Speaker 1: 0:00

I feel like the cool thing about SEO is that once you kind of get a plan for the SEO part of it, you can use that across the board. That's kind of the good part about it is that you don't. It's not just for your website pages, it's for your blog and also for social. That's one of the biggest things. And for social media, seo is huge. That's one of the biggest factors for being found right Is your search optimization, and so if you're not using SEO strategies inside of your captions and you're, that's really kind of something that you can start to look at. You can start to figure out how you can basically segue that over, and it really shouldn't be that different from what you're already, let's say, doing with your site and your blogs and things like that. Deciding like all right for this. Let's say, for this blog post, what is the key phrase that I want to be all right for this? Let's say, like for this blog post, like what is the key phrase that I want to be highlighting Right? Like what, what is, what do I want to be searchable for? And then just using that and then, okay, taking that blog post ideally and breaking it up into some social posts using that same strategy in your captions, and you can use chatGPT for all of this. Like that's what is, I feel like, kind of a big game changer right now is that we have tools like not just ChatGPT, there's various options of AI, like there's so many now, right, but like whatever you're going to use, being able to use that efficiently and even if you're not the one doing it and implementing it, but you kind of have to know how right. You have to know, okay, well, this is how this works and here's how I can hand it off to somebody, if that makes sense, because then you can hire. You can just hire like an intern or someone at a low hourly rate to do the work that you already know how to do. You just don't want to waste your time with it, like you know what I mean. Like your time is better spent doing other things. It doesn't have to be once a week, but once a month is pretty ideal. And if you can take that one blog post and at least break some content out so that you are creating some smaller form pieces of content from that one blog post twice a week, that's like eight pieces of content. I feel like that's very doable for most people to kind of hammer out in one day and then just have it there, whether you schedule it or just put it in a Dropbox or Google Drive ready to go, or just in your drafts, whatever. However, that works for you to actually have that Okay.

Speaker 1: 2:55

And then the other stuff could just be filler right, like, oh, I had a session, I want to do a quick reel. Oh, I had a session, I'm going to post some pictures. Like a lot of the stuff that we do can't be planned far out in advance, like that, because we're busy. First of all, you know, ideally we're busy, we have a lot of shoots going on and we want to use those current, you know sessions to create some pieces of content. So I feel like, if you had a plan for like this other stuff that I was just talking about, that's one thing, and then the other stuff is just filler. It's like okay, I know that I'm going to have at least two or three Ideally I would want you to have three, but let's just say two two pieces of like planned out content from this one blog post and then, once you sort of like get better with that and you get into a consistent pattern. Then you can do two blog posts a month, right, and then maybe you can just, like I said before, hand this off to somebody to do it for you, Like here's the topic I want to talk about, here's this and here's how you would use the AI pieces to create these pieces, and then you can hand it off to somebody who would get to know who would be able to do that for you, ongoing, at a low hourly rate, ideally we're talking like once or twice a month. They would just have to go in and do this stuff and it wouldn't have to be rocket science, those pieces of content. I feel like you would be focused way less on what's trending right On social specifically, because we're really just focusing on SEO, because that is something that's just there and it's ongoing and it's consistent like the golden thread, basically through your content. That's just kind of there. So I feel like that wouldn't be hard.

Speaker 1: 4:44

And Gretchen not having a blog, I totally get it, because you don't you've never done it and because it's kind of like this thing hanging over your head. It feels like this big heavy weight, but that's just a perspective shift. You know that like it'll still, it'll stay as big as it is until you decide it's not. That's really all it is. It's like you know what, like yeah, I know it's there, but it's not a have to, it's a I get to. And reframing that thought pattern in oh I wonder how many new clients I can bring in with this, that's kind of fun. Like I wonder what's out there that I don't even know about. Basically, putting it out there into the universe, into the internet, into the world, in the form of a blog post and SEO is literally just like casting your net right. Like you're a fisherman out in sea and you're just casting out a big net and you are specifically wanting these groups of people and that's what SEO will do for you. And so finding a way that's the mindset portion of it finding a way to make it fun or interesting or gamify it like whatever, is going to work for your brain Cause obviously we all have our different reinforcements to things that pay off for us more than others.

