Many photographers nowadays insist that blogging is dead and have substantially decreased or altogether stopped blogging for their business. Often times, these same photographers complain that they don’t have enough bookings and that they’re struggling to generate leads. Are you struggling with the “to blog or not to blog” dilemma? Well, I’m here to tell you that blogging is not dead, and that if you’re not blogging for your business, you’re making a huge mistake. Blogging is absolutely 100% essential to generating leads, and here’s how I know that:

I started blogging for my photography business over ten years ago and I’ve blogged consistently since then. Altogether, on my weddings blog, I’ve published over 1,000 blog posts to date. 1,034 to be exact. That’s 1,034 opportunities to be found on Google. That’s 1,034 more ways potential clients can find me compared to my competitors who don’t blog.

People think that your website is what will bring in the most traffic. Nope! In the graphic above, you can see that last month, the most visited page on my site was this blog post on romantic wedding venues in New Jersey. It brought in 6.68% of my website/blog traffic for the entire month! Combined with the traffic my blog itself brought in (5.4%), in addition to other blog posts, the number of visitors my blog brought in FAR surpassed the number of visitors my website brought in.

While my website and blog combined brought in 96,520 pageviews total, my website only brought in 16,206 of those pageviews. That means 80,044 pageviews happened thanks to my blog… last month alone. So, that’s how I know blogging is not dead. Blogging is the #1 way I drive traffic to my site and how I generate leads even while I sleep.

So why, then, do people say blogging is dead? Well, I’ll admit that blogging has changed. I would also venture to say that “old school blogging” is dead. What I mean by that is that people these days aren’t subscribing to blogs in their RSS feeds. They aren’t necessarily checking in on favorite blogs on a daily basis either. That type of blogging culture is certainly slowly dying… but people are still accessing blogs through search engines on their desktops, tablets, and phones through regular searches and voice to text as well. They’re following their favorite content creators on Instagram and heading to the “link in bio” when they announce that they’ve published a new blog post. They subscribe to their email lists and check out their blog posts when they’re linked in an email. And they listen to their podcast and and head to the blog for the show notes. Blogs are still hugely popular, they’re just promoted and accessed differently.

“I tried blogging and it didn’t work,” is something I often hear from photographers who have given up on blogging. When I ask them a few questions to get a bigger picture of their experience with blogging, I learn that they are actually sabotaging their blog. No wonder it didn’t work for them! Blogging most certainly isn’t dead, but it is completely ineffective if you’re sabotaging it. Here are 7 ways you may be sabotaging your blog, too:

7 Ways You May Be Sabotaging Your Blog

1. You don’t know who you’re writing to. Or worse – you’re trying to write to everyone. If you haven’t sat down to identify your ideal client yet, you’re most definitely sabotaging your blog. Because when you’re writing to the masses, you can’t possibly attract the one person you’re trying to attract.
2. You don’t know your blog’s purpose. You know you should be blogging but you’re not really sure why. You also don’t understand how blogging can help you grow your business.
3. You’re not creating engaging content. You equate blogging to throwing together a post from your most recent shoot without any text and a few photos. You don’t bother to educate, inform, inspire, or entertain your audience.
4. You don’t blog consistently. Sometimes you go months without publishing a blog post.
5. You don’t share your content appropriately. You just hit publish and hope your ideal client will magically find it.
6. You don’t optimize your blog posts. This is by far the most common and the one that makes me the saddest because if you’re not optimizing your blog posts, you’re wasting your time and energy on a marketing strategy that has great potential.
7. You don’t use analytics to drive your blogging strategy. You never take a peek at what’s going on behind-the-scenes on your website and you don’t use that data to help you make key decisions about your blog.

Does any of this sound familiar?

I’m here to help. I’m currently offering coaching sessions for photographers and business owners who want to learn to create a blogging strategy to bring in new clients. Stop wondering where your next lead will come from and let’s create a blogging workflow that you can maintain even when your season is busy so that you can generate leads consistently all year round. Click here to book your session.