Blogging after one year: Lessons Learnt and Business Benefits

Happy Bloggaversary to me! Yay! Exactly a year ago I decided to give blogging a go, and see how it impacts my photography business. Fast forward to today, my photography blog keeps growing getting more and more eyes on my work. I get more clients than ever who find me on Google! So today I’m going to share with you lessons I’ve learnt by blogging every single week for one year, how it impacted my business and why you should do it too!

Let’s go!

Blogging after one year: Lessons

LESSON 1: Commitment

Writing is easy, sticking to it is not. Just after a couple of weeks into my blogging journey I felt the pressure of squeezing an extra thing into my weekly to-do list.

Call it ‘writer’s block’, laziness, or a ‘not feeling it’ attitude… it’s real and needs to be addressed. I bet you have experienced it at some point, even writing captions to your instagram posts! Just write something, spill your thoughts on the paper, regardless of how imperfect they are! Remember, the beauty of writing is you can always go back and edit it to perfection.

Just like showing up on social media everyday, blogging regularly takes commitment. If you’re serious about growing your business, blogging is an awesome tool.

LESSON 2: Persistence

There’re plenty of blogs online and YouTube videos teaching you how to get to 10,000-100,000 readers in a month or less, or how to start making money with your blog in a week or so… Don’t waste your time diving into one of these “success stories”. Success doesn’t come overnight. It takes time and persistence.

“Nobody owes you their attention. You need to ear the right to attention and respect”

Seth Godin

I remember feeling so frustrated checking my blog’s Google Analytics for the first month or so. Having 2-3 people looking at my photography portfolio or a recent post… Thanks Mom, and a handful of friends who showed their support by clicking on the link!

Don’t let low numbers discourage you, keep going! You never know who’s watching and more importantly what opportunities it might lead to.

Blogging after one year: Benefits

BENEFIT 1: Search Engine Optimisation – SEO

A picture says a thousand words… But you do need actual text to rank on Google! Even if you are a photographer (like me!) and communicate your creative vision with beautiful photographs, you should write in order to get found online.

Everyone says ‘start a blog, and Google will let people find you.’ So I started my blog by simply writing what I had to say. And nothing happened: no new eyes on my blog or portfolio for a few months. Again, it was just my friends and family supporting me. Little did I know that it’s not the text that really matters to Google, but KEYWORDS. If you’re blogging about your day, or a recent photoshoot you did – sorry, hard truth – nobody is actively looking for content like this, unless they know and follow you. Make your blog post searchable by writing about what people are searching for on Google.

Thanks to blogging regularly, I began to look into SEO to help my blog gain traction. This then led me into learning how to be found by clients for my photography services – the most valuable knowledge/skill I got from blogging!

BENEFIT 2: A Library of helpful content

Are you being asked the same questions over and over again? Imagine having answers to those questions handy and simply sending instead of explaining. Clients will appreciate this extra mile, even though it took a 2 seconds to copy and paste the answer/link.

With blogging you can build a whole library of personalised content to refer to when your clients ask questions before booking your services. I always hear questions such as what to wear for a photoshoot, how to do your make-up for a photoshoot, how to get your hair photoshoot-ready, and so on. You might be getting different questions depending on your business. Why don’t you answer those questions in a blog format? This way you can provide value to both your readers online and your clients.

BENEFIT 3: Better Writing Skills

Writing is a skill, and practice makes it perfect. I’m not a writer, I’m a photographer who writes. If you’re feeling like “ahh I’m not a writer, I don’t know how to do it…”, try it and if it doesn’t work you can always hire someone to do it for you.

The more you write the better and faster you get at it. I remember my first blog post took me several days to research, plan and write. And it wasn’t about anything technical. It was actually really simple to write, now I look back at it, but because I wasn’t used to writing and researching, I wasn’t efficient at it. Today, I can write a post of 700-1000 words in one day no problem.

One year after blogging… If I say it was easy, I’ll be lying, but if I say it was a fun challenge, heck yeah!

If you’re still thinking whether you should start a blog for your business, do it. Do you need a bit of inspiration to start? Check out The Billion Dollar Blog by Nathan Barry. Blogging is an awesome learning experience, a chance to have more eyes on your work (you don’t have to be a photographer), and great marketing tool.

Until next week!