How Often Should You Blog as a Wedding Photographer?
Here at Second Fiddle, we want to see your wedding photography business soar. If you’ve explored any of our content, then you’ll know just how much we value blog writing as a key component of any marketing strategy. If you are just getting started with your blog, then now is a perfect time to dive into our article: How to Write a Wedding Blog: 5 Tips Every Wedding Photographer Needs to Know. Today, as we ask how often should you blog, we want to shatter some of the main myths around the subject.
Knowing Your WHY
In this blog post, we’re going to be talking about cadence and evaluating how you can build a blogging schedule that aligns with your business goals. We’ll examine whether post frequency affects your search engine ranking. And we’ll draw on some expert advice to assess the opinion of lead voices in the marketing field.
But before we get started, we think it is important to take a moment and think about your ‘Why’...
Why are you blogging in the first place?
What core objectives and goals do you have from starting your wedding photography blog?
These questions will help inform your blogging rhythm and help to create a cadence that is uniquely suited to your business needs.
There are multiple reasons why you might start a wedding photography blog. These are the most common:
Booking Clients - This should be the primary driving factor of your blog. You are creating content with the sole intent that readers convert into paying customers who book your services.
SEO Potential - Perhaps you are looking to optimize the search engine ranking of your wedding photography site. Since a blog affords you more scope to implement SEO best practices, blog articles are going to have a far higher SEO ranking than a traditional photography portfolio site.
Remaining Relevant - If you shoot frequently, then your portfolio is going to get stagnant really quickly. Posting regular blogs is a perfect way to keep your website full and fresh with your new work.
Personalization - Writing a blog establishes a way for you to communicate your personality to potential future clients. From reading your first-person blog entry, Brides and Grooms get a sense of your ‘flavor’. They’ll leave your site with a deeper understanding of who you are - your positive personality, your humor, your tone. These factors are crucial to bringing in new business. No matter how talented you are, no one wants to book a photographer with a crabby personality for their wedding day!
To conclude, the primary WHY behind starting a blog is to share your work and generate new business. With that established, let’s move on to take a look at some of the main myths in the blogging world.
Top 3 Myths About How Often Should You Blog
Myth #1 - Quantity is Everything
One of the main mistakes in the blogging world is to emphasize quantity over quality. Some bloggers laboriously churn out mediocre content, simply to try and reach numeric targets. This is not going to help you win wedding clients!
Rather than spending your time creating a huge blog turn over, spend this time fine-tuning your current content. Ensure that every blog you post is search engine optimized, after all, what is the point of a hefty blog archive if no one can find it? Make sure that every blog you post is thoughtful, accurate, and going to leave your readers inspired. (This is particularly important if your niche is informational or educational content). It is far better to blog less but establish yourself as a trustworthy expert in your field than to blog a lot and produce half-hearted work.
In a similar vein, when it comes to sharing your photos, prioritize your best work. Again, quality over quantity is vital here. Only post the photography work that you are proud of. If you are just getting started in the wedding photography business you might not have the luxury of choice (and that’s okay!). But if you’re a seasoned photographer, then posting old out-dated work simply for the sake of it isn’t going to do you any favors.
Myth #2 - You Should Post at Your Own Leisure
This is a little more complicated.
Yes - we believe that the answer to how often should you blog is a personal decision. Creating a rhythm that fits into your shoot schedule, to ensure that you don’t suffer from burnout, is crucial.
However, we’d advocate that it is far more valuable to build a consistent post rhythm than to post as and when work comes. The beauty of this is that it demonstrates to your audience that you are actively shooting and booking new clients. If you are newer to the game or find yourself in a season where shoots are few and far between, then you might consider creating more educational posts to attract and build trust with your target client.
The reason for this is that once you develop a relationship with your readers, then you need to keep them hooked. If you have an RSS Feed, then your readers are presented with a chronological flow of your content and notified when you drop new articles on your blog. Once they do this, you need to make sure that you are supplying their demand for fresh content rather than having lulls in your delivery. If you haven’t yet added an RSS Feed to your blog site, you can find tips for doing so here.
