“Show Notes”
Why blog?
- It’s amazing for SEO
- It gives you things to talk about on social
- It gives you content for your newsletter
- It’s good for authority marketing
- It increases engagement on your website
Sam explains that if you only write your blog and don’t promote it, no one will ever find it. He says your blog needs to be about a theme. It needs to be about a topic and help to show that you are an expert in your field. For example, Samsuggests that a wedding photographer could review wedding venues. A blog without a theme or purpose is not much use. Also, consider what is valuable to your target audience and how the topic can demonstrate your expertise.
Once you have a theme, we are then down to writing individual blogs. Marcus asks if your blog should be on your website or elsewhere. Sam says one of the points of a blog is helping with SEO. This does not happen if you use a blogging platform instead of your website.
Blogs are words. Photographs only are not acceptable and don’t work on their own. A blog must be at least 500 words. 1000 words average. Once it gets much over 1500 words, it’s time to think about splitting into two smaller blogs. A mix of sizes is good, some longer, some shorter. For SEO, Google needs to understand who you are and what you do, and only words can do that. For social media, there is no point promoting your blog on social if it is only images, as they would expect to see the images on social anyway. Do use images in the blogs. But there should be plenty of text to go with the images. Do not fill space with photographs.
Organise the writing in your blog. Make it easier for people to skim read. Use sub-headings, bullet-pointed lists, etc, to help people skim read it. This structure helps people and Google to understand your blog. Give value in your blog. The blog has to be useful to them, or it won’t be engaging.External and internal links are essential. Both to other websites (external links) and within your website to other pages and blogs (internal links).
- Marcus asks if Sam blogs and how he blogs. Sam says that inthe past, he has had copywriters blogging for him. This ensures that you get regular blogs created. But he also blogs himself, both written and video blogs. Sam says one key is ensuring you put time aside to create content. In terms of ideas, Sam often uses topics that have come up in conversations in the last fewweeks.
Marcus asks about AI. Sam says it’s good for some stuff. It is bad at writing blogs. Do not simply ask AI to write you a blog; it will be very generic and easy to spot. But it is useful. It is great for ideas. If you cannot think of anything to write, it can give you ideas. You can also ask for a blog structure. Don’t 100% stick to the structure, as it will be quite bland. Then write the blog yourself. But once you have written it yourself, put it backthrough AI and ask for improvements.
How do you get people to your blog? First of all, no one will come if you don’t tell them about it. What can you do?
- Send out social media posts sending people to the blog
- Make an email newsletter and send people to the blog.
Those are really good ways of getting people to your blog. As part of SEO, Google assess how popular your website is and how long people stay on the website. So by sending engaged people to the blog, you are helping with your website’s SEO. Ensure that you have your website connected to Google Analytics so you can see who is visiting your blogs and where they are coming from.
“Show Transcription”
Marcus: Well, hello there Sam, how are you doing?
Sam: Very good Marcus, and how about you? What are we doing this week Marcus? Do you know?
Marcus: I think you’re going to be, yeah, yeah, you’re going to be, it’s your turn to talk to me. I think you, are you going to be talking about blogging?
Sam: Oh yeah, good point. Yes, I’m going to be talking about blogging. Now, I thought I talked about blogging a lot, and I looked through the past shows, and we didn’t actually have a show about blogging. Right, we ought to have one, so, yes, show about blogging Marcus.
Marcus: Yeah, good, I’m looking forward to hear this.
Sam: Cool, so as always, what do my shows always start with Marcus? We’ll see if he actually listens. Why, why do it?
Marcus: Oh why, why do it? Okay, yeah.
Sam: Yeah, that’s usually the topic, whenever there’s a topic I go, why? Okay, so why do we do blogging? Now, we talk about this a lot in the shows, and lots of different things, but I just want to go through it again. Why do you want to do blogging, have a blog on your website? Lots and lots of reasons, okay. It’s amazing for SEO, which means it helps you get found on Google. It gives you something to post about on social, and we’re all, aren’t we going, oh God, what am I going to post about next? I’ve run out of ideas. It gives you things to post about on social, it gives you things to put in your newsletter, effectively if you’ve written a few blogs, you’ve kind of written your newsletter already. Job done, two pieces of marketing in one, double your money. It’s great for authority marketing, and if you’re not sure, that means we have a whole episode about authority marketing, but basically about promoting, you know, building your authority, because you’re talking about things you’re an expert in, and helps people realize how much of an expert you are in those things. It increases engagement in your website, because people will stay on your website longer, because there’s more to talk about and read, so there’s all sorts of things there as to why you should have a blog. Do you have a blog, Marcus?
