The power of a self hosted wordpress website/blog for photographers

This post is for my photographer friends.

This is also a follow up to a prior article on the same topic. In less than one year, I’ve gone from 300-500 visits per MONTH to about 300 visits per day to my self hosted wordpress website and blog (very important: this does not work like this if you go get a wordpress.com blog where “wordpress.com” is part of your URL).

As you can see, my URL does not say wordpress.com in it anywhere (www.photosbypdemott.com). That is because I have the entire wordpress program installed on my host and my website landing page is my URL, but this entire web site is a wordpress blog with blog posts and pages. It may not be as slick as some of the flash sites that are promoted in photography magazines, but those sites will never generate this level of activity unless they are heavily promoted. With wordpress each time that I post to my blog it creates more key words that appear in organic searches on Google and other search engines. Since it is a blog, Google also considers it timely information and crawls through the content quickly. When I post something, the next hour or day I have people who have visited my web site about that topic using organic searches (placing words in their google search box and clicking search). 70% of the traffic to this site is from organic searches as opposed to from links that I have placed on various free classified web listings for example.

By using a plugin called WordPress Stats I can see what words and phrases are used to arrive at my web site. When I see traffic that I want, I try to use those words in my next post. For example, as a photographer I want people interested in senior portrait sessions to visit my web site, but I have found that organic searches are many times “senior pictures” rather than “senior portraits”. Using this plugin gives me the tools to focus on the words that will give me the desired traffic to my site. I also mention cities and towns, schools and names of people to increase localized and desired traffic to my site.

Now, I am not that technical a guy. Of course when it comes to photogrpahy, I’m technical. I have a Canon 1D Mark II with a 70-200 IS USM f2.8 lens (and others) for photography. But, with regard to web sites I don’t know HTML or other languages. I don’t even know how to download wordpress and install in on my host. I let others that are very able in those areas do what they know how to do to get me started.

Larry at larry@e-3design.com is my host and web guy whenever I need some help. Larry can host, install, and design a wordpress website/blog for you or can get you started with an install and hosting if you can do the rest. If you want to start with a self hosted wordpress installation, Larry can get-r-done (but, please do not call him and waste his time. If you want him to do it for you, send him a note and tell him you are ready. He will go over his prices and you can do it or not, but don’t call him and use his valuable time with a bunch of questions so you can do it on your own. If you want to learn all that stuff unless you want to pay him, it is not fair to make Larry your teacher. There are also online tutorials about this stuff where you can learn, but personally I want to be a photographer rather than a web site designer).

Next time I will post a list of plugins that send my posts to Facebook and Twitter and provide all sorts of extra benefits.

If you found this interesting, please post a comment. I want to know if I am providing you with information that you find interesting and useful. You can send me a note at peter@photosbypdemott.com as well.

Here is a follow up to my stats graph:

Related posts:

1. Why WordPress Web Sites for Photographers?
2. My fovorite self hosted Word Press web site plugins
3. My friend Janne’ Peterson of Jannephotographics implements WordPress with total Pizzaz
4. Jeff Smith says,”Could be your photography sucks” in his blog post
5. Getting noticed on the Internet and SEO tips for photographers