Whose Blog Is More Successful?
As you learn more about using your camera, and start taking beautiful pictures, you might also want a way to share them with the rest of the world. There are many social networking platforms that are ideal for this sort of thing like: Instagram, Flickr, Google Photos, Tumblr, and Facebook, along with hundreds more. However, one of the most popular, and effective ways, to share your pictures is a simple, humble, tried-and-true blog. If you are thinking about pursuing this route there there are some things you need to consider before setting up your own photo blog. There are many sites that let you build photo blogs, several of which are free. This first point seems kind of obvious, but a lot of photographers find their blogs stalling out, and gathering dust after a few months, because they did not define their purpose for doing the blog when they first began.
Many people start blogs because they just want to share random pictures, but if you want a viable long-term blogging solution, you鈥檙e going to need something more. Are you starting a photo blog to get your name out there, and generate sales leads (potential customers)? Do you want to make a mark in your community? Do you want to simply post photos you think are interesting? Whatever your reason for doing a photo blog, it鈥檚 important to make sure you at least have one, in the first place. If you have never done a photo blog, then it鈥檚 likely you are doing it for personal reasons, such as trying to learn and grow as a photographer. That is an outstanding goal, and one that has helped many other bloggers, become much better at photography as well. Once you know precisely why you are doing your blog, it will serve as a guide for everything you post.
Brandon Stanton started the well-known Humans of New York blog with a specific purpose: to photograph 10,000 people living in New York City. This helped him have a sense of purpose and direction when taking and posting photos, and doing the same thing can greatly benefit you as well. One of the first pictures I ever posted to my blog. It鈥檚 not even an interesting photo, but I was just starting out, and can look back on this to see how much I have learned since then. In 2008 the web analytics firm Technorati found that roughly 95% of the blogs it tracked, went more than 120 days without being updated. When your blog goes four months without anything new, it is more than likely a failure. So how can you keep your blog not only surviving, but thriving past 120 days, and well beyond? Attention spans are short, and people today have a never-ending stream of tweets, news clips, soundbites, app updates, and cat videos coming their way, almost every waking moment.
So,how on earth can you make your blog stand out, and get noticed amid all the other sites, apps, and feeds that people check on a daily basis? New readers should be able to tell within five seconds, what your blog is about. The best option is to have a specific niche that your photo blog serves (e.g. wildlife, surfers, snowflakes, street pictures, etc.). But, even if it鈥檚 just pictures you like taking for no particular reason, you should at least make that clear to your readers upfront. You鈥檙e basically setting expectations right from the outset, and giving your audience a clear sense of what they will get out of reading your photo blog. Some people do this by having a descriptive name for their blogs, a brief tagline, or a set of pictures that instantly conveys a sense of purpose (e.g. flowers, cattle, cars, sunsets, etc.). Whatever the purpose of your photo blog is, if your readers can鈥檛 figure it out, they鈥檙e going to quickly move elsewhere. My blog is specifically for photos I take with my 50mm lens, and I make that clear to my readers immediately when they visit the site.
