Blogging for Photographers Guide – Key to Business Growth

Blogging for photographers is a popular marketing approach that many photo businesses undervalue.

Read that again…

Most photographers know that they need to blog – it’s a common topic in online discussions and networking events. But…most photographers don’t do it.

There are a few reasons for this…

First, blogging often doesn’t come with much immediate gratification. To get organic search traffic, you might research and write your blogs and not see results for a few months (or longer).

Writing blogs can also be challenging if you’re not a natural writer.

Oh…and did we mention that blogging can be time consuming?

While these are just some of the excuses we see that cause photographers to avoid blogging, we want to shed some light on why blogging is so valuable for your photography business.

And if you’re not currently blogging – you’ll want to start in order to reap massive benefits over the course of your long-lasting business…

What is Blogging Anyways?

It’s a little weird that we feel the need to clarify what blogging for photographers is.

But…after spending a lot of time around online groups (in particular) …there is a lot of noise around the word “blogging”

“Blogging” should be seen as a catchall word that refers to the creation of new pages on your website with text and image content.

We’ve seen descriptions of blogging for photographers that look like …

• Just blog your recent sessions/weddings
• Don’t blog your sessions/weddings, instead create evergreen pages
• Only create in depth, educational content
• Blogging only refers to the things on your website’s blog roll (you know – on the blog page)

All of these are wrong.

Your blogging effort as a photographer will be most effective when you create an SEO and content strategy.

This strategy, if done well, will include the creation of different types of content on your website.

We’ll be covering the different types of content you can create as a photographer later in this post!

Benefits of Blogging for Your Photography Business

Before we dig our feet in, we want to start at the end…

Blogging can be hard work, so what’s in it for me?

As a full time photographer myself, blogging has had a HUGE impact on the performance of my website and business bookings.

You can read more about how search engine optimized content and a consistent stream of blogs helped bring in 80% of my leads last year in Shoot and Thrive’s use case.

The most significant benefits you will get from blogging:

• More organic search traffic to your website.
• Increased volume of inquiries and bookings for your photo business.
• Help position yourself as an expert regarding your photography niche.
• Showcase more of your work to expand your portfolio.
• Empower other pages on your website with internal linking.
• Put more pressure on your competition.
• Hone writing and SEO skills that can be applied in other situations in the future.
• Your content can be repurposed and shared on social media.
• Create natural networking and partnership opportunities.

Get more organic search traffic to your photography website

The impact of high quality and search engine optimized blog content is significant.

When you select the best SEO keywords for photographers and write content that is valuable to your users, search engines will reward you by ranking your pages higher in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

The challenge for many photographers is finding the right keywords and topics to target.

We’ve seen many photographers who “blog” – but the blogs are poorly written and optimized.

These blogs end up going nowhere…

And it can feel like a defeat when they were putting in the work, but not getting any results.

Don’t worry – we’ll be covering blog topic ideas for photographers and strategies for optimizing your content more in this post!

Get more inquiries and bookings

With more eyes on your website, the natural progression of a well optimized website will be an increase in inquiries and bookings.

As a rule of sales, providing your prospective clients with upfront value will get them more engaged with your brand and more likely to want to buy from you.

I’ve seen this firsthand in my business with daily inquiries showing up in my inbox from people who found me through organic search.

With a well optimized process to convert the inquiry into a sale, this is one of the main reasons we recommend any photography business to get started blogging today.

If you still struggle with creating blogs even after reading this article, we create high value blogs for photographers all the time.

Get in touch today to learn more.

Set yourself up as an authority in your photography niche

Becoming an “expert” or “authority” sounds a little tacky, I know, but it’s a natural benefit that comes from creating good blog content.

People gravitate towards experts.

Photography clients especially gravitate towards people that share their experience and knowledge to help them solve whatever problems they have.

(Yes, even if those “problems” are as simple as how to have a wedding in a particular location).

Expand your portfolio

As a photographer, you have access to the photos you have taken and can craft blog posts that incorporate these images in high value ways.

Session blogs are the easiest example of showcasing your work.

Going a step further, you can create content that naturally includes your work like in depth venue guides, showing off a location for portrait sessions, and much more.

Sharing your images while sharing informative content leads to this constant drip of exposure to your work while adding value to your users.

Give other pages on your website more SEO juice

One small part of SEO for photographers is interlinking your website content.

There are many reasons why this is a good practice – from helping user retention and providing a better user experience to getting more SEO results for your website.

Let’s focus on that last point for 1 second…

Here is an example:

• You create a blog post about the “Best Engagement Session Spots in Toronto”
• In that post, you link out to your home page – which you’re trying to rank for “Toronto Wedding Photographer”
• You receive some backlinks from a florist you’ve connected with, and they link to your “Best Engagement Spots” post
• That post becomes seen as a little bit higher value
• By interconnecting your home page, the home page (and attempts to rank for “Toronto Wedding Photographer”) will be positively impacted

There are other things happening here too.