Speaker 1: 6:00

What is that for you, right? Like I always talk about that when I had, when my kids were little and my son with autism, I had a psychologist come in and try and help us with all of these like parenting things. And the main thing he said and I knew it, it was just I needed to be reminded is like, don't make it hard on him. Like, if you want him to put the clothes in the basket, the dirty clothes in the basket, put the basket closer to where he's going to be taking his clothes off. Like don't make him walk across the room, duh. So like the same thing goes for us is like make it easy on yourself. Just remove the roadblocks. That are the roadblocks. So if you know, your roadblock is like I can't do this on Monday mornings, I have too many things going on, whatever, okay, that's off the list. Like, don't do it that way. Whatever works for you is how you need to do it.

Speaker 1: 6:51

And thinking about the block, like it'll get bigger and bigger and bigger until you decide you know what. I'm just going to do it. First of all, it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to even be right. It just needs to be done at this point and it's really not super hard. So I don't know, and I think you switched everything over to show it. So you probably have the WordPress component on the backend for your blog, so you just need to hook up Yoast if you haven't already the premium version of Yoast. Hook that up to your WordPress and it literally walks you through it. It's very, very easy. So, like what I do with my blogs, you'll see.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Basically, when you go into the back end of it, you decide okay, so let's say you're going to do, and again, let's just kind of back up for a second talk about a blog for a minute. We're not going to like just be blogging, you know, susie's session by the lake, nobody cares. We're not going to just be blogging Susie's session by the lake, nobody cares. What about her session would be valuable to a wider audience that are looking for what you offer. So, whether that is planning your session by a lake, five things you want to think about for a lake session, whatever. Think about it on a bigger scale. And so from there it's like okay, what key phrase keywords would I want this to be searchable for? Lake senior session, senior session by a lake. Pick one, right, you put it into Yoast.

Speaker 1: 8:18

There's like a little aspect at the bottom of that when you go into the WordPress and I don't know how this looks on other platforms, but this is how I do it and it's so easy, and I put the key phrase in and it tells you green, yellow or red how well you're doing with that content. So what I do is and I go into chat GPT and I tell it I want to do a blog post. Now, first of all, it knows all about me. My chat GPT knows who I am, what I do, right, I want to do a blog post about a senior session by a lake and the five benefits of it, or the five things to think about. Whatever it is, I'll tell it what it you've got to give it a framework and then tell it with the key phrase I want it. I want it to be searchable for this key phrase.

Speaker 1: 9:05

You need to use this key phrase at least five times in the blog post and it needs to be in the first sentence. And I want this to be five paragraphs with, like, four sentences each, with a subheading as well, for each paragraph. Like you, give it the parameters that you want, you come up with this prompt that you can use over and over and over again. It's the same prompt. You just copy paste, copy paste, right, put it somewhere that you can do that and then just switch out certain little things that you need to switch out per session. And then you just want to add a CTA at the bottom and you can even have chat GPT. Know that that part of your prompts, like at the end of it, make sure you do a nice call to action on how to contact me without it being super salesy, or however you want to word it. It'll spit it out and you can just basically copy paste that into your blog posts.

Speaker 1: 9:49

And then, at this point, once you start using Chachi PT enough, you don't even have to finesse it that much, like it's getting really good at knowing the more you use it, you know knowing what you want it to do and then, once you do that and you put in all like the little things, the Yoast at the bottom will tell you you're either green, good to go, you need some work, or it's like bad, and it'll tell you if you click on those things, it'll say change these things. It'll tell you exactly there you need to add an image. Okay, well, your image. Maybe let's add two images to this blog post.

Speaker 1: 10:24

The images that you need to have need to have the title. It needs to be SEO'd right. You need to put the key phrase in the title of that image as the file name and then as in the description, and you need to use the alt text in the right way. So if it's an image of a girl by a lake, you're not going to put you know, renee Bowen senior session by a lake. You're going to put girl in a blue dress by a beautiful lake with a mountain in the background, smiling, like you need to describe the image. That's what the alt text is for. And then the description is where you put your key phrases, like your keywords senior portraits by a lake, senior portraits in Santa Clarita, whatever it is right, like those things go in the description. So once you do that and you add that, then your SEO score will change and it kind of gamifies it.

Speaker 1: 11:15

I'm not going to lie Like I get a huge dopamine push when I see that thing go from yellow to green. I'm like done, I don't need to work on this anymore, it's good enough, right, and so then I stopped thinking about it over and over again. I'm like it's green, I'm good to go, and I don't care as much about the readability, because there's a readability score as well. I don't care about that as much Like if it's yellow or red, I'm like whatever I care about the SEO score when they're both green, though, so fun. And once you do this a few times, you can knock this whole process out in like 15 minutes, like literally 30 at the most. So you don't need to like even hire somebody. You can, but like it's really doable when you get that system in place. Okay, it's almost scary how easy it is. To be honest with you, it's like Ooh, this feels like cheating, but it works.

