Twelve Months of Personal Branding Photoshoot Ideas to Grow Your Business

Not sure if monthly branding sessions are right for you and your business? After all, how many pictures can you really use each month? That all depends on your business and how you market your brand!

Here are twelve ways (one for each month of the year!) to use monthly branding sessions to grow your business!

1. CHANGING SEASONS - Unless you’re traveling, it can be a bit odd to see a warm weather photo when your audience knows you should have some snow on the ground! Seasons affect your wardrobe, your environment, and maybe your product offerings! If your brand is more focused on personal topics like food, skin care, fashion or family, the seasons will be a major factor in dictating your content.

2. SEASONAL OR HOLIDAY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES - there are tons of promotional seasons per year, and if you are a product or service based business, you want to show off your newest offerings for back to school, fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, winter, gifts, New Years, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Spring Break, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, summer, Fourth of July. If you’re a shop owner, you maybe also incorporate seasonal decor and displays into your sessions.

3. NATIONAL DAY OF….Tacos? Margaritas? Ice Cream? Best friends? There’s a national day to celebrate almost every day of the year, and you can pick and choose what fits your branding that you want to celebrate and share with your audience! Remember - social media is for engagement, entertainment and fun! Your audience wants to see the things that you enjoy that they can relate to! If you’re an influencer, chances are a lot of your sponsored posts could revolve around this type of content! See below for quick links to all monthly national days, weeks and months of observance!

4. EVENTS - Whether you’re attending, hosting, or planning, you can look at your year ahead and hand pick events that you want featured content for as it relates to food, fashion, decor, planning, seasons, new product launches, awards, and lifestyle.

5. PROJECTS - Home renovation? Setting up shop? Featuring a seasonal menu? Creating a course or launching a big new product, service or collaboration? Keep your audience informed and excited as you go through the process and share your big reveal!

6. YOU - This is what personal branding is all about, after all! Sharing your face, at work, out and about, doing your thing, attending events, your style. You should get a variety of shots to maximize your content and be able to use your photos for a number of marketing strategies. This means lifestyle shots, zoomed out and space to add text or info, close up details shots, a variety of poses and actions.

7. YOUR SQUAD - Depending on your business or brand, you may incorporate family stories into your work. At least twice a year, you might consider a session with your partner, kids, pets, best friends, or team!

8. YOUR WORKSPACE OR SHOP - Consider a session that showcases your workspace, shop, studio or home. Wide shots, details and you working within the space. These are images you can use throughout the year! Add seasonal shots as you go, and schedule another workspace shoot if you do a major renovation or update.

9. STYLE - As a style blogger, influencer or small business, you may plan around events or new seasonal wardrobes, gift guides, or travel to feature your personal style! You may have sponsored posts or your tried and true favorite items that you want to incorporate or make the focus of a session.

10. BRANDED DETAILS - These might be considered “filler” images, but things that showcase more of your brand can help add variety to your content. These might be considered your own personal stock photos. Things like your desk, tools and equipment, letterboards with favorite quotes or sayings, flatlays with an assortment of items. There are so many possibilities! You can also think of your environment, like shots around town or your city, storefronts, and places that fit your story. This may be a harbor of sailboats, a busy city street, your favorite park bench or outdoor seating area at a coffee shop. If your home is full of plants or decor, you may do a styled shoot featuring these kinds of details.

11. WORK LIFE - Action shots, working with clients, having meetings, greeting customers. Whatever work looks like for you, there are a lot of ideas and options to share with your audience!

12. MILESTONES AND CELEBRATIONS - Did you hit your first 100, 1,000 or 10,000 followers? Did your business just turn 1, 5 or 10? Did you receive an award or recognition? Celebrate your wins and share them! Order yourself a cake, pop some champagne, and book a shoot!

These are just a few ideas, but even within these categories, there are so many possibilities!

Not sure where to start? I created a 30-day content planning template to get you started!

