The test- My most visited blog page to date is one of a workshop I attended, ran by a Photoshop legend. This guy has a huge following (and well deserved) but by posting my experiences of the course, un-expectingly directs many to my blog from Google searching their name.
To confirm this, last week an American photo legend posted on their blog. images of the Shard building in London. Saying that their images from inside were unusable due to the reflections on the glass.
I commented ( in a non spam way) a blog post that I wrote, on the techniques and equipment that i used to take away the reflections. I included a link to my blog showing the post and my image from inside the Shard. Not so to help this photographer as they are awesome and would know this, but help others who follow. - And in one day I got over 1000 page hits.
I am certainly not one to spam, but find this interesting. It is all good getting the numbers but are the viewers relevant to your work?
More recently I've been testing Google+ I have found huge communities of people with the potential to view your content. But are the 400,000 people in a HDR community worth viewing your posts?
Me Personally-I post for me, and I regularly go to the beginning of my blog and see how I've improved and it spurs me on to create new work and improve, this blog is a living time line of my images and i enjoy slowly watching them grow over the years. This blog is not compiled to generate business. I use other tools for that.
Businesses- For those of you trying to direct potential customers, it is finding that right community / audience.
Facebook has its place, but i find you do not have to be present, that is an excuse. If the content that you create is great, people will still share this. Finding the niche in your postings is the tricky part. Look at what you create and try and think like a customer, where would they be looking.
Posting too much - I think that there is a fine line with over posting. If the noise that you are creating is too often, people will grow tired of it quickly.
Quench the need to post everyday, cut back your posting and spend the extra time to produce higher quality content. ( I know that this goes against most top tip how to blog sites)
Utilising your blog's schedule function is a handy tool. You have some rare free time, and want to catch up with some blogging. Rather then throw out 20 posts in one hit, schedule them to be published over time. This will give you a clearer conscious that you have content coming out over the next few weeks, and helping you to have more time to spend on other things.
Also on this subject, when posting images i wouldn't post every single image taken on the shoot. Show just your best work rather than 900 images of the same subject. People lose interest and will click off and head else where.
Where ever you decide to post and cast the net, please be unique.
I know that the automated sites out there are time saving, but when for example you are viewing tweets blatantly created by software, with a hyper link to your post. It is highly off-putting and less people will follow the trail.
Monitor - Most blog these days utilise some sort of analytics in the back ground, this blog site for example is ran through Blogger (owned by google) and so i can see how many people view a post, where were they directed from, what country, what browser used etc. This helps in working out trends.
For this site i have seen that the G+ community traffic by far out weights that of the Facebook and Twitter views. And what content is most popular.
This post was created from my own personal views, there are no one size fits all with this, and it is taking the time to work out what is best for you.
My first post was over 5 years ago, which is frightening to think where the time has gone.
I will find it interesting to re-read this post in another 5 years time and look back on how things have changed.
Thanks for reading
- ill go now and enjoy some of my newly acquired free time
Lee.
