Blogging is a very effective tool at introducing people to
your products and services… and you just proved that by clicking on the link
somewhere out on the Internet to come and see what I had to say on this one
topic.
Let’s start this by saying that blogging requires commitment.
You have to set a frequency by which you want to post, and stick to it. Setting
a pattern, thereby setting the expectation by your readers is imperative to
creating loyalty to your blogs, your products and your services.
I now faithfully BLOG
almost every day. Between 8:30am and 9:30am my readers now know that I
will have written about something and posted it online. They know they will
find my post on my blog, on my facebook business pages, my twitter feed or on Google+.
I have set the expectation, and whether they consciously go and read it, or
just know that one is there in case they want to read it… its there if they
choose to read it.
Writing Your Blog. The common
misconception is that it’s a daily task. It’s not. I will take a day and write
dozens of posts. By the time this post goes online around Christmas of 2012 I
will already be writing my posts for the end of January. I spend a total of 12
hours a month and write 25 to 30 blog posts.
Occasionally I will write supplemental posts… if you see
two posts in a day that probably means I wrote that during that week because something
had come up and I wanted to address it.
What should you BLOG
about? Well… that’s up to you. What information do you have that readers want to
learn about? What compelling information would be valuable? Only you can answer
that. For me, I blog about anything to do with photography… from tips and
tutorials, to technical information, to travel destinations, my workshops,
social media, marketing.
People that follow me and read my posts know that my
topics have a huge range and they can find information on a lot of photography
related topics by coming to, or searching my historical blog posts.
Soft Sell approach… I follow
the soft sell approach… more times than not there will be a link to one of my
workshops, my tours, or my products for sale. I rarely do the hard sell
approach, rather offer a link to a workshop if I do a “Species Spotlight”… for
example; I am going to Africa a few times in 2013 and a few times in 2014. I just
wrote a species spotlight on the Rothschild Giraffe that will go on my blog in
December. In that post I put links to my workshops. People can choose to read about
the workshop, or not… that wasn’t what the post was about. The giraffe was the
subject and the soft sell was the workshop.
How does a BLOG
generate clients and money? There are a few ways to generate new clients
and sell more products or services. Here is how my blog helps me generate
revenue and new clients.
1 - Placing ads on my blog… Google Blogger gives you the
option to generate revenue by serving ads between your posts. It’s called
Google AdSense. I generate about $25 a month from serving these ads on my site…
but I also periodically go in and block advertisers that are in direct
competition with what I am selling. It’s not an exact science, but the more
sites I block from advertising on my site, the more types of ads I want to show
up on my site are showing up.
It’s a balancing act and a personal decision… but for $25
a month, what the heck… that revenue is increasing the more popular my posts
are becoming. So who knows how much money that will generate in another year or
two?
2- Increasing Your Presence online… Yesterday I touched
on “keywords” on my blog. Creating a relevant title and tagging your blog posts
with words and phrases that people are searching for are key. I use my adwords
account to look for the top searched phrases in the photography industry in
order to tag my content with the most popular phrases used today.
I also write frequently on my blog… the more frequent you
write, the more times the search engine spiders will index your content, the
more relevant they will deem your content to be versus the millions of fresh content
that is uploaded to the web daily.
My blog for example gets indexed a few times a week and
my posts will rank high on search queries quite often… here is one example of
that.
I am doing a workshop with Hal Schmitt and Scott Slocum
in Dallas in May.
It is an aviation workshop. I posted the information on my website but I also
blogged about these workshops. Moose Peterson has written dozens, if not
hundreds of blogs on his aviation workshops for years, and he has them on
different websites.
You will see how my blog out performed Moose, and my own
website. My blog post today showed up higher than any of Moose’s workshop
information anywhere on the web… If I had not have indexed the post properly, written
the appropriate keywords and socialized the post on all my social networks I
would never had the web presence that I am getting right now.
Proper keywords and phrases + frequency of posting on
your blog = how high your content will be served in a search query done on
google, bing, yahoo, etc… there are many more factors, but for the photographer
just starting their blog, or doesn’t want a more technical explanation; this
pretty much will do the trick. If you want more technical information please
fee free to contact me at kevin@photographers-lounge.com
