Girl Means Business

Blogging Strategies and SEO for Business Growth

February 13, 2024 Kendra Swalls Episode 239
Blogging Strategies and SEO for Business Growth
Girl Means Business
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Girl Means Business
Blogging Strategies and SEO for Business Growth
Feb 13, 2024 Episode 239
Kendra Swalls

Send Me A Message or Question About This Episode

I talk a lot here on the podcast about the foundational marketing strategies that aren't always the flashy, exciting things...but rather the solid things that will bring you consistent results. 

One of those foundational strategies is the topic of today's episode...Blogging and SEO! And no, you have traveled back in time to 2010 when blogging was in its prime. It's  2024 and blogging is still just as relevant and powerful as ever before.

Take a listen as we break down the reasons why blogging is key and some of the best practices for making the most of you blog content.

TRY FLODESK
Save 50% OFF you first year when you sign up using this link ⬇️
https://flodesk.com/c/5WCB4U



_______________________________________

Ask Me Anything: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1R0DmOLEQ8xjWf98Xcf7K9YBhhaXRiIkuoOTqirVHlRk/prefill

_______________________________________

Let's Work Together:

The Focused Photographer Lab (marketing membership): www.girlmeansbusiness.com/lab

1:1 Coaching Sessions: www.girlmeansbusiness.com/contact


_______________________________________
Free Resources:

Email Marketing Starter Kit - www.girlmeansbusiness.com/emailkit

Know Your Niche Workbook- https://spring-feather-348.myflodesk.com/


_______________________________________
Let's Be Friends:

Instagram: www.instagram.com/girlmeansbusiness

Facebook: www.facebook.com/girlmeansbusiness

Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Send Me A Message or Question About This Episode

I talk a lot here on the podcast about the foundational marketing strategies that aren't always the flashy, exciting things...but rather the solid things that will bring you consistent results. 

One of those foundational strategies is the topic of today's episode...Blogging and SEO! And no, you have traveled back in time to 2010 when blogging was in its prime. It's  2024 and blogging is still just as relevant and powerful as ever before.

Take a listen as we break down the reasons why blogging is key and some of the best practices for making the most of you blog content.

TRY FLODESK
Save 50% OFF you first year when you sign up using this link ⬇️
https://flodesk.com/c/5WCB4U



_______________________________________

Ask Me Anything: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1R0DmOLEQ8xjWf98Xcf7K9YBhhaXRiIkuoOTqirVHlRk/prefill

_______________________________________

Let's Work Together:

The Focused Photographer Lab (marketing membership): www.girlmeansbusiness.com/lab

1:1 Coaching Sessions: www.girlmeansbusiness.com/contact


_______________________________________
Free Resources:

Email Marketing Starter Kit - www.girlmeansbusiness.com/emailkit

Know Your Niche Workbook- https://spring-feather-348.myflodesk.com/


_______________________________________
Let's Be Friends:

Instagram: www.instagram.com/girlmeansbusiness

Facebook: www.facebook.com/girlmeansbusiness

Speaker 1:

Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast, the show where we're all about helping you feel confident, both as a mom and a business owner. I'm your host, kendra Swalls, mom of two, former teacher and full-time photographer, and business coach. Each week, we'll discuss the challenges, success and secrets that make you say I can do this, because you absolutely can. So pop in those earbuds, grab your favorite snack and let's get ready, because this girl means business. Hey there and welcome back to the Girl Means Business podcast. Now, this week, I want to talk about something that I think a lot of you are sleeping on when it comes to marketing your business, or you're just not doing it the right way, and I don't mean that in the harsh way, I just mean like you need some better practices, and that topic is blogging. Now, if you're wondering, like Kendra, did I just time work back to like 2010 because blogging has not been on my radar for the longest time? No, we are in 2024. You're in the right year, but I promise you blogging is something that you need to be doing in your business, and we're going to break it down. This episode. We're going to talk about why blogging is still important, how to do it, some of the best practices, some common mistakes I see people making, and how to make the most of the content you're creating on your blog. Let's start by talking about why blogging is so important or so helpful for our business.

