ActiveRain Photo Blogging Group Presents The A B C's Of PhotoBlogging

For many members of ActiveRain, this post will be mostly redundant. But as a refresher, let's start from the beginning. In the beginning there was Adam and Eve, we will skip over that part and get to the good stuff.

A Photo blog tells a story with a photo, augmented by words to position the story and expand on it. The first element of this is then adding a photo to a post. But not necessarily the first thing you do in setting up that post.

The first thing you encounter when you are adding a new post  is the title bar. This is where you decide if you want Google Juice for that post. Google Juice is that warm fussy stuff that people work so hard to obtain. In a nut shell, it is Page ranking for your post.

While we are on that subject, what do want in return for the photoblog presentation? Kudos from your subscribers or real page ranking. So let's assume it is the latter, otherwise I don't have a very good reason for writing this.

Selecting a title for a Photo blog is really no different than that for a regular blog post. Does the title capture interest? Wait a minute, the spiders and crawlers don't care about interest. They are interested in key words people use to search for things and that is what they are looking for.

For example. Here are two posts titled differently based on the same photo story. Pardon me while I add a bit of interest for myself and San Diego as I select those titles.

A. San Diego Real Estate PhotoBlog - Make this Beautiful Townhouse Your New Home.

B. San Diego Real Estate PhotoBlog - San Diego Housing Prices Drop, Make this Stunning San Diego Townhome Your New Affordable Home !

What have I accomplished here in the second title?  I incorporated search terms that are likely to be searched by those looking to buy property in San Diego. So lets add up the search words or tags that the spiders and crawlers will pick up on. [ housing prices, san diego, san diego townhouse, affordable home, new home, san diego real estate]. That is a lot of search terms for just the title, wouldn't you agree?

Assuming we have now selected that as the title , what's next? To optimize the title. How about using it as the first line in the post. Google also likes the key words to be used more than once and definitely wants to see them used in the post or photo story, sort of re-enforcing why you chose them in the first place.

Now I just know that you went back up to my title of this post and saw nothing of what I just said. The search terms for the title of this post are [activerain,photoblogging, abc'S] Not going to be a lot of people searching those terms other than ActiveRain. So you can see my title of this post will not get very good page positioning in Google. But if you can learn some basics here, it will be worth the effort anyway.

Should we write the story first or load the photo. We know that the first line of the story is going to be your title re-stated. So I would add that first. The next step is put  your cursor where the photo edge will be and then go to the picture icon. Adding a photo from your computer or where you store them online is is easy. But each of those locations will take a slightly different action to load the photo.

Here is a little tutorial on Adding Photos to your post that Jeremy Blanton of ActiveRain created to help you with that process.

 This first video will just show the 2 different ways to insert a picture onto your blog.

This second video shows you how to align the photo in your post, re-size it & also place some white-space around your picture so that the words of your post do not run into your picture

Now that you have your photo downloaded into the post, you are ready to embellish your photo story. You have seen the word PhotoBlog used in this post and I think I should better define it.

You may ask, " what's the difference between a PhotoBlog and a regular blog since both can and usually do have photos" ? It is a nuance of course but here is how I would explain the difference. When you write a blog you will naturally want to illustrate it and add a photo or a slideshow. The photo and slide shows add interest and support the blog or story you have written. In a photo blog, the photo or slide show is the story and you write words to further enhance and embellish the story.

Think of it as photo journalism. The photo becomes the story and the words support it. As I mentioned this is anuanced meaning that it is open to other interpretations. That is why we started the ActiveRain Photo Blogger Group. To share resources , to share experiences and to learn how better to enhance our own photo telling stories and presentations. We also share in photo enhancements,tutorials on photo taking, branding and copy writing your photos for public presentations, etc.

Your photos are your valuable property and you should determine how they are used and by whom. And our Photo Blogger posts are ALWAYS with our own photos. Some of our members posts even share how they originally took the photos. There is so much we can all learn about Photo Blogging but it is mostly about having fun and sharing what we do.

We welcome you to become a member of what we think will become one of the strongest and growing groups in the Rain. We will have contests, we will present you with awards that will appear right on your posts for all to see. We use guidelines that have been approved by ActiveRain and by doing so, our photo posts are also eligible for consideration for featuring just like the regular blog posts. We welcome you to the ActiveRain Photo Blogger Group.