The Importance of Blogging and Showing your Personality – Marketing for Photographers
This chapter is an excerpt from the in-depth e-book, Creative Freelance Marketing for Photographers.
When potential clients come to your website, the quality of your work is only part of what can make you stand out. If a customer can get a sense that you are an interesting, caring, and reliable person through your website and marketing efforts, there is an excellent chance that they will want to hire you.
Adding a personal touch is often what will create the impetus for someone to contact you.
Potential clients are not only interested in seeing the type of work that they are looking to hire a creative for. While that is their primary consideration, you will most likely not be the only person qualified for the job. Clients have to interact with, trust, and deal with the person they are hiring, and because of this a lot of them will take into account many other factors when choosing whom to work with.
Who you are as a creative is a big consideration for them, and your personal work and narrative can be a big draw, even if it does not relate directly to the job.
This is true for selling your prints as well. A small percentage of people will purchase art without contacting its creator, but in my experience the majority will not. When you sell art, you are not only selling the piece, you are also selling yourself as an artist, and you can be sure that anyone who is interested in hiring you or purchasing something will explore your blog if you have one.
Social services like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are further avenues where you can share your personality. Over the last handful of years, blog prevalence has slowed somewhat as creatives have migrated over to using social sites more frequently. However, both should be used in tandem. Your website should be your central hub that you then surround with the social websites that you use.
Google gives an advantage to websites that are frequently updated with new content, and a blog is usually the way to achieve this. This content can add new ways for people to find you through search terms. But even if a blog does not turn your website into a hub of activity, it is still a way to inject your voice into your site, and that is what is most important. It is a way of talking to your audience directly, of showing your personality, of showing the process behind your work and life, and of sharing insights and knowledge of both your field and your passions. A blog is a way to put up new prints, works in progress, to highlight personal projects, and to gain feedback on them. It can be a visual diary of your progress and a way to test out your voice on a consistent basis. It can be a way to share new ideas and techniques that you have learned. It can even stray occasionally from its main focus. One of my favorite photography blogs,
A blog is a way of talking to your audience directly, of showing your personality, of showing the process behind your work and life, and of sharing insights and knowledge of both your field and your passions. It is a way to put up new prints, works in progress, to highlight personal projects, and to gain feedback on them. It can be a visual diary of your progress and a way to test out your voice on a consistent basis. It can be a way to share new ideas and techniques that you have learned.
A blog can even stray occasionally from its main focus. One of my favorite photography blogs, The Online Photographer, frequently goes on interesting tangents about cars, music, and even football, and it helps people realize that the owner, Mike, is about more than just photography.
I consider the blog aspect of my personal website to be vital, which is why I keep links to the newest and best posts on the homepage. This is not something that you need to do, but it has been important to my business growth and development. It is where I can put up images that I love, whether or not I think they are sellable. I use it as a way to experiment in a public forum.
There are few things that make me happier than when someone purchases a print for the first time or hires me for a job or workshop, who then says they have been following my blog and work for years.
Many people put their blogs right on their homepage, but it is more common to see a blog on a separate page. That is a decision you will have to make. Explore the websites of other photographers to see how they incorporate their blogs and what content they add to them.
A blog is a place to keep people coming back to your website consistently. If you can keep your website on a person’s mind on a somewhat consistent basis, you can be sure that they will contact you immediately when they need to hire a creative.
Furthermore, as you build a following, if you write posts relevant to your topic or field, it will be much easier to gain links and referrals. A blog does not have to be updated on a daily basis, but it can be; weekly or monthly updates can be effective as well. Once a week will be a bit better to keep people coming to your site, but it is not necessary. If the posts are good, once a month will still allow new viewers to go through your recent posts and get caught up, while keeping the regulars coming back enough of the time. It will also give you more time to make each post that you create have a higher quality. How often you post will depend on your goals and your audience.
For further education, download Creative Freelance Marketing for Photographers.