Speaker 1:

Now I will say that blogging is something that I have tried to stay consistent with across the board in my business. Now, I've not always been consistent with it. There have been times when I have sort of dropped off or I've let it fall to the wayside. But it is definitely something that, when I see that I'm not getting as many clients in my business or I'm not like really kind of feeling like my marketing is at its strongest, it's one of those things that kind of come back to you. You know how we see this on the internet a lot where it's like, okay, if you're having a tough day, like you're feeling mentally, physically, emotionally drained, you kind of go through this checklist of like, okay, did I get enough sleep? Have I had enough water? Have I exercised today? Have I taken care of myself? Like physically and mentally, like you kind of go through this fallback of am I doing the core things that I know are going to make me feel better as a person. That's the same thing I do in my business.

Speaker 1:

When I find that I am feeling frustrated or unsuccessful in my marketing strategies, I kind of go back to the same checklist of am I focusing on the right things in my business? For me, those things are building an engaged community, which we talked about in a previous episode. Am I really nurturing my email list and growing my email list, and am I consistently putting out content? That is core content. And for me I have two types of core content. That is the podcast right here and blogs, both for the girl means business and for my photography business as well.

Speaker 1:

If I find that I have not really been focusing on those things, that tells me I've kind of gone off on this like weird side tangent in my business, like I've gone down a windy path. I need to get back to the main road, and blogging has always been one of those core things. I talk a lot about these sort of foundational marketing strategies and that is a lot of what I want for you in your business is I want you to have these foundational building blocks in place so that when you find yourself kind of drifting or when you find yourself getting frustrated with the algorithms and social media and all the shiny new things you can come back to. Am I still focusing on the things that I know are going to work for my business, that I know are the solid bedrock of my business and my marketing? Because when you get away from those, you start to build your business on this sort of sandy, not stable, ground. And so email, blogging, networking, these are all things that are going to really be those foundational pieces.

Speaker 1:

So why is blogging such a foundational marketing strategy? The main one? There's a couple, but the main one is SEO purposes search engine optimization. We all want to be found on Google. It's one of the best ways to get clients into your business is through Google searches, and the number one way you do that is through having a lot of content that can be found and shown in a Google search. So when you are creating a blog post and you're creating one once a week or twice a month or even once a month, you are actively updating content on your website using keywords that can then be found on a Google search, and I will say from personal experience that most of my clients that have found me when I actually asked them, like I asked them when they fill out the contact form how did you hear about me? If they have checked Google or Google search however I have it worded on there I will kind of follow up. When we have our consultation or when we get together for our session I will say like hey, I'm just curious. You said you found me on Google, like what were you searching for? What was it that came up in those conversations? A lot of times what came up was a blog post I had written, not my homepage, not my actual website, a blog post on my website.

Speaker 1:

So the fact that you are able to create this sort of like incredible space for all of these keywords to live is incredibly helpful for your business because on your website you can include keywords, you can include the towns that you serve, the products you offer, the services you offer. You know all the keywords you think people are searching for. But that is kind of a one-time thing. It's sort of static. It's not ever evolving and changing, and the way that SEO works is Google wants to know that your website is up-to-date and current and that it is relevant to what the person searching is actually looking for. So when you have on your homepage. I am a high school senior photographer or senior portrait photographer, serving X, y and Z cities, and it's lived there in the same place on your website for three years now and it's never really been updated, or maybe you update it once a year. It kind of becomes this white noise in the background that Google goes well, it's there but it's not the most relevant to what my client or what my searcher is looking for. However, if you have multiple blog posts utilizing those same keywords or similar keywords that have been updated once a month or every couple of months on your site, that tells Google that your content is more relevant and it's more closely related to what the person is actually looking for. That's doing the searching. It's kind of a whole like algorithm-y type situation, but you're more likely to get shown in this algorithm than you are on social media. Honestly. The other reason that blogging can be really powerful is that it allows you to create a resource library of content that now your audience is interested in.

Speaker 1:

I cannot tell you how many times I have had somebody contact me about hiring me for a photo shoot and they will send me a blog post I had done, I had shared of a favorite location, or it was not even necessarily about a particular session, which we'll get to later like what to put in your blog post but it was highlighting maybe one aspect of it. I did senior photography for a long time. I still occasionally will do some senior portraits. One of the things I blog about are creative ideas for your senior session. Another one I did was how to show off your hobbies during your senior session. I would showcase these different sessions that I had done.

