I’m so excited to share that I will be having a free webinar where I’ll share 5 things you can do with TailwindApp that you can’t with Planoly.
Join me and get the details by clicking the button below!
Today we are discussing all Pinterest, why you should use Pinterest as a wedding photographer, and the basic settings.
Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home and style inspiration, and more.
People say it’s a social media site, but it’s a REALLY GOOD search engine and highly used by brides.
Pins are ideas that people on Pinterest create, find, and save from around the web. If you click through the Pin, you can visit the website to learn how to make it or where to buy it. As you discover Pins you love, click the red Save button to save them to your boards.
Collections of Pins in an organized and specific way.
Why should you use Pinterest as a wedding photographer?
Pinterest is the highest referrer to my website. More than IG and more that FB. Many photographers I start working with say that IG is the biggest referrer to their website. After we work together for a couple months on Pinterest, Pinterest is always higher.
If you want MORE traffic, start spending some time on Pinterest. Writing blog posts is the easiest way to create content for Pinterest AND as a wedding photographer, this is the best way to get your information out to google and future brides. I had a bride book me from North Carolina and Los Angeles due to a blog post.
TIP: If you create Youtube videos for your wedding photography business for brides, you can pin Youtube’s also!
Business not Personal: The first thing you need to do is to switch your personal account to a business account. The main reason is Pinterest analytics. There are zero reasons not to make it business – It’s free. Go do it now.
Make sure to make all personal boards private. Private boards don’t have analytics and aren’t see on your Pinterest Board. If you have boards that have a lot of followers or pins, but it’s not for your business, archive that board. Then you retain the analytics and can access it, but no one can see it.
Need Help on How to Change Personal to Business or Create Business: Just go here
Username:
Profile Picture:
Profile Name.
Profile Description (Bio):
Profile Cover:
Over the next few weeks, we’ll go over boards, how to create pins, how to pin from your blog to drive traffic, and how to use Tailwind in my Private Facebook Group – click the button above to join and see the LIVE video!
You can never see your business from a top-down view as easily as someone else can.
~Jen Vazquez, Wed Photography Coach
I know I know — but think about it……You know it’s true! Consider how when you can have an issue within your family or relationship and you call your bestie and chill in a coffee shop or the mall you feel SOOOO much better?
It’s the same thing, only for your business! The Urban Dictionary says this about a “bestie”. “A person who means the world to you. The person that when you met you just kinda connected. The person that you were always there for. The person that isn’t a love partner but they hold a special place in your heart. Someone that when they get hurt it hurts you too. Someone who no matter what happens between you two everything always ends up being alright. A person you can trust with anything.”
The same is true for a “BizBestie”. My definition?
I’ve been blessed over the years to have some amazing friends and girl bosses, so I thought I would explain how they’ve blessed me and in doing so, perhaps you’ll make sure to get some of your very own!
When you find a boss chick who is running the heck out of her business CLICK – you have a dream team waiting to happen. Other hustlers help you to hustle too. I know you’ve heard “Your network is your net worth.” a quote from Tim Sanders, former Yahoo! director. Well, he was super correct! Surround yourselves with high producing and smart women and viola – your business gets better!
It’s amazing how much I can help others and yet it takes me forever to make some changes to my own business. Take my friend and BizBestie Susan of Babes Building Empires. She is such a blessing to me and my business. Yet, it took me 5 months of her telling me I should start a coaching business before I did. Then it took me more than a year of her telling me I should work with other wedding photographers since I’ve photographed weddings for over 10 years. I was so scared to “limit” myself only to wedding photographers. So I coached creatives and helped a lot of people. But, until I narrowed it down to wedding photographers, my marketing wasn’t speaking clearly and wholeheartedly. When I made those changes, my business and marketing became easier and more simple.
Do you remember how it feels to be in a relationship and have an argument? You go off and talk to your bestie and something she says or the way she says it clicks and you feel a solution in your heart that enables you to work through it? Well, it’s the same thing for your business. Others can sometimes see more clearly and easily than you for a path forward for your business. You are in smack dab in the middle of the relationship but she can see both sides and help by pointing out a clear path.
When you choose the right BizBestie, you will help her and she will help you! Every time you two meet in person or via video chat or even on the phone, you help propel both businesses forward. My advice here is to have 1 or 2 things you want to talk about. Otherwise, my BizBestie and I chat away about everything under the sun and don’t actually complete much for the business. We all need that downtime, but my goal is to do both at each meeting so it’s worth the time investment – even when you are busy in your business!