Marcus: I do. I do have a blog on my website, yeah, and it’s sort of filling up quite nicely. Excellent. I’m never quite sure how many people look at it, but nevertheless, I do spend a bit of time putting a blog together, yes.
Sam: Excellent. And then, do you promote it afterwards?
Marcus: Oh, how do you do that?
Sam: Right, so then we’re going to talk about that too, because if you just write a blog and don’t promote it, nobody’s ever going to look at it, and then the whole thing’s a bit of a waste of time. So we’ll come on to that too. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about, now I’ve decided you definitely do need a blog, because in terms of those marketing, it just covers so much, is kind of a theme to your blog. So you need kind of all your blogs to be based around a theme, and it can be quite general, but it, you know, it can’t just be about anything. There are so many blogs I see where people clearly have been told, you must have a blog, they have no clue what to write. And so they’re going, oh, you know, oh, I’ll do one once a month. So this is my May blog, and in my May blog, I’m going to, oh, I went for a nice walk this month, and I met my mother, and we had a lovely, and you’re, oh, my God, nobody cares. Nobody’s interested. So your blog needs to be about something and show you an expert. So as a photographer, you know, it’s probably based around something to do with photography, you know, if you’re, say, a wedding photographer, it could be, you know, something, you know, like literally about maybe wedding venues. You could review a wedding venue every couple of weeks or something. If you’re a brand photographer, often people kind of stick to just the general topic of branding, and all about how you can use your images in your branding, and building your brand, and all sorts of things like that. But it needs to have a theme. It can’t just be, what is in my head this week? Let’s dump it on paper, because you spot those blogs a mile away. They’re useless for your marketing. They’re useless for SEO. So I think that’s important. A lot of people don’t realize that. They think, I’ve got a blog, I’ve written, that’s good. It’s not if you’re not doing the right stuff.
So yeah, have a clear theme and stick to it. Don’t just waffle garbage. Please, it’s a total waste of time. Yours and everyone else. When you’re thinking of the theme, the other thing is what is of interest or value to your target audience? That’s really important. And what shows your expertise, and there’s a bit of a balance there. So it might be that some topics were really valuable to your target audience, but actually it’s not your area of expertise. So it’s not helping you in your position of authority marketing, showing you like an expert. So you need to kind of balance those two things of getting a topic where you’re showing your own authority, but also it’s really engaging for your audience, which again, means you need to know who your audience are. So yeah, you need to think about those things when you’re coming up with a theme. And as we say, it doesn’t need to be very specific, but just generally, you know, my blog is about branding, or my blog is about wedding venues, or my blog is about dogs. Maybe you’re a dog photographer. Something along those lines. You know, if you were a dog photographer, it would not matter if it got into food or whatever else.
Marcus: Yeah.
Sam: Cool. So then we get to writing a blog itself. So what do we write when we’re actually getting down to the writing? So obviously, you’ve already got a theme, so that’s really helpful. You’re looking like you think you’ve got a question there, Marcus.
Marcus: I do have a question actually. I was going to let you just say a little bit more, but now you’re asking. I was going to just talk about platforms for your blog. Is it best to do it within the platform you’ve got your website on, or is it better to go and get an independent one?
Sam: Yes, 100%. It must be on your website. I’ve seen people who have their website. The whole one of the points of a blog, one of the big things is it builds SEO. It helps your website get found. If your blog is not on your website, it’s helping the blog platform get found, not your website. It doesn’t help you at all. You can use it for your helps a bit because it gives you something to talk about in your newsletter, but you’re not sending people to your website. It helps a bit on your social, because it gives them the same way you’re not sending people to your website. If you use a blogging platform and not your website, the only people you’re helping really are the blogging platform.
Marcus: Gotcha. Okay, good. That was mine.
