Why I Don’t Blog and How You Can Stop Blogging Too

I am a professional photographer, and I don’t blog. Do you wish you could say the same thing? I can show you how to stop blogging forever—and still have great SEO.

Some of my contemporaries create blog posts for every wedding, portrait session, or event they photograph. However, except for a few experimental SEO posts, I stopped blogging in 2012.

Even though I’ve stopped blogging, my business thrives, and I still rank on the first page of Google for some of the most competitive photography-related keywords in my area.

The key takeaway from my statement is that you don’t have to blog if you want to maintain a successful photography business.

In this article, I’ll explore the advantages and disadvantages of blogging. I’ll also discuss fresh alternatives to blogging that you can incorporate into your business.

Blogs vs Websites

Blogs originally started as personal thoughts delivered via a basic content management system. In most cases, those blogs were often attached to static websites. Using that system, photographers could post regularly updated, time-sensitive content that supplemented material on their static website. Over the years, blogs have evolved and are now incredibly complex.

Rather than remaining independent from static website content, the line between website and blog has blurred. Today, many photographers run their websites on blogging platforms like WordPress or Blogger.

For this discussion and to define what we’re talking about more clearly, a blog is an area of your website where you post fresh content regularly. The rest of your website is where you post static content. Examples of more static information might include your biographical information, your contact information, and your primary image galleries.

Other static content might also include articles and information. Some of that content can be referred to as evergreen content. The name evergreen comes from trees that retain their color year-round but refers to the content that stays relevant for lengthy periods—often for many years (or forever if you keep it updated).

Perfect Answers

Every year, I teach hundreds of photographers about SEO and the business of photography. Students frequently ask me if they should blog more, start blogging, continue blogging, or give up blogging altogether.

Since every studio is different, I can’t give anyone a perfect, one-size-fits-all answer to those critical questions. However, I can share some thought-provoking information that might help you devise a blogging strategy that’s just right for you and your business.

Why Photographers Hate Blogging

It’s easy to find photographers who don’t enjoy blogging. Some of their most common complaints are that blogging is time-consuming, retouching is laborious, writing is difficult, and blog posts, in general, are no longer as popular as they once were.

Time Consuming

Creating a well-rounded, fully retouched, meticulously curated, SEO-friendly blog post is time-consuming. This is the most common complaint of bloggers and content creators alike.

If you’re one of the few photographers who can create a substantive blog post in just a few minutes, I applaud your skills. I want to sign up for your next workshop. However, if you’re a mere mortal like the rest, there aren’t many shortcuts to creating a powerful blog post.

Tedious Retouching

Selecting, correcting, and retouching photographs is a tedious process. We’d all rather be behind our cameras.

I’m admittedly envious if you’re a photojournalist who shares your work without retouching. I’d also observe that you have a distinct blogging advantage over other photographers. However, if you’re like most photographers, you think that your straight-out-of-camera images need some help. And that’s where we all get into trouble.

How long it takes you to adjust or retouch photos will vary, but for your next blog post, I’d encourage you to track how many minutes or hours it takes to prepare your images. I’m confident that your results might be depressing.

Difficulty Writing

Both good writers and poor writers need help writing fantastic content.

Even if you love writing, creating textual content for blog posts takes work. Writing tasks are exponentially more challenging and less enjoyable if you dislike writing. In either case, to make a good blog post, you need to put your fingers to a keyboard and spend some serious time and thought creating textual content.

Most experts suggest including at least 300 words of unique, compelling, and keyword-rich text in every blog post. Others go a few steps further and suggest targeting 1,000 or more words to appear in the best positions for competitive keywords. That’s a bunch of words, folks.

In addition to the time it takes to write a solid piece of content, you may also say, “I don’t know what to write about for this post.” This kind of writer’s block isn’t uncommon. Although I teach strategies to create killer content, there’s no easy fix to producing new topics when you’re always writing about the same kinds of portraits or events occurring at the exact locations week after week.

Popularity Failure

Blogs are commonly considered to be the ideal method for sharing new content. They’ve also been cited as one of the most popular areas of photographer websites. That latter statement may no longer be accurate.

When blogs were considered innovative marketing, newly engaged couples, prospective clients, and other photographers all flocked to your website to check out your latest blog post. Now, unless you’re a famous photographer with a loyal following, most blog posts receive much less visitor traffic than the rest of your website.

