Things have not gone quite as planned. Nothing disastrous, just other things that have arisen along the way, with some additional work that I have been doing on my website.
And some new ideas from things that I have learnt recently. The new ideas have changed my plans going forward, hopefully for the better.
There are things that I want to do, and things that I was planning on doing that I will be deferring for very good reasons.
The latest rethink
I am therefore having a bit of a rethink about the content of my photography blog and what I am going to be doing over the next three months.
My photography blog
My photography blog is still the core of my photography business, being the daily update of content on my website which gets shared into the outside world on a daily basis.
And to be brutally honest the core of my SEO work. One day I will rank highly in Google for the search term photography blogger!
Whats coming up on my photography blog in April then?
The completion of the editing of my Santorini photos. As mentioned on my blog the other day, Lightroom appears to be behaving itself much better these days which is great news for all of us Lightroom users, and there are a lot of us.
I ordered 16GB of RAM from Crucial the other day, which I will be fitting myself. With this doubling of the memory in my Dell PC I should be benefitting from the latest performance increases introduced in recent versions of Lightroom Classic, now on version 7.3.
I decided to leave the image editing until I had plucked up the courage to order the additional RAM. At the time of writing this I have ordered it, have received it, all I need to do now is pop it in my PC. I don’t want to say anymore as I don’t want to tempt fate.
My hope is that with the new external hard drive, the significant clean up of the files on my PC, the speed improvements in Lightroom and the increased memory in my Dell PC that I will find photo editing a joy once again.
And if this works a new SSD will be ordered next month – one IT upgrade at a time!
And the image processing I will be doing?
This is the schedule of sets of travel photography images that I want to produce
I want to carry on with my travel photography work, which is an area of significant interest to me going forward.
To be honest if I can make a living as a travel photographer I would be quite happy! And I could easily combine my photography with writing to achieve my ultimate aim – travel photographer and travel blogger!
New web page
Staying with the travel photography theme, I will be adding a new set of 12 images to that web page, with optimised images but no text. Lets see how that performs along with everything else I am doing. When I say perform I mean in SEO terms – do I need to do any more work or is the metadata on the images combined with the other things I am doing all that I need to do?
This is a trial of how I produce web pages in the future, which will hopefully transform how I work.
Updates to my website pages
In addition once all the computer changes are in place I want to add new images to each and every page of my website.
Yes – every page.
Why? I have just worked out that I can automate the import of Lightroom Metadata into my Squarespace website. This is a good time to do this, and I have scheduled time each week to go through my pages one by one and renew all the images. They may be the same images as are already there, but with the metadata rewritten and imported into the correct field on my website for consistent optimisation.
And I have been waiting until the time it takes to do such work is less, which is right now for the reasons above.
And while I am there I am going to review the metadata on each page and update it – this is quite a quick job now that I know what I want in these fields – it makes sense to do this at the same time as the images.
The metadata will reflect the content of the image metadata and the keywords pertinent to each and every page.
And the good thing is that all the images will be prepared for publication on any external channels, as all the metadata will be there.
My website needs a refresh in places!
I have looked at some of the older pages and they are looking dated. I have updated a lot of the images on many of my web pages, but never finished this exercise properly.
New material
There is the inevitable additional material that this exercise will produce which will feed directly into my photography blog – all the bits working together nicely.
Page text and content will be reviewed at the same time, but not actioned yet.
I will continue with some back of house website work, and will be trialling this in conjunction with a variety of web page constructions and contents.
I am hoping that other things that I am doing will negate the need for lots of additional work, but this is something for long into the future, possibly next year.
Is the work I am doing with my blog and website working?
I think so – I am experiencing a significant increase in traffic to my website – my target is to achieve 1,000 visitors per month by the end of the year – at this rate I might reach this target sooner.
I am also experiencing an increase in enquiries – this is the real benchmark. If I get 10,000 visitors to my website but no enquiries so what?
The content of my blog posts
I will also be continuing with my regular varied set of blog posts about all things photography. The mix of posts will include
- Long in depth posts
- Information about articles being published on Improve Photography and other websites
- Images old and new
- Videos
- Image processing
- Business news
- Website news
- Gear
- Opportunities
- Things that have happened to me that others might find of interest
- And anything else that fits in with my photography business and the world of photography in general
Planning my work
One other bit of news is that I have now allocated half hour chunks of time to specific tasks in the week. I am trying a new approach to getting things done, having successfully transformed the former nightmare that was emails.
New resources that I recommend
How to be a Productivity Ninja – Graham Allcot
Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business And Influence – And How You can Too – Gary Vaynerchuk
And my next piece of light reading
The 7 habits of Highly Effective People
And finally
One final point for today which has just come to me as I finish writing this post is this.
What percentage of time in a photography business is spent taking photos? In my case I would guess 10%. 20% on a good week.
Blimey. I never thought it would be like this. But the truth is that I really do enjoy all this other stuff.
I love taking photos, and processing them in Lightroom. I g
et a real buzz when I receive feedback from a client – that is the best feeling.
And I am enjoying the writing about photography and my photography work – the more I do it the more I enjoy it, and hopefully the better I become.
Now its time to cross my fingers, install that RAM and get back to those pictures of Santorini.