What Should I Blog About?

Google exists for one main purpose. To provide its users with content that is relevant to what they are searching for. If you haven’t been told by at least one person that you should be blogging on your website, you’ve probably been living under a rock for the last 5 years. But it’s one thing to be told you should be blogging and another knowing what to blog about. Time and time again, I hear photographers asking “What should I blog about?”. So today I want to help you find the answers to that question.

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3-Steps To Content That Gets You Booked

How we blog as photographers has changed a lot. It used to be that you could post a small bit of text with some photos of your most recent wedding, do a little bit of optimisation for your target keywords, and you’d rank on search engines. And while I believe there is still a benefit to blogging your recent work, that alone is not enough to reach your ideal clients in most cases. So if blogging your work isn’t enough, what should you blog about?

The online world is competing for our attention. So in order to get your audience hooked, you need to deliver relevant and valuable content to them.

Bride and groom standing in front of a wooden boathouse by a mountain lake in Austria

The Recipe For Endless Content Ideas

How do I know what to blog about? I’ve developed a 3-step process that helps me find endless ideas for blog posts. And today I’m going to share it with you.

Step 1 – Know Who You Are Blogging For

Before you get too stuck in with brainstorming blog ideas, it’s really important to know who you ideal client is, because when you don’t know that, you’re going to struggle to know what to write about. Or you’ll have a load of ideas but they will be completely irrelevant to your audience.

Why is this important? When you know exactly who your ideal client is, you know what they are searching for.

Spend time properly working out your ideal client avatar so that you know all about them, including about their personalities, likes and dislikes, vision for their wedding day, their biggest questions and the struggles around their wedding day.

Bride and groom stand in front of a wooden hut in the snow

Step 2 – Map Out Their Journey

Your couple’s journey doesn’t start from the day they start searching for an elopement photographer. It might start when one of them decides to buy a ring or thinks about planning a proposal. And it continues after the wedding day too.

Once you’ve identified the journey your ideal clients are on, think about all the steps they’ll be taking at each stage of the journey. What things will they be searching for? What questions will they be asking? It doesn’t just need to be questions that they ask you as the photographer either. It can be anything you know they are asking other vendors/friends and family/Google.

Man on one knee proposing to his girlfriend in front of Lago di Braies in the Dolomites in Italy on the stepy of the boathouse

Step 3 – Create content that answers their questions & end with a call to action

One of the key ways to getting discovered by your ideal clients and demonstrating your value is to create relevant, informative content that answers the questions they are asking. And if you think about their entire journey, they are likely to be asking a lot of questions.

For example, for a couple who aren’t yet engaged, one partner might be searching for the best locations to propose. So you can use your local knowledge to create a post about the best locations to propose in your area. Or 5 tips for planning the perfect proposal in your location.

When you know their journey, you can create content that answers all of their questions, sometimes even before they thought to ask them. So while they might come to your site asking one question, you might end up keeping them there longer and answering ten more.

Each question you answer demonstrates your expert knowledge, which helps your ideal clients in their struggle to plan their wedding and in return they feel extremely thankful to you. They see you as an expert and begin to trust you.

End each blog post with a call to action – it might be a simple one like sending them to another post, leaving a comment or sharing the post, or asking for a bigger commitment such as filling in your contact form. Before you know it, there’s an enquiry in your inbox and a new booking in the calendar.

Bride and groom in a barn, groom is in a wheelchair and bride is crouching down to kiss him

Common Questions Around Blogging

Should I Blog Client Sessions?

When it comes to blogging past sessions, think about what potential clients are looking for? Do they want to read another story filled with cliches about the wedding day of people they don’t know? Probably not!

When you blog past sessions, it’s fine to share a bit of background about the couple, but keep it short and relevant. Don’t go overboard on how the couple met and talk for hours about the way they gazed into each other’s eyes all day. Instead, present the session (couple shoot, wedding or elopement) with some helpful tips and information for other couples who might in interested in that location too. Optimise the post for relevant keywords and make sure these are reflected in the H1-H3 headings, URL, meta description and image alt tags.

Should I Blog About Things That Aren’t Related To My Photography Services?

When I first started out I didn’t have much experience or portfolio, so I blogged about a lot of personal things. While it’s not a bad thing to have a couple of posts about more personal subjects or other lifestyle-related topics you know your ideal clients are interested in, your primary aim for your blog is to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in your field, and to provide value to your clients around the service they are coming to you for. What you don’t want to do is confuse people about what you actually offer by having blog posts on a load of unrelated subjects. It might get people to your blog if you’re good at SEO, but if they aren’t your target clients, it’s not a good use of your time.

Your priority should be creating content that shows your expertise in the areas around your specific niche first. Help them address all the challenges they are facing around planning their proposal, engagement, wedding or elopement. Keep showing up and putting yourself forward as the expert to help guide them through these challenges, with your services of course, being the solution to making everything better. Every now and then you can intersperse these posts with some more personal ones, but focus on their biggest challenges first.

If you need someone to do initial research or sketch out the backbone of the article for you, one cheap copywriting service I’ve used before is iNeedArticles where you can get the outlines of a 1000 word article for around $25.

Want to learn more about blogging and SEO?

If you want to gain a deeper knowledge of SEO and blogging, I highly recommend taking the SEO & Blogging Course for Photographers by Fuel Your Photos. While it might seem like a high investment for an online course, there aren’t many other courses out there that will give you the results that this one will (at least in my experience). There’s so much out-dated SEO advice out there but Corey & Dylan have created an amazing course, which they update regularly.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SEO COURSE