With that in mind, it might be a bit harder to find the motivation necessary to write a blog post that will, in most cases, be viewed by only a few people.

There are dozens of reasons that explain this behavior change. Still, I believe the foundation principle is that prospective clients want first to determine if you’re a good photographer—usually by viewing your most prominent image galleries relevant to their needs. They want to know how much you charge or get an idea of your starting price. And finally, if you pass those tests and they’re still interested, visitors want to contact you to find out if you’re available and how they can book your services.

For these visitors who are seeing your work for the first time, I contend that they aren’t looking at your most recent blog entry. Likewise, they won’t be digging into the posts you’ve published over the last several years.

This means that your portfolio, pricing, and contact info are the most important pages to the most important people—your first-time visitors.

To confirm this hypothesis, check your Google Analytics account to see if your website’s traffic patterns hold true. So that you know, your website architecture and clickable buttons may skew those results depending on how your blog posts are accessed and whether your image galleries are integrated into your blog.

Why Photographers Blog

There are dozens of reasons why photographers blog for their business. Let’s look at some of the top reasons why maintaining an active blog is beneficial.

Now that you have a basic idea of why many photographers blog, let’s explore each claim and determine if there are alternative strategies that can yield similar or even superior results to regular blogging.

Networking

Blogging is one way photographers can recognize the work of other vendors involved in a wedding or event. Creating a strong vendor network is another way to help generate new business.

Vendor Blogging

For photographers who create blog posts about recent events, mentioning and then linking to vendors involved in the project offers several benefits. First, the post provides a convenient platform to share work. For this reason, watermarking blog photos is particularly important when you expect your images to be shared.

Blogging events also encourage reciprocal engagement by the vendors mentioned. This often involves a link back to your website. Since the authority of most vendor websites is low, those backlinks will only yield a minor SEO benefit. However, over time, the cumulative value of those backlinks can be beneficial.

Alternatives to Vendor Blogging

Although blogging may be the preferred method for sharing photos, vendors who have blogs or who are active on social media may want to use only those photos that they perceive ashelpful to their brand rather than all the photos the photographer thinks are important to the event.

In this situation, an alternative is for photographers to provide watermarked photos directly to the vendor and then require those vendors to provide backlinks for every use on every platform—whether it be Facebook, blog, or website.

With that approach, photographers can still achieve the same traffic and SEO backlink benefit without creating a blog post.

More Visitors

Creating unique, powerful, informative, and shareable content is one way to help drive traffic to your website. Although every post you make may not go viral, developing great content makes it much easier to improve your website’s traffic characteristics.

Generating Traffic

After creating an original blog post, photographers should drive traffic to that post by promoting it through their social media channels or via active email lists. Whenever possible, the subjects or companies featured in the post should also be enlisted to help share their link and get the word out.

Generating Traffic Without Blogging

Promoting informational blog posts becomes more complex every day. Due to the sheer volume of shared content, only the most extraordinary posts drive a notable number of clicks.

Alternatively, posting important photographs directly to social media platforms and then linking to a website in the description of each photo can yield similar traffic responses. This practice assumes that the images you post are powerful, unique, or exciting or the content is valuable.

Similarly, if you can create evergreen content that is relevant and powerful and easily accessible to your website menu, you may have spent your time more wisely than you would have if you simply created a blog post that is only going to be relevant for a relatively brief period.

Photographers can use the same strategies to drive traffic to essential web pages just as quickly as they can to time-sensitive blog posts by creating evergreen content instead of blog posts. A mention on social media is probably why you’re reading this article right now.

Busy Photographers

Blogging frequency can be a success indicator for photographers. For example, if a photographer creates substantive content 3-4 times per month (or more), visitors may see this as a sign that they are a busy photographer. Since a busy photographer is good or popular, that perception can influence visitors and lead to more work.

Blogging Frequently

If you plan to blog frequently, could you consider adding an editorial publication calendar to your planning process? This document should outline suggested topics for each week throughout the coming year.

Although the topic you choose to write about may vary from your publication calendar based on the workyou photographed that week and timely happenings in your life or studio, when you have a document outlining your goals, it’s much easier to stick to the plan.

