Are you up for the Challenge?
The Photo Friday Challenge
Each week, hundreds of people pick up their cameras and answer the Photo Friday call to be creative and original. Photo Friday is not a competition, it’s a challenge to create outstanding images within the constraints of a weekly theme.
How it works is simple. The Photo Friday team posts a photo assignment for you to interpret in any way you like. You upload your image to your website or photoblog and enter the picture link on the Photo Friday website.
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Tweet This10 Simple Ways to Get Your Photoblog Noticed
Follow these ten simple steps to help increase the traffic coming to your photoblog.
1. Shoot Well and Shoot Often
Frequently updating your photoblog with new images is the first step to building your blog’s audience. The quality and style of photos you take is what will keep people coming back for more. Make sure you have something new to show them and upload images often to maintain their interest and keep them loyal. By posting new images frequently you also increase the number of chances for your photoblog’s content being noticed by search engines such as Google or Technorati.
2. Submit Your Photoblog to Search Engines
Get noticed by the popular search engines by submitting your photoblog’s URL to Google and Yahoo. Most search engines provide a ‘Submit Site’ link to notify the search engine of new websites and blogs. By submitting your photoblog, the search engines will crawl it and include your pages in their results. Simply submitting your photoblog to search engines doesn’t mean your images will appear at the top of Google or Yahoo search results, but at least images on your photoblog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up by a search engine.
3. Update Your Blogroll
By adding links to your favourite sites in your blogroll, the owners of those photoblogs will find your photoblog and will be likely to add a reciprocal link in their blogrolls. It’s an easy way to get the link to your photoblog in front of many other photoblogs. The hope is that others will find your content interesting and enjoyable and become loyal visitors to your photoblog.
4. Leave Powerful Comments
Commenting is an essential tool to increasing traffic to your photoblog. Respond to comments left on your photoblog to show your readers that you value their opinions. By encouraging conversation on your photoblog you will increase visitor loyalty. Leave comments on other photoblogs to drive new traffic to your own photoblog. Make sure you leave your photoblog’s URL in your comment, so you create a link back to your own blog. Many people will read the comments left on a photoblog post. If they read a comment that interests them they are more likely to click on the link to visit the website. So it’s important you leave meaningful comments on other photoblogs that are likely to invite people to click on your link to read more.
5. Syndicate Your Photoblog’s Content with an RSS Feed
Setting up an RSS feed button on your photoblog makes it easy for your visitors to read your blog and receive a notification when you publish new content.
6. Use Links
Links are one of the most powerful features on your photoblog. Links are noticed by search engines and act as a nudge to other photobloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps you get noticed by other photobloggers who are likely to investigate sites linking to them. This may lead them to become new visitors to your photoblog or to add links to your photoblog from theirs.
7. Tag Your Image Posts
It only takes a few moments to add tags to each of your photoblog image posts. The benefit og adding tags is worth the effort, because they can drive extra traffic to your photoblog. Tags are like links, they are easily noticed by search engines. They also help visitors find your photoblog when they carry out searches on search engines such as Technorati.
8. Submt Your Image Posts to Social Bookmarking Sites
Taking the time to submit your best image posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit can be a quick and simple way to boost traffic to your photoblog.
9. Search Engine Optimization
Remember to optimize your pages for search engines to find them. Include relevant keywords and links, but don’t overload your image posts with too many keywords as this can be considered spamming and may result in your photoblog being removed from Google’s search entirely.
10. Join Photoblog Forums and Discussion Groups
Online forums, groups or social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are valuable places where you can share ideas and discuss issues with like-minded people. By adding a link to your photoblog in your profile you’re able to promote your photoblog each time you leave a post or contribute to an onlinecommunity. People will click on your link to find out more about you.
How Twitter Will Change Your Photoblog in 2009
Last year Twitter really hit the mainstream big style and bloggers began adding widgets to sidebars to display their latest tweets.
