Blogs were a big hit a few years ago when every single person followed you because there was little competition; now-a-day’s however, we have every single photographer, teacher, programmer, designer, and student blogging! Is it worth building blogs anymore?
The few blogs that popped up a few years ago have exploded in traffic! They are now the big boys while we play in the sand with our own blogs. Sure, if you can keep an up-to-date blog with unique and interesting content the visitors will slowly trickle in. When I mean trickle in, I mean like 5 visitors a day – if you are lucky. And then 3 of them exit within the first page. Photography blogs are all the same, therefore do not expect a ton of visitors. That is the life of a blogger… so why continue? Why is it good for photographers to blog?
Photographers should simply blog about their day and post pictures that would be going into their gallery. Then you ask why? I already have pictures in my gallery? Today’s generation of internet users do not really care for your fancy flash gallery that takes an hour to load… instead we like to hear more about your shoot, about you, and what kind of different things you thought about while taking the pictures. That is why a blog is great! New clients may browse through your image gallery, but they want to see (or read) the type of person you really are! Perhaps this is not a conscious thought, but if they are debating over two photographers with the same photo’s – and yours has a blog, then they feel like they are already interacting with you.
Don’t believe in the power of user interaction? Why do you think Facebook is so popular? Social Media is all about interaction!
So you may not get tons and tons of visitors, but if you have your blog linked to your online gallery you might just get an extra client or two because of the extra interaction with the user.
Quick Blogging Basics:
- Spread links to other sites from your blog! This will increase SEO ranking and you may just get some link love in return!
- Add articles on a constant basis, either it be 1/week or 1/month, keep it constant instead of random and spontaneous. We often schedule articles to publish on a certain days ahead of time.
- Think of a catchy title for all your posts!
- Add numerous images to longer articles. This actually acts as a “roadmap” to keep people from getting lost in one large page of text.
- Use unique content! Often a photographers blog will be a personal recollection of the day-not a copied post from wiki about the mechanics of a camera for example.
awesome article.
I’ve had a blog for a little while and have wondered where it’s going. I’ve tried a few different thing including using it for street photos, taliing about equipment, thoughts etc. However I’ve decided to have one blog on my main site which I’ll use to talk about projects and specific shoots and a very simple photo only blog for the street shots. Primarily I wanted to keep the street photos together without a gallery and keep the working blog pretty tight, although both carry links to the other site.
We’ll see how it goes.
I just started my blog. It has been helping to motivate me to make better images and so far its working. Having a photo of the day go to my facebook(where all of my friends and family can see it) “forces” me to make an interesting photo.