What do customers look for in a blog?

[waple]

I've never been into blogs, but I hear all the kids are doing it nowadays. I've read several feature stories in magazines about sucessful photographers that say their blog is an important part of their web site.

What sort of things do you think your customers (family portrait, events, commercial photography) would you look for if they went to your blog?

I haven't made my blog public yet since I only installed it a couple days ago but it's at www.allizdogstudios.com/allizblog if you want to see it. I tried to get it to match my site, and this was as close as I could get.

I've only made three posts but I'm not really sure what I should show. Do I need to maybe go into more details about the shoot? I'm assuming that a client won't really care about how the lighting was set up or what parts of the photo I dodged and burned. And I'm not targeting other photographers/peers. This is something that I want to use to help build a client base.

Please approach this as a potential customer and let me know what you think is missing or should be changed. I've looked at other blogs out there, but since I've only been looking at blogs for less than 48 hours, I was hoping to get some opinions of folks who have been familiar with them for a much longer time, and maybe have seen them evolve in some way or another (I wanted to highlight this because I know someone will tell me to look at other blogs).

Since I'm not just a portrait photographer, but also shoot products and sell art prints, I plan on posting on several different things like how I took a bland photo and turned it into a painting, maybe before and after processessing on a portrait, or I don't know, whatever.

If you know of any good photographer blogs that are aimed at the customer that would be good for me to look at, I'd appreciate links. Like I said, I've looked at several, but I'm having a hard time really figuring out what's good for a customer's point of view. If they even look at blogs.

Thanks for any advice.

[Pony]

Share alittle about yourself,your recent successes,upcoming work,be a little bit personal.When people can identify w/you,most of the time you will have better favor w/them.That mixed w/samples of your work and info about your business should go a long way.One site I spent much time on last night was http://scarlettlillian.net . This person is really open but there should be much info you find helpful.Thanks for the previous K!

[waple]

Thanks Pony. Do you think that having a really, really long page like that is a good idea or is it better to only have maybe the most recent one or few open then have the others minimized where you have to click to open them? Or do you think that people would tend be less likely to look at anything they have to click to find?

[Pony]

She attracts a mostly female audience and women love conversation.It think it best to not have that much length.I for one will grow alittle impatient or less interested with her style.I would stay with medium length and let the viewer have the option of selection.Alot of that will be based on your ability to provide that content.How much will that be? The quicker I find what applies to me or my interest,the more likely I will return.I bounced around her site quite a bit because of the length.Mutliple pages should be easier to track info.