I want to take a quick minute and show you some of my favourite blog writing tools. As we all know Blogging is a critical part of SEO for Photographers. I know it’s an oxymoron because blog writing isn’t the most fun thing to do for most people. I use these great blogging tools that can make it a little bit quicker, a little bit easier, it can simplify the whole process. Let’s take a quick look!
Research: Answer The Public
‘Answer the public’ is an amazing resource for generating blog post ideas. With Answer the Public, you type in a subject and are presented with an aggregated list of related subjects from Google and Bing.
With using this tool you can find search intent options for your chosen subject, and this will help you create a well-rounded article that will have the potential to attract much larger visitor numbers.
Research: Keyword Surfer
This is another tool for researching your keywords before you start blogging. My favourite keyword research tool is keywords Everywhere, but it’s a premium paid for blogging tool (A bargain at only $10 per 100k keywords though!), but if you want a great research blogging tool that is completely free, then try out Keyword Surfer by Surfer SEO.
This blogging tool is a chrome extension that shows you search volume data of search terms that you enter in. Using this to research blog subjects will help you choose words that are used by your potential clients and help you get your articles in front of as many people as possible.
Creation: Voice Typing in Google Docs
The first blogging tool I want to talk about is voice typing in Google docs. Voice typing is a transcription service from Google. Transcription services can be really pricey, but this one is completely free.
What you can do with Google voice typing is record yourself talking about the wedding or photoshoot. The text is added straight to the Google Doc, and this can then be added to your website. This allows you to speak your blog post, to go ahead and say it, to speak it, put it in your natural phrasing.
A lot of times, when you’re writing a blog post, you end up staring at that blinking cursor. When creating a feature post about a particular photo session, record the post before you drive home from the shoot using the voice memo feature in your phone. Load up Google Docs when you get home. Then start talking about: what happened at the photoshoot, everything that led up to it, everything that happened, or some idiosyncrasies of some of the people that you photoed. Or even with a wedding, you can recap a wedding and the whole thing and the whole process. You could even do it during the day and record little snippets on your phone throughout the day.
I usually do about five or six minutes and can usually get about 500-600 words of usable content. When we’re only shooting for 250, 300, 500 words it’s definitely worth the 5 bucks to have it transcribed. Try it and see if it works out for you.
Typos: Grammarly for Chrome
Grammarly is a chrome extension that alerts you to grammar or spelling issues in your text content and offers suggestions about improvements. It’s completely free.
The quality of your text is going to be judged by your readers (and Google) so it’s important not to have typos or grammatical errors, and Grammarly is really easy to use solution that works well with WordPress.
Head over to the Chrome Extension Webstore and add it to your browser right now.
Quality: Hemingway App
The Hemingway app (http://hemingwayapp.com) allows us to copy and paste the transcription and edit. It allows us to edit it so that we can make it grammatically correct. Google pays attention to grammar, sentence structure, and user experience. Paying attention to these aspects will make a big difference in ranking. It will also enhance the user experience people have when going through your website. What this tool allows you to do is to copy and paste or even to write text. The app will highlight all the areas that there are problems.
Image Optimisation: Shortpixel Plugin
There are many image optimisation plugins out there, but my favourite is Shortpixel.
Shortpixel has a range of optimisation settings for compression and includes a ‘lossless’ option so that photos are as small as possible but do not look visually any different.
I have found some image compression plugins are pretty brutal when it comes to compression, and photos can end up looking unsharp as a result – not what you want when your portfolio is online with the purpose of gaining new clients!
Wondering how to name files? Check out our how to name files article.
Distribution: Revive Old Posts
Revive old Posts is a free WordPress plugin that posts your blog posts out to your Facebook page and Twitter account.
Posting consistently across social media can be a real challenge. In my experience, Twitter and Facebook are typically not the strongest platforms for generating wedding bookings, so they don’t tend to be the top of photographers priorities. The risk with this is that if a potential client looks at those platforms and you have not posted regularly, this may impact their trust of your brand.
This could have a negative impact on conversion.
Well performing content that ranks well in Google is great, but you do need to have an active presence across social media, and this plugin looks after that for you for free.
The other benefit in regularly distributing your content is enabling older posts to have fresh opportunities for new traffic. I speak to a lot of photographers wondering why posts don’t rank, but then tell me they posted the blog in question 2 years ago, shared it on one platform only at the time and have not shared it since.
If your content is not actively being promoted by your company, why should Google drive traffic to it by ranking it highly?
You are in the driving seat. Have a content distribution plan for both images and blog content.
Instagram is great for distributing your photos, and WordPress is a great website platform for your blog content. Revive Social has a great blogging tool to automate the distribution so you can set it and forget it.
There’s an option to upgrade to the premium version which also posts to Pinterest and a few others. Learn more on the Social Revive website.
Blogging Tools Summary
Blogging starts with research, and we’ve covered two great blogging tools for you to collect lots of data. Our phone voice recorder allows us to be able to put our thoughts into text right after the photo session, and Google voice typing enables us to have it transcribed for free. Grammarly and the Hemingway app then allows us to correct typos and identify the sections that need correcting. You can skip over the sentences that are already good. Shorpixel with help speed up the load time of your articles and Revive old Posts will help you distribute them automatically.
These are the seven blogging tools that I love and recommend to my clients. I know I’m super confident when it’s done, that it’s done right, and that it has some great potential to generate traffic and rank well. Hope you enjoy.
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