Sam: So yes, must be on your website. Really important. So yeah, once you’ve got your theme for the blog when you’re writing individual blogs, you then need obviously a much more focused topic for your individual blog within that theme. I mean, you know, if… We’ll go back to our example. You’re a really simple one, isn’t it? You’re a wedding photographer. You’re doing wedding venues today. I’m going to do the fat duck in, you know, wherever it is in the center of Manchester, and that’s my wedding venue that I’m going to, you know, do.
Nice and easy. But yeah, have a really focused topic, okay? Blogs should be at least 500 words. Photographers love to go. Ooh, there’s lots of photos. Words, guys. Blogs are words.
Nice pictures in there, yes, because you’re photographers, but they are 90% words. Am I getting this through enough? Do you think, Marcus?
Marcus: Yeah, okay. So why? Why are words so important, Sam?
Sam: Yes, Marcus. Why writing? Good question. Because you are photographers. So from all those things we talked about, for SEO, you need the words. Google needs to understand what you’re about, who you are, what you do, and it can only understand that with words. A picture can give it a little bit of information, but nothing like words. You need a lot of words to help get you in the search for the topics you want to be found for. If you want to be found for wedding venues and you’re talking about wedding venues, Google’s not very good at picking up the pictures you’ve got of wedding venues. Yeah, it’s going to vaguely notice it’s a pub or it’s a restaurant, but, you know, so talking about wedding venues and the food and everything else, it’s going to pick up on all those things. So for the SEO, it’s absolutely vital. For the social, you could put the photos on social. So why would you then send people to the website which you want to do? So you need something on the website to draw them in. So you need that content because, you know, if you’re sending them from social, where you’ve put a picture to look at another picture, it’s not that engaging. So you need the content. From that point of view, it makes people stone your website longer because with the best photo in the world, they’re not going to look at it that long or they’re on your website much longer if you’ve got stuff for them to read. And again, in terms of you being authority, you can show you a good photographer, but you can’t go anything beyond that with the photograph. You don’t necessarily know a wider sphere than just the, it’s a nice photograph or you can get all that stuff across in the writing. So yeah, lots of reasons why it needs to be writing. So yeah, 500 words minimum, kind of 1,000 words, I’d say it’s kind of an average, 1,500 to 2,000. If it’s getting to that long, it’s time to think about maybe splitting it in two. It’s getting a bit long unless it’s like a one-off really, you know, key one. They’re your kind of size values. 500, definitely no less. You can, you know, 500, 600 words isn’t that long. You can do a quick one-off.
Marcus: No, it’s not.
Sam: That’s it. But I wouldn’t do, I would kind of mix it up, you know, maybe some shorter, some longer, some 500, some 1,000, that sort of thing. Don’t make that too short. So have image, do have images on your blog, but not millions of them. So you have to have a featured image, which is kind of, you know, so every time your blog is shown, that’s the main image of your blog. And then put images in the blog too. But make sure there’s lots of text, too. The images are there to show your photography, to break up the text, to illustrate it. The photographs aren’t the point. The point is the content. Yeah, and you should just have some amazing photographs to go with that. So yeah, no, 100 photos dumped at the bottom.
Marcus: Yeah, no, just dump them. Well, that’s not good for anything. And also, Sam, I guess there’s also some SEO juice to be had from adding keywords onto your metadata on the images as well.
Sam: If you were, yeah, I mean, you can put the, you can put the, you can describe the images and you can get the odd keywords in there. Yeah, I mean, it makes a little bit of difference. It’s, to be honest, the writing is much, much more important. But yeah, it makes a little bit of difference. But it’s one of those things, don’t get stressed about that, because some people think, oh my God, I’ve met a few people and they go, I was going to blog, but I must have some metadata, and I must have this, and I must have that, and I must do that.
And that is like, just write the blog. Don’t stress. The key is get it written, get it published.
