How to Start Your Own Photo Blog & Keep Track of its Analytics

The term “blog” was derived from “web log”, a website where Internet users would write about their daily activities. Eventually, blogging entered the marketing sphere as numerous entrepreneurs realized the medium’s marketing potential. In fact, it’s now possible to turn a blog into a home business as well.

Aside from journaling, marketing, and creating your own business, there are  other blog types that you can use for a specific purpose. These include professional blogs, niche blogs, and media blogs. But for this article, we’ll discuss how photographers can create a blog which displays their visual work.

Photographers can gain a variety of benefits from having their own photo blog, such as allowing their clients or readers to view their work and reinforcing their brand. If you’ve already decided to set up your own photo blog, here’s a few blogging tips that can help you on your photoblogging journey.

How to Create Your Photo Blog 

Think about your reasons or purpose for starting a blog.

Before creating a photo blog, you should ponder on why you’re starting one as well as your desired results. Figure out the main goal that you have for your blog: It could range from recognition and lead generation to sharing fascinating pictures. You may even aim for your own learning and improvement if you’re a photoblogging newbie.

But if you really don’t know why you’re making a photo blog, you may end up having no sense of direction and your efforts will go to waste. You’ll have a better sense of direction once you’ve determined your goal for setting up a blog. And while we’re on the topic of purpose, it’s better if your blog has a definite niche for readers to identify its theme. However, if you still don’t have one, you’ll first have to find the photography niche which is right for you and then create your blog from there.

Choose the best blogging platform for your blog.

Once you’ve established your purpose or reasons for photoblogging, it’s now time to pick an online platform where you’ll create your blog. You can choose from any of the top three (free) blogging platforms on the Internet: Blogger, Tumblr, or WordPress. We’ve listed down some of their features and benefits so that you can see which website will work best for you.

• Blogger: Blog creation on this platform is quick and easy. You can also edit templates easily and use its main photo-sharing feature.
• WordPress: It’s an adjustable and measurable website for photoblogging, and you’ll be able to share photos on the platform as it has many plugins designed for photo blogs.
• Tumblr: This microblogging platform provides uncomplicated blog creation and a simple-to-use user interface. It also has templates that you can modify for social media purposes.

How to Measure Your Blog’s Analytics 

What is Analytics?

Analytics is defined as a scientific method of identifying and conveying essential patterns or trends in data. This particular process is able to measure and acquire certain observations for data interpretation by depending on statistics, computer programming, and operations research. Certain tasks such as examining previous data for future trend research, interpreting results of particular choices and matters, and performance evaluation usually make up analytics.

Moreover, there are a few reasons why analytics is a highly valuable tool for websites. For one, you’ll know the best methods for website promotion with the help of analytics. Also, you’ll be able to enhance your site when you learn about visitor behavior; this will help you boost your site’s results.

Promote your content to your readers.

Now, let’s say you’ve already created your photo blog. You’re showing your work off to everyone who will see it online. But it’s actually unlikely that readers will make an effort to go to your blog frequently. In that case, you’ll have to look for other means of promoting your content to them. You may either invite your readers to participate in newsletter registration or share your new posts to them via social media.

Establish interaction between you and your audience.

For most bloggers, their true measure of success is establishing a devoted audience. But in reality, this kind of accomplishment is difficult to achieve. Some readers might give you comments or criticisms regarding your work once your blog traffic and readership begin to increase. So, communication between you and your commenters is important.

You can interact with your readers or audience in a variety of ways. For instance, it’s necessary to give a reader your thanks whenever they like one of your pictures. You can even ask them if they have any images that you’d want to take a look at. Other communicative methods can include using readers’ advice to take a photo again and motivating everyone to shoot and share images that are identical to a picture that you’ve posted before. In other words, you should express your own replies to every commenter. But this may not be practical once your blog rises in traffic and visitors.