How To Promote Your Photography Blog
Blogging is a great way to promote your photography business. But in itself, it’s not enough to attract swathes of your perfect clients.
As well as creating the content, you need to be ‘marketing’ that content, regularly! (It’s called ‘content marketing’ after all!)
Many photographers spend hours creating content but then fail to make the most of it once it’s published. These are the photographers who then write-off blogging, claiming it doesn’t work!
If you’ve tried blogging in the past and not achieved much from it, then read on. Here, I’m sharing tips on how to promote your photography blog and reach more people.
Related: How to start a photography blog
Allocate sufficient time to promote your photography blog content
Promoting your photography blog content is essential because you can’t rely on people just stumbling across your website and finding it.
While you’ve hopefully optimised your website for search engines, this won’t drive immediate traffic to your site. You’ll need to be doing far more than this!
After you’ve hit publish, I hate to break it to you but this is when the work begins! Content promotion should actually be allocated double the amount of time that you spent creating your blog content in the first place!
Say you spent three hours to create a blog, the images to go with it, any multi-media to be included etc. Then, you would ideally spend a further six hours getting the blog out and in front of your ideal photography clients!
You really need to continually be promoting your content to keep yourself visible and to ensure your blog gets seen. The online space is incredibly noisy.
More than 4 million blogs are published every day now, and yours needs a helping hand to have a chance of reaching your target audience and making the impact you want it to.
Related: Visibility Tips for Photographers: How to maximise every success to attract clients
Are you promoting your content enough?
In marketing, ‘The Rule of 7’ states that people must be exposed to a brand and it’s message at least seven times before people take notice. It takes time for people with no previous experience of you to come to know, like and trust you.
So, if you’re reading this and it’s already dawning on you that you’re probably not promoting your content enough, stick around as here’s a list that I hope will help.
The truth is that you can increase the visibility of your content in so many ways, and here I’ll introduce to how you can promote your photography blog using email marketing, social media and more.
How to promote your photography blog post
1. Promote your photography blog on social media
Post on social media to get visibility in the newsfeed & in relevant groups
This is likely to be the first thing you think to do and is perhaps something you are already doing pretty well. After all, your target audience likely hangs out on social media every single day. So you know that you can attract people to your website by sharing it on the various social platforms you use.
You can either share the link to your blog content (where sharing links is possible) or direct people to your blog by mentioning it in social media graphics, live videos and ‘Stories’.
On Facebook, share a link to your photography blog on your Facebook business page (although the visibility of Facebook page posts is pretty dire unless you are advertising). There are also Facebook groups (only share where appropriate and where posting links is allowed).
You may also have your own Facebook group and this is a good place to share your latest content. Facebook advertising is another way to promote your blog post and reach more people.
On Instagram, you can include a link to your blog page or latest article in your Instagram bio (although the down-side of this is that you’ll need to update this regularly). A commonly used alternative is to use a tool like Linktr.ee which creates multiple links – one of which could direct Instagram users to your blog article. Or, you can create your own customised web page on your own site, as I have done with mine.
Instagram provides a full suite of promotional tools so do use as many of these as you can. There are grid posts, IGTV, Stories, Instagram ‘Guides’ and Reels.
Plus, there are obviously other platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Which platforms you choose to share your content on will depend on your photography business and your audience. LinkedIn would be a great one though if you are targeting the B2B community – perhaps you’re a commercial or corporate headshot photographer, for example.
Finally, while this isn’t strictly social media, don’t forget that you can also add updates to your Google My Business listing. Posting my blog posts on my own Google My Business profile leads to thousands of impressions per month! In this video, I show you how:
Schedule promotional posts on social media in advance
There are a wide variety of social media scheduling tools now – some free, some paid. With just a little bit of time spent on forward-planning, you can easily create a number of different social media posts that link back to a blog article you’ve created.
Schedule these to be published over the coming days, weeks or months, as relevant.
It’s well worth batching your social media content as it means you won’t have to be constantly on social media and your blog is being published on autopilot! Tools such as Planoly, Buffer and Tailwind are great for social media scheduling.
Related: Recommended (and mostly free) digital marketing tools I use
Pin posts to the top of your social media profiles
Also, this is a small thing but can really help to boost the visibility of your latest blog content; pin a post to the top of your Facebook and Twitter profiles.
Simply make and publish a post mentioning your latest blog, as normal, then select the option to ‘pin’ the post to the top of the page to fix it there until you change the pinned post at a later date.
I’d recommend that you use this feature every time you publish something new.
When people visit your profile or business page, the first post they’ll then see will be your pinned post; a post that they otherwise may have missed had they not gone on to scroll through your page feed.
Change your social media header images regularly
Another thing you can do on social media that can be really effective is to make an update to your page cover images. Include an image that’s relevant to your new content and add to that copy that entices them to find out more.
You can also add a specific URL in your Facebook banner image description. So, why not use this feature and set the banner image to click through to your latest piece of content? Then simply update each time you have a new piece of content to share.
2) Share your blog content with your email list
Something you perhaps don’t do so consistently but is well worth the effort…sending a link to your blog out by email to your email subscribers. They want your free resources, tips and advice. They’ve opted in, so send it to them!
Don’t have an email list? Start one today – MailChimp and Mailerlite* are free and simple to use, so are likely to be great options for you if you’re just getting started. Then, once you have a list – no matter how small – keep the list engaged by sending them regular updates and encouraging them to click through to your website.
Remember, people who’ve signed up to your email marketing list want to hear from you, so don’t be shy about keeping them informed if you have valuable new content to share with them. Chances are if you’ve created a piece of content that you know they’d find useful, they’ll be grateful you sent it over!
