10 Tips for Discovering Your Blogging Mojo
I am a big believer that it is important for photographers to blog, and to do it well.
Your customers will live vicariously through you while reading your blog. They will share your adventures. They will get to know you and they will begin to identify with you. They will feel what you felt when you focused your lens and you pressed the shutter button.
When they buy your services or they buy your prints they will be buying a piece of you and your experiences. Each piece of art will have a richer, deeper story behind it than just the image alone because it will hold the story of you.
Since I am new to blogging I’ve been reading a few books about it. One of my favorites is 31 Days to Finding Your Blogging Mojo by Bryan Allain. It’s full of great tips and it covers all of the basics that you need to know to get started blogging. Here are my top take aways from the book, but it is full of much more information than what I’ve included here. I highly recommend buying it and reading it for yourself.
- Strive to create 2-way online conversation and community around your blog. Try ending some blog posts with an engaging question. Encourage readers to share about themselves—their experiences, their preferences, or their wishes.
- Realize that every conversation—online and in the real world—about your blog is an opportunity. Own the fact that you’re a blogger and your blog is worthwhile. Be able to talk comfortably and confidently about your blog. Talking about it will help you improve your blogging voice and focus.
- The more focused your blog content is, the better chance you have at seeing quick growth. Know your audience, your perspective, and your content.
- Your goal should be to write one blog article a week.
- Shorter blog articles are better than longer ones. Keep them less than 500 words.
- Be your most genuine authentic self when writing. Show personality. Humor. Be conversational. Share little details about yourself to create connection points with your readers.
- Include a good picture of yourself with your blog to help make it personal. Smile. Look friendly.
- Have writer’s block? Think about writing a series of multiple blogs on a topic. Or collect several old posts and create compilation or guide on a topic. Or write a top 5 list. Or read through past reader comments to get new blog ideas.
- Still have writer’s block? Try a cheater post—Ask readers 1-3 questions, post a picture and run a photo caption contest, ask for feedback or recommendations on something, repost a popular blog from your archives.
- Promote your blog. Make multiple and original tweets about each blog post. The author of this book tweets each blog post out 4 times.
Have you read any good books on blogging techniques? Let me know. I’d love to check them out. (See what I just did there.)
Focal Point 
Thanks for sharing these blogging tips. It is great to discover another local NoCo blogger.
Yes, it is! I checked out your blog. I love learning about the history of words. I always learn something new.
I have not read any books on blogging, so I can’t contribute any titles. I do, however, have a few thoughts on the intent of blogging as an artist.
Any definition of art will be controversial at best, but for the purpose of this discussion I’ll define art as human expression using creative skill and imagination with the intent of communication. I know this is limiting, but for the sake of discussion I think it will suffice.
Communicating through artistic expression is a challenge. As with any conversation, the sender and receiver must have the same frame of reference for ideas to be successfully communicated. As an artist, your potential audience is vast and wide, and some will “get” the intended message while most will miss it. Is this a problem? Does it matter? I suppose that is dependent upon your intent.
How does this apply to blogging? If it is your desire to communicate specific ideas and concepts to your audience, your audience must come to know you. The frame of reference needs to be established and understood. Blogging provides an avenue to develop this understanding. I would submit that in an effort to accomplish this universal understanding, it is less important that you discuss particular photographs and more important that you discuss your philosophies along with anecdotes not exclusive to photography.
Sharing technical knowledge is fine if your audience consists solely of photographers, but it is much less interesting to those who are interested in your emotional and creative capacity. And these are the people who will be with you for the long term. I would think that you are trying to develop relationships with your patrons based on an emotional affinity rather than technical knowledge. Technical knowledge is easy to share and obtain; developing an emotional understanding of another is much more difficult and thus its pursuit much more rewarding. This, I believe, develops a true audience.
Not all photographers can write; you can. As people get to know who you are, they will come to better understand your photographs, and that will lead to a richer and more rewarding experience for both you and your audience.
As Billy Joel penned, “advice is cheap, you can take it from me, it’s yours to keep, because opinions are free.” I create art to aid in my understanding of the world and to create order out of chaos. I have no intention of communicating anything through my art to anyone other than myself. I know me, so my job is easy.
Christie,
I love your blog look and feel. Nice words. Simple ideas. No clutter. Nice photos. What are you shooting with these days?
I agree with Brandon J Scott too. But you don’t have to be Kim Kardashian either. You have nice tone, and that’s a good place to start, continue, and end.
I like the “under 500 words” tip. I posted a blog about life in the hard drive industry – around 700 words. You can find it on my LinkedIn profile.
Again, I like the clean writing and graphic layout style of your blog.
Nice work.