Blogging For Your Workflow

Blogging is a major pain point for photographers. It can be months, or even a year, before a session gets up onto the blog. Does it have to be this way? Can blogging help with other parts of the post-session workflow? The answers are emphatically NO and YES!!!

Let's talk about blogging and how it is beneficial to your workflow. First, understand that this is a commitment you are making to yourself. No one is making you chose this workflow, but I truly believe it will make your life significantly better!!!

Here's our scenario - you shot a session yesterday and now you have a string of items to do until you deliver the gallery. You have to  cull and edit and share a sneak peek and post to all the social media channels. You need to share behind the scenes of the session and deliver the gallery as quickly as possible and you have more sessions coming up! Blogging is probably not one of the items you consider necessary to that list but I would challenge you to consider it as an essential.

When you book a session, make the next day your "edit and blog" day. If you do all your own editing, maybe it's just an editing day, but the point is, you are trying to get this blog post up asap because it serves as a great sneak peek for your clients and it is easy for them to share. Plus, you get to brag on and love on your clients with what you write. Not to mention that blogging is great for SEO. There are all kinds of benefits to blogging for your business overall, but if you have a deadline for your blog (must be up two days after the session or whatever your deadline is), then you have to get the editing done too! You can't blog photos if you haven't edited photos. So blogging helps you make editing a priority.

If you outsource your editing, it's even easier. You simply edit the photos you want to blog, send those edit photos to your editor for them to do the rest of the gallery, and then you just move on to blogging!!!

The pairing of blogging with outsourcing your editing is a powerful motivator to stay on top of things. It can be a lot of work right in the moment, but imagine not feeling behind the ball for months on end because you get finished with everything in the first week or two! It is possible!!!!! Here's a sample of what this might look like for me, as a family photographer:

Tuesday - Shoot the session, Come home and upload RAW files to my computer.
Wednesday - Cull RAW images and start editing, focused on the blog. Create and share sneak peek video from what has been edited.
Thursday - Finish blog writing and add photos. Finalize blog post.
Friday - Blog post is live.

I only blog Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so my blog posts go live the closest day to when I shoot where I still have time to actually get it done. A Tuesday shoot goes live Friday, but a Saturday shoot will go live Wednesday, because I don't work on Sundays. You figure out what works for you. Wedding photographers, since you only work weekends, your schedule is much more set and you could be more consistent about always blogging on Mondays or Tuesdays or even Wednesdays. Whatever works for you. But definitely create a blogging workflow that allows you to blog in that first week after a session.

In case you missed it, another benefit of this workflow is that it allows your galleries to be finished and delivered sooner! Whether that's you doing it yourself or your editor, your gallery turnaround time will be much quicker if you commit to blogging quickly.

Want to chat more about this? I would love to help you create a workflow that works for you! Interested in learning more about my editing services? Send me an email at [email protected]!