That’s the most important thing. Doing what else? Oh yes, organize the writing in your blog. So most people won’t read it all the way through. Try not to cry. They won’t read your blog all the way through. They’ll kind of skim read it. So make it easy for them to skim read because they’re more likely to stay for longer. So use things like subheadings, bullet pointed lists, numbered lists, paragraphs, columns and stuff, structure it so it’s easy for people to see, and for Google too, that really helps Google too to understand your blog. So it helps people, it helps Google, it helps skim reading, so yeah, that structure is really, really important. Use it as much as possible. Give value so, you know, this is for your target audience, is this useful for them, yeah? Are you giving them something useful that they want to read about or are you just kind of waffling about something that everybody probably knows? Yeah, so give value. I mean, as a photographer, it’s fairly easy because in some things, like for example, I do web design. How much do I tell people how to design a website before I’m giving away my job? For you guys, if you’re writing, you’re not taking the pictures, you know what I mean? So you’re not giving the pictures away no matter how much you write. Use links.
Marcus: Yeah, it’s good to give away, it’s good to give away information. We’ve talked about that. No, that is a mindset of abundance from the show before, you know.
Sam: Yeah, we’ve talked about that a lot. Cool. And then internal and external links are vital. So external links, you might think, I don’t want people to go away, but you can make them open in a new tab, but yeah, external links are really relevant. You know, we go back to our wedding example, you’re going to link to the venue’s website, obviously, yeah, and maybe to a caterer’s website and other things. That’s really important, that really helps. And internal linking, so maybe that blog, when you’re writing, actually is relevant to another blog, so you link to other blog. So you’re kind of linked to other pages on your website and other blogs, and what you can do from time to time is go back through your old blogs, recheck through them, because you’ll have had new blogs written, you can put new links in from time to time between all your blogs, and the more interlinked they are, the better. Both from a reader’s point of view and from a Google’s point of view.
Marcus: Sam, do you blog?
Sam: Yes, have you? Yes, I have. Multiple websites with multiple blogs.
Marcus: So tell us your process that you go through, because obviously you’re blogging a lot, you’re saying how do you sort of accumulate all this information, how do you get it out, and how do you get time to do it all?
Sam: How do I get time? That’s a good question. So sometimes I vary my process, and I vary it a lot because I’ve just redone what I do in my business. So in the past I have had copywriters doing some writing for me that obviously makes it a lot easier to get it done on a regular basis, because you pay them and they do it. I have done a lot of them myself. I am at the moment doing quite a bit of video, which I enjoy doing, and people find really engaging. I find in some ways it’s quicker. So I move a bit. Videos are really good for blogs, that’s no problem at all, and audio.
Marcus: Because presumably they need a transcript on their account for the SEO.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, that’s it. So I mean, yeah, like on the, if you go to the Shoot to the Top website, we’ve got the transcript for the shows, and yeah, YouTube and stuff picks up the transcript for the videos and stuff, so that’s all fine and works well. So yeah, so my process is, one, putting time aside to do it. That’s really key when you’re planning your week. What am I doing this week? How much content do I need to produce putting time aside? And then in terms of ideas, I often go off conversations I’ve had with people on the phone, conversations I’ve had with clients, you know, often I’m thinking, oh, you know, I’ve had three clients this week, all asking questions about whatever it is. That’s obviously a topic people are interested in, worried about concerning them. Let’s try and explain this topic for people.
Marcus: Gotcha.
Sam: So that, that’s the… Sorry, go on.
Marcus: No, I interrupted you Sam.
Sam: Well, I was coming to an end anyway, go on.
Marcus: I was going to ask, have you started using any AI for…
Sam: So that was my next topic. So AI, I think, is really good for two things, okay? It is not good for creating a blog. So do not go, I want a blog about using photography in your branding chat GPT, write me a blog, okay? Don’t do that, okay? We will come up with a very generic one. It’s not brilliant for SEO. It’s not brilliant for your authority and your tone of voice and everything else because it will kind of be spotted. But there are two things that… I mean, it is brilliant. So there are two sides you can use it for, I think, which it’s really, really good at. One is ideas. If you’re staring at that blank page, what am I going to blog about? Ask chat GPT. Do you have some ideas? I could blog about as a brand photographer in the UK. I’m in this area. My speciality is this. The more prompts you give it, the better. Give it a paragraph or two. Come up with a list of blog topics. Brilliant. And then you can also go, right, okay, I want to do this blog topic. Can you give me an idea of the structure of the blog? And it will go, yeah, you could have these subheadings. And you go, okay. So it’s really good for that. If you’re staring at the blank page syndrome, it’s brilliant for… Yeah, but don’t get it to write it. Get it to just give you ideas. And then the structure. You probably don’t want to stick to that structure because it’s a fairly formulaic structure and often ends up very, very similar. But it gives you some ideas. Then mess around with it. Then do it. Then write it yourself. So you do need to do the writing yourself. But there’s no reason afterwards you can’t put it back through chat GPT and say, here’s my blog. And then give it lots of prompts. If you’ve already given it the prompts at the top, great. I’m a professional photographer. I’m in this area. I use British English. I use this style. These are my audience. Blah, dee, blah, dee, blah, dee, blah, dee, blah. Here’s my blog. Can you suggest some improvements? It’s working on your work and just helping you. So I think that’s the key. Don’t get it to write. But yeah, blank page syndrome, it’s great. And writing improvement, it’s great. I think that’s the key for me.
