Photo blogging can be a great way to quickly and easily build credibility with both site visitors and search engines. With this in mind, we wanted to give you a few options for photo blogging and show you step by step how to setup your own photo blog.
The WordPress.com Option
Advantage: Inexpensive
Disadvantage: Limited functionality and design; You have to set it up yourself.
Go to www.wordpress.com and click the sign up button
Complete the signup form and confirm your email address (WordPress will send you a link to click)
Once you verify your email, click on the login button
Once logged in, scroll to the bottom and click on the “upgrade” link
There are a few options I would suggest. In terms of “upgrading”:
Custom CSS – $14.97
WordPress.com (the hosted version) does not allow custom themes. The closest thing you can do is to have a developer edit the CSS portion of the blog.
No-ads – $29.97
Unfortunately WordPress.com will automatically inject ads into your blog. Since the ads are contextual based, it often means that your blog will be showing ads for your competition. With this in mind, it’s important to purchase the “No-ads” upgrade.
Custom Domain – $14.97
It’s vital that your photo blog builds credibility on a domain that you control. The default WordPress domain name is username.wordpress.com. This means that all the credibility you build helps wordpress.com and not your site. The custom domain upgrade allows you to set your own domain.
Flickr Integration
You will now need to configure Flickr to push photos to your new photo blog. To do this, simply sign into your Flickr account, go to your profile and click Click on the “Extending Flickr” tab. Under the “Blogs” section, click the link that says “Configure your Flickr-to-blog settings” then click “Setup Your Blog.”
Select WordPress as the blogging platform and click next.
You will then need to supply the API endpoint as well as your blog username and password. Note that the API endpoint is simply your domain name with /xmlrpc.php appended to the end (example http://photos.yourdomain.com/xmlrpc.php). As the last step, you will need to give the blog a name and click “All Done”.
Optional
You can create a posting template to configure how the photo pulls into your blog.
Push Flickr Photos to Your Blog
Once you have logged into Flickr simply go to http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/ and click the link in the bottom right (Under the header that says “Upload to Blog”. Set your configurations and then click “All Done.” Flickr will now give you a special email address to be used to publish photos to your photo blog.
The Dakno Photo Blog Option
To make things easy, if you own a Dakno SwiftBlog, we can create a custom photo blog on your domain matching your exact look and feel of your current Dakno SwiftBlog. Dakno will handle all the setup for you. You simply need to supply us with your Flickr account information (username and password). We’ll take care of the domain setup, configuration and loading. We will then supply you with your secret email address. Every time you send a photo to this email address, your photo blog will automatically post the new photo. For more information on your Dakno photo blog, contact us here at Dakno.
Here are several examples of photo blogs recently launched by Dakno:
- Ann Arbor Photo Blog
- The Hoboken Photo Blog
- Portland, Oregon Photo Blog
- Connecticut Area Photo Blog
- Tyler, TX Photo Blog
- Miami Photo Blog
Of course we had to implement this idea ourselves! Checkout our Dakno Real Estate Web Design Photoblog!
We believe this facet of your online presence will enhance your ability to woo Google!
Bobby Carroll – @rewebcoach
P.S. Don’t forget to add your headline of the photo caption to the “subject” line of your email. In addition, you will want to add a little bit of text to the photo for your site visitors and the search engines. You’ll also want to toss a few of your keywords in the headline and copy to give you that extra SEO boost you want!
This is completely brilliant and I will be referring people over here for an informative read! I would love to do a BarCamp session on photo blogging with you sometime.
Love that you did this post to show us how to do a photo blog! I’m going to check my WP.org theme to see if there’s one in that group that I can use. I LOVE these photo blogs and have wanted one of my own for awhile now.
Thank YOU!!
Hi Sarah – Brad and I treasure your feedback and appreciate your compliment. We would be happy to help you lead a photo blogging discussion at a future RE BarCamp.
Hi Ann – I have to give Brad credit for the bulk of this post and his handy deign work. Now that the iPhone has video capability, you will see photo blogs morph into media blogs incorporating both photos and videos.
Great blog you guys. Cant wait to share with our agents. Hey we are planning a REBarCamp in Toronto on Sept 30th. This will be the first one north of the border. I sure hope you guys will be there. Finalizing details.
Thanks Shirley! Now I have a reason to get my passport so I can travel to YYZ for the RE BarCamp! 😉
I have a photo blog but it has no “curb appeal” kind of plain. I love taking pictures so for me it is a natural…I just need to work on the razz-el-dazzle factor. I also don’t think I have any page rank at all…not sure why as it’s been around for a few years.
Okay, thanks to @SarahWV I saw this, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Flickr hates me. It refuses to recognize my username at all while setting up my blog. Is there a chance that it’s because it’s self-hosted and WP hosted? That’s all I could come up with that made it any different than your directions.
Great idea, no matter if it works for me or not.
In case anyone has a self-hosted WordPress…the secret is to set your Settings>Writing correctly.
There is an option to allow Remote Publishing>XML-RPC
Check that box and everything works.
Hmmm. Okay, I got that part working, but now the “posts” aren’t appearing, I’ll have to toy some more tomorrow.
Hmmm… you certainly got me thinking about enhancing my WordPress blog with more photos… The landing page features three of them on a scrolling basis… I have a ton more.
Thanks!
Beautifully said. Instead of expressing in words about a property, a picture can give thousands of ideas to the visitor about the property. Well said. Thanks for sharing it.
Really precious lesson. I love photograph but have still little skill. Thank you for the knowledge you share.
Just a note that the Extending Flickr tab is now under “Your Account” rather than “Your Profile.” It may have moved since the time of writing.
Building a website designed for first time home buyers is a great idea. It makes is even better now that the government is now offering incentives to get buyers into their first home. Kudos on this blog post.
Yes image optimization is also very important in Google…Besides SEO of the website image optimization of the images of the website can also lead to some traffic.
Nice tips mentioned here…Never thought of these things..
Thanks