Speaker 1:

I've done several where it was musicians or they were in a really cool environment playing their instrument. One was we set up an entire drum set in the middle of this field at sunset and we did pictures. Another one she was a violinist and we did it at this really cool outside of this art museum and they had these really fun sculptures and we did her playing the violin in between all these sculptures. I would get a lot of clients that would come to me saying we saw your blog post where you were showcasing these young musicians. My daughter plays piano or she plays the trumpet in the band or whatever it is, and then they will want to hire me because they saw that on my blog post. Even if I have those same images in my portfolio, they're not seeing that part of it. They are seeing the blog post that gets shown to them in that Google search, because maybe they've Google searched for creative senior portrait ideas and my blog post comes up, or senior portrait ideas with a drum set or with a drummer and my photos come up. So there's lots of ways that that content inside of your blog both the words and the graph, the images can really have a lot of power when it comes to getting seen and getting your content noticed on a Google search.

Speaker 1:

The other great thing about blogging is it has a long shelf life. Let me give you a perfect example, a real life example, of how this has worked in my business, for me, the fact that my blog post have lived on for years. I have multiple examples. I'm going to share, too, one.

Speaker 1:

I had a session years and years ago I'm talking like 2015, maybe, not even then, maybe 2014. I think it was 2014 where I had photographed this couple for their wedding and she had told me at one point she was like hey, whenever we get pregnant, I have a really fun idea for a photo shoot I want to do. I was like, sure, that sounds great. She reached out to me a year later. She was like, hey, remember that topic, that idea that I had, that I told you about. And I was like, yeah, she goes. Okay, well, now I need to do it. So we set up a whole photo shoot where, in the middle of the photo shoot, he had no idea this was happening. It was right around Christmas time New Year, not New Year's like November-ish, october, november and she was like we're just doing photos with our dogs for our first Christmas card together as a married couple. In the middle of the session she was like, okay, I had brought poster board and markers. I said, hey, can y'all do just kind of a fun, creative idea for me. We've gotten all the shots we need. I want you to each take the poster board and the marker, write a note to each other and then I'm going to have you stand back to back and when I say go, you're going to turn and share your sweet notes and I'll get like the emotional reaction. He wrote like some love, like you're amazing, I love you, I'm so happy you're my wife. She wrote we're having a baby. And I was able to capture like this incredible moment where he like lost it. He dropped everything and he ran to her and picked her up and hugged her and swung her around. It was so, so sweet.

Speaker 1:

I blogged about this probably two months later because I couldn't share it until they had shared with their family at Christmas. I blogged about it on a random Tuesday afternoon like evening. I was like, oh, I have nothing to blog this week. I will talk about this as like a fun session that I got to do. I told the whole story behind it and when I say the next day, I woke up to the shock of my life. I'm not kidding.

Speaker 1:

That blog post had gone viral Like we're talking. It was picked up by Buzzfeed and it was on all of these websites. It had gone onto like news articles. We were interviewed by news stations. We had people who were like hearing about it in other countries. It was insane. So for about two weeks this thing went crazy, crazy, crazy. Then it, of course, has died off.

Speaker 1:

Well, I have not thought about that blog post in years. I mean that was 2013, 14, 15, somewhere in that range. Ten years later, I still get people that will message me on my contact page and they will reference that blog post or they will reference in the middle of our session. Yeah, when I was looking for photographers I came across your blog where you had the couple that, like, she told him that she was having a baby in the middle of the session. And they still will bring that up because even 10 years later that blog post is still working to help get me new eyes on my new audiences, onto my website and into my business. I have not done anything to that blog post in over a decade. It's still working for my business.

Speaker 1:

Another more recent example I have not shot weddings in a couple of years. In fact, when COVID hit I kind of used that as an exit strategy to get out of doing weddings because I was starting to feel really burned out with them. But I used to blog a lot about wedding content. So things like how to choose the dress for your body type, how to pick your best venue location, unique venues in our area, wording for your invitations if you don't want to have kids at your wedding or you want it to be black tie, like all these different things like really blogging kind of tips and value for potential or for current brides. Now again, I have not shot weddings since 2019. I have not advertised weddings since 2019.

