If you’ve been wondering how to start a blog for photography, you’re in the right place! We know a thing or two about blogging – and about the best blogging platforms – and we’ve condensed our knowledge into the below guide of everything you need to know.
Read on to learn about everything from identifying your audience to presenting your work with the best-designed templates.
Define Your Photography Niche
Photography is a varied art form, with plenty of different subjects and styles to choose from. It’s important to make a choice, though, and narrow down your focus so that you can become really good at the types of photography you’re interested in.
Choosing your niche is also important because it will help you build a recognizable personal brand. If you define yourself as a wildlife photographer, for example, then your name is more likely to be remembered in those circles than if you were a generalist who was okay at a few different genres.
Defining your niche might seem overwhelming – after all, there are a lot of different types of photography to choose from, from landscape to portrait and documentary to fine art. But it helps to think about what you’re already interested in outside of photography, and see how you can relate that passion to this new art form! Check out some other tips on how to find your niche with our guide.
Identify Your Target Photography-Enthusiast Audience
Just as you have to understand yourself and which niche works best for you, you also need to know who your ideal readers and followers are, and the kind of content they want to see! This is because the more satisfied your audience is with your work, the more likely they are to share your name with friends, or even purchase work if you’re looking to sell digital downloads or prints of your photos.
The best way to develop this understanding is to conduct audience research. Before you’ve built up your own following, you can start by researching photography enthusiasts in general – for example, their demographics and interests.
This works to your benefit in other ways, too – if you ever get stuck for inspiration, you can use what you’ve learned about your audience as a jumping-off point for your next photo. For example, if you know your followers are interested in street photography, you can head downtown for a walk and see what you end up capturing.
Select a Photography Blogging Platform
Some blogging platforms are more photography-focused than others. Some of the best ones are:
- Squarespace: Has really sleek templates for showcasing photography.
- Wix: Great for beginners because it’s really easy to use.
- WordPress: Can store large volumes of media, which is great if you have a large portfolio.
All of these platforms offer plugins and apps to enhance a photography site. Wix’s “Photo Albums” feature lets you display each album in its own mini-site, while Squarespace’s full-screen slideshows make it easy for your work to take center stage.
Craft a Captivating Visual Design
Photography blogging is all about the visuals – but it’s not just the photos themselves that are important! 94% of first impressions on a website are related to its design, so you want to make sure that yours is ticking all the right boxes!
The easiest way to do this is by using a website builder with excellent photography templates.
A quality photography template will include some blank space so that your work can really shine without being overwhelmed by background noise. It will also place the images front and center, or in a sleek gallery format.
It’s important to optimize your images before uploading them to your website template. This isn’t as technical as it sounds – there are tons of free online tools, such as Image Resizer, that will optimize them for you at the click of a button. This is important because it helps reduce website loading times, which makes for a better user experience. You can check out our image optimization guide for more details!
Create Stunning Visual Content
Of course, once you’ve figured out how to start a photography blog, the next step is to make sure your photography is the best it can be! If you’re passionate about the niche you’ve chosen, this will be an easy step.
One way to boost the quality of your photographs is to read up on technique. If you’re stuck for inspiration, the rule of thirds is a good place to start. It’s a general rule in visual arts that states an image should be divided into nine equal parts, using two horizontal lines and two vertical lines.
Fancy (read: expensive) equipment isn’t a quick fix for producing high-quality photography! In fact, if you have a good eye and solid technique, you can get started with just your smartphone camera – no problem!
Plan Your Photography Content Calendar
In photography blogging – just like any blogging, really – consistency is very important for connecting with your audience and building trust. By maintaining a consistent posting schedule, you’ll be giving people a reason to check back in with your blog for a reliable stream of new content.
You can improve your consistency by creating a content calendar – basically, an advance plan of what you’re going to post and when. You can do this by hand if you prefer, or use online apps like CoSchedule to help you.
Make sure to plan your content calendar around whatever seasonal events are coming up! Whether that’s simply some summer or winter-related photos according to the time of year, or content related to photography events happening in your area, a little bit of research will go a long way.
Optimize Your Visuals for SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, covers all of the things you can do to make your photography blog rank better in Google results. There are a few SEO basics specifically related to images that will be particularly useful for a photo-heavy blog, such as:
- Using relevant file names: Automatically-generated file names, such as IMG_2348, are not good for SEO because they don’t give search engines any information about a photo. Try to give your images relevant names instead – for example, a portrait could be named “girl smiling” or similar.
- Adding alt tags: Alt tags are descriptions of your image that are used to help anyone using a screen reader to tell what is being depicted. They’re very important for accessibility, and they also give search engines more context about each picture.
- Compressing images: Compression is a part of the image optimization process that we mentioned earlier, and it makes images easier to load – thus improving your website’s speed.
Promote Your Photography Blog
Once you’ve got your blog all set up, it’s time to promote it so that you can showcase your work and attract interested followers.
Social media is one important way you can promote your blog. Instagram in particular is great for photographers because you can grab people’s attention by posting your best work there. You can put the link to your blog in your Instagram bio to drive traffic to your site.
Email newsletters are also a great tool to have in your content marketing arsenal. You can add a form to your blog to collect the email addresses of interested readers, and then stay in regular communication by sending them monthly or weekly updates on your work!
Summary
The above tips are the ultimate guide for anyone wondering how to start a blog for photography. Let’s recap the steps here:
- Define your photography niche
- Identify your target photography-enthusiast audience
- Select a photography blogging platform
- Create a captivating visual design
- Create stunning visual content
- Plan your photography content calendar
- Optimize your visuals for SEO
- Promote your photography blog
If you’ve read this far, you’re definitely prepared to give it a (snap)shot yourself. Best of luck!
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