In Retrospect: 3 Reasons Why Blogging Everyday Doesn’t Really Matter

Being a relatively new sole proprietor, I spent the past year burying myself in workshops and trying to learn from other successful photographers how to progress and grow as a business. One part of that growth pertains to social media, and believe you me when I say there is a lot of conflicting information out there. As I like to write, ‘blogging’ is a feature that I’ve incorporated into my business identity. But blogging is one of those things that fall into a gray area; how often do I need to be doing it? What do I need to write about? Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get varying answers – and that doesn’t help the blossoming professional photographer. Here are my 3 reasons why, despite the insistence of a select few big name photographers, blogging everyday doesn’t really matter for creative professionals.

1. Quality vs. Quantity: There are a few photographers who insist on blogging everyday about their ‘everyday’. While I agree that transparency is a good thing, and everyone likes to see that you are an accessible, ‘real’ person, people are also extremely busy and their time is valuable. You may win yourself loyal readers for a few weeks with this method, but complete saturation is exhausting, both as a reader and as a blogger. I gave this everyday method a go for a few months straight, and found that it became so time-consuming that I was sacrificing time with my two children to blog. I also had so much reading to do about people’s daily lives that I was sacrificing my time for work just to read mundane updates. Instead of frequency, I’ve chosen to aim for consistency and cogency. Be your own filter by making each post worth the time it takes to read it.

2. System Overload: With so many varieties of social media nowadays, we’ve got to make choices on how far to stretch ourselves. Sure, we can link up Twitter and Facebook, but what about Flickr, LinkedIn, MySpace, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Digg and any of the other numerous places to shout out about your work? If you are posting daily on Facebook and Twitter, repeatedly throughout the day, are your daily blogs also going to get read if they’re more of the same? Maybe, for a little while. But how many loyal readers are you going to win? If the idea of social media is to interact, you’re not going to get much of that if you’re just posting a blog simply to say that you do it everyday. That can’t possibly feel like a worthwhile investment of your time. Check into Bloggers Anonymous. http://darmano.typepad.com/bloggers_anonymous/

3. Frequency Doesn’t Equal Success: What matters is that you are reaching your target audience and building a relationship with them. Your blog’s content should reflect you as an individual, but it should build upon your business and stay relevant to your target audience.

As a creative professional, I have an advantage in that my work IS pictures; people go to my blog expecting to see examples of my work, and pictures they’ll find in plenty. Having struggled with knowing what exactly I should be blogging about, the posts have previously been all over the place. Now that I understand what works for me and have narrowed my focus, I will be able to reign in the content and make it count. And that is an effort I can feel good about, instead of struggling to make a daily blog post.