10 Killer Tips Guaranteed to Actually Kill Your Photography Blog

There are so many rules and guides all over the web on how to create a proper blog that’s it’s really easy to get confused. However, if you consider yourself as a successful photography businessman, you should pay attention to this subject. In this article I don’t want to teach you how to create a blog and repeat a lot of words said before.

So, today I’d like to have some fun and share with you 10 BAD tips for beginner photography bloggers. I hope that funny format of this article will help you to better remember essential things you should pay attention to and make sure that everything is alright on your blog.

Note that following these bad tips will surely lead you to messing up your blog! Don't follow them! 

#1: Forget SEO

Who knows what SEO is and why should you waste your time thinking of this. Why should search engines figure out what each page of your blog is about? Let it remains a mystery for both users and search engines. Who came up with all these dull rules? The rules were made to broke them, were not they? All these keywords, titles, usability, and the entire SEO-optimization is for dummies who don’t know how to run business online effectively!

Who follow these stupid Google guidelines? Buy links, duplicate contents, and hide content. Buying links is an attempt to manipulate Pagerank, but how could you increase it without buying links? Stolen content is also fine, you’re not a robot to write an article per day, so why not to use someone else’s post s your own? Google won’t see anything. Also, use as many keywords as you can in each sentence to let search engines know what it’s all about.

#2: Choose the First Platform You Find

Why should you care about the platform to build your blog on? Listen to your granny, neighbor, friend of your older brother to choose the first site builder you find! No matter that you are not aware how to code, upload your new post to the blog, or it has limitations in adding high-quality photos. No matter that it has no customer support and you are supposed to search various forum days and nights to figure out how to solve issues with your blog. It’s okay!

#3: Add Tons of Pics Without Description

You may upload to your blog any images you like, but don’t add a word to them to describe. Your viewers are not blind! Don’t they see what’s shown on the photos you upload? Don’t care about tags and descriptions, – it’s wasted time. Search engines will not see your images, but who cares?

#4: Disregard Fresh Trends of Web Design

Who needs those stupid trends? Your blog looks just as awesome now as it did when you launched it in like 2008. Focus on some more important things. You have a strong vision how your blog should look like and nothing could change that. Your target audience needs are also don’t matter at all. Leave concerns about conversion and better user experience to Jacob Nielsen. It’s your blog and you know better how to run it.

#5: Don’t Care About Community

Don’t care about people’s opinion about your blog, just do what you do. Never conduct surveys, answer lame comments, write only generic emails and never get back to the people who writes you. Forget about giveaways and freebies, don’t waste your precious time on all this useless stuff.

#6: Hide Your Contact Details

If you want to talk to somebody you will get in touch with them yourself. Don’t let accidental visitors to interrupt you with their silly phone calls and email. Who they think they are to annoy YOU? Don’t bother answering people’s questions. People on the web are tend to leave negative feedback and criticize everything. And the rest are plain spammers. Live your happy life without all that mess.

#7: The More Colors, the Better

Who said that red letters on the blue background with vivid green banners are bad? When you create a blog feel free to use rich color scheme. Over 10 color tones will be enough, or even more. You may try to overcome all the expectations and use even more colors in design. Use a lot of textures, shadows and gradients. They are trendy these days 😉

#8: Write a Lot About Yourself in Details

That’s true that people care only about you, not about themselves. So, you can just copy a boring text from from your CV listing your education, skills, and awards, and that’s it. No creativity, interesting and funny stories about your life, no details. The more dull information you share the more trust you get.

#9: Steal Photos

Is using photos without permission illegal? Everybody can steal pictures from the web, so don’t worry about licenses and credits. In a case a photo owner will claim for you, you can always say that you found it on some site and know nothing about this image. Your business is way more important than some copyright claims from people you don’t even know, so don’t worry about it!

#10: Guest Blogging is Dead

Guest bloggers are great writers for your blog, no matter that they offered a post about fresh muffins in Paris to your photography blog. Take all these articles without distinction! Let all these dull bloggers care about guidelines on how to write a proper guest post. You may take every post you like or don’t!

OR if you don’t like the option with guest bloggers, don’t invite them at all. Make it super difficult to find a “Write for us” page on your blog and hide your contact details, like I suggested before. It’s a great way to get rid of all these annoying emails.

Give me a virtual high five if you ever followed at least one of these bad tips. I guess we've all done that. Now that you read them all, make sure you do the opposite and approach your photo blog wisely. Here are some resources to help you with that.

5 Useful Tools to Help You Care About Your Blog

1. Google Keyword Planner is a useful service from Google that allows you to search for proper keyword for your blog post and hints at how to insert it properly. This tool will help you to drive traffic to your blog using correct keywords.

2. Defrozo (I also happen to work with them) is a free photography marketing platform that allows you to create both a photo portfolio and a blog on its basis. It’s a great tool tailored specifically to the needs of photographers. With its all-in-one workspace and drag-n-drop editor, creating a blog post and inserting images from your Defrozo media library is a as easy as ABC.

3. Canva is a start-to-finish design app that is made for non-designers. With this tool you can create beautiful images and add some typography on it which is a great choice for blog posts.

4. Colour Lovers is a creative community where people share trendy color palettes and patterns to use in your future blog design. It’s quite difficult to combine 4 or more colors, but Colour Lovers will help you with this task.

5. Unsplash is a blog style photo site that allows you to submit your own photos for personal and commercial use for free with no attribution required. It’s a great example of truly high-quality photo site. There are no fake-looking stock images, only real and honest beautiful photography.

What if you had to give a really bad advice to fellow blogging photographers, what would it be? Can't wait to read your bad tips in the comments!