For those who are more ambitious, consider creating three or four completed blog posts that you can hold in reserve for the likely event that you cannot create a new piece of content on any given week.

Alternatives to Frequent Blogging

As you can imagine, creating new content every week is challenging. Similarly, booking enough notable and sharable work to keep your publication calendar filled is challenging.

And with 36 to 48 posts expected of you as a minimum for each year, what initially seemed like a reasonable goal can soon become dreaded work that hangs over your head every week.

If those demands get the better of you and you need to maintain a frequently updated blog, that part of your website may appear stagnant. And so, the blog that once made you appear busy can mark you as a failure—regardless of the truth behind the situation.

If you can maintain a regular blogging schedule all year long, then by all means, keep blogging. However, if you can’t maintain that continuous schedule, putting your work and efforts into different types of content generation might be more productive.

There are several ways you can accomplish this goal. The first is to create a “Recent Work” image gallery on your website. Let this serve as a way to show that you’re still working and allow repeat visitors to see your latest masterpieces quickly.

Similarly, if you tend to be more verbose and informational in your posts, create a “Recent Articles” section of your website where you can post your evergreen content.

Finally, adding evergreen content generation to your schedule instead of just posting fresh blog content will typically yield greater long-term SEO benefits.

Education

Developing and posting informational blog content can help educate visitors and potential clients and may influence conversions. That content can make a photographer’s job easier or allow for the discrete framing of the photographer’s unique selling proposition.

Informing Visitors

One way to educate visitors and customers is to post helpful and informative content as a part of your regular blogging schedule. Over the years, I’ve seen many examples of this kind of content. Examples of some commonly repeated subjects include:

By sharing this kind of information, you not only establish credibility as a photographer but also provide information to make your job easier, your deliverable better, and your client’s role more comfortable.

Alternative Content

When you’re thinking about creating and posting information that’s perpetually useful to customers, I contend it probably makes more sense to post it as evergreen content on the relatively static portions of your website.

Since that kind of educational content will be useful to clients now and in the future, it’s a perfect candidate for evergreen content—just as this article is a good example of evergreen educational content.

Client Vanity

Everyone loves to be recognized. By featuring photographs of a product, a client, or an event, photographers can show appreciation for their clients and make their photos more sharable within a client’s sphere of influence.

Celebrity

Even when clients are featured on something as mundane as a photographer’s blog, they will feel flattered. When a client is flattered, that’s likely to make them feel better about you, which can lead to referrals or mentions on social media.

Disappointment

When your blog features new clients every week, there will likely come a time when you won’t want to feature a specific client or event on your website. Invariably, that client will question why you didn’t feature their project or event. And that will be an awkward conversation even if you reply with the old, “I’m so busy that I can’t feature all of my projects on my website.”

You won’t ever face that issue if you don’t have a blog. You can still share photos of your clients, but instead of sharing 5, 10, or 30 images, you can share 1 or 2 in your primary image portfolio. For maximum results, you can frame your discussion with a statement: “I loved your wedding so much! The photos were so amazing that I added one of your images to my ‘best of’ portfolio gallery. Isn’t that awesome!”

Recent Work

You’ve heard the phrase, “You’re only as good as your last photograph.” Or your last job. Or your previous success. And for that reason, photographers are often well served by making recent work accessible.

Best Foot Forward

As photographers, we like to be recognized for our achievements. Although it might appear self-serving, blogging about our favorite photographs is one way to help gain recognition for our work. Blogging is a wonderful way to present that work quickly and easily.

You Hate Old Work

When you blog about a project or event, you’ll eventually be unhappy with many photographs you previously loved. One way to avoid this common phenomenon is to select and post no more than five photos of your favorite project or event. I call these photos your Fabulous 5 and speak about them at great length during my classes and workshops.

Here’s the theory. If you select only your best images, those photos are less likely to work against you as your skills improve. You’ll also achieve better conversion results with five amazing pictures in a blog post instead of five amazing photos, three good photos, and two average photos. Remember that as photographers, we’re often judged by our weakest work.

Skip The Problem

If you’re not interested in blogging, you can achieve comparable results by creating a section of your website titled Recent Work. If your website platform allows you to optimize those recent images with keyword-rich content, you can achieve the same results on gallery images if you had blogged those images as a group.