By creating related content, you are helping position yourself as an authority on being a wedding and engagement photographer in Toronto.

You can even link to your blog from your home page to show this value in a more “in your face” kind of way.

Put more pressure on your competitors

Wedding and portrait photographers traditionally have relied heavily on venue partnerships, word of mouth referrals, getting a booth at an expo, paid directory listings like Wedding Wire (which is generally terrible for vendors), and similar marketing efforts.

SEO and blogging allow you to skip the line in some ways.

I do feel there is a place for these traditional marketing efforts (don’t get me wrong), but I’ve seen time and time again where my clients found me through organic search…and decided to book me instead of the photographers on a vendor list.

In the coming years, I am predicting this will become even more common as Gen Z couples increasingly get married or look for portraits of themselves.

It’s very narrow sighted to think marketing strategies will stay the same when they’ve been applied to generations like Baby Boomers, Millennials (where I fall), and even Gen X…yet Gen Z is increasing in touch with finding things online.

Repurpose and share content on social media

One thing I love talking about is the “compounding effect” of SEO efforts.

You can reuse and share your content on your socials, driving traffic to your website with valuable resources.

Connect with other vendors to network and partner

One of the biggest short-term payoffs I’ve seen with my content creation has been using blog posts to help make connections with wedding venues and other vendors.

Even a studio portrait photographer has opportunities here…

As an introverted person, I’ve never been great at just calling someone up and naturally finding some conversational route that leads to a strong partner relationship.

Blogging became a buffer that allowed me to connect with lower pressure, but maybe even higher value.

Use Blogs to Connect with Your Ideal Client

If you don’t have an ideal client avatar, it’s a good exercise to do to have a more focused business.

My ideal client informs all my business decisions.

Yes, that also includes my marketing efforts and how I spend my time when it comes to content creation (like blogging for photographers).

When you create blog content with your ideal client in mind, you get the following benefits:

• All your blogs contribute to a more succinct and targeted brand message. This leads to higher conversion rates.
• You can write from a position of experience and expertise that your users will value. Your users will want to connect with you and your unique experiences.
• You can naturally add empathy into your writings. Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you want to attract people in established, busy careers (like lawyers). You can refer to your client’s busy career schedules and desire to create lasting memories of their family in your content…something that seems really simple but is actually more meaningful for your users.  
• You can attract the people you want to hire you. Good blog content for photographers can help them get in front of the right audience.
• Blog content serves as a “filter” for your audience. Following up the last point, when you create content with a specific ideal client avatar – it means that some people will find your post and not connect with you (not your ideal clients), while others will find it and connect a whole lot (your ideal clients). You will never convert everyone who lands on your website but can convert those who matter most to you.
• People will want to hire you because you connected with them. Hiring a photographer is often a very personal decision. This is especially true when dealing with photographers that are more expensive. Having touchpoints that show who you are as a person will make people more engaged with your brand and more likely to hire you.

Blogging for Photographers – 5 Different Post Types

Now it’s time to get into the heart of this post about blogging for photographers.

There are 5 different types of blog posts you can create.

1. Session/Wedding Blogs

For photographers, blogging your recent sessions, weddings and elopements are a unique opportunity compared to any other industry.

This type of blog ticks the following boxes:

• Attract users looking for hyper local areas (parks, wedding venues, etc.)
• Serve as an expansion of your portfolio
• Create blogs consistently and in relative high volumes

In general, session blogs are a great “easy” way to start blogging for photographers.

There are a few problems that come up with this type of blog post regularly if you aren’t careful:

• Poorly optimized for SEO
• No keyword research driving the content
• Thin content (when you just post images without any text or very limited text)
• Not including links to other pages or CTAs to redirect traffic
• Using too many images per post creating poor UX and heavy pages (even with optimized image sizes)
• Keyword cannibalization when you create content about the same locations over and over again

Most significantly – a lot of photographers we’ve talked to don’t blog their sessions consistently (or at all). Typically, the reasons for this come down to not enough time, not enough commitment, or not enough of an immediate return.

If you’re not blogging your sessions (or doing them smartly), you’re leaving money on the table.

In 2022, one of my session blogs brought in 8 inquiries for one venue in New Jersey.

I had calls with 6 of them and converted 4 into bookings at around $6,000 per sale.

This is a super popular wedding venue with a ton of photographers on their recommended list (and I wasn’t one of them).

This one post helped drive $24,000 in sales…in just one year.

You need to get started now and stay consistent with it.

 If you’re struggling with time but still want to reap the rewards, we can help!

We have a process to create quality, search engine optimized session blogs for you every month.

Contact us to learn more and get started!