“but wait- there’s more!” she said.

keep scrolling for daily, weekly and monthly celebration and observance quick links!

National Days, Weeks and Months to Celebrate

Just for fun, here are ideas for each month of the year, specific to the calendar year, as well as quick links to all those daily, weekly and monthly national celebrations and observances:

• JANUARY - New Year, new business or personal goals, launch new product or service, National Days, January Weekly Observances (including National Pizza Week), January Monthly Observances

• FEBRUARY - Groundhog Day, Superbowl Sunday, Valentine’s Day, Black History Month, February National Days, February Weekly Observances (including Random Acts of Kindness Week), February Monthly Observances

• MARCH - Spring Equinox, St. Patrick’s Day, March National Days, March Weekly Observances (including International Women’s Week), March Monthly Observances

• APRIL - April Fools Day, Arbor Day, Earth Day, Easter, Teacher Appreciation Day, April National Days, April Weekly Observances, (including National Library Week and National Volunteer Week), April Monthly Observances

• MAY - May the Fourth (Star Wars Day - yup, nerd), Mother’s Day, Memorial Day Weekend “MDW”, May National Days, May Weekly Observances (including National Small Business Week and National Pet Week), May Monthly Observances (including National Photography Month!)

• JUNE - Graduation, Father’s Day, Summer Solstice, June National Days, June Weekly Observances (including National Gardening Week), June Monthly Observances (including LGBTQIA Pride Month)

• JULY - Independence Day, Chocolate Day, Moon Day, July National Days, July Weekly Observances (including such gems as Be Nice To Jersey Week, Nude Recreation Week and Everybody Deserves a Massage Week), July Monthly Observances (including National Ice Cream Month)

• AUGUST - Summer, back to school, August National Days, August Weekly Observances (including World Breastfeeding Week and Be Kind to Humankind Week), August Monthly Observances (including Happiness Happens Month and International Peace Month)

• SEPTEMBER - Fall Equinox, Grandparents Day, Labor Day Weekend, September National Days (including Talk Like a Pirate Day), September Weekly Observances (including National Suicide Prevention Week and National Keep Kids Creative Week), September Monthly Observances (including National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month)

• OCTOBER - Fall foliage, apple picking, pumpkins, Halloween, October National Days (including National Cinnamon Bun Day on the 4th and Boss’ Day), October Weekly Observances (including National Fire Prevention Week and National Business Women’s Week), October Monthly Observances (including National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month)

• NOVEMBER - Election Day, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, November National Days (including National Calzone Day for all my Parks and Rec loving friends), November Weekly Observances (including World Kindness Week), November Monthly Observances (including National Novel Writing Month or “NaNoWriMo”)

• DECEMBER - Winter Solstice, Season of Giving, December National Days (including National Day of Giving), December Weekly Observances (including Gluten Free Baking Week), December Monthly Observances (including AIDS Awareness Month and National Human Rights Month)

Plan for the Year Ahead

I hope these ideas inspire you to look at your calendar and start brainstorming for the year ahead! As it is in business, the days can pass quickly. And when you create a clear plan for your marketing and content, weeks or months in advance, you’ll save yourself time and frustration because you’ll already know what’s in your calendar!

grab a free 30-day content planning template

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Shannon Sorensen is a Connecticut-based small business and branding photographer. Personal branding photography for small business and entrepreneurs focuses on showing the heart behind the business, compelling stories to help your audience get to know you and your business better, and turn fans into paying clients! Learn more about personal and business branding photography.

Book your branding session with Shannon!

Why I'm Using Snapchat & Loving It

This is a shorter version of a post on my creative lifestyle blog, Dancing Lily Studio. I hope you enjoy it, and as with all of my blog posts, the opinions expressed here are solely my own. 

I don't usually post much about social media and how to use it, but I thought today I'd talk a bit about Snapchat and why it's quickly becoming one of my favorite social tools.

