In a day and age where social media is king, for many businesses a huge part of being visible online includes maintaining a blog. Like most Staffordshire wedding photographers, we’re avid bloggers! We love sharing snapshots of happy couples and wonderful weddings. We’re quite often asked whether we blog everything that we shoot, or when we’ll be blogging a particular session.
The truth is, we don’t blog everything.
On average, we probably blog around a third of the sessions that we actually shoot throughout the year. There are lots of reasons why we don’t blog every session or wedding. For those of you wondering why, here’s a bit of an insight into our blogging habits.
Why don’t we blog every wedding or session that we shoot?
The biggest blogging rule for us is privacy. We work with lots of teachers, police officers and other professionals where privacy is super important. Quite often these couples request that the details of their weddings are not shared freely online. Sometimes couples would prefer to keep their day for themselves and their families. That is of course, absolutely fine. We will always always always respect a couples want or need for privacy. In these cases you wont always see teasers on our Facebook or write ups on our blog.
Does the wedding or session meet our focus? Do we need to blog it?
The second most influential thing that helps us to decide when we’ll write up a session is whether it meets our focus.
We maintain a blog for several reasons:
- It’s a great way to give couples and prospective clients a “snapshot” of what a session may look like.
- It’s a really good way to maintain a web presence.
- Blogs are a fab resource for sharing informative advice with our clients and anyone else who happens to stumble upon our work.
- To share inspiration, ideas and creativity with couples, photographers and like minded suppliers.
We aim to tick as many of those boxes as we can when we blog. Of course that wont be possible all of the time. For example, with engagement shoots it’s quite common for couples to choose similar locations, or similar “themes” according to the time of the year. As summer approaches, beach sessions become a really popular location choice. This week we have 3 scheduled.
Owing to the fact that our style and the way we work is fairly consistent, the likelihood is that these sets of photos may look fairly similar. They may share similar details or stand out features for example. Therefore it wouldn’t make much sense to blog them all in quick succession. If this happened time and again and we featured everything, the chances are that people would stop visiting our blog as it would soon become repetitive.
New ideas and new inspiration on the blog.
When planning, most couples are looking for new ideas, new content and helpful advice. If that’s something we cannot provide we’ll generally avoid another main feature on the blog. We may however use the photographs elsewhere, such as in advice blogs like this one, on other social media accounts. They may also feature in external third party features or write ups.
This also applies to weddings.
The same principle applies to weddings. Last year we shot 2 weddings at the same venue, 3 days apart. Both weddings shared the same colour scheme and had a similar over all theme. It’s not as much of a coincidence as you may think. Just as the “real world” has trends, the wedding world has them too. Month to month, year to year, weddings can be similar if there is a dominant trend around at a particular time. During our career as wedding photographers there have definitely been stand out trends. One year, at least half of the weddings we shot had a cadbury purple colour scheme. It was just the in thing at the time!
Variety is the spice of life.
Therefore if two or more sessions are fairly similar, we are unlikely to feature them all. This also helps us to avoid giving the impression that we only shoot a certain type of wedding. If we have a spate of barn weddings for example and featured them all a couple who were new to our blog may assume that we only shoot this type of wedding. Everyone wants to see something they can relate to, so we try to include as much variety as possible on our blog and website. Not only does this help us showcase our skills across various types of wedding, but it’s also more likely a couple will be able to relate to our work.
External blog features and exclusivity clauses
Another thing that may influence our decision to blog, are external features. These sometimes come with exclusivity clauses. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, an exclusivity clause means that the blog or magazine agreeing to feature the work will insist on being the only one who share that feature. Therefore, if we know our work has already been picked up by a blog, magazine or other publication we’ll usually choose not to share it on our own blog initially. It’s always a bit more exciting for all involved to see photos “in print” or written up by a third party.
Time- there’s never enough of it when it comes to blogging
And after alllll of the above have been considered, it ultimately comes down to time. More weddings means more time spent blogging. Whilst I adore re-living a beautiful wedding or heartfelt engagement session, it takes a long time to put even a relatively simple blog together.
It means going back through around 1000 photos. Then carefully selecting around 100 that not only compliment one another but also summarise the day perfectly. I’ll then need to download and resize them all before re-uploading and tagging each image individually. Then the blog needs piecing together. Each photo is individually selected and placed to help tell the story of the day. A section of text introducing the wedding also needs writing. We also choose to including a list of other suppliers who were involved in the day. Sometimes this can be a laborious process if there are several businesses with the same name. In that case we usually have to have a good investigate to locate the correct details. Finally, the blog needs to be optimised for SEO. I need to check that it flows well and that there are no awkward spacing issues. I need to check that clickable links go where they’re supposed to. Really, it comes down to time and fitting blogging what we can, when we can.
Take this post for example. It’s half past 9 on a Saturday night (the only one I have “off” for the foreseeable future I might add) and i’m sat here writing this. Why? Because in order to do justice to all the weddings and shoots we want to feature, I need to make more time for other stuff. That usually means giving up what is meant to be “time off”. Time off doesn’t really exist when you run your own business.
Other forms of social media also need attention
We’re also big fans of Instagram and Pinterest. As are our couples. Blogs aren’t big for feedback and interaction so we’ll also often post non-blogged wedding content on there. So if you don’t follow us already, it’s worth a follow for some exclusive not-seen-before content every once in a while.
We hope that this post has been informative and given you a bit of an insight into how we blog and why we don’t showcase everything.
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