Marcus: And so you’re going to mention some ways of getting people to come to our blog salmon.
Sam: How do you get people to come to your blogs? Well, like any other marketing thing, what am I going to do to get bums on seats, people to read my blogs? People will not go there by magic, guys. You write a blog, no one will see it unless you do anything. Top secret. Hint. So what are you going to do? Make a LinkedIn post, a Facebook post about the blog topic and send people to the blog. Nice and easy. All of your followers or some of your followers on social will then go and look at the blog. Put a little bit about make a newsletter or email marketing, go to email marketing software. Write an email, a little bit about the blog, send them to the blog. Send that off to all your email marketing lists. Some of the people in there will click on it and go and read it. They are probably the two main ways of getting people to your blog. Social and newsletter. The key is that’s then really good for your SEO. So when you try and build your SEO and build people coming to your website, Google looks at how many people visit your website. So if you’re pushing people to your website and once they’re there, they’re staying on pages and reading it for a long time because it’s a really interesting blog. That’s really helping your SEO because Google can, oh look, lots of people are going to this website and they’re interested in it and they’re staying there.
That means I’ll start to push people there too and that means your blogs will start to appear on the Google search. But yeah, you have to put in that effort getting people there. And yeah, the biggest, the easiest ones is social, newsletter, they’re kind of key for getting there.
It has to be done. No point writing the blog if you don’t get people there too because no one’s going to read it. And then yeah, have your website hooked up to the stats so you can then go to Google Analytics. And you know how many people have read your blog. You can see where they came from. You can go, oh look, I did loads of promotion on Facebook and I bugged it, nobody came from Facebook but I did one post on LinkedIn and loads of people came. So next time I’m going to work on LinkedIn and I won’t bother with Facebook or whatever your results show you.
Marcus: Okay, okay. Gosh, you’ve really incentivized me there, Sam.
Sam: Right, it sounds like Marcus, you need to promote your blogs.
Marcus: Yeah, but I do need to promote my blog. I’m not promoting it, I’ll be honest about that. No one ever really thought about it, I don’t know. But yeah, now that’s a good way of doing it. Really easy, isn’t it? Just do a little snippet on LinkedIn is what you’re saying or put it in your email newsletter.
Sam: Yeah, right, so the other thing you can do is turn your post, you do get LinkedIn articles. You can turn your blog into a LinkedIn article. And LinkedIn articles are shorter than blogs so at the end you can say, oh, see the blog article here. And what you can do is ChatGPT is brilliant for that. You can put your blog into ChatGPT and say, could you rewrite this in the same style as a LinkedIn article? It knows what a LinkedIn article is, it’s got your style, bang, job done.
Marcus: Is that still a thing, LinkedIn articles?
Sam: Yep.
Marcus: it still is. I haven’t seen people promote them in the same way they did maybe about three years ago.
Sam: Yeah, as far as I know, they are still there, yet still. I haven’t done one that recently but I was doing them relatively recently a few months ago. Yeah, you know, another way to get your blog out there I guess people can look at that. They’re interested, they don’t quite get to the end, they can read more and get more teeth. Excellent. And what we need from our listeners, Marcus, is some reviews. The more reviews we got, the more people will find the podcast, which is so vital. We want more photographers to find the podcast, so please, please, please, listeners, leave with some lovely five-star reviews on Apple, Spotify, wherever you do your listening, and that would really help more photographers find the podcast. And, Marcus, I will see you next week.
Marcus: I’ll see you next week, Sam. Thank you very much.