2. Pillar Blogs

Pillar content meets the following criteria:

• Extremely high value
• Lengthy and detailed coverage of a topic
• Explores subtopics in modest detail
• Targets higher competition SEO keywords
• Provides many opportunities for brand opinions and perspectives
• Draws in a larger audience
• Presents more conversion opportunities to take users from viewers to purchasers of your services

In general, pillar pages will be comprehensive and showcase your expertise on a topic.

They often come in at higher word counts (3,000 – 5,000+) – this is a result of being more comprehensive, as well as needing to be better than the competition to compete for higher value keywords.

Your website will typically only have a few of these.

For wedding photographers blogging, some pillar content ideas include:

• How to Get Married in [CITY]
• Best Wedding Venues in [CITY]

For portrait photographers blogging, a few pillar ideas for you, too:

• Best Places for Family Photos in [CITY]
• How to Prepare for Family Portraits in [CITY]

You can swap out “family” for virtually any niche.

3. Educational Blogs

Blogs designed to educate your audience fall into this category.

There are many different formats these posts can take such as…

• How to guides
• Definition posts
• Listicles
• Case studies
• News
• Tutorials

Around here, we sometimes refer to these posts as “growth blogs” – because while they do provide education, the purpose of writing them as a photographer and business owner is to help catapult growth for your website traffic, inquiries, and bookings.

There are a few things we’ve found to be true about educational blogs…

• They typically are longer and cover a topic in detail. While word count is not everything, we see these often between 1,000 – 3,000 words.
• They are generally more focused on a specific topic instead of discussing many topics.
• They require the most optimizations for titles and keywords to be higher performing than competition. Titles in particular are huge for getting a better click through rate.
• They often target lower competition keywords with the intention of taking ownership of that keyword. Competitor research reveals current ranking articles are thin, not very valuable to users, lack expertise and experience, or have very low word counts (among other things).

4. Brand Blogs

While most of the content in the categories above will focus on SEO keywords to drive traffic to your website, there are some blogs photographers might make that aren’t focused on SEO as the main goal.

Blogs focused on sharing things happening with your business fit this niche.

An example of this type of blog would be sharing news about your business (like launching a new website or changing your pricing).

For blogging photographers, this type of blog is probably going to be rare.

We don’t recommend them all that much unless you have an active following or are going to use these content pages to share on social media and other platforms.

5. Personal Blogs

Lastly, personal blogs may not focus on SEO – but can provide great opportunities to connect with your audience (potentially even deeper than all the other content you write).

I actually love personal blogs when they are done well and compliment your brand.

For example, a few years ago I created a blog series that talked about my trip to Iceland with my wife.

It was an amazing trip – 14 days traveling around this awesome country in a campervan.

I made posts for every day, documenting the sights with what is basically a journal entry and some photos.

This content wasn’t directly related to our work as wedding photographer but gave people an extra touchpoint to connect.

While I didn’t write these with SEO in mind, they also naturally began to rank for some terms.

I ended up getting a number of nice backlinks from travel related websites – which helped my site out with a little more exposure..

We even picked up a few elopement inquiries over the years from couples who found our journey interesting.

You can create personal blogs about really any topic, but always keep in mind what your ideal client will find interesting to learn about.

I do also recommend separating this type of content from your regular blog roll (or hiding them altogether behind a category tag).

Here are 100 Wedding Photography Blog Ideas if you need them to get started!

Creating Topic Clusters – A Photographers Blogging Strategy

Now that we’ve covered the different types of blog content photographers can create – it’s a good idea to think about how they can work together to create a synergy.

Yes, I used the word “synergy.”

It takes me back to my days working in a corporate office.

I’m sorry…(lol)

For better and for worse, synergy is a great way to describe what I am ultimately looking to do when I blog as a photographer.

Too many photographers view their blog posts as independent from one another.

This works against them.

One of my preferred approaches to creating a blogging strategy is by creating topic clusters.

Here is a quick illustration of how a topic cluster works in theory:

Creating a topic cluster is fairly easy – at least in theory.

Topic clusters involve identifying a good pillar (or top level) post, then creating additional educational articles covering sub-topics in more detail.

In practice, solid topic clusters may even have 3, 4, or 5+ levels of depth.

An example topic cluster for a wedding photographer could look like this:

• Top Level: Pillar Content about How to Get Married in [STATE]
• 2^nd Level: Educational Content about How to Get Married in [CITY]
• 3^rd Level: Educational Content about certain aspects of wedding day such as choosing vendors, finding a photographer, picking a florist, first look or not, ceremony ideas, etc.
• 4^th Level: Wedding Venue Highlight Posts
• 5^th Level: Wedding blogs from past clients you photographed

Some opportunities that come from creating topic clusters:

• A more focused SEO and blogging strategy
• You can create all the content ideas upfront, then work on writing them after
• You should have a clear picture of how much search volume all of this content could bring in instead of thinking about search volume on a blog-to-blog basis
• More ownership over your local market(s)

A word of caution: creating content for topic clusters can be very intensive and time consuming. If you struggle with time management, writing effective copy, and doing SEO research (like finding the best keywords to target) …we recommend finding a marketing agency to help you.

