Stockland Martel

To promote its new e-book, the Photography Blog Handbook, Photo Shelter recently posted a series of “success stories” by photo bloggers. That is, they asked these bloggers to talk about their most popular post and why they think that post connected with people.

The reasons for the high traffic and heavy commenting on the posts listed were telling. Marc Feustel of eyecurious noted that their interview with photographer Hiroh Kikai drew a lot of attention “because there is very little content in English about Kikai and a lot of people really liked his book Asakusa Portraits.” So offering something that people can get only from you is important.

Jennifer Spelman of Photo Coleslaw‘s most successful post, called Surrender, was aimed at emerging photographers. “One line from that piece, ‘Surviving the photography business is one part vision, one part business and all heart,’ seemed to resonate with a lot of people,” she told the Photo Shelter guys. Jennifer is herself an emerging photographer, and it’s easy to see why her diaristic, heart-on-sleeve post was so readily embraced by others.

Instructional, usable info is also a traffic magnet for blogs, as music photographer Todd Owyoung, whose describes his ishootshows.com as “the premier site for music photography featuring daily concert coverage, portrait features, and photo advice,” discovered when he posted a tutorial on how to make a beauty dish for small flashes. “Once they’d finished the beauty dish, many people posted their own versions of the design, which created a chain of trackbacks that repeatedly generated interest in the original tutorial. So in this regard, the DIY beauty dish gave people something that they could literally make their own and which they were genuinely interested in sharing,” he noted.

Posting something in which people are “genuinely interested”—that, I think, is really the way to make a photo blog (or any blog) successful. The tricky thing is balancing your blogging with your work as a photographer. A blog is like an online magazine. Before you start one, you have to ask yourself if your goal is to be a publisher and get lots of traffic and serve your readership. Or whether your blog is a vanity (not using that word in a pejorative sense) vehicle. Or whether you’re blogging to get your name out there and generate specific leads and provide your clients with information about you (how you work, your problem-solving skills, etc.) that they can’t get elsewhere.

Your approach to your blog—how often you post, what kinds of material you write about, how much you care about traffic—and how you should judge your return on investment depend on your having a clear plan. If you don’t have a clear plan going into it, you could be in danger of feeling like you failed if you don’t have many followers or comments. And you could even find yourself becoming a writer instead of a photographer. And trust me, you don’t want to do that.

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Incidentally, the most-trafficked post at our blog is this, hands down: Out of the mouths of reps

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