Why Your Photography Blog Sucks Redux

If you’ve already Failed as a Photographer and Made Your Photography Like a Bad Cold, then you’re probably ready to find out Why Your Blog Sucks.

But don’t let my provocative titles scare you off. There is actually a point here, and that is to help you understand how to leverage the Internet as an indirect/passive marketing tool for a fraction of the cost of traditional direct/active methods.

What am I talking about?

Back in the olden days of yore, marketing for a photographer only consisted of activities like sending out a mailer, visiting a photo editor, taking out an ad in a source book. And although these direct marketing activities haven’t gone away, they are expensive in terms of time, money and effort. You certainly shouldn’t abandon direct efforts, but you should realize that there are more marketing tools available to photographers.

When the Internet rolled around, we suddenly had a virtually free mechanism for advertising our services. But even still, we were doing a lot of heavy lifting in Web 1.0. We created a website, we stuck a few pictures up there, and if we were intrepid, we advertised our email and URL. If you’re chuckling at this 1990s view of the web, you shouldn’t be. The majority of photographers on the web still think this is the value of being online. They still think they are controlling who is visiting their website.

(cue chuckling) They are not.

In the past two years or so, there has been a perceptible shift in the way that savvy photographers view the Internet. It’s no longer just a place where a digital translation of their portfolio is posted. Instead, it’s become much more robust and integrated. And most importantly from a marketing perspective, smart photographers have realized that the cost of deploying a smart web strategy is significantly cheaper than the direct strategies of the past.

I could easily spend $5000 design, producing, and mailing a post card to prospective buyers. But I have no direct way of measuring the success of that campaign. I don’t know who received the postcard. I don’t know who looked at it. I don’t know if they came to my website afterwards. And clearly, if my website doesn’t have e-commerce or a searchable archive, then a visitor has no point of conversion on my website. That’s akin to the Gap advertising in a magazine, but when you make the effort to visit the store, you can’t try the clothes on, nor buy it. Hey we sell clothes! Oh, but you can’t buy it in our store. You have to call us during business hours to find out what’s available and how much it costs.

Are you beginning to see the absurdity?

A contemporary online strategy for photographers isn’t just about having a website. Nor is it just about having a website with e-commerce. It’s about building a presence over time that passively draws unsolicited visitors to your website to make more money. Why rely soley on direct marketing efforts to drive people to your website when there are billions of people online? All it takes to get to you is finding your website. But they aren’t going to find your website if you haven’t considered how your website is going to get into Google.

But I digress. Let’s talk about why your blog sucks.

The truth is that your blog doesn’t suck. You’re just not conceiving of it in the right way. A good blog doesn’t really even need to be read to reap benefits for the author.

This is what I call a “blog with benefits.”

A blog is a structural dynamo for Search Engine Optimization. The frequency of updates, the opportunity to embed salient keywords, and most importantly, the propensity to link build from a blog gives it enormous potential. Have you ever seen a blog that didn’t reference another page on the web? Have you ever seen a blog that didn’t have discrete page titles for every entry — thereby giving diversity to the site?

So given the enormous potential of a blog to enhance your SEO, you really need to keep that in the back of your head as you put pen to paper. That doesn’t mean the blog should read like a keyword list because Google will punish you for such activity. But it does mean that the insertion of keywords which are important to you (like say, “the best photography websites” or “photographer SEO“) should be recurring themes.

If you’re a wedding photographer, why talk about what you ate for lunch? Talk about weddings. Talk about geographical areas you cover. Talk about packages you offer. Talk about the stuff that a bride would search for.

There is nothing magical about SEO for photographers. If you can understand f-stops, you can understand SEO. So keep writing your sucky blog, but make it suck so good.