Fortunately, you’re in luck! We help photographers get their SEO and blogging in order.

We can help you create massive results by helping you identify the best performing content structure and creating the content you need.

Contact us today to learn more!

Using Your Blogs to Benefit Other Marketing Channels

If the motivation to start blogging still hasn’t kicked in, let’s look at how you can use these blogs to start getting short term wins while you wait for it to rank in organic search.

Social Media Marketing

A few ways to use blogs in your social media marketing:

• Include direct links in your social media posts
• Refer to the post link “in your bio” for more engagement
• Share valuable blog content with couples who slide into your DM’s
• Include references to pillar content or other high value posts on a social media landing page including your bio section
• Respond to comments with links to blog posts where you answer certain questions commonly asked

Paid Ads

This is a more advanced technique and will require being able to create well targeted ads for Facebook, Instagram, Google, and other platforms.

Your ads can refer to your blog content.

They can also refer to specific landing pages you’ve created with conversion goals really in mind.

Vendor Networking

One of our favorite marketing strategies is to take blog content and get other business owners on board.

There are many strategies to go with this, here are a few simple ones:

• Share your session/wedding blogs with vendors that worked the day. A good email will share the value they are receiving from being included (and getting a backlink to their site) and open the door to more communication that can lead to more networking and partnership opportunities.
• Contact a high value business you want to connect with and talk about your content strategy. You may be able to find opportunities where they can contribute to your content and receive benefits that come from it. You can receive the benefit of extra expertise on the topic, a backlink from them, and the opportunity for more networking with them.

Creating Blogs for Extra Revenue Opportunities

While the main target of blogging for photographers is typically to attract new photography clients to buy services from your business, there is another opportunity to keep in mind.

With affiliate marketing (and to a lesser extent for photography business blogs – ads), you can monetize the blog posts you are already creating to make extra income.

A simple way to naturally integrate affiliate marketing into your blogs would be to refer to valuable products or services that your users are already going to be interested in purchasing.

For example…if you write a blog about “Best Farm Wedding Décor”, you can include referral links to websites like Amazon and receive a commission of every sale made.

You need to identify the best affiliate marketing programs for photographers and remember to register for an account. Every company and offer is unique and may have certain eligibility requirements.

How can affiliate marketing impact your photography business?

One of my favorite things is earning passive income.

This is the money you can make from doing a little work up front, then letting your content circulate in organic search, bring in traffic, and convert them into the sale of different product offers made available through your web pages.

In my photography business, I earn passive income using affiliate marketing.

Some of these earnings come from targeting my wedding clients – sharing offers for wedding décor and invitation suites.

Some content is also geared towards other photographers on pages hidden from plain view (not easily accessible in my blog roll) and I’ve sold everything from camera and lenses to CRM subscriptions.

I also created a separate photography website with the specific goal of challenging my SEO and writing skills, with the goal of generating passive income in perpetuity. I worked aggressively on that website over the course of a few months and have mostly let is sit since (for a few years now), and it brings in consistent 4 figure earnings every month.

Frequently Asked Questions about Blogging for Photographers

Do People Actually Read Blogs, Anyways?

Yes. People read blogs. And if they aren’t “reading”, they are skimming through them to identify if it’s content they find valuable for what they are searching for.

It also depends on the type of blog.

Someone may rush past filler text on a session blog because they want to see photos from a particular photographer at a particular location.

For a pillar article, users will be more likely to read more – since they have much more to gain from spending time slowing down and taking the words in.

To help counteract people who don’t love reading every word, it’s important to optimize your headers to make your text easy to skim through.

At the end of the day, one goal of blogging for photographers isn’t just having people read your content, but to just get them on to your website where they will be exposed to your unique brand (colors, graphics, personality, etc.) and images (the work they’ll want to hire you for).

I heard blogging your sessions isn’t good for SEO, is that true?

No. Like all good SEO myths in the photography industry, there are some important things to consider when blogging your sessions.

But, when done correctly, your sessions can add a ton of value to users and provide an excellent source of consistent blog content that can get SEO results.

Things to know about session blogs:

• Target low competition keywords
• Will receive low search traffic volumes most of the time (this is not a bad thing)
• People who search these terms typically have higher buying intent

Additionally…

• Many photographers do session blogs incorrectly such as reusing titles, keywords, etc.

Session blogs benefit from a compounding effect. Post most (or all) of your sessions/weddings, and you will experience benefits to your business.