One of the most popular types of blogging is of course photo-blogging. No doubt blogs do have one/two nice images in their articles. But in photoblogs, these pictures are the center of attraction in a blog post. People visit and bookmark these photo blogs just to see those amazing pictures regularly. Although, generally it is not very difficult to start and maintain a photo-blog, but then you must take some important precautions and apply some SEO techniques to optimize and popularize the blog and also to protect your content.

Follow up:

The main points to consider while starting and maintaining a photo-blog are:

1. Content sources - for creating and enhancing your work.
2. Search Engine Optimization & bringing traffic from other sources.
3. Protecting your pictures from the web-thieves.
4. Selling and Monetizing your content.

Let's discuss these points in detail:

Content Sources
As pictures are the most important ingredient of a photoblog, so your first source of content is of course your own camera. You may get some free pictures from Public-Domain-Image resources, but these can be only used to enhance your work and not to directly display on your blog.

The camera you are using should be a minimum of 3MP (3 mega pixels), as images of lower-quality or resolution are of no use to most of the webmasters/designers/users.
Read more about cameras, camera-reviews and photography-tips in these websites:

• DP-Reviews
• Digital Photography School
• Picture Correct
• For your inspiration - Nat Geo Photos

For enhancing your images displayed on your photoblog, as I have already mentioned you can use images from Public-Domain-Images resources and combine these images/vectors with your own pictures to improve/enhance the effects.

You can read and follow these Photoshop-tutorial websites, to further improve your photo-editing skills:

• PSD-Tutplus
• Photoshop Tutorials
• GraphX-Design
• PhotoshopStar
• And of course a Google Search for Photoshop Tutorials

SEO and Traffic Building Strategies
So once you have collected all your images and a blog is ready to fill in with all your pictures, there are some precautions you should take and some SEO strategies you should follow to popularize your content and to make sure that nobody can steal all your hard work.

Whether you want to sell your images, want to distribute them freely or just want to display them on your blog, it is always recommended to use small images of lower-resolution on your web pages, and place a link to the main-larger picture files, so that your blog-readers can download these pictures from these links. This is done, so that the images load quickly without demanding a lot of bandwidth which may otherwise upset many of your readers.

A pictue is worth a thousand words...
Well the phrase sounds correct to human ears, as their eyes have already experienced this strange pictures-text phenomenon. But for search engines that do not have ears or eyes, photo-blogs are nothing more than some strange blogs with hardly any meaningful textual content. So you must focus on the image-SEO strategies if you want to build good traffic from search engines. That means, you must have "alt" and "title" attributes bound to all your images. And these alt or title attributes must explain the pictures perfectly, filled with important keywords. For example; suppose one wants to embed a picture of sunset at a beach, then the code used by most of the bloggers look like this:

<a href="http://LINK_TO_BIGGER_IMAGE"><img src="http://LINK_TO_THE_SMALLER-IMAGE.jpg" /></a>

But an SEO optimized code should actually look something like this:

<a href="http://LINK_TO_BIGGER_IMAGE" title="an evening at an Australian Beach"><img src="http://LINK_TO_THE_SMALLER-IMAGE.jpg" alt="a picture of sunset at an Australian beach" /></a>

Observe the additional alt and title attributes with added description about the image, I have filled these attributes with the required keywords which will tell the search engines to index these images tagged with the above listed keywords like "Sunset, Beach, Australia" etc. And when an Internet surfer searches for any of these words, your page will be shown to that user. To further improve the indexing of these images, try to add some descriptive text alongside the images.

Getting traffic from StumbleUpon, Digg and other social networking sites:
Traffic from these sites generally do not prefer staying long on a single webpage. So you already have an advantage over other text-based blogs, where readers have to spend more time to read and understand the article completely, to vote for it. Your main content being images (which should of course load fast, so use smaller images as already explained), and without those obstructive and annoying adverts (and pop-ups) you can easily get 1000's and millions of new readers every month. Once you get sufficient traffic and subscribers, you can allow some advertisements in your blog. But remember, if you are focussed mainly on social networking sites for your blog-traffic then pop-ups and pop-unders are a strict NO-NO always.

Protecting Your Content
Once your content and pictures are online, protecting them from content-thieves is really difficult. After some weeks of searching on Internet, I have prepared a perfect mix of techniques to stop image theft almost completely. These techniques will help you in protecting your pictures by:

• Stopping indexing of images in Google Image Search (as at least 95% of images are stolen from Google Image Search results).
• Using HTML encryption
• Embedding images using CSS instead of only HTML, with an overlay protective transparent image.

As explaining these techniques in detail need a separate post, so you can better read this post already written by me: Protect your images on your website.

Finally Selling and Monetization of Your Content
Once your photoblog becomes famous and you become a successful professional photo-blogger, then you can start monetizing your blog and pictures. The best way of monetizing is of course your private advertising, but being a photo-blog, you can also try this new type of advertising called as In-Image Ads

You can also feature some of the best content from your photoblog at image-selling sites like, ShutterStock, Fotolia and Dreamstime. But remember that these sites accept only high quality, unique, creative and innovative pictures. So initially you shouldn't waste too much of your time with these websites until you become professional in this field. Till then you can of course sell your images from your own blog/website.

Do you photo blog? Have you thought about starting your own photoblogging site? Why not tell us about in a comment? I'd love to hear about your blogging aspirations!

The Photogenic Angel