Blogging Tips

There are a ton of Photo Hosting Services and as bloggers we should be making use of great photos on our blogs. Photos capture eyeballs quickly because users scanning posts will more likely pause when they see a photo that is compelling. If you take photos then you’re going to need a place to store them.

You can upload and then store them to your blog through the upload media option in WordPress and Blogger (and probably other ones too) which is fine. However if you do just host the photo on your blog then you could be losing out on possible traffic to your blog. Let’s say that you took a photo of a dog, like the boxer above. You upload that photo to your wordpress blog so that you can use it in a blog post. That’s it, you are done. Photo on a blog end of transaction.

But you could get more out of that photo.

Now let’s suppose that you take a photo of that boxer and you upload it to Flickr and you add tags to the photo such as “boxer”, “Sticking out tongue”, “dog”, “funny” and “funny dog”. In the caption of the photo you leave a link to your blog post. This means that if someone was doing a search on Flickr for funny dog photos or sticking out tongues then they may find your photo. They click on the photo and want to see it clearer, on the photo page they see a link to your blog post about your funny dog and they click that link. Bang. Traffic.

Ramp it Up

But suppose that you host that same photo to multiple sites. Flickr, Picasa, Buzznet and Zooomr all give you the option to add in captions which include links. They also allow you to tag the images with keywords. So this means that the users within those communities can easily find your photos and your blog post. The services I listed above are the ones I use on a daily basis to host my daily photo, I also post my photo to Facebook and ShutterCal. Each of them drives traffic to my blog.

Which is my favorite?

Each site has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Facebook – You can add links to your photos but not tag them with keywords, you can tag them with people though. Can’t post photos from Facebook to your blog.

ShutterCal – Simple interface, organizes photos on a day by day basis in a calendar. Only post one photo per day. Sort of the point of the site and all.

Buzznet – Got way too hip and focuses more on really hipster things like music and movies and less on photos. However you can still generate traffic from the site.

Photo-A-Day #1213 08/03/08

Zooomr – Offers free infinite uploads but not a hugely popular platform even though they offer near as many options as Flickr.

Picasa – Free and you can pay for additional space but don’t need to unless you run out but as Google gets bigger you get more space. Plus Picasa has a very cool desktop program that can catalog and sync all your home photo directories. There is also a face detection option which is currently at 8% completed for me because I have over 250,000 photos for the software to sort through.

From 4th Annual Scoop The Herring Day

Flickr – Probably one of the most well known and most used photo hosting sites out there. It integrates with nearly everything and there is a fee if you want to go pro.

What Photo Hosting Sites Do you use? Which do you like the best?