How Blogging changed Kristin’s Wedding Photography Business
A little over a year ago, Boston wedding photographer Kristin Chalmers noticed that her bookings seemed sluggish. As 2013 came to a close, she was only 30% booked for 2014. Traditional marketing methods weren’t working, and she needed a new way to market her business, Kristin Chalmers Photography, so she made the decision to choose Fotoskribe as her trusted blogging partner. Kristin had wanted to stay consistent with adding content to her blog for a while, but kept running into reasons that kept her from doing so.
“I knew deep in my heart that blogging gets you where you want to be. I feel like a strong website is the key that opens the door to your blog. Updating a website every time you shoot something is impossible. That’s why you blog. But who the hell has time for that? Not me.”
With regular blogging, not only did her audience grow, but new leads started to roll in.
She reports that she is currently above her booking goal for 2015 and the leads keep coming in. She also has been able to find new avenues of income through booking elopements and mitzvahs. 80% of her new leads this year can be attributed from online searches that linked back to her blog. In addition to new leads, she also has gotten exposure through larger publications. She has been featured multiple times in Buzzfeed and was featured in an article in The Improper Bostonian. She has even been solicited by The Huffington Post for content.
When asked how they found her site and her images, the answer is always the same: they found her blog through a Google search.
“If you ask me, blogging IS the social media king. It’s the baseline, linking to all other forms of social media.”
Creating a consistent blogging strategy has made a huge difference in Kristin’s business.
Fotoskribe linked her blog posts to automatically post in all of the different avenues of her social media, increasing her exposure without adding to her workload. By posting on the same day every week, she soon developed a following on her blog and more fans on Facebook and Twitter. Fotoskribe helped Kristin to use WordPress to its fullest capacity, helping her leverage SEO to rank higher on Google. The team also helped Kristin to be innovative with the content that she created to help her stay inspired.
“I was struggling not only business-wise but creatively as well. Fotoskribe helped me with that by encouraging me to blog personal stuff too. The team worked like copy editors for me. They would make creative suggestions like ‘We’ve blogged a bunch of weddings, now why don’t we do something about your autism work?’ Or, ‘It’s mother’s day, I know you don’t have time to blog but just write a little something about being a mother.’ All these ideas really brought my audience in.”
Kristin says that working with the team at Fotoskribe keeps her accountable for blogging and gives her guidance on the best direction to take with content and new ideas. All of the content was written based on what Kristin desired, specifically tailored for her unique brand and the notes she provided for the posts.
“I never lost my voice. I still do the writing and it sounds like me, but Fotoskribe takes the guess work and formatting out of the equation. You can Facebook and twitter all you want, but it’s your blog that’s YOU. It’s your voice and who you are, not only as a business but as a person as well.”
Now that she has a year of steady blogging under her belt, she aspires to get back into more editorial-type work that she did when she started her photography business in LA. She hopes that she will get more exposure by integrating that work into her blog.
Kristin has identified two blog posts as her favorites since she started working with Fotoskribe. One was about a groom who passed away, teaching her that what she does for a living is priceless. Published at the end of 2013, it still gets new hits every week. The other favorite post was about having a successful marriage as seen through a wedding photographer’s eyes.
“It’s really about my husband and me, but all my couples LOVE reading it.”
We are so happy to have helped Kristin grow her business and harness the power of consistent blogging. We hope that 2015 brings her even more success and look forward to continuing to blog together!