Myth #3 - Your Old Content is Irrelevant
The idea that the Google algorithm prioritizes new content over archived blog entries is false. While it is true that Google functions on a QDF (a query deserves freshness) ranking that hopes to serve fresh-er content to its users, this does not mean that your old blog articles are insignificant.
Marketing guru, Brian Dean, has done some insightful research on the subject through his company, Banklinko. Last year, he produced a rundown of Google’s 200 ranking factors. This master list went far beyond traditional SEO best practices and produced a thorough analysis of exactly what it takes to constitute an authoritative domain on a Google search. #66 on his list was ‘Page Age’. He diagnosed that, while Google ‘prefers’ fresh content, an older page that is regularly updated could still outperform a newer page.
Rather than putting all of your attention into creating fresh content, it might benefit you more to do an audit review of your past content, and implement changes to keep these archived articles fresh. Fine comb the articles. Check for broken links or any images that aren’t optimized and have a slow load time. Catching these kinds of errors could breathe new life into an old blog piece, and be far less time consuming than writing something from scratch.
Experimentation is Key
The reality is that there is no finite answer to how often should you blog. The frequency looks different for every business and every individual.
We challenge you to experiment. Experiment with what it looks like to build a discipline of writing into your weekly schedule. Experiment with different cadences and rhythms of posting. Experiment with sharing this content on social media and see what the user reaction is. Experiment with ghostwriters, and whether it is profitable for you to pay a copywriting service, to help you with the heavy lifting.
Through experimentation, coupled with an analysis of your web page analytics you can set goals for your content production. If you are starting a blogging experiment for the first time, we’d advise that you set up a Google Analytics page, and monitor the following metrics as the staples for success:
The number of unique visitors to your website
The number of pages that those visitors explore
Time spent on your website and bounce rate
Which channels drive most visitors to your website
The number of customer conversions
You might also wish to run an organic experiment to discover what posting times are most successful for your audience. SEO guru, Neil Patel ran an experiment that concluded that his most successful post window was between 9:30 am and 11 am in the morning. However, marketing expert, Track Maven, ran a similar experiment in which he concluded that the most successful post-time to guarantee social shares and comments was between 9 pm and midnight. We’d invite you to explore a posting schedule that suits your audience. There is freedom and flexibility once you understand that optimized post times look different for everyone!
What The Experts Are Saying About How Often Should You Blog
Neil Patel also ran an insightful experiment on his blogging frequency. He found that when he doubled his blog cadence from 1 post a week to 2 posts a week, he saw his monthly web traffic increase from 46,134 page views to 59,707.
The reality is that as the blog market has changed and evolved, so has posting etiquette. Back in the inception of professional blog writing (2005-2010) marketing experts advocated blogging at a rate of 3-10 posts a day. This was the cadence that prolific blog-sites such as Huffington Post and Mashable modeled. This changed in 2012, with data supported posting once a day. Nowadays, posting once a day is likely to cause reader-burnout. Be aware that the number one reason that people hit ‘unsubscribe’ is due to being inundated with too much content.
According to the Marketing Insider Group, the prime rhythm for blog content is to post 2-4 times per week. They advocate a ‘magic number’ of 11+ posts a month. Hubspot suggests that the optimum rate to grow organic traffic is to post 3-4 small blogs a week OR 4-5 long-form blogs a week. They place a greater emphasis on the need for fresh content to attract new visitors.
Similarly, when asked how often should you blog, Jenna Kutcher shared that the secret to her blog success is that she never goes 3 days without posting new content.
Our takeaway is that there is flexibility to create a posting rhythm that suits your needs. Where the experts suggest 2-4 blogs a week, why not start off with at least 1 blog a week as you experiment and find your pace!?
What to Conclude?
Our main conclusion is that every blog is different! Our advice is to simply start somewhere and remember that something is better than nothing at all. Don’t get overwhelmed with trying to keep a pace that isn’t realistic for you, especially if you’re a solopreneur.
Let your ‘Why’ and your experimentation help you to create a weekly post cadence. Have fun, and enjoy the process of creating written content that your clients will love!
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