(Photo)Blogging Tips

I’m not really new to blogging… I’ve blogged for most of the last four years. But, I am new to actually trying to build an audience and making the blog into something that someone other than my mother would read. I started this blog about 2 weeks ago and, so far, I am up to 100 subscribers and about 400-500 visits per day. Yeah, I know it’s not going to break any records but I’m happy with it. It’s exceeded blogs I’ve had for years by a long shot.

In the meantime, I’ve learned quite a bit… I’ve also noticed that many people who appear to visit my site regularly also have blogs, so I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned over the past two weeks. Some of this you’ve undoubtedly heard on other blogs, some you probably haven’t. This is only based on my own blogging (and browsing) experience so if you have had different experiences, let me know in the comments!

The content

It’s about YOUR photos

This is a lesson I’m still learning. I’ve been focused so much on building this site and coming up with good content that, honestly, I’ve almost forgotten that this is a photoblog! I’m not saying you have to take photos everyday, but don’t forget that the most original content you can come up with is your photos. And, if you go through a stretch where you haven’t had a chance to come up with any new masterpieces, go through some of your old stuff that no one has seen. As you may have noticed, once a month I publish an article that “looks back” on photos I took a year ago. Flickr has an “archive” view so you can see your photos from any day in the past. Use it.

Write what you DON’T know

You might be thinking: “Huh? How am I supposed to do that?” Most blogging tips I’ve seen always say “write what you know” and that is certainly good advice. But, as someone who’s only been into photography for a little over a year, there really isn’t much that I know. At least not enough to fill a blog that people will keep coming back to. So, I decided that I wanted to use this blog, primarily, as a way for me to learn. So I started writing down the things I still needed to learn about photography… It’s quite a list! And I decided the best way for me to get good content AND grow personally, is for me to begin researching all of it. I’m a lazy person. I love to read but I hate reading dry photography books on techniques and rules. But this site gave me a reason. For example, when I started this site, I didn’t know how to read a histogram. I had an idea but I never bothered to sit down and learn it. So I dug into it a bit, learned how to do it, and wrote about it. That article is now one of my most popular posts with more external links to it than anything else I’ve written. Could it have been better? Sure. But that leaves me with the opportunity to write a follow-up article. If you don’t know something, chances are there are plenty of others that don’t know it either. Find out, teach them, and they’ll come back for more…

Spread the love

Over the last year and a half, I’ve discovered some truly great photographers. Their work has influenced my tremendously. Some I’ve gotten to know through various sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Others, I’ve never communicated with directly. So, on this site, I wanted to take the time to acknowledge these photographers and the impact they’ve had on my own photography. I’ve featured two photographers so far on this site. I love writing these posts. Both times, the photographer I was featuring was more than happy to have someone publicly acknowledge their work and was more than happy to cooperate in writing a brief bio for me. Have the posts been popular? I don’t know. They haven’t received as many comments and views as some of my other stuff but I don’t care. I’ve built stronger links to some really talented people and, ultimately, my photography will be better for it.

Design

It’s NOT all about the content

I hear a ton of sites talk about how design doesn’t really matter as much as the content. If you’ve got good content, you’re good. Well, I’m not so sure about that. Yes, if it’s good content, you’ll probably do fine. However, you need to get me to subscribe first. If you’re site isn’t pleasing to the eye, chances are, I won’t read a word you say and I’ll move on. I can’t tell you how many new bloggers I’ve seen that are trying to build an audience but don’t appear to have put any effort into the design of their site. And the site problems run the gamut: Background clashes with the text, animation/audio/video starting as soon as the page loads, the page takes forever to load, ads that completely saturate the content, images/ads/text that are too big for their location on the page, default Wordpress themes, etc. This drives me nuts. You could be William Shakespeare but, if it looks like you put no effort whatsoever into presentation, I’ll never know. Most bloggers nowadays are either using Bllogger or WordPress. There are so many different theme and design options for these two platforms, it’ll make you dizzy. Put some effort into it! You could even go as far as I did and purchase a premium theme for $50. That’s one of the best things I did for this site. Because it’s a premium theme, you won’t see too many other sites with it, and I automatically set myself apart from the thousands of blogs who all look like one another. And, come on, it’s $50. That’s a dinner for two at Olive Garden. Invest in your site’s design and it will pay off in the long run.

