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Microstock Photography Forum - General => General Stock Discussion => Topic started by: Jonathan Ross on August 16, 2009, 19:07
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Hi All,
I don't have a Blog but I have noticed many of you do. Cheers to your efforts and sharing of info. I was curious if you could tell me how many hits a month is good or standard in this photo blog business. Is it a million hits or 10 million or if there is any expected hit ratio you guys hope for. Anyone that can offer any advice I would surely appreciate the feedback.
Best,
Jonathan
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If you write it, they may come. In other words, don't worry about the numbers.
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you should be blogging for yourself not for attracting other people or you'll soon get fed up if people don't come. It could be a diary of your earnings, photo trip or shoots or whatever, either way you have to be clear from the start why you're doing it an what you want to achieve.
a million hits would be a marvellous amount of traffic to achieve, but its likely to be way way less. What exactly do you mean by photo blog business? if it's your typical "make some posts about rule-of-thirds and hope make a fortune with Google adds" then forget it.
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It would depend on a number of factors, you can open a WordPress (http://www.wordpress.com) blog and keep it seperate or download their software (http://www.wordpress.org) to your own space to extend your website, then you decide on what the blog is going to be about and post your blog.
If you write it, they may come. In other words, don't worry about the numbers
They may come, but only if they know your blog exists, so you will need to market your blog, decide on who your target audience is and how to reach them, what value your blog will be to these readers and what will make them want to bookmark your blog and come back, milions of readers is something of a dream, thousands of readers will be a good blog.
Will your blog be like your posts here and offer your opinions on the industry, some workflow ideas, tutorials etc: a tool to raise your profile amongst your peers and get your name out there to fellow artists, sometimes this might be better as a seperate blog away from your business website and customers.
If your blog going to be a marketing tool for existing and potential customers where the content here would be much different, and this would then be a blog to extend your website, to inform customers of your activities.
There is an option to have both, and once you have a plan of action you will need to directly market your blog, if it aimed at fellow artists then there is the blog section on this forum, you have a few hundred followers on Twitter, not sure if you have facebook, posting links on these social media websites will bring some traffic to your blog.
The amount of traffic will be based on on how good the content is and how well your direct and viral marketing is, since I moved my blog to my own webspace a month ago, using MSG, Twitter and Facebook for marketing I got 925 visitors in the last 7 days.
925 visitors may seem ok for a blog that has only been running for a month, but if the visitors are not returning just opening and closing the page then it is no good, I know from my blog statistics that 35% went on to read more than one page which is a positive, 40% were new visitors, 20% of visotors returned again within the seven days, and 658 of the visitors were from the USA.
I know from Google Analytics the average time and bounce rate, readers of my last post 'The transition of Microstock' which was quite short spent on average 2.37 minutes, the post before that 'Affordable Editorial Images for Blogging' the average time was 8.48 minutes on my blog.
So it is not just a matter of creating a blog and waiting for the visitors, you have to decide on your market and how to reach them, then analyse and track that visitors are reading your blog and not just hitting the site from a link and closing the browser.
David
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Hi Adeptris,
I am not really free right now to do a Blog the way I would want to, maybe down the road in a bit. I was just trying to gauge numbers and see if anyone would help out in sharing some of their own numbers experience. This came about when I looked on Alexa and saw that my plain old web site has had over a million and a half hits. I also noticed a 430% change over the past three months at my web site, if I am reading their data correctly. That Is the reason for asking the hit rate on your blogs. I am really only looking for some advice if there is anyone that will share. I can always just check some of your blogs on Alexa to see what you are getting but I thought it might make an interesting topic.
Thanks,
Jonathan
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talking about photography i think the best blog out there
is APhotoeditor.com
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Hi Adeptris,
I am not really free right now to do a Blog the way I would want to, maybe down the road in a bit. I was just trying to gauge numbers and see if anyone would help out in sharing some of their own numbers experience. This came about when I looked on Alexa and saw that my plain old web site has had over a million and a half hits. I also noticed a 430% change over the past three months at my web site, if I am reading their data correctly. That Is the reason for asking the hit rate on your blogs. I am really only looking for some advice if there is anyone that will share. I can always just check some of your blogs on Alexa to see what you are getting but I thought it might make an interesting topic.
Thanks,
Jonathan
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for what you are talking about, Jonathan. I think the idea of "successful" blog is very ambiguous. It depends entirely on your niche. My blog goes hardly anywhere until I post something about motocross photography. That is my niche. Everytime I blog on the subject, I go directly to page one on Google.
A trip to Monument Valley barely got me to page five. Also, blogging, Facebook, collection links to google, Twitter, etc. have done very little to increase sales ... as far as I can see. I do get a lot of views of my Motocross Legends collection at cutcaster ... but NO sales.
If anybody knows how to make blogging work better, give us a shout.
By the way, I think Holgs' blog gets lots of attention and he sells the heck out of his World Travel images.
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Thanks Warren,
That was a big help. Power to you and your business. Please any others with advice.
Best,
Jonathan
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A lot of times a blog will be very important for SEO purposes and drawing readers into your main site or product offering. For example, a stock agency might write about a recent survey of graphic designers and how they use images with the hopes that the article gets indexed and ranked high by google and sends them free organic traffic. If you wanted to chat about this Jonathan just give me a ring over skype. i know a few more tricks that can help you.
Also i would use wordpress bc that way the traffic you receive is benefiting your other sites and added to your overall rank and not another companies like blogspot did for google at the expense of the bloggers.
John
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i find photo blogs very very boring apart rare cases.
but there are exception thanks god, have a look at this in the blog section :
http://photojournalismlinks.com/ (http://photojournalismlinks.com/)
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http://pa.photoshelter.com:80/mkt/seo/seo-toolkit-central (http://pa.photoshelter.com:80/mkt/seo/seo-toolkit-central)
The Photoshelter Cookbook actually is an interesting and informative read on SEO (internet marketing). I was hesitant to offer this since it has been out there for so long. Maybe you have not seen it?
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Sergey, Warren, John, Adeptris and Microstockinsider,
Thanks for the input it's all very helpful. It's great when people can help each other on these sites openly and freely. I appreciate your candidness. Best to all and if anyone wants to share more please do, it is a great help.
Best,
Jonathan