Speaker 1:

I don't really talk about weddings anywhere on my social media, in my current blog, on my website, it's not. I mean, I have like a little section for intimate, like elopement style weddings that I will still do occasionally, but I don't share anything about the fact that I shoot weddings at all in the last four years and yet I still. Just the other day I got someone reach out to me, a couple who were interested in having me come to Oklahoma to photograph their wedding at this particular location, because they saw a blog post where I had talked about this one particular location being a really unique, creative place for an elopement or for an intimate, small wedding. Again, that was probably four or five years ago that I created that blog post. It is still working for my business today.

Speaker 1:

That's the power of having content that has a really long shelf life in your business, and with social media you don't get that. You don't get a long shelf life. Nobody is coming to me saying, oh, I saw your Instagram post from three years ago. It was so great, it's what got me to want to book with you. No, that doesn't happen. Social media content lasts maybe 24 hours and that's it. So if you're putting all this time and energy into all of the social media content, then you are missing out on the lifespan of some other types of content in your business, primarily blogging.

Speaker 1:

The last kind of benefit I will say when it comes to blogging is that it creates this resource hub, this resource library on your website for your current and potential clients. So let's say that you own a flower shop and you're like okay, well, I'm gonna create a couple blog posts that teach my clients and potential clients about the types of flowers we offer, about delivery timing or pricing, or how to take care of your flowers after you get them at home with you. So then maybe you're answering a lot of these questions that your audience, you know they're asking, you know they have about working with you, hiring you, all the things. Now, when they email you or they text you or they say, hey, how do I take care of my flowers after I get them home so that I know they last a really long time? You can then say, like, here's a link to a blog post where it like outlines everything that you need to know about how to take care of your flowers.

Speaker 1:

You're now driving traffic back to your website, which again boost your SEO. You're getting more eyes on your blog content, which again boost your SEO, and instead of having to repeat yourself 5 million times to every client that asks the same question, you have a place you can send them that's going to answer all their questions for them. I know a lot of people do, you know, like a care guide, or they send welcome packets to their clients and those are great. But again, you want the traffic on your website, so why not create, even like, a page on your website that has all these resources in one place that can kind of click through and click on the ones that they need to know about? So let's say that you're a wedding planner and you have a blog. You know you have blogs on your website where you're sharing tips with brides about all these planning things they need to know prior to their wedding Once they hire you, or maybe they're getting closer to their wedding day and you know they're all going to have the same five questions. Create a page on your website where you link to the five blog posts that go into detail about those five questions, so now you're not having to write out the same information onto your email every time. You're not having to have the same conversations with your bride at every single pre-wedding meeting. You can still touch on those topics, but they're already a little more educated and, instead of sitting them a separate PDF where they're just going to open it in their email, you are sending them back to your website, where you're driving more traffic to your site. You are boosting your SEO through the clients you already have. You're driving traffic to these particular blog posts. Again, that's boosting that SEO. So when someone goes and does a Google search, you're more likely to get seen because your content is being shown as something that people are actively looking at on a consistent, regular basis. It's all about continuing that cycle, and so if you're driving people to other places that don't help boost your SEO, that don't help boost your visibility online, you're missing out on a lot of really great resources, a lot of great traffic, by sending people back to your website. So having these blog posts that can serve as resources for your audience can really help with that.

Speaker 1:

Now that we've talked about why you need a blog post or you need blog content, let's talk about some of the best practices for getting the best type of blog content on your website. Now, the first thing I will say is that the platform you choose does kind of matter. Some are better than others and, to be honest, I would just kind of go straight to WordPress. I know that different website hosts have different aspects or different sites that they use. I've used WordPress with every website platform I have been on and I've talked to a lot of website designers and they all say WordPress is one of the best places to go when it comes to blogging. It has the most capabilities when it comes to getting that visibility for your blog. So I would check and see what your current website platform utilizes and if it's possible to utilize WordPress, then I would absolutely do that. It does not change anything about like why you show it for my web design, and then WordPress is just kind of the behind the scenes piece of the content that goes onto my blog. So that's the first thing is really choosing the best place to host it, because I do think that that matters. Now, I'm obviously not like a website expert, so if you have someone that helps you with a website, maybe reach out and ask them just to be sure, but I know from my experience and from talking to people, wordpress is by far one of the best ones to go with.