In 2009, Twitter is set to become even more tightly integrated within blog design. From ‘Tweetbacks’ and ‘Tweetstats’ to tweet comments and ‘TwitterRolls’, they are all about to start appearing on blogs.
In a recent blog post, Rachel Cunliffe lists 10 ways Twitter will impact on blog designs this year:
- Bloggers will start adding ‘Tweetbacks’ to their blog posts.
- ‘Tweetstats’ will be added to blog sidebars.
- Catch-all social networking widgets in blog sidebars will be ditched in favour of ‘TweetThis’.
- Bloggers will start mixing blog posts and tweets into a single column.
- Visitors to blogs will be able to comment on tweets displayed within a blog.
- ‘BlogTweet’ Feeds will be used to include or exclude tweets.
- Form fields will be added to enable visitors to fill in their Twitter name when adding comments to a blog.
- More use will be made of sidebar widgets to display favourite tweets, recent tweets, etc.
- ‘TwitterRolls’ will be added alongside Blogrolls.
- Blog design will become influenced by Twitter themes.
Many of the features are already up and running and can be found on increasing numbers of blogs. Some are even on FotoWIRED. For example, I have included a sidebar widget showing real time ‘Tweets’ for photography, there is a ‘TweetThis’ link at the end of each post enabling visitors to send it to Twitter, and at the bottom of the page I have included a ‘Follow Me On Twitter’ link for anyone wishing to do just that.
One feature of Twitter sure to take off with a bang is ‘TwitPic’. An example of the viral effect of instant image posting via Twitter was Janis Krums’ photo of a ditched airliner in the Hudson River on January 15 this year. This poignant image of passengers climbing onto the plane’s wing, along with the immediacy of Janis’ caption “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” is a striking example of photography’s ability to capture ‘decisive moments’. As of today, his Twitpic has had 380944 views so far. How long will it before digital cameras are fitted with Twitpic buttons to send images to photoblogs instantly?
The future of the photoblog is surely set to change, and Twitter is likely to be one way in which the online photography community will embrace this in 2009.
Have your own predictions? Add them to the comments.
Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it,20 Cool Photoblogs
This week I thought I’d share with you some of the photoblogs I’ve discovered on the internet over the past year. I’m subscribed to about 150 feeds, the majority of which are photoblogs and photography related websites.
Photoblogs are a great way for photographers to share their images. The provide the opportunity for photographers to comment on each other’s work, share ideas and offering words of enouragement in a community environment which I have found to be both help and fun.
Below are 20 of the coolest photoblogs I follow, many of which I visit weekly. So if you’re looking for more ideas or simply fancy a browse through what’s out there, this is the place to start. They are listed in no particular order of favouritism. You will also find a link to an rss feed where there is one available.
I hope this brief introduction to some photoblogs out there has wet your appetite for more. There are hundreds worth taking a look at. Some of them really quite amazing. A couple of good places to start looking are coolphotoblogs and photoblog-community.
Leave a comment below and let me know which photoblogs caught your eye. If you have a photoblog of your own, let me know as I shall be writing a series of posts on photobloggers from different regions of the world in the near future.
If you’re new to RSS feeds you’ll find a clear introduction to how it works at ProBlogger.
Don’t forget to subscribe to my rss feed.
1. DailyWalks (rss)
2. Kevoto
7. Daily Dose of Imagery (rss)
8. Moodaholic
10. Eric Rousset (rss)
11. La Galerie de Martineb (rss)
12. Daily Snapshots (rss)
13. LightInfusion (rss)
14. CornerShots (rss)
15. Framed and Shot (rss)
17. Express Train (rss)
20. Atfirstsight (rss)
22. One Stone Eye
23. JR Photoblog (rss)
24. Through the Lens (rss)
Ok, so there are more than 20 photoblogs here. Just as I was about to wrap this post, I thought of another one to add to the list. That’s the way it goes. There are so many good ones out there.
Please leave a comment. Let me know of your favourite photoblogs.
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