make cash from your online portfolio
Having a presence online is essential for promoting your work. We explore the various options available
Getting your images online is the best way to get your work noticed, gain new clients and even sell prints to customers that you could never reach in any other way. The internet gives you the chance to showcase your work in a way that’s accessible to people around the world, not just on your doorstep, and even to be found by magazines and professional picture editors. Of course, the web can be a big, confusing place where it’s hard to get noticed amid the sea of images already available, and you might also be worried about the possibility of image theft if you display your best shots publicly.
So here, we take a look at how to get your shots online, how to protect them, and how to help people find them.
Photo-sharing sites
If you want to get your images online without the hassle and expense of setting up your own website, then the simplest way is to use a photo-sharing site such as Flickr, 500px or Pinterest. These offer a great way to get your images on the web, and are usually free to use. They are particularly good if you are prepared to put in some time and effort to join groups and communities on the site, which will help gain your images more views and exposure. They are also perfect for linking to social media such as Facebook or Twitter, which can also help improve the exposure of your images to as many people as possible.
Website options
While photo-sharing websites are great for getting your
images online, having your own website can be a more versatile and productive way of selling your images and services, and can also look much more professional. There are several ways of producing a website, from building it yourself to using one of the many all-in-one photography website providers such as Clikpic, Smugmug, or Zenfolio.
If you are ‘tech-savvy’ and want a bespoke site, then it’s not difficult to build your own website. To start with, you’ll need a web hosting service, along with a domain name, which you may need to buy and register separately, although often this can be done through the web hosting company. Once you have this set up you can start to build the actual site using a platform such as WordPress.
The all-in-one providers offer a simpler solution than building your own site, as you don’t have to design the site from scratch or worry about separate hosting, as this is part of the package. You can either use an existing domain name or purchase one through the website provider. Then all you need to do is select a template from their site, upload your images and add a few words.
Basic design
Whether you build it yourself or use a template, you should generally try to keep the design and layout of your website simple, clean and uncluttered. If you are simply showcasing your images this is extremely important, as you don’t want anything to take attention away from these, but being easy to navigate and clearly laid out is advantageous to any website.
An additional advantage of simplicity is that a streamlined design can also make your site easier to use on the smaller screens of phones and tablets, which is becoming more important as more and more people access the web on these devices. To boost this further, you should also look for templates and designs that are ‘mobile friendly’, which means that logos, text boxes, buttons and images are resized for smaller screens.
Along with coming up with a design you’re happy with, make sure that there is plenty of information about you and the photographic services that you offer. This is particularly important if you are trying to promote an offline photographic business, but even if you only want to sell prints online, people are much more likely to trust you enough to buy prints if they can find out some information about you and your photography.
Preparing your images
With any photography website, the images are the key to its success, so you need to make sure that you resize, sharpen and save the ones you’ve chosen for your portfolio so that they look their best on-screen. They also need to be small enough to load quickly on your site, as users aren’t going to wait ages for photos to load.
You can do this using the normal resizing and save options, but Photoshop and Elements include a handy ‘Save For Web’ option in the File menu, which allows you to preview the effects of the different options before you save the image.
Getting found online
There’s no point having the best website in the world if nobody knows it’s there. You should start by promoting your website as much as possible, through friends, family and on social media. This can help start driving traffic to your site, but for the website to really succeed you need it to be found among the millions of other sites on the web, which is where the world of search engine optimisation (or SEO) comes in. There are loads of books, guides and even companies offering to help with the SEO of websites, but before you start spending loads of cash you need to make sure that you have the basic elements in place.
For this, you need to put in place a few simple things on your website, so that it can be found by search engines such as Google. No search engine can easily recognise images on their own, so you should start by making sure that all of your images have plenty of keywords attached to them. (You can do this easily in Lightroom.) Keywords should include the location or subject, along with more words that people are likely to search for that describe the picture and its contents. Search engines will scan the text on your site, but this is often limited to the first few lines, such as the headline and strapline of the copy, so you need to make sure that these areas of the text have as many words or phrases that describe the content and that people are likely to search for. You should also try to include links within your site to different pages.
Along with what is on your site, you should also try to get as many links back from other websites as you can. First of all you can link it to any social media accounts that you have, then you can also ask other sites to link back to yours. This shows search engines that your site has content that is interesting enough for others to want to link to, which improves its search rating.
All of these elements are only the start, though, as you should also make sure that the site, text and content are updated regularly to indicate that the site is active. But while updating these areas is good for your ranking with search engines, avoid making frequent changes to the main layout and design elements, especially the home page, as this can have a detrimental effect on search results.