5 ways to drive traffic to your photo website

Promote your website as many ways as possible...

1 Offer an email subscription

If you offer an email subscription so that fans will be alerted every time there’s a new post, it saves them the bother of having to think too much about it. All of the main blogging platforms have options for offering email subscriptions: you just need to add the widget.

2 Regularly update your site

A surefire way to get people back often is to regularly have new work for people to look at. As it’s your personal photography website nobody expects you to update several times a day – but if your site hasn’t been updated for months, it can start to look neglected.

Similarly, you might find that you have a couple of quiet months followed by a week of shoots. While it’s tempting to stick everything up as soon as you have it ready, consider scheduling posts so that the blog is updated more frequently, such as weekly.

3 Connect with social media

Facebook and Twitter are huge referrers to websites, so it makes sense to get in on the action. You can publicise your latest post on your personal Facebook page, but you might want to consider setting up a page dedicated entirely to your photography. You can link your blog accounts so that it automatically posts to Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. If you can build up a following on Twitter and Facebook, it will be even more effective.

4 Tag your posts

As it’s your own website, you shouldn’t worry too much about being a slave to search engine optimisation (SEO), but there are still things you can do to help your website get noticed by the likes of Google. Make sure every post is tagged with appropriate keywords. This helps Google pick up your posts, as well as help your readers find older posts and images.

5 Network with other blogs

One of the best ways to increase traffic to your site is to become part of the blogging community. Look for photographers and blogs with a similar content to yours, read them, and leave comments on posts. There’s a good chance that if you leave a comment on someone else’s website, they’ll want to check out yours – and before you know it, you’ll be part of a community.

When you receive a comment on your blog, make sure you reply to it – even if it’s just to say thanks. The more you build a relationship with the readers, the more they’ll come back.