Meredith's husband 0:33

This podcast . This episode , is about using your blog to be happy . Using your blog to do things that make you happy . Not just for better SEO , because you need to blog . Use your blog to do things that will make you enjoy life more . Do you remember having that shoot a couple years ago where you shot a kid who had autism ? Yeah , let me rephrase that If we don't want to shoot kids with autism , you remember photographing a kid who had autism ?

Meredith 0:59

Well , I photographed a school of autistic kids .

Meredith's husband 1:03

But before that I mean a couple of years ago .

Meredith 1:05

Oh , yeah , yeah , yeah .

Meredith's husband 1:07

It was a single family .

Meredith 1:09

Yeah , with one kid . And you came , yes , yeah , who had autism ?

Meredith's husband 1:13

Yeah , and you came home . I remember you coming home from that . You were super excited , you were just buzzy . He was the best you were like me after having too much coffee .

Meredith 1:21

Yeah , I'm actually , can I say , I'm photographing . I then photographed them again and then I'm photographing them again this weekend .

Meredith's husband 1:30

Oh , wow , that's great and I remember also you photographing the school with autistic children . Yeah , and you came home also from that like super electric .

Meredith 1:38

Yeah , with autistic children . Yeah , and you came home also from that like super electric , yeah , okay .

Meredith's husband 1:40

So let's fast forward a little bit . Okay , to , can I say , your ADHD diagnosis .

Meredith 1:46

Yes .

Meredith's husband 1:47

And then your subsequent photographing ADHD kids , although not on purpose .

Meredith 1:54

Yeah .

Meredith's husband 1:55

You have done that and you have found that you connect with them . Yeah , you resonate with them . You resonate with them , I should say you're able to connect with them , whereas not everyone can . That's sometimes challenging ?

Meredith 2:06

Perhaps ? Yeah , because I speak the language .

Meredith's husband 2:10

So you remember talking about this as a service that you might want to offer , that you wanted to do more of this .

Meredith 2:15

Yeah , after the very first shoot I wanted to .

Meredith's husband 2:18

Yeah , I know , know , I remember the problem was and is that's not something you can really just put up on your site and say you offer as a service , just out of the blue . I feel like it's , that's a big step . You don't really know what , you don't know what kind of search activity is out there let's say , you don't know if people are looking for that you don't't know , et cetera .

Meredith 2:37

I know people are looking for it , but I know especially people who are high on the autistic spectrum , who have children , rather that are high on the autistic spectrum , always fear and they don't want to approach photographers because they think , oh my kid is going to .

Meredith's husband 2:54

It's just , there's a lot of surrounding it . So it would be nice to have something on the site that makes those people feel more comfortable , though right . Unwelcomed , yeah . So let's fast forward a little bit more . And you recently have started blogging , yes , to my own surprise , and the blogs have been pretty good , also to my surprise . And you recently asked me if you should blog about , if this was something you should blog about yeah , photographing kids with autism , with ADHD neuro other neurodiversities yeah .

Meredith's husband 3:28

And at first I didn't really know , because I did some some very quick keyword research and I didn't see any search activity for that . But then I started thinking , well , let's just do it , even though we don't know exactly how many people are searching for that sort of thing . Let's just do it , and then we'll get feedback Right . The problem with keyword research is that you can't tell exactly what people are looking for .

Meredith 3:51

Google just kind of gives you . You need to research , right . That's why it's called research .

Meredith's husband 3:55

No , that is the research . Like typical keyword research , Google is just going to give you kind of rough estimates . That's the best you can get . However , if you write a blog about something and people start to see it and it becomes visible in Google , then you can see exactly how people are searching .

Meredith 4:12

Hence the necessity for blogs . Yeah , so they secretly can help you .

Meredith's husband 4:16

They can Exactly blogs , yeah , so they secretly can help you . They can .

Meredith 4:21

Exactly .

Meredith's husband 4:21

So what we're doing now is you've written that blog about photographing kids with ADHD . I think it was specifically ADHD in that blog and , like I said , I did some keyword research . I can't tell you what other searches are happening out there , but the step now is I got a little bit of an idea about what types of searches are happening . So we're going to fine tune that blog a little bit and we're going to publish it Okay , and then we're going to see how it connects with people .

Meredith 4:51

Okay .

Meredith's husband 4:52

Then we will know exactly what people , because right now we don't really know what to target exactly .

Meredith's husband 4:58

Do we talk about photographing kids with ADHD , with autism ? Do we say neurodiversity , what are the popular terms ? We don't know really what resonates . So we're going to publish that blog and then we're going to see what resonates and then we'll come back in a month or two months or in the future at some point and we'll fine tune again . We'll have a better idea of what people are looking for . Then we can take the next step about oh , what resonates ? What might you put on your site ? What might you start to offer ?

Meredith 5:26

as a service . So the people listening , who may not focus on that but may have their own special niches , can do the same .

Meredith's husband 5:36

Yes , in fact , I would say that's , that's , you've , you've , you've gotten to the point before I have .

Meredith's husband 5:42

Welcome to my world . You should use your blog not only just for , like , seo purposes and doing stuff that you feel you need to do , but find something that you like to do , something that makes you happy . Yeah , use your blog to explore that , without having to make it official and put it on your homepage . This is what I do , because that's a big step , because a lot of times you might want to do something like I don't really think people would appreciate that or there's probably nobody looking for that . Your blog is a perfect opportunity to explore those things a little bit and figure that out .

Meredith's husband 6:17

There's got to be some part of your business that you really like yes , and maybe is not like the main focus of your business . Yes , like you really connected well with kids with autism and ADHD and you found you really liked it , but you don't think there's a market out there for that .

Meredith 6:36

I do think there's a market , but I don't really know there probably is there .

Meredith's husband 6:38

Probably is there , probably is . I agree there probably is , but we don't know how to go about it . To access it so we will use the blog . Now that you are blogging , now I'm blogging , we can use the blog to explore that a little bit . Find a niche and another added benefit of blogging about kind of niche topics like this you can get to the top of Google a whole lot faster with a niche topic than you can by targeting , say , family photography , brooklyn .

Meredith 7:05

Right .

Meredith's husband 7:06

Because there's not going to be anybody . I should say there are probably going to be very few people competing for that niche term . So I took that recent blog that you did .

Meredith 7:15

Yes .

Meredith's husband 7:16

And I did a little video , demo , tutorial type of thing about how we can fix it . Actually , I shouldn't call it a tutorial , it's just a demo . It's not like a course , but I made a little video just doing what I would do as the next step for this blog in targeting that niche and I just kind of went along . It's like an over-the-shoulder video just explaining what I'm doing and why . That's in the free section of SEIQ . I'll put the link below so you can go find this episode on your favorite podcast player and then visit the link .

Meredith's husband 7:50

That's never going to happen . I'll save the link .

Meredith 7:53

What is the danger of putting a blog out and then realizing it's not helping and you don't like it and then taking it off ?

Meredith's husband 8:03

There's very little danger to that . Oh , there you go . If you put a blog up and then you decide that you don't like it and you want to take it down , the only danger would be if a whole bunch of other people like it and it's getting a lot of attention and a lot of links and a lot of traffic , and then you take it down . What's the likelihood of that ? Close to zero right .

Meredith 8:23

Is there a way to check first ?

Meredith's husband 8:25

first , what do you mean ? Just before you take it down oh , absolutely how I got about a hundred other episodes you can check out meredith's laughing so hard that you can't hear her . Oh my stomach hurts .