post as well as my homepage and randomly all over my website.

2) Blog posts rank too!

Another thing I was noticing was that my posts started popping up on google too. I would blog about the different weddings that I photographed including information about the ceremony location and the reception venue, and then after a month or so, Google would index my posts and rank them.

I would find myself Googling a venue that I blogged about and BANG, I found my blog posts popping up on page 1 and 2.

This is an awesome way for brides to find you. Brides started contacting me because they would be researching their venue and stumble upon of my blog posts! They would say, “I just googled ‘abc reception’ and saw the wedding you shot there”.

** QUICK TIP ** if you alt tag your images in those posts, they will start appearing on google image search, which is a super powerful searching platform that brides use too.

Just to give you an idea of what I mean and show you the power of these blog post when it comes to generating leads, check out the following examples:

If you Google ‘Yarra Yarra Golf Club Wedding’ my website appears directly underneath the Yarra Yarra Golf Club website.

If you Google ‘Maia Docklands Wedding’ my website appears as the number 1 search result, even above Maia Docklands website! You can also see Allure Productions blogging about their wedding and ranking very well too!

One more example, if you search ‘Leonda by the Yarra Wedding’, although my blog post does not show up first, it does rank as the first result that isn’t actually the Leonda by the Yarra website, which is awesome!!

To use Leonda by the Yarra as an example, this is a venue that I LOVE shooting at, so I really wanted brides to find me when they were looking at getting married at Leonda. I simply added the main keyword, ‘Leonda by the Yarra’ into the title of the post, in the image alt tags, in the heading and throughout the body text and after a few weeks, Google found it and ranked it!

The best part is, since Google found that blog post, I’ve been getting lots of enquiries for weddings at Leonda. An amazing outcome, for a total of about 45 minutes work!

3) It shows couples that you are busy and experienced!

Having a portfolio of images is fine and generally works really well, but most of the time I have found that couples want to see a whole wedding shoot, not just your best of the best hero shots.

Brides can relate to you and your work when they see a whole wedding from start to end. They can see themselves getting ready at the same venue, they can get a better understanding of your style and will have a clearer expectation of what they are going to get if they book you!

They also get a good understanding of your personality in the way you write! So when writing your posts, be happy! 🙂

I’ve also found that 80% of the couples that I’m booking are getting married in a venues that appear in my blog. They saw the post, liked what they saw and decided to contact me for a meeting.

Most of the sale was already done before the couple even met me. They read my blog, saw my images and we’re almost sold. They just needed to meet with me to make sure I wasn’t a crazy person and the booking was pretty much done!

I hope this has inspired you to start blogging! Get your writers hat on, pour yourself a cup of coffee and just write, see what happens. I find it quite therapeutic and actually gets me really excited about the work I do!

Thanks so much for reading my first blog post about blogging and how important it is for your photography website and business. If you found this post useful and think it could benefit others, feel free to share it with your friends.