There are many groups both in-person and online. You just need to find one that matches your vibe, personality and focuses on your specialty in business.
If you want to join a group of wedding photographers that have your back, check out my private group Wed Photography Coach!
Finally, having the wrong people being your BizBestie may slow you down or take away valuable work time because there is an imbalance. Be sure that you are both getting help equally OR……. Hire a business coach! It’s always helpful to have a coach be your BizBestie. Yes, there is an investment, but they are 100% focused on you for the 1:1 time. Additionally, their experience and ability to cut through the crap and find those 1-3 steps that will immediately help your business move forward is FULLY worth the investment! Signup here for Coaching Info!
Right now I have a GIVEAWAY for a 2-hour BizBestie call. Just take these two simple steps:
Want more help? See the posts below:
1: Write Down Your Favorite Past Clients
Write down 3 to 10 of your absolute favorite past clients. The more clients you can study, the better! If you are just getting started in wedding photography and you don’t have very many past clients to work with or you’ve booked people you don’t enjoy working with, then write down friends, family, or acquaintances that you would love to photograph if you got the chance.
2: Mark next to their name
Write down symbols next to each client based on the criteria below. You can write down as many of these symbols that apply:
3: Analyze your list: Look at your list, and identify the clients that have two or more symbols next to their name. These are the people that are truly ideal for you as you enjoy working with them, are inspired by working with them, and/or don’t have to haggle over your rates (i.e. they thought you worth it).
4: Dig Deep: Their Likes, Interests, and Hobbies
Ask these questions of your list to understand who your ideal bride is. Keep in mind that you can utilize IG or FB to figure out some of the answers.
Once you’ve written these down:
Circle any common traits that occur between your favorite couples. Star the traits that you like the most about them.
Underline traits that you also happen to enjoy.
5: Boil down the information to find their Values
This is hard to do, but after working with them and “stalking” their social media, you can start to draw conclusions as to their values. When you can dig down and figure out values, it goes a long way to really understanding who your ideal bride is and what makes her tick. This helps you to know how to speak to your ideal bride on social media.
Even though Instagram is so important to wedding photographers and how they find brides, it’s super important that you blog, anyway. Why?
Here are some reasons: What if IG closed tomorrow? What would you do? Many brides still go to google to check reviews, My research via polls to my brides and google search show that brides still Google search to find wedding vendors. Additionally, brides often confirm their potential hire by looking at all these sites, social media and websites as well as Google and Pinterest.
Remember that social media comes and goes (think MySpace) and remember how easy it was for people to find your business on Facebook? Now…… maybe 2% of the people that actually like your page will see your posts.
Your website can either do nothing OR you can utilize the single best way to get found FOR FREE! If you want to do this, you need to optimize your website for search and understand SEO.
So I went to my favorite SEO expert Neil Patel. Here’s what he said:
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your online content so that a search engine likes to show it as a top result for searches of a certain keyword.
Let me break that down even further:
When it comes to SEO, there’s you, the search engine, and the searcher. If you have an article about how to make vegan lasagna, you want the search engine (which, in 90% of all cases, is Google) to show it as a top result to anyone who searches for the phrase “vegan lasagna.”
SEO is the magic you have to work on your article in order to make Google very likely to include your post as one of the top results whenever someone searches for that keyword.”
~Neil Patel
What does this mean for your wedding photography website? I’m betting you can guess — A LOT!!! If you’re Jen Vazquez, Bay Area Wedding Photographer and you only have a few blog posts referring to “Jen Vazquez, Bay Area wedding photographer,” you will miss out on booking brides.
Soooooooo, let’s get to the tips!
Do you have beautiful blog posts filled with phenomenal photography but no words to describe what’s happening in your images? From my research, you should have at least 200 words to every blog post you publish. Within those 200 words, be sure to include keywords like “wedding in San Jose, California” and “San Jose wedding photographer” This way Google knows what your blog post is about and serves it up to brides in your area.
Create content that brides want to read or are searching for. An easy way to do this is to write a blog for every question that your brides ask you. It’s a way to build up a ton of great content for your brides and a great way for new brides to find you. If one bride has the question, you can bet multiple brides wonder the same thing.
Be sure to optimize your images. What does optimizing your images mean? There are three places to put a name (i.e. search terms). Alt Text, Title, and Description. All three places can have the same name OR a variation of the name, if you have the time. Here is an example of a great optimized image name: “bay-area-santa-clara-catholic-wedding-at-five-wounds-with-pale-pink-and-Burgandy-jen-vazquez-photography“
Use these SEO Keywords in every blog
Share your blogs by newsletter, social media, Pinterest, on business and personal page. Sharing the information tells Google that you are popular and trustworthy.
