I tell you that story because I want you to remember something as we go through this episode: the original engine of my business was never an algorithm. 

It was never a platform. 

It was someone being told, “you need to go see her, she’s the best at what she does.”

And I believe that form of marketing is coming back. Sort of.

This is Unpopular Opinions, and today’s unpopular opinion is this: your website and your blog are more important than ever. And AI is the new word of mouth marketing.

The Four Eras

So I’ve been in business for 27 years, and over the past 27 years, I’ve seen what I call the four eras of marketing trends, that I want to share with you real quick.

Let’s walk through this, because I think when you see the whole arc laid out, it clicks.

Era one: word of mouth.

That’s where I started. One photo, one postcard, one referral chain. Simple, slow, and entirely built on trust between humans.

Era two: websites and blogging.

Once I had a portfolio worth showing, the website’s whole job was just that — show what you do. Pretty simple, honestly. 

And blogging back then was basically an extension of the portfolio. You blogged a session to prove you were busy and working. “Look, here’s this week’s shoot.” That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

And here’s something I’ll say that might ruffle some feathers — a lot of photographers are still blogging that way today. Like it’s 2007. And it’s not helping them. More on that in a minute.

Era three: social media.

This is where things got loud. 

Social media became the new storefront. People didn’t just want to see your work anymore, they wanted to feel like they knew you before they ever booked you. 

So we shifted into telling stories, building relationships, showing personality, all in the name of trust before the transaction. 

And for a long time, that worked really well. It also became exhausting, and it made a lot of us believe that if you weren’t constantly visible on Instagram, you didn’t exist.

Era four: where we are right now.

People are impatient. 

Nobody wants to scroll through fifteen posts or read a wall of text hoping to find the one useful sentence. The market as a whole is just kind of over it.  People still consume social media, but it’s not the trusted source it once was.  People know that it’s used primarily for marketing, and people don’t like being sold to.  They still look, but they’re not necessarily using it to make buying decisions.

They are looking for referrals.

And to get those referrals,  they’re opening up ChatGPT or Claude or Google’s AI overview and just asking. “Who’s the best newborn photographer near me.” “Who should I book for my family photos” They want the answer. Not the journey to the answer.  Make sense?

And that, right there, is the moment we’re in. 

We’re basically back to word of mouth, only, now the mouth is a robot.

As a small business owner and a marketer, I think this is fascinating, and honestly, kind of exciting.

Here’s the parallel I want you to really sit with.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, when someone referred a business to a friend, how did that friend vet it before calling? They went and looked at the website. They read the blog. They wanted to see the proof before they picked up the phone. The referral got you the introduction. The website and the blog got you the booking.

Now, AI is doing the referring. Someone asks ChatGPT who the best newborn photographer in their area is, and the AI gives them a name. That’s the referral. 

But here’s the part people are missing: the AI didn’t pull that name out of thin air. It reads websites. It reads blogs. It read reviews. And it makes recommendations based on the information that it finds. And friends, thats what people do to.  They read through websites and blogs, and then make a decision about a business based on what they find.

So the referral source changed.  But the vetting step are the same. Back in the early 2000, the information that was on your website and blog are what got you clients. Now, with these new changes, websites and blogs are the thing once again.  

The only thing that’s different is who’s doing the referring.

Which means if you’ve spent the last few years pouring all your energy into Instagram and neglecting your website, you’ve actually been investing in the wrong half of the equation. You can get all the social proof in the world, but if your website and blog aren’t built to be read — by humans or by AI — you’re business is going to be harder to find.

I’ll give you my own proof point, because I don’t think it’s fair to teach something I haven’t tested on myself first. 

I went and checked my own visibility — ran the actual searches, the same ones I’m shared with my newsletter list last week. So I search on Claude and on Google’s AI overview, when someone searches for a Seattle newborn photographer, I show up. Prominently. On Perplexity? I don’t, yet. That’s a gap, and I’m closing it right now, in real time, the same way I’m teaching it.

And that’s the marketing work we all need to be doing right.

And the good news is, I think this kind of old way of marketing is much easier. You’re no long chasing an Instagram algorithm. 

All you have to do is create content on your website and blog that is easy to read and understand by both people and AI.

So what does that mean in practice?

 It means going back to your blog — that thing a lot of us let die or kept using as a portfolio extension — and turning it into something genuinely useful. 

Create client-centered content. Answer the actual questions your clients ask you in DMs, in consults, in the studio or in your emails. 

This is exactly what I’ve been teaching to the photographers I mentor or coach inside my certification program.  I’ve been teaching this for YEARS because client-centered content was always good marketing — it just took the rest of the industry a minute to catch up to why it matters again.

If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines thinking your website doesn’t matter, or that blogging is a waste of time, I want you to hear this clearly: that thinking is what’s keeping you invisible right now. 

Your blog and your website matter more than ever.

And I’d love to help you get yours optimized for this new marketing era that we’re just entered

I built a program called Searchlight specifically to help you with this.

Searchlight is a six weeks program, and it walks you through exactly how to become findable — in Google, and in AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude — using the same client-centered content approach I just talked about. 

We go through your website, your blog strategy, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and we build what I call a visibility loop, where all of those pieces reinforce each other instead of you starting from scratch every time you post something.

It’s just $47 a week for six weeks, and enrollment opens this week.

If you’ve felt invisible in search lately if clients aren’t finding you and it’s feeling harder than ever to book out your calendar — that’s not a talent problem. That’s a visibility problem, and it’s fixable. 

That’s literally what I’m going to help you do over the next six weeks.

I’m sharing the link in the show notes. 

Let me know if you have any questions

And I’ll see you next week.