Comments

Feedback received by visitors, clients, and other photographers can influence perceived popularity and SEO. Blogs’ commenting functionality offers a convenient platform for sharing feedback and promoting dialog.

Vocal Audience

If your website visitors appear in sufficient volume and are active and vocal, it can be extremely gratifying to see them comment on your posts. Search engines also consider frequent comments on posts to be a quality indicator.

Nothing But Crickets

When blogs were young on the Internet, creating a dialog with website owners through blog comments was common. However, in today’s world, it’s much harder to get people to engage with your website through blog comments.

Therefore, when you have comments enabled on your website, but most of your blog posts have only one or two or no comments, it makes your site look less popular than your traffic might indicate. And less popular blogs tend to receive less traffic and less engagement. Likewise, that lack of comments might be a negative quality indicator for search engines.

If your website or blog has a comment feature but is not engaging visitors, Irecommend that you either find a way to encourage comments with your content or disable and remove the feature entirely from your blog.

Featured Venues

Event photographers typically work at area venues. Blogging about those venues is a frequent practice that can yield positive search engine results.

Relationships

Venues are often the first stop for clients planning an event, so establishing a solid relationship with those venues or, at the very least, appearing in search results for those venues is helpful when booking new clients.

Blogging in depth about venues is a sure-fire way to create content that search engines will love.

Venue Profiles

Although blogging about venues is one alternative, you don’t need a blog to achieve positive results and optimize your website for people searching for venue photographers.

One option that commonly provides reliable results is to develop a section of your website with substantive evergreen content about area venues. Since you’ll typically only see one page of your website ranking for a particular keyword phrase, optimizing a single page for a venue can be just as effective as blogging about it once, five times, or ten times.

Personal Stories

Posting personal information or lifestyle details on a blog can help some visitors connect to photographers on a deeper level.

Lifestyle Influencer

In the best situations, the photographer can become a lifestyle influencer whose popularity drives conversions. For this reason, some photographers share details about their daily lives in their blogs. This might be a powerful online marketing strategy for photographers who can do this organically and who have a lifestyle that might engage most potential clients.

Do They Care

To be a lifestyle influencer with a large following, you need a solid personal brand. Although it’s undoubtedly helpful and even essential to include personal details on your website, using personally oriented blog posts as part of that strategy can introduce several potential issues.

First, some clients may view those kinds of posts as narcissistic and react negatively. Since you can expect to turn off a certain number of potential clients with a lifestyle influencer brand, you must be sure your brand will appeal to an exponentially more extensive crowd.

I prefer to express my personality through biographical photos, my About Rob Greer page, and my writing style in general.

Enjoyment

Some photographers blog because they love to share stories. That’s certainly a beautiful thing, and I’ll never question someone’s passion—whether it be blogging, knitting, drag racing, or stamp collecting. Do what you love and love what you do.

Not Me

Although I don’t hate blogging, I have so many other things I need to do during my business day that continually working on the next blog post isn’t high on my list of fun things to do. So for me, I’m not going to be the person who says, “I love blogging.” But I promise not to judge you if you’re that photographer.

Multiple Photographers

For studios that offer the services of several photographers under one brand, blogging allows highlighting jobs completed by individuals.

Individuality

Featuring different photographers in different blog posts allows visitors and potential customers to evaluate individuals’ work before hiring. This is also likely convenient for the studio manager, who wants to post new work from each photographer quickly.

Abandonment

Over the years, I’ve met dozens of photographers who have run successful studios with several associates. Each one has a terrible story about a nasty break-up with one or more of their photographers.

When that kind of situation occurs, blog posts promoting the amazing associate photographer can become a problem for the business. The studio owner then has a choice. They can delete the blog post and lose the benefit of that content—some of which might rank well for SEO. Or they can leave the content up, meaning the old associate can point to that work in their marketing as they get started. That decision could also open the studio up to unwanted questions in the future.

There are also a dozen other issues that can complicate this uncomfortable situation. However, if you choose to remove the photographer’s personal aspects as the primary part of the content marketing, it’s much easier to make a change if the unthinkable happens.

For example, if you instead feature the work of individual photographers in galleries of their own, it would be a simple matter to move those images into your master “best of” portfolio.