Speaker 1:

Up next is the type of content you put in your blog. What I see a lot of especially photographers doing when it comes to blogging is they want to blog about their sessions, and this is one of those things that's kind of like a best practice versus like let's maybe not do this anymore, because I know that, yes, it has its place and if you want to blog about your sessions, that's fine, go for it. However, you need to also add in other types of content. So let's say that you are committing to I'm going to blog one blog post a week per month, so four a month. Out of those four, maybe one to two can be about your recent sessions. The other two to three need to be something that is a value to your potential audience, because you're think about it this way, think of it from a consumer perspective.

Speaker 1:

If I go on to Google and I type in family photographer in my area and I get a bunch of blog posts that come up and the first three blog posts are meet the Smith family. What a beautiful session they had. Look how fun they are. Aren't their smiles so beautiful? Look how great their kids are. We had the best time. It was so much fun. I'm bored. I don't know that family. I don't care about that family. Yeah, the photos are great, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1:

If I get down to the fourth blog post and it's like here are five locations that are fun and creative ideas for your next family session, and I read through that and it's showcasing their photos, which are great photos. They're fun, they're playful, they're all the things I want. But not only are they showcasing their photos, they're actually helping me with something. They're helping me get ideas of like, ooh, I don't have to take pictures with my family out in this random field. Who? What if we do a fun family photo shoot at an amusement park? What if we do a photo shoot at, like, a local ice cream shop or whatever? Like it's giving me ideas.

Speaker 1:

I am more likely to choose that photographer over the one that just showed me the Fun Smith family that I have no connection to or don't care about. So, when it comes to creating your blog content, I want you to think about who your ideal client is, which, again, if you aren't sure about that. Go back and listen to our episode on ideal client, because that's really really important to have in mind. Who is your ideal client and what are the things that they need help with? What are the questions they have? What are some of the frequently asked questions that come through in your inbox when you're working with clients? What are some of the things you know that maybe they are struggling with or that maybe they are worried about? Again, I'll use maybe like a family photographer, for example.

Speaker 1:

Most moms of young children get stressed out when it comes time to take family portraits because they worry their kids are not gonna behave. They will bring toys and snacks and all kinds of things to bribe their kids with, and they fear the kid meltdown in the middle of the photo shoot. So if you know this, you know that that's a struggle, that's a pain point for your audience. You can create blog content around that. You can create an entire blog post about why it's okay if your kids have a meltdown in the middle of the photo shoot, or why it's okay if your kids aren't smiling the entire time, why that's completely normal and how you're still going to get really great images from your session even if they're only smiling 20% of the time. Or I have worked with a client in the past where we did a whole blog post about mini sessions and the idea that like, is a 15 minute mini session really enough time to get great photos? And we did a whole blog post about why these 15 minute sessions can be a really great way to get like quick, easy photos of your kids without the hour long worry of are my kids gonna melt down 20 minutes into the session. And we shared like almost a full gallery of an entire mini session so they could see the variety and the different poses and the amount of content we were able to capture in a 15 minute time frame.

Speaker 1:

So the content of your blogs needs to be of value to your audience. It needs to be not necessarily what you want them to have, not, you know, it's not here. Come work with me, cause look how great my photos are. Look at this recent session I did. It needs to be giving them what they need. They need information, they need to feel like they can trust you, they need to feel like they are connected to you. So sharing value and I know I really wish I needed a better way to say this because value drives me nuts these days. But finding ways to create content that's going to give them something they can use is going to go a lot further for getting them to become clients of yours than it is if you're just sharing your most recent like success or your best session or your recent work.

Speaker 1:

The next best practice I want to share with you is around the idea of keywords. So one of the reasons why blogging is so great for your SEO and getting your business noticed is because it allows you to incorporate a variety of keywords into your content on a consistent basis. So there's two ways that you need to be incorporating keywords into your blog post. The first one, obviously, is the actual content itself. So your blog post needs to be, I would say, a minimum of around 300 to 350 words. You don't have to write a novel. You don't have to make every blog post this huge long thing. It can be short, it can be sweet, but it needs to probably be. I would say between 300 and 500 words is a good blog post length. Any if it's too long, people are going to quit reading it. If it's too short, there's not enough content there for the Google searchers to really like latch on to. The other thing with your content is it needs to sound very natural. You need to write the way that you would talk to a client.

