We’ve all heard it: When it comes to business, blogging for photographers is gold. Not only is it great for SEO (search engine optimization), but your blog is a great way for your clients to share your work and your website with ALL of their friends and family. Talk about increasing your reach! I always blog my client sessions, but I’ll be honest… Last year, I fell way behind on my client blogs during my busy season. I didn’t mean to… It just happened (or didn’t, ahem). I had the best of intentions, but staying on top of client blogs just kept getting pushed to the back burner, and eventually fell off my radar in the chaos that is Fall for photographers. But this year, I knew that needed to change.
Not only is your blog a great way to get your work in front of new people, but the timing is key, too. When clients first see their images, they are excited and thrilled and want to show them off! What better way to do that than by sending their friends and family right to your blog where they can view all the highlights of their session. By falling behind on this critical element of business, you could be missing a window of opportunity to reach potential clients. These are a few things I’m doing to help me stay on top of my client blogs this year.
Dictation
I have started using a free dictation app (Dragon Dictation) on my iPhone to record thoughts and highlights from my sessions on the go. As I’m driving home from a photo session, I will record these thoughts while they are fresh in my mind. The app lets me email it to myself in one simple step. BOOM. I have a rough draft of my blog post done before I’m even home from my session.
Code as You Go
As I am culling my images, I mark the images I want to highlight on the blog by color coding as I go, so that selecting blog images isn’t a separate task later. Images that are keepers for the gallery get flagged, and images that are favorites for the blog also get flagged red. You can read more about how I select images for my blog posts here.
Don’t Delay the Export
When I have finished editing and am ready to export the client’s images for their gallery, I also do a separate export right then for the blog images, which go into their own subfolder in the client’s file. This way there is no digging through the images later when I’m ready to blog. I save time by not having to find them all over again.
Once I’ve exported the blog images into their subfolder, I go right into Blogstomp to prepare the photos for my blog. With a couple fast clicks, my images are ready. I love BlogStomp for it’s easy image sizing and watermarking!
By following these simple steps, putting together my client blog post is quick and painless. These steps help me avoid the temptation to put blogging off due to not having time to write the material or to sort and prep the images. By creating a simple and easy to follow workflow, client blogs don’t have to be a chore! Blogging for photographers is too important to ignore. These steps have saved me lots of time and helped me to stay on top of blogging my photo sessions, giving my clients a great and timely way to share their session with their friends and family.
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