A Photographer’s Guide to Websites, Blogs and Social Media – Tuts+ Premium

We have another Photo Premium tutorial exclusively available to Premium members today. In this tutorial, we’ll be learning about building your web presence as a photographer. Learn more at the jump!

You cannot just expect people to discover you by chance. Maintaining a website or blog is easy, often free and if done right it can take very little time. Tie that in with some social media and you have a great marketing tool at your disposal.

Every photographer who is looking for work or wishing to showcase their photos should have an impressive website. Nowadays it is cheap and easy to connect with people all around the world. So why not go ahead and do it?

You don’t have to hire a website designer or learn a single line of code. With the web tools available today it’s easy to create an amazing portfolio.

Keeping a blog

Within your main website, I believe it is very important to keep a blog. Blogging gives you the opportunity to write about your photography with both a professional and unprofessional slant. You don’t have to be an amazing writer, you just have to create content that others might find interesting.

Lots of photographers choose to blog about their experiences on a day out shooting in new locations, or about a new style of photography they have been learning about. I use my own website to write photography tutorials. The best thing about blogging is there is no right or wrong way of doing it.

Examples of popular blogs (other than Phototuts+, of course) are:

• Stuck In Customs – Trey Ratcliff posts tutorials and articles as well as reviews for camera gear. Trey’s helpful content and relaxed style of writing has made his blog the #1 Travel Photography Blog in the world with over 175,000 photo views every day.
• Canon Rumours – Canon rumours focuses on providing fresh content on the world of Canon. People follow it to stay up-to-date without having to do the research themselves. Users will often share the content they read about through other forms of social media. There is also a Nikon Rumours site.
• PetaPixel – PetaPixel is a generalist photography blog. They post about industry news, trends, interesting techniques and even crafts. This site is great because they post multiple things each day, which means you’ll visit it when you get to work, at lunch and on your phone during the boring afternoon meeting.

Posting up your own reviews of products can often create discussion between photographers and help to draw people to your blog. An example of this on Phototuts+ would be the recent review of X-Rite’s ColorMunki Monitor Calibrator written by Daniel Sone.

By drawing people to your website and blog there is a good chance that they will try to view your portfolio. Ideally they will start to share your work with others through social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. This should increase your chances of finding more work or bigger and more important jobs.

In this article, we will be looking at different blog setups and variations of social media, to help you better target your audience.

Features your website/blog should aim to have:

Comments

If your selected blogging software doesn’t allow people to comment on your work, then you might as well start looking for different blogging software now. Having interactivity with your audience is a key part of sustaining an online presence.

Search bar

Giving a user the option to search for specific content on your site allows them to find the article or page quicker than browsing through everything. Effort dissuades people, so help them exert as little as possible.

EXIF data

When you upload a photo onto your blog, it’s great if the photo keeps the EXIF data tagged to it. This will tell other photographers which settings and equipment you used to originally capture your image.

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