How Do You Attract People to Your Blog and Photos?

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

How Do You Attract People to Your Blog, and Photos,

and E-Bay, and to your Website, and So Forth?

Part I

(Flickr)

    When I started my blog some 18 months ago, I thought it would be easy to attract people. I also thought selling on E-Bay was easy.  I also thought that if I took lots and lots of great toy photos, I'd have thousands of people wanding those photos, and I'd make loads of money! 

    Well, I now have between 40-140 page views per day on my blog. Not quite the 326,940,395 hits that Katy Perry has on YouTube for her hit song "Fireworks".

I have 31,404 page views for my Antique Toys blog

and 5228 pageviews  for my Pro Photography Learning Blog.

     For E-Bay, I've managed to become a Top-Rated Seller, and A Power Seller, which is fine with me. However, I'll never get rich buying and selling toys on E-Bay. In fact, if I break even, I'd be lucky. However, I did it to keep busy, and to be able to write about toys.

My ID on E-Bay is sib2048w

I've been given feedback and I gave feedback  for a total of 1040 items

I am a Top-Rated Seller

I'm a Power Seller

I'm in the Toy 1000 Reviewers list

Top-Rated means that buyers have been very satisfied with my items, packaging, and shipping times.

A Power-Seller means that I was selling about 40-50 items a month.

Being in the Top 1000 Reviewers List means that people like my reviews and read them (in visits)

    As for presenting my photos, I learned that  there are sites on the Net where you can upload your photos for free (within limits), and have everyone view them.

   What I'm going to talk about today is Flickr

    Flickr is a website where you can you can upload your photos. As far as Flickr, and my next post about Picasa, they're both not like that line from the Kevin Kostner movie Field of Dreams. His line was "if you build it, they will come". Basically, Kevin and his family end up one night having  long ago baseball legends show up on a small lot next to his corn field. So he decides to build a basball field to help them play.

    Well, I loaded all of my nice photos (please excuse my lack of modesty!), and figured (wrong!) that I'll get loads and loads of people visiting. Not! Even though my photos are well done for focus, lighting, detail , and size,  I might as well have put them up in the local supermarket. I've only had a "slight dusting" of people.

     What I realized yesterday, is that you have to add "tags" or words to your photos in order for the photos to appear when people do a search for your photos. So now I've started to add tags such as "old antique toy" or "old toy photo".  Of course, if you pay Google (I think it works that way) you appear at the top of most searches. Try doing  a search for "old toy" and E-Bay appears for the first 10 pages.  Search results will vary from search engine to search engine, but the 3 that I have with Chrome ( a browser from Google) or Safari (a browser from Apple)  all pretty much show similar results. Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo  are the 2 other search engines that I sometimes use after Chrome. 

    I just discovered Blekko which advertises itself as "spam-free". It shows less of E-Bay, but please don't tell anyone! 

The Basics of Flickr

My name on Flickr is lightreflector1

I think it's better to keep my name or use the same name all over the net. I also have a different name for Picasa,and I'm sure nobody knows that I am the same person on both. 

My name on Picasa (owned by Google is major trout. Needless to say, when I do a search for "major trout photos",  I get 500 pages of  trout fish photos!

When you sign in, you come across this page when you press "You". As you can easily see, there is a lot of material to learn and use. SO just putting up my photos as I mentioned before only got me a "dusting" of visitors.

A sample screen capture of my photos.

I also have architecture and flowers on my "stream" or sets of photos.

If you double-click on any of my photos, you will see nice quality and detail of my photos. Yesterday, I found a photo on someone else's blog that was being used without my permission. I told the person to give me credit (my name) or please remove it. He removed it. I wrote back, to say that he could use any of my photos just so long as he gives me the credit. However, I also told him not to use any photos that I have asked other people if I might use.

I know how hard it is to get people to help me, so I figured that I could let this person use my photos. 

For now, some extra "free publicity" won't hurt, and when my blog hits the 1,000,000 count,

 if I'm still alive, maybe I'll go commercial!

 The red arrow pointing to "add a tag"is what i wanted toy to see.

Notice that I have no tags. Tags are words that you add to your photos for the search engines to track down when you do a search. Now all of my toy photos will have "old toy photo" and "old toy" as their tags. Of course, it will take probably 3-4 weeks for that to enter the Web and for the search engines to find those words. Of course, E-Bay still pays those search engines the "big bucks" to occupy the first 20 pages or so of any toy search.

 At the bottom of my page, you can see how many pages of photos that I have listed for free.

If you want many more (more than the free 300MB), you need to pay about $ 5.95 U.S. dollars fro every 3 months.  Because my photos are large-sied, 300 MB is taken up fast.. But for most people 300MB is a lot of space! Also, you can put up any time of photos (not porno, not racist, not slanderous and so forth).

 Here's how my page looks to me, and probably would look to you if you did a search for me.

For the toy photo above, I actually have "tags"!

 Here is a page of result when I did a search for "Hubley"

I have a fair percentage of toy photos under my name lightreflector1.

 Changing the search words to Hubley Car, increased my  percentages of photos much more. 

Of course, the search was only done in Flickr and on Flickr.

Groups are a part of Flickr that you can join. The added exposure will help you get people who you are interested in having look at your photos.

How to Upload Your Photos to Flickr

 The instruction page shows you how to load up lour photos to Flickr.

It's very easy!

Of course, you have to join Flickr to be able to unload your photos.

 The next page that guides you to upload your photos.

 My Desktop 

I'l be using the pictures in the folder :

2012-All from 

Feb-October 

12 items

I don't know if you can upload entire folders or you have to upload individual photos.

I always load individual photos.

The File folders in my large folder from my desktop

I keep my Raw files (Canon CR2) and large-sized JPEG's from the 

actual camera exposures in the same folder as my smaller JPEGs that I use for my blogs.

My file sizes for Flickr and Picasa are 4" x 6" @ 300 pixels/inch  ( 100 mm x 135mm)

Those are large, but you don't have to use such large-sized files!

There are the actual images for upload.

All of my smaller JPEG photos are extensively labelled so that I can find them fast.

Even better are programs like Lightroom and Aperture, which I both have.

However, using those programs takes up loads of computer memory

 and your computer slows down.

There are my photos that I uploaded to Flickr.

I will add tags, and you can also see the other choices that you have on the left side of this 

screen capture.

Here's the final instruction to upload your photos.

The new page view on Flickr for my latest uploads

An actual screen capture.

Notice the large size of the photo, and as I mentioned, 

you can still double-click to make the image even larger.

I hope that for some readers the introduction of these photo-sharing sites will have sparked some interest and desire for you to join.

So that's another post for today (Added Sunday October 14 for Wednesday October 17 of next week).  I certainly have yo give other blogger credit for keeping their blogs up to day. Especially for those bloggers who have been doing this for 10 years, day after day, week after week, year after year!  My blog usually has lots of photos that take extra time to add, but nevertheless, bravo to the other bloggers.

That's a Wrap!

Thanks for dropping by, 

and as always, 

have  a great morning, afternoon, or eveinging,

wherever you may be.

Stacey

   

s.