I joined Snapchat last summer with a group of fellow moms to share fun, quick snippets of our kids' days with each other. Then more friends and family joined, and guess what? It's become the main place where I share my day to day life. Here's why:

Around late January, we were planning a trip to Disney, Lily's first time there, and I knew I wanted to be able to share our trip with friends and family. I didn't, however, want to clog Facebook or Instagram with pictures and videos of the trip for five days straight. Especially with little things that happened throughout the day. I have a documentary heart and wanted to capture everything.

Snapchat was the place to share all of that. I could take photos or 10 second videos throughout the day, add them to my Snapstory (more on that in a bit), and at the end of the day, I saved my story to my phone for backup and posted the whole video story to Facebook. Prior to the trip, I shared my username on Facebook and Instagram and invited friends and family to follow me if they wanted to watch my snaps during the day. I was surprised at how many people signed up!

So, if you're lost on how to use Snapchat or what the point of it even is, here's how it generally works:

1. Capture. You either take a picture (and choose the duration of the photo to appear for 1-10 seconds), or have up to 10 seconds to capture on video by holding down the camera button, to share with your friends/followers. 

2. Filters! Snapchat is constantly adding fun filters to use that do anything from change the coloring of your snap, to mark the time or geotag the place, weird face filters. You can also add text, emojis, or draw on your photo or video.

3. Do you want to save? You can choose to save your picture or video to your phone before sending it to friends by clicking the little button at the bottom.

4. Next you share. You choose exactly who sees each "snap". You hand pick who to send it to, allowing you to send a picture or video to one person, a small group of people, or everyone on your list. This allows your to, in a sense, have a private conversation through pictures and video. Something a bit more private might just go to Sean or my family or best friends, while other snaps can go to everyone. 

5. Life is short. A snap only lives for 24 hours on your story. Then it's gone. Whether you share a picture of your dinner or a quick video from a hike or hanging out at home or working or getting buzzed on boxed wine, even if it's not "pretty", it's only there for a limited time. If you send someone a snap directly, it's there until they view it, and then it disappears. They can view it one more time by holding down the snap, but you'll receive a notification that they've replayed it. It's meant to be brief. 

6. Put the CHAT in Snapchat. You can go back and forth with contacts having conversations through photo, video or text! You can also reply or comment on a snap sent to you, or one that you see on someone's story (but only if you are mutual followers), but once that comment is received, it also disappears.

7. Snap your story. You can add any snaps to your "Snap Story", which is public to anyone who follows you. You can download your story at any time to your phone, and any snaps on your story from the past 24 hours will save to a .mp4 video.

8. Keep in mind, lovers of landscape. All photos or videos are vertical layout, so if you save them, they may be oriented differently from what you intended.

This photo has been rotated from it's original awkwardly vertical orientation.

So, what's so great about a social tool that's so brief and temporary? It's liberating! It more raw, more real, no pressure to create a curated gallery of your life that anyone can view indefinitely. It's an opportunity to share your day to day with your audience in a way that's more authentic, unedited, and a true glimpse into your life. The camera quality isn't amazing, the filters are just ok, so these are not going to be amazing visuals. You can share 2 snaps per day or 20 or none at all, and the next day, do something completely different. And there's no pressure to make it all personal or all business. You can use it however you wish, and start fresh each day. 

For now, I am enjoying sharing bits of my day. Since I work from home, and Lily is home with me when she's not at school, you may see me working on crafts/sewing, painting, Lil playing, funny or random pictures, cooking dinner, current editing work, on location for photography, our weekend adventures to Massachusetts...It's probably the most real representation of my life, if that is of any interest. 

Are you on Snapchat? Do you like it? Do you think it's just another passing trend in social media? I'm always fascinated by how these platforms come and go and change. There have certainly been plenty that seemed like they'd become huge, but were basically over in a week (Google Wave, Ello, Periscope). Not to say they were a failure, they're still somewhat used, but there are definitely platforms that I think will remain more significant for the time being. 

If you'd like to follow me on Snapchat, my username is shannonsoren. Please keep it clean! lol