If you need to remove specific photos, you could also use 301 Redirects to point visitors and search engines to similar images without losing any SEO that might be associated with the photo you were forced to remove.

Complete Events

Photographers can highlight a wide range of photographs that reflect their overall style and approach when sharing a blog post featuring an event.

Full Monty

Showing photos from a complete event or even a highly curated grouping within a blog post is helpful for visitors who are trying to determine the photographer’s skill set. As photographers, we know it’s easy to hide behind a “best of” portfolio.

Evergreen Showcase

Although I’m 100% behind the idea that showing a complete event is a great idea, if you’re like most photographers, some of your event photos are better than others, and even if you’re blogging, you will only pick those events that reflect the best of your work.

Instead of using blog posts to share complete events, I recommend creating several evergreen galleries that show a curated collection. If you add one or two of your best events to that category every year, you’ll soon have an easily discoverable area for visitors where you share large bodies of your work.

Storytelling

Many photographers enjoy telling stories through photographs. Posting a series of photos on your website is a wonderful way to share that story conveniently.

Blogtelling

I have a master’s degree in English, so I’m allowed to make up the word in the heading of this section. I think this new word should apply to blog posts that focus on telling the complete story of the day. Although storytelling is certainly a valid reason for creating a blog post, I’d encourage you to limit the number of photos you use so as not to overwhelm the viewer.

I’ve always said ten photos are the perfect number of images to tell a wedding story. The ideal story would include one photo of the bride getting ready, one of the groom getting ready, the first look, the bride and groom perfect/epic portrait, the processional, the first kiss, the recessional, the first dance, the cake cutting, and the bouquet toss. With those ten photos, you’ve nailed the wedding story. The rest of your photographic storytelling photos supplement those magical moments. See, ten photos are all we need to deliver. Right?

Albums Tell Stories

Instead of posting a series of photos to showcase a complete event story on your blog, I’d encourage you to create event albums and then post album spreads as individual sections within your event photo galleries. Not only will the album images be well curated and retouched, but they will also theoretically be organized to tell a better story.

Peer Pressure

Some photographers feel pressure to blog because they see other photographers blogging or because other photographers or experts tell them that they should.

Do It, Do It, Do It

Although peer pressure can sometimes be harmful, in this situation, it is being applied with the best of intentions. People have learned that creating content regularly can have positive effects on your business and your SEO, and they’re just trying to help.

Just Say No

Just because everybody says you absolutely and positively must blog doesn’t mean you must listen to them. Many photographers, myself included, have a spectacular business without any blogging. So, if peer pressure is your primary or sole motivation, don’t let yourself get sucked into doing something you don’t want to do.

SEO

Writing blog posts to improve your search engine positions is why people blog. And it’s true that when SEO techniques are correctly and rigorously applied, photographers can realize positive results from search engine optimization.

Fresh Content

It’s a known fact that fresh content is appealing to search engines. And there’s no better place to post your fresh content than on your blog. So, blogging is good. The answer to that question is yes. And no. And it depends.

It’s Not That Simple

Suppose you’re a photographer who creates unoriginal posts that aren’t optimized and only include a sentence-long introduction. In that case, you’re unlikely to see large rewards from your efforts, even if you post daily.

Using fewer words will save you time, but if you hope to see your post appear in significant search engine positions, that kind of short-form content won’t get you to the finish line. It would be best if you did the work.

And if you’re doing the work, why not do it on your website, where it will live forever, rather than on a blog, where it will eventually become less and less important as time passes?

Final Thoughts

Here’s the big takeaway from this ridiculously long, 5000-word article. Content is content.

That’s a stupidly obvious statement. Of course, it is. Let me use more words to say the same thing.

Whether you create a perfectly SEO-optimized blog post or a perfectly SEO-optimized piece of evergreen content, you’ve still created something that search engines will love. Content can live anywhere and still meet the needs of your visitors and search engines.

All things being equal, I think creating amazingly awesome, long-form, evergreen content infrequently is easier and more effective than frequently creating short-form blog posts. In business, I’m all about making life easy.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, there’s no right or wrong answer to blogging or not blogging. But if you’re one of those photographers who hate blogging, I hope I’ve given you a few ideas and alternatives that might keep you from doing something you don’t want to do.

May the force be with you, always.