Speaker 1: 12:12

And the more you blog, I'm telling you, the more eyes you're going to get on your site, on Google, like it really really matters. And specifically because Google and everything, they're sourcing your socials right, like your social like. If you, you'll see it Like when you search for somebody or something, their socials will come up. Right, you'll see all these other things come up. So that's why, once you do it here, then you go into that same chat GPT thread and you'd be like okay, now we're going to create eight pieces of short form content. For that, I want one of them to be a carousel slide and one of them to be a short form video. You can do both video, I don't care, I'm just kind of using this as an example.

Speaker 1: 12:55

So I want you to give me an idea for those posts. Right, I'm still using this key phrase. This is the key phrase that I want you to be focused on, and I want you to give me a caption using that key phrase, showing the value of this blog post, pointing people to that blog post, even right, because you can like in your social posts. You'd be like, hey, if you want to see this blog post pointing people to that blog post, even right, because you can like in your social posts. You'd be like, hey, if you want to see this whole session add over to my blog. But you don't have to do that for each of those posts. It could just be a post, okay, and so you can tell that same thread.

Speaker 1: 13:27

Now give me a caption for each of these, or you could do it one at a time. However, you, you know, make it easy for you, but you can tell it to create these eight pieces of content or 10, however many you decide and you can ask it to put it in a table for you where it's like the main caption, and then use these hashtags, whatever it is, and it'll put it into a table for you so that you can just copy paste it If that's what you want it to do. Again, make it easy on yourself, like you know, step at a time, and then you just kind of take that and there is an integration from JetGP for Canva, like, you can definitely like link these things if you want to get very expansive with it, or you can like create it yourself, but the idea is that the content, the caption, the SEO, the meat is basically done for you, so you don't have to like continuously think that you're recreating all of this content, like it's just the same. And it's honestly better if you're talking about the same stuff over and over again, because then the algorithms tend to know what you're doing, what you're talking about and how they can send people to you and ideally that's what you want to do. Is you want to say, okay, now create this email that I can send to my list to send them to the blog? Right, so twice a month you're sending that, or, however it is, at least once a month to your list about this blog post, because your list and Google, what they care about is how much value you're giving them. You're giving them, ideally, what this blog post is going to do is going to help them in some way. Okay, and so that's why, if Google likes it too because it's like, oh, we got good SEO we're using the key phrase. Make it easy for the algorithms, the computers, to know what you're talking about, and it will 100% send it to the right people. We have to make it a valuable piece of content for somebody.

Speaker 1: 15:26

If I were my target client and this is where knowing your target client is really really important If I were a high school senior or a high school senior parent, who are you talking to in this? First of all, you got to know that. What am I searching for? What would be valuable to me, too, what would be a really cool thing to read about that not everybody else is doing? That's another thing, and you can ask Jachie PT to help you come up with those ideas. Like I have multiple sessions of girls by a lake or girls by an ocean for their high school senior portraits, I need ideas. I want you to come up with a list of, you know, 20 ideas for titles for blog posts that are going to be valuable, searchable and, ideally, what my target clients want.

Speaker 1: 16:16

Give me some ideas, See where you know, like kind of let it see what it gives you and then you can refine it, because usually sometimes it'll kind of spit out a bunch of stuff and I'm like, okay, five of those were goods. I want you to use these five and give me more like this. And then it gets even better, like the second, third time sometimes, that you prompt it and then just make that list and say, okay, this is my list for the next 20 weeks. Right, it's done. The blog, the ideas, are there. Now all I have to do is tell Jachy PT. This is the title, this is what I want this blog post to be about, and this is the key phrase that I want you to use to search for it and don't overthink too much of that. Just put something down, right. Like just kind of put a key phrase down and then go from there. It really does help if you just sort of like break it down.

Speaker 1: 17:04

I do think that, especially going into busy season, you just get really busy and this stuff kind of goes to the wayside. But when you implement this kind of thing, this stuff kind of goes to the wayside, but when you implement this kind of thing, it stays there and if it's like, if it becomes a non-negotiable, that's what's going to keep you getting the inquiries while you're busy. That's ideally what we want. Even if you don't have time to fill in those posts and do things in the moment, you know you've got this really good, like strong SEO fueled content working for you on the backend, and then you don't really, even if it's just a couple of times a week, like it's there, so you don't have to feel like you're behind all the time.

