Hi friends! I’m Amanda Hedgepeth and I’ve been a wedding and portrait photographer for the past seven years while building my dream life and business here on the East Coast with the people who matter most to me!

I want to share a little bit with you today about two things that have kept my business going SO strong: social media and blogging.

These two things have undoubtedly been what’s built this business of ours so well and we can thank them both for getting us the clients that we adore so much because we have created such a relate-able brand through these two platforms! After seven years of using them ourselves, we know that these can be pain points for people who want to utilize them but feel a little lost about where to start, what content to share, why it matters – and we want to help you with that! Here we go!

Social Media

For seven years, I made an effort to show up continuously on social media (which back then, started with just a Facebook business page!) and I never took more than a week off, ever until recently this past January during a scheduled hiatus of three weeks. Even when I wasn’t shooting a session or wedding that week, I would re-share old work or just an image of our family, and I had no idea that I was building an incredibly strong personal brand that connected clients to me in a way that would be so powerful for our brand new business. Using social media is (generally) free and tells people that you love what you do, you do it often, and you want to be the person who provides this service for them…but people will NOT know these things if you are not in front of their faces showing up diligently! If you post once every couple of weeks, some of your closest friends and a few others may know what you do, but it’s not going to necessarily keep YOU in the forefront of their mind when it comes to that craft or service versus their other friend who shows up and proves they are deeply enthusiastic and passionate and AVAILABLE to do that very same thing! When we mixed our actual work with telling the story of our family – FIREWORKS – it was like this gold mine we hit and if you’re struggling with how to be professional but create a RELATABLE brand that works for you, we have a free video and worksheet below!

Blogging 

I’ve been blogging for less time than I’ve been utilizing social media, but once I discovered the power in hosting a blog as a way to serve clients AND be a vault of resources for other photographers, business owning moms, etc…it became a HUGE priority to me! And guess what? It does NOT have to be a daily thing or scary. At all. There is a way to go about blogging to make it FAR more simple and on top of that, you can show up consistently without showing up constantly. I think people fear they need to come up with five new posts a week and that’s simply not true! Social media actually has played a part in alleviating that burden of constantly blogging…because we can still “show up” with a simple social media share or post and then save our best content for 1-2 times a week on the blog in more detail. For us, the blog shares about how our family has grown, our business has grown, our style has changed and improved, our Dave Ramsey journey, our faith journey and SO much more! If you want to take your blogging up a level by figuring out WHAT to share, how to share it and how to make it work BEST for you…we have a coupon code below for our two new downloads available separately or bundled in the Five Waves Shop just for Creative at Heart readers! 🙂

Creating a Relatable Brand video sign up! 

Five Waves Shop!

25% off ANYTHING in the Five Waves Shop until July 31 – use code CREATIVE

The creative industry is filled with SO much good advice and education and we think that’s such an incredible thing… but we want you to know that you can SIMPLIFY these processes by determining what matters most to you to share, how and when you’ll share, what boundaries you’ll create and more. You can do this!!! 🙂 

 

 

Be sure to connect with Amanda here: 

Blog // Website // Facebook // Instagram