Hello Dearie,
If you’ve decided that blogging is something that can benefit your business, but you just can’t seem to get yourself passed that blinking cursor and blank page, I am here to help. It’s taken a few bumps but I can feel my writing muscles hitting their stride and wanted to share what clicked.
First, don’t start out with full thoughts and try to write actual paragraphs. You’d be amazed how freeing it is to start with bullet points. But before we get to that, we need to hit on the purpose of your posts.
My blogs break down into three different categories, and those categories impact how I write. The categories are: education, portfolio, and personal. Education posts can be for other photographers/business owners or they can be for clients, these need to be clear and concise but still may have a fair bit of writing (for these posts, photos are supplemental). Portfolio posts are all about the work, so these are going to have brief intros plus credits to any other vendors involved but ultimately are about getting to the photos as fast as possible. Lastly are personal, it’s a goal of 2021 to write more personal posts; these are posts where the writing usually still has emphasis but I am a bit more relaxed in my writing style (also on my photos, because these posts tend to include a lot of cell photos).
For this post, I’m going to focus on writing educational posts because for these, the writing is the most important. Once I have a topic, let’s for example say First Looks at weddings, I have this process:
- Define your topic: assume your reader is not familiar with the subject you are discussing.
- Determine what questions your reader may have and answer those
- If there are specific concerns or problems you are aware of with the topic, address those
- Use photos when possible to help illustrate what you’re discussing.
You can start out writing in bullet points, then expand into more long form, paragraph style (or don’t, if the bullet point style is a better way to convey the info). Boom, informative blog post done.
