Why I’m Loving the Fuel Your Photos Membership

I realized recently that many people who know me have no idea what I do.

Even the people who have been following Fuel Your Photos for years might not know what I’m currently putting my energy into.

In this post, I’m going to give an update about what I’ve been working on, and why I’m loving the Fuel Your Photos Membership so much right now!

First, a little backstory for those who don’t have any context…

Myself and Dylan Howell run a brand called Fuel Your Photos.

We teach photographers about websites and SEO. We have:

• The largest Facebook group dedicated to SEO for Photographers (over 26k members)
• A podcast where we talk about online marketing for photographers (currently 37 episodes)
• An SEO course with over 1,000 students (+ some pretty amazing testimonials)

Plus we’ve written dozens of blog posts, been featured on many of the industry’s top podcasts, and spoken about SEO and websites at some of the biggest photography conferences in the world.

Dylan and I both offer consulting services, but our primary product over the past few years has been our SEO course. For a while, we were selling the course for $1249, with lifetime access. However, we found that there were a few critical pieces missing if we really wanted to prioritize student success.

The Fuel Your Photos Membership

In late 2022, we decided to turn the course into a membership. We currently charge $499 to join, and then $249/year for anyone who wants to stick around.

The membership is so much more than just a course. It now includes two separate courses (with more to come) and also includes a private community, weekly group coaching, WordPress templates, and a few perks like discounted consulting and premium templates.

Over the past 2 months, I’ve been putting almost all of my energy into three areas of the membership, and they’ve really renewed my excitement about what we are offering at Fuel Your Photos.

The New Content Course

Last year, I decided to run a small workshop for 5 students. We spent 4 weeks learning about writing content that gets clicks from Google.

I absolutely loved the format. Weekly group calls and assignments so that everyone knew exactly how to keep on track to get a post published by the end of the workshop.

Since then, we have done 4 more rounds of this 4 week workshop, working with dozens of photographers on perfecting their blogging.

The results have been great. Most photographers get one piece of new content published by the end of the workshop. Some have created pieces that are already driving traffic. Others feel significantly more confident in their strategy and aren’t stressed about blogging anymore.

Other students realized how much expertise they have to bring to their readers, and published authoritative posts like these:

Since students were loving the workshop, we decided to also release it as a self-paced course (and it is *included* in the membership).

Now, there are 7 lessons and a Notion template for any students who want to take the course on their own time.

Combined with the weekly Office Hours, this can act exactly like the workshop! Just take a lesson each week, then come to an Office Hours call to review the assignment and get pointers about the next week!

Speaking of Office Hours…

Weekly Office Hours

I’ve been doing weekly Office Hours since January of this year.

These calls are open to any members, and are a place to get personalized help and chat with other members who are actively working to improve their website and SEO.

Instead of paying for 1-on-1 consulting where you need to use an hour all at once, you can get small chunks of consulting spread out over time *included in your membership*.

It’s also a great way to take advantage of the tools I have access to, like Semrush, Ahrefs and Sitebulb. Instead of paying $100+ per month to use the tool, you can come to an Office Hours call and ask me to run a report for you!

After a few months, I realized that this was one of the most valuable things I was offering members. It was also the main thing I looked forward to working on for the business each week.

In June, I decided to test doing Office Hours 3 days per week. The extra calls have certainly built momentum, and I’m so excited about the energy and results we’re building together each week!

I’m going to commit to 3 days per week for the next few months, with a heavy focus on collecting member success stories!

I’d love to see you there…

WordPress Templates

For a long time, I’ve been a huge fan of WordPress. I was doing custom WordPress development before I was a wedding photographer, and started using WP for my photography site in 2008.

As much as I love WordPress and *want* to recommend it to photographers, I can admit that it can be quite complicated to get started.

Also, if you’re using any popular 3rd party builder (Flothemes, Prophoto, Divi, Elementor), it’s basically a completely separate platform that can barely be called WordPress anymore.

I decided that I want a big part of my journey with Fuel Your Photos to be making WordPress *easier* for photographers!

The first step was to work on a standard BASE starting point so that we can offer more tutorials and education that really makes things easy. WordPress has toooo many options, so I want to be opinionated and give you the options that will be most effective and cause the least headache.

I started with an example family photographer template. This is an example of a template that prioritizes SEO for a multi specialty photographer. It uses sections directly from our course lesson about creating a perfect home page.

Here’s an example of Nashville Newborn Photographer using this template:

Recently I decided to split up the Kadence child them from a cloud library of templates and sections.

I am excited about adding much more content about WordPress, and many more sections to Kindling Cloud in the coming months.

Again, all of this is *included* in the membership!

Future Plans for the Membership

I’ve been trying to “follow what works” with Fuel Your Photos, but also have some ideas about the direction we’ll be taking things next. These are some things coming up in the next few months.

Online Learning Experience Improvements

Sometime last year we were forced to move our course from a hosted course platform that was closing down. We decided to self host on WordPress, but didn’t have time to do an extensive custom build.

I’m using the membership as a way to improve my development skills, and to experiment with some of the ideas I have for creating better online learning experiences.

This will happen slowly over time, but I’m constantly tweaking to improve the member experience.

More Courses

Our course library will continue to grow over time. We may restructure the current course a bit, and add some courses dedicated to specific topics. I’m already working on an interesting course about AI and SEO that I hope to release ASAP.

Continued Office Hours

As long as people keep showing up and getting value, I plan to continue with 3 Office Hours calls per week for the foreseeable future. I’ll keep working to tweak the format, and will probably dedicate one day each week to WordPress/Kadence support!

Top Secret Tools and Features

Dylan and I have some *really* cool ideas that we’re quietly working on in the background. We aren’t sure about release dates, so we don’t want to tease them too much… but stay tuned for some cool projects we have planned for this and next year 😉

Pricing Updates

Honestly, the value of the membership is extremely high if you’re someone who wants to get serious about improving your website and SEO.

We lowered the price of admission to give more people access, but as we continue to add more value we will need to adjust the price.

At the end of July, we plan to increase the up-front price for new members to $549. We will likely increase the price again in the fall. The annual renewal will stay the same.

Special Offer

Right now, if you purchase our membership, you’ll be presented with an option to add two consulting calls to your order for only $200. Calls must be used in August or September.

That’s a total of $699 for two 60 minute 1-on-1 calls, and a one year membership including everything I talked about in this post!!

This offer will only appear for the first 10 people who decide to take it!

TL;DR

This year, Fuel Your Photos started offering a membership, and I’ve been working hard to implement new ideas, new content, and provide more support for our members.

The value is high, student results are great, and there is much more to come!

If you’re a photographer who wants to learn more about SEO and using your website to get new clients I’d love to see you in the membership!