Knowing What You Want on Your Website One of the biggest challenges of making a website is deciding what content you will have. To decide that, it’s always a good idea to take a look at what others have done. You want to know what links are on the homepage; what they sell (including services), if anything; and what other extras they have. Table 11.1 presents a wide range of photographer websites and the content they contain. Notice that there is a trend toward websites that contain blog posts (see Figure 11.2). It makes sense because when you write a blog post for your webpage, you have fresh content that will keep people coming back. You’ll find that all the sites have great photo galleries and that some don’t sell anything. Most of the time, if they’re not selling anything, they’ll have ads to make money. 166 ■ Promoting Yourself SELLING IMAGES ON YOUR WEBSITE OR BLOG RIGHT AWAY WITH PAYPAL PayPal is a site you can register on that allows your customers to pay for their goods with a credit card.When the buyer wants an item on your website, he can go to the PayPal site and pay with his credit card. It’s quick and easy to sell images on your blog using PayPal.You can make a button for the image that states its name and price and that will link to PayPal so the customer can use his credit card to buy it. (You can also make multiple-choice buttons that allow you to sell the same image at different sizes or in black and white versus color.) To make the button go to PayPal, click on the Merchant Services tab at the top of the page.Then click Buy Now Button. Fill out the form and then click on Create Button.You’ll be given some HTML code to put in your blog post (in the HTML section). Put it under the image, and your image will be for sale. After that, they can click the button and pay, and you can deliver, say, a high-res image by e-mail. NOTE You can make money on your website or blog by putting ads on it. Google (https://www.google.com/adsense) has an AdSense program where you can put ads on your site with HTML code. LinkWorth (www.linkworth.com) also has a good program for putting ads on your site. TABLE 11.1 PHOTOGRAPHER WEBSITES AND CONTENT Website Main Homepage Items Sold at Site Ads Links and Content Photocritic.org Home, About, All Articles, On About page, link to Google and Search, as well as blog posts his book on Amazon: Adsense Macro Photography Photo Workshop Tony Sweet Gallery,Workshops, Bio, Fine art prints, notecards, None Photography Events, Blog, Store DVDs, and books (Tonysweet.com) Author Gunther Home, Store, Limited Edition, Fine art prints, Amazon Photography High Resolution Murals, Contact, limited editions (aguntherphotography.com) Copyright, Galleries, Links,Tutorials, Wallpapers (free), as well as daily blog posts Jill Greenberg Portfolio, Names None None (manipulator.com) (she photographs celebrities), Bio and Press, News, Publications, Exhibitions/Events, Contact Wow Photo Art Home, Statement, Reviews, Prints, prints on canvas None (wowphotoart.com) Exhibits, Buy, Care, Links, Contact Promoting Yourself ■ 167 Figure 11.2 Many websites today contain blog posts. Letting Others Know about Your Website/Blog Once you have your website up and running, how are you going to let people know it’s there? There are myriad ways to do that—no one way is an easy bullet. It takes time and perseverance to get people to come to your website and/or blog. In the “Getting Your Photo Noticed on Google” section in Chapter 10, there is information about one way to get people to come to your webpage/blog—making filenames for your pictures that the Googlebot can find. If you recall, when you make a blog or website with an online program such as Blogger or Weebly, you’ll have to upload the images to that website/blog. The programs convert the insertion of images into a website/blog into language the web can understand, which is HTML. Here are some other ways to get your website/blog noticed: ❈ Get popular blogs/websites to link your blog/website to theirs. Many blogs/websites have a Links section. Your goal is to get to be one of those links. The more links you have, the more the Googlebot will notice that your site’s out there, and the higher ranking it will give it in the search results. ❈ Submit your blog/website directly to the search engines. Google’s is at www.google.com/ addurl, and Yahoo!’s is at https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/. It’ll cost you, though— a tidy $299 per year. ❈ When you name the new pages to your website or new posts to your blog, use the right keywords. In Blogger, it asks you to name your blog as well as describe it. The words count in your ranking. For example, I named one of my blogs “Digital Traveler.” When you type those words into Google, my site comes up first (out of some 11 million sites). If your site comes up number one for the keywords “digital photography,” then you know you’re probably going to get millions of hits a day. Digital Photography Review (www.dpreview.com) has that honor; it’s a site you should count on for great reviews about cameras, lenses, and other photo accessories. ❈ Submit your blog posts, webpage, webpage articles, or even your best images to social book- marking sites, such as delicious.com, shoutwire.com, and digg.com. People on those sites can vote on whether they think your submission is a good one. ❈ Keep content fresh. Post on blogs as often as you can and/or add fresh content to your website. Search engines like to pick up new stuff. ❈ Submit your site to directories such as photo.net and photographydirectory.org. 168 ■ Promoting Yourself Using Twitter to Announce Your Events/Activities Keep in mind that getting word about your photography out there will get more people to a gallery when you have a show, draw more readers to your photography book if you’ve written one, and send more people to your blog/website to see and either buy your photography or click on the ads on your site/blog. Twitter is a social networking site where you post short messages (140 characters max). You can choose to follow other people by searching for them. (To search, click on Find People at the top of all Twitter pages.) After you do your search, a list of people will come up with a Follow link. Just click on that link to follow them. Once you start following people, you’ll find that they’ll start following you. See Figure 11.3. Every time you post on your blog or other site and/or find an interesting photo article/blog post/website, let people on Twitter know. (This is called “tweeting” it.) If you’re writing a book, you can put out a chapter bit by bit (140 characters max per post) on Twitter. It’s easy to become a member; just sign up at twitter.com. When you start being active on Twitter, you’ll find you gather followers quickly. Promoting Yourself ■ 169 Figure 11.3 An entry on Twitter is called a “tweet.” Finally, you can link your Twitter posts to your blog. This will put your Twitter posts on your blog every time you tweet. When you do this, your blog and social networking accounts will be more active, drawing more interest. To do this, log into Twitter and click on Settings. In the More Info URL category, click on the link that says You Can Also Add Twitter to Your Site Here. A new window will come up with a choice of blogs and social networking sites (MySpace, Blogger, Facebook, and TypePad). Click on one of them and then click on Continue at the bottom-right part of the window. Last, in the new window, choose the number of updates you want on your blog and then follow the directions for putting the updates on the blog/social networking sites you want. Creating a Print Photography Portfolio Creating a print portfolio is one of the best things you can do with your photos, which often sit in your computer without anyone physically seeing them in print form. Printing your images makes sense because no one knows what will happen to technology in the years to come, possibly making what’s in your computer today obsolete 20 years from now. (You can review the “What Will Your Images Look Like in 10 Years?” sidebar in Chapter 1 to see what the possibilities are.) When you print your photos out, they become a permanent record of what you’ve done. With today’s archival inks and paper, your printed images are likely to last generations. 170 ■ Promoting Yourself NOTE You can let people on Twitter know about photos you post by giving them the URL in your post. Flickr gives you a URL for each photo you post. Navigate to your homepage and click on Your Photostream under your image/greeting at the top of the window.Then, in the next window, click on the picture for which you want the URL. It will appear with a single enlarged version of your image. Blogger also gives you a URL for each photo you post. (Click on the photo in your post to get the photo’s URL.) NOTE It doesn’t hurt to follow other photographers, too, as you’ll come to find out new techniques and goings-on in the photography world. . wants an item on your website, he can go to the PayPal site and pay with his credit card. It’s quick and easy to sell images on your blog using PayPal.You can make a button for the image that. some HTML code to put in your blog post (in the HTML section). Put it under the image, and your image will be for sale. After that, they can click the button and pay, and you can deliver, say,. way is an easy bullet. It takes time and perseverance to get people to come to your website and/ or blog. In the “Getting Your Photo Noticed on Google” section in Chapter 10, there is information