Wedding Photographers have an easier time with this because we have gorgeous images!
Ensure that you have share buttons on your website for social media – this makes it easy and today, doing something easy online ensures they may click. If someone has to copy and paste, etc to share the information – it oftentimes is one too many clicks for people to have to do.
My favorite tools to Share:
Mailchimp: Get your content to your couples and to industry friends by creating a newsletter. While MailChimp may seem like an odd tool to list, I decided to include it because Mailchimp pushes people (especially your clients) to share your content directly from an email you send out. I also think Mailchimp is more reliable in getting your content to your followers than Facebook.
Tailwind – this is my all-time favorite tool for Pinterest, FB, and Instagram! By clicking the Tailwind link, you’ll get a free trial and they will give me a tiny stipend for sharing.
There literally nothing worse than having 404 Page Error put up when you are looking for something. Guess what? It’s irritating to Google too. It makes Google feel like you are untrustworthy and it really messes up the algorithm.
My favorite free tool to check links: Atomseo
Google doesn’t like slow sites. Photographs are most important, for us photographers, but we also need to ensure that they don’t slow down our page.
Photographs should be saved and uploaded as JPGs. This file type can handle all of the colors in a photograph in a relatively small, efficient file size. By using JPEGs, you won’t end up with the enormous file you might get if you saved a photograph as a PNG.
The average speed for a website to load in 5 seconds. You can fix your site load time by cutting down on the size of a page. The biggest way to add to the size of your page? Slapping on tons of huge images. So, how can you fix this?
I love to take my favorite hi-resolution images and I throw them in BlogStomp. It’s a paid tool, but you can use the trial to try it out. I automatically optimize my images so they look their best but are web sized. It’s a lifesaver.
My favorite free tool to test speed: Pingdom
This is often overlooked. What are backlinks? Backlinks are another website links to your website.
So as an example, if you are listed (even a free listing) on WeddingWire, Zola, or The Knot. That’s a backlink. When you get your images published somewhere, that’s a backlink.
The bigger the website, the more powerful that backlink is because Google believes that you are more trustworthy. Especially if you are a wedding photographer and you have a link on a wedding site because it is a wedding-related.
Here are some ways to get started with backlinks (all free):
If you are looking for a coach to help with knowing who your ideal bride, how to attract them and book them, then I’d love to work with you! I have a private FB group that you may enjoy learning in or you can work with me 1:1. I’d love to cheer you on and give you concrete step by step ways to bring in those brides!
Below we’ll be discussing 5 tips on how I make blogging my weddings easy and effective — now don’t click away! Hear me out and I may just change your mind if you (like me) HATE writing blogs!
If you are like me and HATE writing blogs, here’s WHY you HAVE to write them:
Right about now, many of you are thinking, UGGHHHH – I know I should BUT:
Stay tuned, and I should overcome each of those things you may think!
How I help my wedding photography clients is I’m all about creating systems to make this crazy wedding business easier and more effective.
One way I do that is with my pre-wedding questionnaire for my clients: This enables me to easily and quickly write a blog to post within 72 hours after the wedding (YES I know, roll your eyes – I’ll explain more in a sec)
These are four things I put in every single blog post as a minimum:
Then after writing the blog, I take my favorite images typically 50-75 (yes I know that’s a lot but this is my sneak peek for my brides 48-72 hours after the wedding) and it boosts your SEO. It’s part of my process so I can photograph my wedding, deliver the sneak peek in 72 hours and enjoy all of the traffic to my website and social media accounts because the bride and groom are sharing it with all their friends and family. I get the work done, and my clients and their friends and family are blown away because RARELY does that happen.
Naming/Sizing your images: I use Blogstomp (but there is other software out there) and it resizes and names them so incredibly fast (and who has time?). Things to think about. Why? Well images names are also SEO searchable and when your title, your blog details, and your images have keywords, your website/blog will start rising in google algorithm and you’ll rise higher on the search page for your location or venue:
Lastly, make sure that you include your branding words (three words that describe your ideal bride and brand – for me is adventurous, playful and fun party brides). You can use these words somewhere in each blog post and an unconscious pattern will develop for your brides to be about your brand and it helps google show your content to your ideal brides.
If you found this helpful – I will have more of this in my upcoming course, Identify Attract Book: A course helping Wedding Photographers identify their ideal brides and book them with a simple but effective system. You can sign up on the waitlist to hear when it opens HERE.