Speaker 1: 17:49

Okay, so, danny, I wanted to just touch on this really quick. You said that you are not as booked. You got mostly guys, which is great. So I'm going to ask you cause I know I've talked to you specifically about this too on the one-on-one how much marketing are you doing, meaning what we were talking about at the beginning of the call are you blogging? Are you talking about it a lot on social? How often are you doing it and how are you doing it so more than just once a week? Showing up on stories, posting pictures, that kind of thing?

Speaker 1: 18:19

Yes, I would be posting fall for sure, because it's here basically. I know it still feels like summer for most of us, but it's definitely fall season. I would absolutely be repurposing any content that you have from any fall sessions and blogging about the benefits of a ball session, like why you want to get booked in fall three reasons why fall sessions are amazing. Or pick something about a fall session and dig into it and why would that be a valuable piece of content? And when you do, post about it, whether it's short form video, which is ideal for your reach, because that's that's where you get new eyes on your brand your stories are for your followers Okay, that's great and you can definitely post on your stories, but you really want to be posting new content on your feeds.

Speaker 1: 19:08

You want to be posting either the new feature that Instagram just kind of came out with, whereas you can use you've probably seen it, but basically you can create. Let's say, you use an image Okay, it's a carousel post, because they gave us more carousels now and they gave us new texts that I was talking about with Gretchen in the Voxer thread. You can go in to Instagram and just do it all within there. So let's say you've got go in to Instagram and just do it all within there. So let's say you've got like five images of a fall session, let's just say, and you would post it as you normally would like a carousel, but you can add text on it now from within the platform, and what a lot of people are doing is using it as like an educational sort of carousel slide. So you would use the same image. You don't have to. I'm just saying what most people are kind of doing. You would use the same image and you'd be like you know my top three reasons why fall sessions are the best swipe.

Speaker 1: 20:02

Another thing of short text on the same image, same image, different text, right, or you can use different images, that's totally fine, but the idea is that you're using a feature that Instagram gave you. That's new. That's always good, because they're going to push out that content. Anytime they give us anything new, they're going to push out that content. So try and challenge yourself to maybe use that carousel post with the adding the text from within Instagram, like this week or next week, like a hundred percent, and see how it goes. Instagram like this week or next week, like a hundred percent, and see how it goes. You still should be doing some reels, however, because that is where most of the reach comes from, and they have really stayed true to this promise that they said a few months ago that they were going to push out smaller creators. That's absolutely been happening. So, like this is the best time for you to try and get a wider net.

Speaker 1: 20:52

Okay, do you want to call in from people from from the next towns over? Do you want to, you know, be talking about destination sessions? What do you want to be talking about? Who do you want to attract? Make the content about that for those people and put the SEO content in the caption. That's the biggest thing. That caption, the biggest thing. That caption should be meaty. It should not be like I loved shooting, you know, stacy, senior portrait session by you know, contact me for for your fall sessions. That is not. That is not good enough. You have to be writing a, basically a small mini blog post for your caption, which is why, if you just repurpose the blog, it makes it easier. Or use chat, gpt, whatever you got to do, but make that caption a meaty ass.

Speaker 1: 21:38

Seo situation because Instagram isn't really using hashtags anymore. Like they've said it many times, they don't matter as much. You can still put them there, but that's not how people are finding you. They're finding you from SEO, and so if you're doing a really good job of putting that SEO content in your caption, that's what's going to help the algorithm know how to send your content to the right people. It's going to give you more reach and also get you searchability. That and using the trending sounds obviously always helps. Okay, it's not like a must, but it adds fuel to that fire. So you want to be using all of the tools that you can to give you the best results.

Speaker 1: 22:23

So that's what I would be doing right now is I would just go hard right. If you don't have clients and you need clients, I would be like laser focused on I need to be producing at least one, at least one a day. All right, I'm talking about specifically for Instagram, tiktok, probably more two to three. If you want to grow on TikTok, you got to be posting like three times a day. But we're not talking about TikTok specifically right now, but like Instagram for sure, once a day, at least once a day.

Speaker 1: 22:51

For the next like 10 to 14 days, go hard, show up on your stories, talk a little bit on your story, make sure you put captions on your story so people can read without the sound. Get to the point in your stories. You want people to consume it. So if you're just kind of rambling and stuff, that's not super helpful for your reach and your engagement, get to the point. But put a CTA. So like, if you're talking about, like I've got fall sessions, first of all you're going to repost your reel that you posted and then you can put a piece of text there and then you can say pop on screen and be something like guys, fall sessions are the most popular time of year.