The act of blogging

Set a schedule, or The Balancing Act

This may seem like common sense but I still have a hard time actually doing it. Set a schedule for blogging. You control the site, the site doesn’t control you. I work during the day so that limits my potential blogging time to nights and weekends. I also live with my girlfriend and I want to be able to spend time with her as well. So, if I need to write an article or spend more than a few minutes on something, I plan it ahead of time. I try to tell her the day before that I have some work to do on the site the next day, and 99.9% of the time, that’s fine with her. The key is telling her why I’m glued to the computer ahead of time so that she doesn’t think that I am just ignoring her when she goes to bed and I’m still burning the midnight oil. You can also come up with set “blogging time”. I’m a morning person, she is not. So, I get up around 7AM on the weekends, make some coffee, and head into the computer room to get some work done. This usually gives me a good 4 or 5 hours of blogging time where I am not actually taking anything away from “us”. Another thing that I think helps is involving her in the blog. I bounce ideas off her, and make sure I show her the article I just spent four hours writing yesterday… “See honey! I was blogging yesterday and not just surfing porn!” In all seriousness, it always helps to involve your girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, in your blog. I’ve found that blogging can be extremely time-consuming and, if the people closest to you aren’t on board with it, it will only be harder.

Write ahead of time

Inevitably, you’ll have days where you’re free to blog for 8-10 hours without anyone bothering you but, instead, you spend the time browsing your 500+ RSS subscriptions and you don’t get anything done. Then, later in the week, you’re short on both time and available content for your site. Now, you’re in a position where you either need to let your site sit idle until you have a couple free hours, or you need to give up something else, like a day of work. Both are not ideal solutions… Most blogging platforms allow you to write a post and schedule it for publishing some time in the future. For example, I always knew WordPress had this feature but I didn’t use it until I started this site. Now, I love being able to do that.

Write ahead of time, redux

Instead of writing an article and setting it to be published at a specific time in the future, why not just write all the article ideas you have and just save them as drafts? This way, you’ll always have decent content ready to go in the event that you hit a dry spell next month. I think many of us in the blogging world, or on the web in general, get used to instantaneous gratification. We write an article and immediately publish it. Let’s stop doing that so much. When you have a few hours to blog, write a few articles and just save them. So, next month, when you have unexpectedly go out of town for a funeral, you have content that’s ready to go and you’re readers will never even know you were gone.

Record ideas anytime, anywhere

Have you ever sat down at the computer and your mind was totally blank? You’re ready to write and you can’t come up with a good idea to save your life. Then, the next day, in traffic, the ideas are coming at you left and right. You get excited! You think of at least five things that would make a great article BUT you have no computer. Make sure you have some way to record these freak brainstorms. I type them into Notes on my iPhone. Before the iPhone, though, I used to do things like SMS myself, email myself, call and leave myself voicemails, etc. For a while I even carried around a small digital audio recorder and would record ideas in there for safe keeping until I was somewhere with a computer. You have to have some way of recording these ideas. I would venture to say that 75% of the ideas I get for this blog come when I am nowhere near a computer.

Use del.icio.us

Being a successful blogger is as much about reading other people’s content as it is about writing your own. The problem is, though, there is just too much content out there. Sometimes, when I’m at work reading through my 600+ RSS subscriptions, I often find great content that I simply don’t have the time to read. This could be an article you want to link to, a new service you just found out about on Mashable, or an awesome photo you’d like to comment on. Unfortunately, though, I don’t have the time to do it when I see it. Enter del.icio.us. I use the del.icio.us Firefox add-on religiously. I see an article I want to spend some time reading or blogging about later, I click the del.icio.us Tag button in my browser and I tag it with something like: read_it, or blog_it, or comment_it. Then, later when I get home, I can easily find everything I wanted to read. If it weren’t this easy, I can assure you I would forget about it in five minutes. This has helped me tremendously!

