Writing is an act of ego. When you sit down in front of the white page, you have to truly believe that you have something interesting to say for someone else to want to read it. And, even though writing can be a cathartic and liberating way of expressing what’s on your mind, it can also become an experience filled with frustration. Continually trying to measure the success of your writing by the number of people who read your posts can send you down a spiral of disappointment. There will never be enough analytics in the world to satisfy your need to be read.
When I started my blog, I did it with the idea in mind to tell the story of my journey from working in a different industry to becoming a full-time professional photographer. I wasn’t actually telling the story to other people, I was telling it to myself. It was my way to track my progress and to remind myself to stay humble and to never forget where I came from. However, it quickly became my strongest marketing tool, and, nowadays, I purposely use it to shape my branding and to tell the world about my learnings, my work and my concerns.
When you work professionally in photography, the competition is intense. You need to be constantly promoting your work and letting potential clients know about your existence. This is particularly true in big cities like London, where photographers spring up like mushrooms. What’s worse, we are all promoting ourselves in the same unidirectional ways (emails promos, newsletters) and it is very frustrating when after so many years of investing time and money promoting yourself nobody seems to be listening on the other side. According to figures from Spektrix, over 75% of these promos remain unopened, and over 97% are not clicked through.
Blogging seemed like a solution to that. Through my posts, I am telling the story of my brand and telling my readers what I stand for. But, measuring the success of blogging comes with its challenges. You find yourself from very early trying to figure out how to increase the number of visits and subscribers. And none of those numbers tells you if people are actually reading you.
Luckily, I realised that keeping track of those figures was useless. Even if I had hundreds of subscribers and thousands of visits to my posts, I wouldn’t be able to know if someone was actually reading them unless someone gave me some form of feedback. So I stopped obsessing over those numbers. These days I just write hoping that one day someone will run into my posts and find something useful in them. Until then, it’s only a labour of love.
If you are a photographer or a creative in general, and you still haven’t found a way of promotion that feels like you, why not create it yourself? That’s what my friend Olivia Pinnock did for herself. She wasn’t finding the jobs that she wanted in the industry and that’s why she created the Fashion Debates, a platform that has allowed her to show the industry what she wants to be hired for.
So, even if blogging sounds like a self-centred thing to do, I do it in the hopes that my words inspire others to reassess their lives, to consider a different perspective on the issues that I care for and to learn about the creatives industries. That is what my brand and I stand for, and that is what I try to promote.
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