Speaker 1: 23:27

I did a whole blog post about it. I just talked about it on this post. Go read about it. But long story short, you need to get booked for it right now, because I'm going to get booked for these sessions. It's a small window of time that we have for fall. We think that we have time. We don't? It's not that long. Book your session now. Dm me if you want a session, because Instagram doesn't like it when you make people leave the platform. That's the issue. So when you ask them to DM you or you put a question box up and you say drop your email and I'll send you info on sessions, that's better because, a you've got their email now and, B you didn't have them, leave the platform right. So, ideally, those are the things that you want to be thinking about and and go off, go hard with those CTAs, get them in. Like, don't be afraid to ask for the sale. You can't get what you don't ask for. So I would, I would be going hard, that's what I would be doing.

Speaker 1: 24:24

What captions can we put in reels so that people are reading and watch the whole thing? I have several reels I want to do, but I'm stuck on what words? Okay, yeah, so it is very much a thing where and you see it all the time like, read the caption, and that's the whole reason why the reel gets so many views is because it's a short reel. That's the thing. It has to be seven, seven seconds, seven or under for that kind of thing to happen. People aren't going to do that on a 15 second or longer reel, so your reels need to be short. That's the, and you can play with this. But if you want people to read the caption and have your video on repeat to get the views, that's ideally. What you want is a shorter video, okay, where all of the actual meat is in the caption, and so it's the same kind of thing that I was talking about at the beginning and I know you weren't on, tracy, so like, go back later and rewatch it.

Speaker 1: 25:13

But ideally you want to be thinking about what is going to make this post valuable. Okay, so I'm posting about so-and-so's senior pictures these are her sneaks, okay, and we shot it at the beach. What would be valuable to my audience as well as fun for my client to see her pictures? It has to serve two purposes for me there, right? I'm not just posting these sneaks for her, because that's not doing me any good. If I just post so-and-so's senior pictures at the beach, she'll like it. She'll like the images, images and she'll probably share it to her story and I might get some eyes on my brand from her friends, ideally, and maybe that reel might take off.

Speaker 1: 25:59

I don't know who knows, right, but ideally what I want is I want the caption to serve a bigger purpose for SEO. I want it to be a longer form piece of content than not just like something that I spit out, if that makes sense. So you need to think about how you can make that valuable and it depends on the post. Don't overthink it either. You can use ChatGPT for this as well. Right, like. So you could go into Jachet PT and be like I have this client we shot at the beach. I need five ideas on how I can get people to read an entire caption. Like, what kind of caption can I create? That's going to be interesting.

Speaker 1: 26:39

So you can think about three common mistakes people make when they're shooting at the beach. People love mistakes and pain points. It's going to hit that back of their brain. It's going to hit the lizard brain. It's going to be like oh, do I do that? And then you're going to get their attention. Unfortunately, that's marketing. So if you're just using aspirational marketing and positive marketing, you can use both. But if you're just using positive, you're probably not going to get as many views, because people don't really want to see the feel good.

Speaker 1: 27:07

Now, if your images are amazing, then they will, right, but that's the other part of it. It's like you want, like for your reels in general, you want to keep them short. You want to have something on the screen that pops up right away, that tells people what it's going to be about, like boom. And so that could even just be like three common mistakes I see people make when they're planning their senior session. I'm just throwing stuff out, but you get the idea it's going to be like it needs to be there for people to go wait what, and it gets their attention.

Speaker 1: 27:37

The visuals have to be a hook as well, like there needs to be something kind of going on that's going to be like oh, so it can't just be like a long like BTS video of like you doing, let's say, seven, eight seconds of shooting, or longer like quick, quick cuts of like you doing it.

Speaker 1: 27:54

So ultimately, like maybe kind of throw in a few visual hook, text hook and then the caption is where the meat is for SEO and also for the value that you're trying to tell people, because you can't tell people that in a seven second video, right, so all of it has to be below, say, like you can even put what the three things are really quick and be like read the caption for why or how to avoid this. So you kind of have to be thinking about what's going to get people to stick around, ideally on pretty much every piece of content, and you can use ChatGPT to help you with that as well, because it will definitely give you a lot of good options for that. So you want to be thinking about these three areas specifically, just like in any pieces of your content. You want to grow, you want to nurture and you want to convert. How are you doing that in your content?