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Using Your Blog to Increase User Interaction and Interest
Some photographers and artists use a blog to show their work and life with the world. Other companies may show their latest projects or let their customers in on the personal side of their business. However if you are looking for a smart way to increase your client’s interaction, invite more new clients to your website, or boost your SEO, a blog is the perfect tool. Look at each blank page as a marketing opportunity, or a way to clear up some common issues your clients may be experiencing. In this blog entry I’ll explore a few tips on how to increase visitor interest in your blog.
Step 1: What to Blog About
The first step is to decide what your blog post should be about! It’s possibly the most time consuming step in this process. Luckily I have a few tips to help you make and keep a list of topics you want to blog about.
First, think about what your clients want to know. Google can be a great tool, simply look up forums on your industry, industry related blogs, or think about questions your clients ask you often and use those to generate topics. Above all find forums, or other areas where potential clients, and other experts are active and let the industry generate its questions. Each question is a potential blog entry for you to show off your knowledge and prove why you are in the industry, and how you will solve your client’s questions. Even comments from your own blog entries can inspire new blog posts.
Lastly, be confident and share your biggest success and your biggest failures with your readers. You can share with people how you were successful, or your biggest challenges and what you learned from them. Clients and potential consumers enjoy hearing from someone who is willing to share details and aspects about their business. It lets them know what sort of business you are, and how you will treat new customers.
Step 2: Create a Headline
The next step is to create a headline that works well, and entices a click to read more. You want to make sure with each post you are addressing your client’s questions, piquing their curiosity, or helping to direct your customers line of thinking about you or your brand. Some examples of this may be “What do I wear for a Fall portrait session?” or “What questions do you need to ask your next wedding photographer?” These types of headlines entice new users to click and read the blog article you’ve just wrote, as they can hear first hand your expertise and it answers questions they may have about hiring their next photographer.
Step 3: Keep Your Readers Engaged
The third step involves writing the post and keeping your clients interested, engaged, and to make them take the next step toward interacting with your blog, website, or even better, contact you for a sale! This can include many factors that you will want to work into your posts for maximum effect.
Utilize great keywords in your post that are naturally phrased. A good example of this is a wedding photographer from Miami, Florida may write an article about a great location they recently shot at for a wedding. He may address this as one of his top 5 picks for the South Beach area because the Miami Beaches are great around sunset for bridal portraits. This is instant fodder for SEO. Content that updates frequently containing information that your website is already about.
The next step is to get your clients interested in your website. Using the same example, the photographer may post one or two teaser photos of the wedding he shot, then link those photos to a gallery in his website of more wedding shots. This gets clients interested in the website, and possibly gets them a step closer to clicking “Contact Us” to request a consultation. Each post should try to link somewhere in your website that contains more information, or to your social media. At the end of the post you can even ask a question. This photographer might say, “Leave a comment below and tell me about your experiences here, or if you have any questions about my services. I’d love to hear from you. Alternatively, you can contact me on my website.” With a PhotoBiz Blog, you can easily link text to any page of your website.
Step 4: Share Your Post
Then it is all about sharing your information. The more in depth posts you make, the more popular your blog will be. However starting fresh means you have to attract an audience and let your customer know you are there.
With our PhotoBiz Blog, we make this very easy and efficient. You can use our share icons in the settings area for each blog post and let people share on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and even email. The more helpful and informative your articles are, the more likely they will be shared.
When it comes to sharing the post across your Facebook business page, or your Twitter account, a personal recommendation of mine is not to use services that automatically share your blog post, but to write a brief synopsis for each social media platform that fits the formula. An example is that Twitter has a character limit and isn’t as interactive, meaning besides retweets, comments are harder to track as other people won’t see them. For Twitter, just share the link and headline or teaser tag. On Facebook, share your blog link, the headline and then ask your fans to leave a comment based on what the article is about. For example if your article is about that great location for a South Beach wedding, ask your Facebook fans where their favorite wedding location would be, and have they had a wedding there? This increases user interaction on your Facebook page, starts conversation, and may even lead to sales.
What’s Next?
After this your blog should be a big hit! However there are a few things that you can do, especially through PhotoBiz to increase the ease of use for you and your clients. First, I recommend coming up with a brief list of tags for your posts. These can be tags like “Frequent Questions,” “Wedding Locations,” and “Expert Tips.” In each of these tags you will want to organize what you write about frequently to assist your clients with finding your blog entries. Remember that even for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) a site that is easy to navigate is more likely to do well, and clients will enjoy the experience more.
A common frustration I hear with clients who write a blog, but don’t do it often is that it takes a lot of time. This is true, great content is a big part of your online marketing and should be considered a part of the job. Even if writing is not your forte, you are going to have a fresh outlook on your business. Who knows what better to tell your clients than a professional in the field? So once we understand that writing takes some time, schedule a chunk of time to write a few blog articles and then schedule them to release later through the week. With our PhotoBiz Blog you can simply type in the date you want the post to publish. Let’s say you spend Sunday evening writing three blog posts. Schedule one for Monday, the next one for Wednesday, and another for Friday. This way your blog is constantly churning out fresh information, while you are busy managing your business and doing what you do best!
Last, But Not Least
You’re done! You have a frequently updating blog, guests are interacting with your social media and with your website, you’ve even made a few friends in the industry by producing great articles. You are getting the hang of blogging. Why not take these skills elsewhere? Remember in step 1 where I said that a great source for blog articles was in industry forums and blogs? Well now you can offer to write articles for them, and link back to your website or your own blog in doing so. Please remember when doing guest writing for a forum or industry blog, that it should pertain to subject matter you deal with yourself. This provides relevant links to your website, attracts professionals and possible clients to your site, and your business can reap those benefits. Otherwise, search engines will tend to rank your website lower and clients who navigate to your site will leave quickly, which won’t boost your SEO or help you obtain new business.
In closing, a PhotoBiz Blog is a great marketing tool and a content producer for your website. With the right direction, your blog will attract new clients, keep return visitors, help people to share your links and boost your search engine power! It’s an opportunity for marketing that you can’t afford to pass up.
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