Speaker 1:

So this is where, if you're using chat GPT which I am offered, like yet, let chat GPT help you with this and let it maybe give you a list of topic ideas or even come up with an outline. You can even have it write the blog post, but you need to go in and edit it into your own voice. I have seen people post on social media where they'll be like go check out my latest blog post. And I go look at it and I'm like, oh gosh, it is so obvious that AI wrote this. It's not even funny, and so we need to make sure that, if we're using AI to write our content for us, that we're still making it sound like it came from us. So AI chat GPT, it's a great starting point. It's a very good rough draft version, but you have to go in and make sure that you are making it sound like it's a conversation you would actually have with your potential client, and then you wanna make sure you're including these keywords that are going to help you get found.

Speaker 1:

Let's go back to the example I gave earlier of the senior portrait blog post, where I was talking about creative ways to incorporate your hobbies into your senior session. So that might be the title creative ways to incorporate your hobbies into your next or into your senior portrait session. So right away I'm already kind of getting some keywords in there. But then when I start the actual content of the blog, I am going to find ways to naturally include some keywords I would wanna use, such as location keywords, maybe the high school they go to, the hobby that they have, or the various hobbies. But specifically here, because I'm kind of giving ideas, I might talk a lot about locations that are in my area. So in this particular post I start off by saying I absolutely love it when my senior clients come to me and want to include the hobbies that they love into their portrait session. So again, right there I've already included a couple more keywords and then I'm going to go in and talk about maybe locations that I've shot at that were really great for helping to showcase certain hobbies. Or I might talk about the schools. So I might say here's an example of Brittany from such-and-such high school. She is in the marching band and she wanted to show off her musical skills with her trumpet. We decided to use their high school field at such-and-such location, you know whatever kind of incorporate the name of the school, the name of the town, those kinds of things, because those have now been naturally added into the blog post and when someone searches for that town and senior photographer hopefully because I have those keywords in that blog post maybe more than once they are going to show up in a search together. So it's all about naturally including these keywords, kind of thinking ahead to what are the keywords I really want to make sure that this post gets attached to this post and then finding ways to include those that don't feel like you are forcing them.

Speaker 1:

Google is very smart. The crawlers that get sent out when someone does a Google search are very smart, and so they are able to pick up on whether you are doing something called keyword stuffing. So keyword stuffing are those moments where we've all kind of seen this. We've probably all done this at some point. It was probably a strategy that someone taught us how to do years ago. It's like when you get to the bottom of a blog post and there's 20 different keywords kind of at the bottom and you know they're separated by dashes or lines or whatever. But it's like Southlake senior photographer, creative senior photography ideas, like it's all those keywords just kind of like crammed into a paragraph at the bottom of the page. That is keyword stuffing, and Google is smart enough to know that when you're doing that, it kind of like dings you for that it's not going to make your content as visible because you are using not great strategies in your content. And the same thing kind of goes for the way it's written. If you're writing and you're like I love photographing seniors in Southlake, texas, and Greatvine, texas, and Keller, texas and all these like you're kind of like throwing these words in, that as a reader you're like what, what is? Why are you doing this? It doesn't make any sense. You need to be able to read it and it flow really nicely.

Speaker 1:

The second thing you want to do when it comes to keywords is you want to add keywords to the images that go into your blog post, and this is what a lot of people skip over. They have the keywords in the body of the text, but they fail to add the keywords to the images. The reason why these are really helpful is if someone goes onto Google and they do a search for senior photographer in Southlake Texas and they click on images because they're looking for a photographer. They want to choose somebody whose photos they really like. They're maybe doing image search. You want your image to come up in that search and I just did this with a client the other day.

