I’m so glad you’ve listened to the last few episodes, taken my advice, and built out an awesome blog for your website. Now that you’ve got a blog that’s great for SEO and your clients, I’m going to tell you three ways you can put your blog to use without you actually having to do much additional work.

Convert Your Customers into Your Pinterest Marketing Team

I learned this first tip from Pye Jirsa at SLR Lounge, and frankly, it blew my mind. It’s genius, and it’ll blow your mind, too.

In commercial photography we often work with mood boards. In advertising and brand work mostly, but occasionally I’ll get an editorial assignment with sample images or reference images attached. Mood boards contain sample images, but they might also contain illustrations, colour swatches, patterns, or anything else that gives stylistic information about the desired end result, the vibe, look, and style of a shoot, without actually saying, “It needs to look exactly like this.” A mood board is not a shot list.

What was revolutionary to me was the advice to have every single one of your clients create their own mood board of images on Pinterest — something they might already be doing if you shoot weddings and engagements — but instead of surfing Pinterest for images, have them pin 20-30 images directly from your website and blog.

I have an email template that asks them to create a mood board on Pinterest, tell them how to do it, to pin 20-30 images from our blog and no more than 10 others from Pinterest for variety, and then email me the link to their mood board. This is a great way for your clients to communicate their desires with you visually, and when you have an extensive blog with hundreds or even thousands of photos, it gives your potential clients more to share and pin on Pinterest. 

Each of those pins links back to your website and each of those backlinks is a tiny little SEO boost for your website. Even those tiny little gains add up. If you do 100 sessions a year, then you’re getting 2000-3000 pins a year without even having to do a single thing. That’s amazing marketing value you just can’t pay for. Two additional benefits here are: your images will start to become frequently recommended pins on Pinterest, and you’ll have more and more and more backlinks to your website, which add great SEO value to your website. 

I am not a fan of watermarks on my images. I kind of hate it, but all of my images now have a subtle, unobtrusive watermark on them so that when they get pinned, my Blackwood Studios watermark is right there on the image, without taking anything away from the image.

So, if Pinterest wasn’t part of your social media marketing strategy already, it should be moving forward. And you barely have to do anything to make this work for you.

Automate Social Media Posting with Zapier

I’ve talked about my undying love of Zapier before and I’ll do it again. An automation I created and use for my blog uses Zapier’s RSS feed service and monitors for new blog posts. I do this for Studio Builder’s new episode posts on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and I do it for Blackwood Studios.

Whenever a new blog post goes live on my website, it triggers Zapier to create new posts on my Instagram account, Facebook Page, Twitter feed, and Pinterest. You can add LinkedIn to the mix if your clients are mostly business types. If you use MeetEdgar to automate social media posting, you can even add new blog posts directly to your MeetEdgar library, though, personally, I would recommend doing that directly in MeetEdgar, with its built-in RSS feed tools.

Manage Content with MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media management system that works differently than most other content planners. While you can still schedule posts to go out on your social media channels on certain days at times, MeetEdgar really shines with its fully automated posting system.

If you have a blog with lots of sessions and plenty of great evergreen posts and articles, you can build a content library of your blog posts in MeetEdgar, categorize them — such as by session type, how-tos, tips and tricks, etc. — then build a schedule based on your categories, and MeetEdgar will keep your social media stream flowing.

Without having to do much work beyond setting it up, MeetEdgar will continue to keep your social media channels flush with content, multiple times a week, daily, multiple times a day, or whatever works best for you, and you never have to do a thing beyond that. Just schedule your recurring time slots each week and off you go.

You can also give Meet Edgar the RSS feed of your blog or multiple blogs, and tell it which channels each blog feed should post to. It will find new blogs and automatically add them to your content library.

Again, you never have to do much of anything beyond setting it up once and just letting it do its thing. Obviously, MeetEdgar is not free but it is worth the weight of its heavy lifting in gold. 

They have two plans — a Lite plan that’s only $19 USD a month, which is perfect for a solo photographer focusing on 3 social media accounts — such as Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest — and 10 recurring time slots a week, and a regular plan at $49 USD a month, which is great for photographers with multiple brands, up to 25 social accounts, and gives you 1,000 recurring time slots a week.

Summary

As you know by now, I just love automation. As an entrepreneur, anything that frees up my time to do the work I enjoy doing and removes the mundane, repetitive work is always a plus in my book. Spend a little time putting these kinds of systems in place and you will save countless hours a year. If I added up the time I save with all the set-it-and-forget-it type of automations I use, it would probably equal one or two full-time work works each year.

I think I’d rather spend that time on vacation.

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