Related: Email marketing for photographers: Maximise your visibility with emails
Re-send your email to the people who didn’t open it first time round
Don’t forget, your open rate on your emails is probably 25% or less. Emails get diverted to spam or they simply get ignored, deleted or are missed.
The great thing with email marketing software is that it informs you of the open and click-through rates of your emails, and you have the option to quickly and easily re-send the email to those who didn’t open it the first time around.
This gives you a second chance to hit their inbox and for them to potentially view your email containing your helpful content. And it works!
I’ve found that a decent proportion of the people who missed mine or my client’s emails the first time do open it up on the second sending, so it’s definitely worth a shot. Best practice is to send the email to those who didn’t open it first time round within 24 hours of the first campaign having been sent.
Use your email signature to promote new blog content
Another great place to share your latest content is in your email signature.
Chances are you send tens of emails every day – many to prospects and people who might want to know more about what you do. So, why not include a link to your latest blog article (along with any other useful links or resources) in the email signature?
Include a link to a specific blog article, or include a link to your blog page where people can discover all of your articles in one place.
3) Secure media publicity on the topic
Another way to promote your blog content is to source editorial opportunities in the media to talk around your specialist subject or the specific topic your blog covers.
Pitch yourself by dropping journalists a brief email summarising how you could contribute. Outline the expertise you could offer or suggest a specific point of view or a personal story that’s either topical and newsworthy, or relevant in some way to their audience.
If you secure an interview or are featured in the press, you may get a chance to mention your business and any free blog content and resources. Always ask if this is a possibility at the interview stage and don’t wait for them to ask you.
Related: Using the media to promote your photography business
4) Guest blogging
Offering to write on other blogs is also a great way to share your blog content and expertise. A useful technique is to write a blog post on your own site and then offer similar, but different, content on an external site, and then link back to your own blog post.
For example, you might create an article containing posing tips for brides and grooms and then write a guest post on mistakes couples make on their wedding day in relation to photography. I hope you can see that these topics are aligned (and could feasibly be interlinked), but are different.
Be careful to the websites you choose to blog for carefully. You won’t want to select websites with a lower domain authority than your own site. Ideally, guest blog on site which has a higher domain authority than yours and who have an established and relevant audience to your photography business.
5) Repurpose your blog content
Be creative and repurpose your content into different formats
What I love about content marketing is that there are so many ways that you can potentially repurpose a single blog post. From just the one original article, you can create an infinite number of other content pieces and, by doing so, you can get promote your blog and reach more people!
For example, you could:
- Write and publish a blog post on your website, then promote that blog by repurposing it into a Facebook Live (which would reach some of your Facebook followers – new audience no.1), then you could download that video from Facebook and add that to your YouTube channel (new audience no.2) – a group of people who may never have otherwise discovered your written version of the blog.
If you’re more comfortable creating video initially, simply reverse the process.
- Create the video – go live or share it on Facebook once it’s created, publish it on your YouTube channel, then have the video transcribed and use that to create a blog post for your website.
Create a content upgrade to provide further value
Once you’ve written your article, could you also create a ‘content upgrade’ such as a checklist, workbook or template? This is a great way of adding further value to the reader of your article and also gives you something else to promote.
You could create social media graphics (I use Canva) to specifically promote that content upgrade and add that into the mix of promotional posts you are sharing on social media.
If the blog alone isn’t attracting readers, perhaps the freebie will help. Valuable free resources that help your audience to digest information quickly, learn something or which saves them time, is usually a winner!
Having your photography blog article available in multiple formats like this is a great way to increase potential views and engagement too. If you take this approach, it’ll help you ensure that your blog post reaches more people and gets many more views than it would otherwise.
So, how could you repurpose your latest piece of content for other platforms? Has this got you thinking?
6) Promote your blog content in high-traffic areas of your website and in other blog posts
Do you know which are the most visited pages on your website? Check your Google Analytics and you’ll probably find that it’s the home page and the about page.
Therefore, these are great places to promote your latest content. Don’t just put it on the blog page! I share links to my blogs on my About page and have seen views significantly increase for those articles.
Also, consider whether your website has a sidebar or a footer where you could list recent blogs (or include eye-catching graphics relating to your latest blog articles).
Internal links are very important too and help Google to understand how your site is structured, so you should interlink one related blog post to another. This has the benefit of also helping website visitors discover more of your useful content. Plus, if the internal links are followed, this increases the amount of time that a person spends on your site overall – another positive signal to Google.
7) Ask for the share!
You can potentially get your blog post seen by more people if you include a strong call-to-action directing readers on what you want to them do next.
For example, adding a call-to-action such as “share with someone who needs to read this today” will greatly increase the likelihood that the reader will do exactly that.
Use social share buttons
Make sharing your blog article as easy as possible for them too. Use a plugin so that there are visible social share buttons throughout, or at the bottom, of your blog posts.
If you make sharing quick and easy for your blog readers, they’ve enjoyed your content and feel motivated to share it, hopefully, they will!
Promote your photography blog and reach more people
This list is by no means exhaustive in terms of what you can do to promote your photography blog, but I hope you’ll try out some of them and see what impact it has.
Keep an eye on your Google Analytics to see what difference it makes to your web traffic. I think you’ll find that if you spend more time promoting your blog content and inspire more shares, this will lead to more traffic which could mean more enquiries to your photography business.
Let me know in the comments below which of the techniques above seem to work best for you at driving traffic to your blog. I’d love to hear what’s working for you.