Don’t rush!

I get impatient. When I have an idea, I want to write it and get it out the door. Stop it! When you’re writing an article, especially a longer “featured” article, write it, save it, and let it sit overnight. Re-read it. Re-word a few things. You’ll end up with a better article. This post that you’re reading right now was written over the course of three days. That also doesn’t include the 8 days of brainstorming prior to even typing a word.

Format your articles nicely, with images

Maybe this is just a sign of my shiny-object syndrome, but whenever I get an article in my feed reader and all I see is text, I rarely read the whole thing. Break up the article a little with headings, sections and, yes, images. As a photographer, you should have no problem finding images to stick in your posts. They may not even be relevant to the article… put them in anyway. It is, after all, a photo blog.

Syndication and Subscriptions

Make it easy to subscribe

You want subscribers, don’t you? To me, that’s the best indicator of how my blog is doing. Sure, I may get 2,000 unique visits one day because my article appeared on PhotographyVoter or Reddit but that won’t happen everyday. A new subscriber on the other hand says to me “I like your content and I don’t want to miss anything that you post”. In addition to the browser’s feed icon in the address bar, I also have two other places on the front page from which you can subscribe. I also have a little blurb at the end of each article asking readers to subscribe. You don’t want it to get in the way of your content, but, if a reader wants to subscribe to your feed, don’t make him search for the feed address.

Explain what RSS is

Let’s face it… Most people that use the Internet have no idea what RSS is. Chances are, most people that see your cute RSS icon are not going to have any idea how to subscribe or what that means. I would recommend creating a small link near your feed icon that says “What is RSS?”. I first got this idea from ProBlogger and I think it’s definitely one worth stealing. Of course, I haven’t gotten around to adding it here yet, but it’s coming.

Offer email subscriptions

Even after you explain what RSS is, some people will still prefer a daily email. Let them have it. Feedburner offers a free email subscription option if you use them to burn your feed for you. Use it and make it easy to subscribe.

Offer a full feed

There are people who swear that NOT offering a full feed increases their pageviews because it forces their subscribers to actually visit the site. Well, I’m not one of those subscribers. It is extremely rare that I will see a partial feed, or just a headline, in my RSS reader and click on it to read the rest. Everyone else I know is the same way. If I can read the article in my reader and decide that it’s good, I’ll visit the article on the site and del.icio.us it for later consumption. With over 600 subscriptions, this is a must. In fact, the chances that I’ll UNsubscribe from your site is probably greater if I don’t get a full feed than if your content isn’t that great. I’ve always offered full feeds and always will. The only time articles get broken up in my feed is if I have to break them up over multiple pages on my site (for formatting purposes). Once I find out how to break articles over multiple pages on the site but keep them intact in the feed, I’ll do it.

Marketing

Spread the love, revisited

Getting eyeballs on your site is not a zero-sum game. Sending traffic elsewhere doesn’t mean that the traffic will never come back. Take some time and find good content elsewhere, particularly on smaller-medium sized blogs that many people haven’t discovered yet. Link to some of their content, they’ll appreciate it. However, be genuine! Don’t just link to someone in the hopes that they’ll link back to you. If you don’t send your visitors to good content, they’ll stop following your links and you’ll lose credibility.

Be responsive

When you do get comments, emails, and linkbacks, respond to them. All of them. Even if it’s just a small “Thanks for the link!”. I do my best to respond individually to every link, comment, and email. I may have missed one or two, but I try as best as I can to stay on top of it. Someone took the time to contribute to your site in some way… You need to acknowledge that.

Be sure to check out (Photo)Blogging Tips: Part Two for ideas on coming up with new content!

That’s about it for now. Since I’m still pretty new to this and since even I haven’t completely implemented all of the tips above, I’m sure you’ll be hearing from me again on what works and what doesn’t work. Stay tuned!

Tags: blogging, tips