When using your blog for marketing and PR purposes, it’s vital that you turn on your visual thinking and come up with great ideas that can communicate energy around your project. Using a blog to promote your message and to connect to your current and potential community is now commonplace. But if you want people to talk about it, and spread the word, you need to make a visual impact.
How do you stand out from the crowd?
Here’s an example using a very simple project. Because it’s hypothetical, there are no photos for it. Let’s say you’ve self-published a recipe book, made up of recipes your family has loved for the past 20 years, with a few really old ones from your mother’s day. You want to use a blog to promote it beyond your close family, and to create strong visual meaning so people will remember it.
Number one: who loves your book the most? Your family, and possibly a few friends. How can they provide visual impact for your project? Simply by being photographed (in good light) laughing and enjoying one another’s company at the table. Pop it in the blog and voila!
Let’s say you connect with a worthy group or association, willing to support your efforts. If they were to have a fundraising dinner made entirely from your recipes (with participants receiving copies of your book) you would have plenty of opportunities for photos of a positive event to include in your blog – plus a link into a good cause as well. Or go for a school event, something other than family, where your recipe book can bring out the good times and good feelings in people. Again, document the whole process, not just the final meal.
Endorsements are standard workhorses of the photo-op, and if you do find a prominent person to endorse your recipe book, don’t think only of a text blurb. Try to get a photo of yourself and the endorser together, with the book, or perhaps sharing one of your cupcakes! Very blog-worthy indeed!
No external endorsement or organization? Use your extended network to get a couple of cooking teams together, to make your recipes, then celebrate by eating the results and reviewing the creations. All this can go into your blog. Be sure to photo-document the whole process of each team. You could even go so far as to select a couple of “judges” to determine who wins the “bake-off”!
One tip to remember: nothing looks less appetizing than food that has been badly photographed. If you don’t have access to great lighting and a good camera, stay focused on the interactions between people – go for the smiles and the good times rather than the plate of limp-looking yam fries.
Okay, that’s enough of the recipe book example. The main thing to remember is that everything you do in getting your project to fruition is bloggable. It is never too late to start. You can use the old documentary trick of “recreating” if you didn’t start out documenting your process. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a tagged picture can speak even louder.
And one more tip: Be yourself! It’s a lot more fun.