Speaker 1:

I was having a conversation with one of my focus photographer lab members and we were talking about blogging and I was mentioning about the adding the keywords to the photos and she was like I don't know how to do that. I don't know like what's the purpose of that? I went and I did a Google search of senior photographer Southlake, texas, which is the area I live in, the area I served for seniors, and I did an image search and, sure enough, about two rows down, two of my images were on their linked to blog post I had done about senior portrait in that area using those keywords. So those can have as much searchability as the actual like copy the words do on your blog. Now, in order to do that, when you add images to your blog post you should be able to add alt text. So for me I'm on show it and on, you know, on WordPress, if I go in and I click on that image, there's a box that pops up on the right that gives me, I think it actually says SEO description or SEO title, like might say alt text. Alt text that is where you want to put those keywords and this is where you can just write them out as is. So you could say senior portrait photographer Southlake, texas, family photographer, denver, colorado, you know, creative photographer, creative session ideas or creative locations for your next photo shoot, like. You can change it up for each photo, but adding those keywords to those photos will help them show up into a Google search as well, especially the image search.

Speaker 1:

All right, so we have talked about why blogging is important to your business. We've talked about some best practices for creating your blog content, and I know this episode is running a little bit longer than usual, but I have one more thing I want to talk about so just hang with me for a few more minutes and that is how to promote your blog post. So obviously I've mentioned it on this episode, but you want to drive traffic to your blog content, because the more people that view your content, that tells Google that this is something people are interested in and it's more likely to push it out in a search. So one of the easiest ways to do that is to let your current audience know when you have created blog content. So kind of like, each week on this podcast, I will send out an email to my email list with some story, fun, tip, resource and then at the bottom I share go listen to the latest podcast episode. I share the title of the podcast for that week.

Speaker 1:

You could do the same thing with your blog content. If you have an email list and you send out a blog once a week, include that blog, maybe even include like a little like a preview of it, and then a button that says click here to read more and it takes them to your blog post. You can also take your blog post and you can turn it into multiple social media content pieces. So instead of saying like, hey, new blog posts, go read it. Give them something to entice them. Give them like a little taste. Like every movie, every TV show, they create a preview. Right, they have that little snippet that they want that you watch. You're like, oh, I really want to see this, and then you, it's on your radar. You want to go watch the movie or you want to check out the Netflix show or whatever. Whatever it is, you want to do the same thing for your blog. You want to take out kind of like a key piece of it, something that it's going to make people interested and get them excited about it.

Speaker 1:

Share that on social media. Turn it into a carousel, put it into the caption of a graphic maker, turn it into a reel and then direct them back to your blog to read more or to learn more or to get the full blog post. Have it linked in your bio. Share the link on Facebook. Share the link in Facebook groups. Maybe it's a really great resource If you are a local business and you've created a blog post of here's 10 fun things to do over the holidays with your kids, or here's five new things coming to town that you need to go check out, or five small businesses to go support in our area. Share that into these Facebook groups, because you're not asking anybody to. Actually, you're not advertising your business. You're sharing a resource and a lot of times, those are the things that are not necessarily banned from those Facebook groups.

Speaker 1:

You also don't have to always share new blog content. You can reshare past blog content. Remember I said that your blog content has a really long shelf life. It lives on for a really long time, so you can recycle that content over and over again. There's also a thing called evergreen content. This is where you create content that is not specific to necessarily like one time or it can be reused. So, for example, around Christmas, there's always people who are re-sharing older content around holiday decorating ideas or recipes for the holiday or fun things to do with your kids over the holidays. They aren't necessarily new content. It might have been something they created two or three years ago, but they recycle it every season. And so if you create content that you can recycle over and over again and reshare over and over again, it's going to take some of the pressure off of you to create something new all the time or always have something new to share.

Speaker 1:

If you're like, hey, we've got Mother's Day is coming up, I wrote a really cool blog post last year about a Mother's Day thing. You can recycle that and reshare it around Mother's Day again. So there's so many ways that blog content can really help you to market your business, stay top of mind, build connections, all the things, and I hope this episode got you excited and ready to start blogging in your business. As always, if you're listening to this and you have questions or you want to learn more or you're like I don't know how to make this work in my business, you can always reach out to me. You can go over to Instagram at girlmanesbusiness and send me a message, or send me an email at kindraatgirlmanesbusinesscom. I love chatting with all of you, so please feel free to reach out to me. Thank you so much for being here this week. I hope you have a wonderful week and I will see you back here next week. Same time, same place. Bye.

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