What’s Most Effective….

So many different websites for photographers these days…

There are many varieties :-

“Fun” social media – casual chat on facebook, twitter, foursquare etc.
“Serious” social media – Facebook Business Pages and Linked IN
Blogging – share your wisdom
Website galleries – show those shots off!
Photo community sites – 500px, ephotozine, flickr
Youtube and video sites – moving piccies!

Or maybe it’s better to go out there doing SEO for your website, forget all about your photos and get people to your site ?

Social Media

Well “Social Media” will probably get the biggest audience…

Twitter – you are “visible” to the whole world. Add on hash tags you may be seen by a specific audience too. You can even directly name people you want to see the photos! Now that’s powerful.
Facebook for fun – you can get very active and fill your wall with lots of photos. This can lose you followers if you go too far! Also, try to choose your photos wisely – ones which evoke a reaction. Either exceptional quality, funny or caption it with an amusing/emotional remark.
Facebook Pages – these need promoting more and more now – i.e. you need paid adverts. I have 2500 followers on my page, posts usually reach just 25-50 of those unless they are promoted
LINKED IN – I’d use this to promote “useful blogs” than to just post photos. Linked in can be a very dry experience, so the odd photo will brighten up the experience for people!
Google + – the best thing ever for SEO, though no one will ever read it… apparently.
The rest – Tumbr, Pinterest, Instagram… these all have their place, and tools like IFTTT can “share” your photos to these automatically, saving you time… worth a look.

BLOGGING

We should all do this – you can get free blog accounts on Blogger or get yourself a WordPress site.

SEO is, apparently, all about “great content” these days – so creating genuinely useful lists and tips, or even reviews and discussion, is what we are all supposed to do now.

So next time you are about to broadcast lots of photos, how about writing a short blog with a gallery of images, instead of just posting the images. You then use social media to advertise it – with one of those “click bait” titles of course.

Here’s why:-

you control image quality – facebook compresses your photos and makes them look terrible!
you drive traffic to your site – more hits, more SEO
more links to your site – every link and share to your piece generates SEO
get a readership – if you’re pretty regular, people look out for your content!
become an “expert” – as you build your library of articles, your credibility grows….
appear “busy” to the world – a busy blog gives the impression you are busy and successful, a business to hire!

Making money!

So if you want to “make money” online, where should you spend your their “online time”?

Not an easy one with stock photography being saturated – but there are opportunities:-

on-line galleries – Photobox, red bubble etc. do tee shirts, cups, prints etc.
affiliate marketing – get commission be recommending and linking to other people’s products
stock libraries – its time consuming, so pick one which has a LIGHTROOM upload plugin to speed the process
sell guides or training – if you’ve got something to show, maybe get a course together and sell it on-line
books – Blurb hooks up with LIGHTROOM so you can quickly create books and upload them to their library, and there are many others out there.

It’s a challenge – the main one is being found in the first place and taken seriously