Write about things outside of your photography for increased search engine ranking and get those links coming in from other sources to raise your rankings is important.
“Writing articles on “image creation” and “the places you’ve been” will attract mostly other photographers. And they don’t buy photos. While it is certainly desirable to have highly-ranked photo-centric websites link to you, this is a very narrow market, and not one that will boost your overall rankings that ultimately attract image buyers.
If you’re going to invest time into blogging, you want NON-PHOTOGRAPHY sites to link to you. How do you do that? By blogging about subjects that probably have less to do with photography as the other subject.” Dan Heller
The above quotes come from Dan Heller’s website and an article called “Perils of Taking Advice from Pros” It is also one of the reasons why I am more interested in talk about economics and photography on my twitter feed and this website. I am a documentary photographer (I have now accepted that term for what I do, a story for another day) and I am interested in how economics and capitalism affects our social landscapes we inhabit. This is why I post on these subjects and not just photography. I if I want to get noticed by the Search engines need to get out of the photography ghetto.
“This leads to another point I’ve made often in the past: don’t emulate other pros. What they do NOW, or have done IN THE PAST, often has no bearing on their current success, or yours. Most of them are unaware of this, and erroneously believe they have advice that emerging photographers should adopt.” Dan Heller
The above quote has implications for me as a teacher of photography. what I did or did not do to be successful as a photographer will not be what you need to be doing to be successful as a photographer. Dan Heller’s “advice for emerging photographers in this day and age is not to look at photographers at all—look at general online business development. There are many texts and periodicals that deal with building business models that are more universal, and can better translate to a photography business than what narrowly-experienced pros can offer.” I tend to agree with him on this one, which is why I keep thinking that a marketing degree or course, would be of great benefit to any aspiring photographer. Work out how to market oneself and you can make it as a photographer. Especially, in an online internet connected world, where what you do can be picked up and magnified beyond the confines of specialist photography magazines. That is not selling out, it is actually becoming part of the culture or more our popular culture that we all live within. How does one do this? I think it is to make work that is relevant to the society that you are living in. It will then if you market and promote it, then be picked up and referenced. That is going to make a successful career for you as a photographer, just don’t rush it and give up the day job. till you have the income to do so. Otherwise, you will end up taking jobs, that you do not want to, for less money than you need to survive on and still not make the images, that you have always wanted to.