[lang_en]

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily Minneapolis Photography. Minneapolis Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains photography, composition and photo techniques.

CDPB - Monthly Theme Hints and Tips

Monthly Theme day at CDPB is a great way to build your traffic. Not only is it a great way to challenge yourself, but it helps you to feel a part of this amazing community, or as I describe it to my friends: a mutual admiration society. The CDPB’ers have a wide range of skills and interests and an especially wide range of geographical locations! But they all have one thing in common, they encourage each other in a very positive way. They all know how much dedication it takes to keep taking pictures and posting them day after day. I’ve found that even one comment like “great job!” or “I love the little whats-it in the corner, cute!” can put a smile on my face and keep me going.

So if you are running a daily city photo blog, go sign up and join the theme day. Once you are signed up for the website, go to the forum. When you are signed in as a blogger, you will have more options in the forum. The theme day is the second option in the second block. Click on the first thread: “how to join.” There are two steps, you first join the theme as soon as possible then, on the first of the following month, go back and copy the list of links and paste them into your post for the theme. That’s it! Now you are part of the group, you have linked to them all and THEY HAVE ALL LINKED TO YOU. This brings lots of traffic and shoots your ratings up like a rocket - over 100 blogs linking to you at once!

Besides being part of the community, my attempt at contributing is to write about photography techniques and offer tips like this one. Not everyone in the CDPB group is a a professional photographer or web designer, they do it because they love it (the best reason to do anything!) But I am a professional photographer and web designer, so I want to help out by offering advice and information where I can. I hope my articles are useful, if you enjoy them, please link back to them and tell your friends. More of my articles are found under the categories “Photography Techniques” and “Building Traffic.”

Tomorrow is my 100th post, so please stop by and join me in celebrating this little milestone!

P.S. Gerald asked me to add that you can join the CDPB without having a blog. Also, if you join the monthly theme, make sure you post the theme with all the links. If you change your mind after you join, you can remove yourself from the list.[/lang_en]

Minneapolis Photographer Mitch Rossow presents daily Minneapolis Photography. Minneapolis Cityscapes, People & Perspectives: Mitch explains photography, composition and photo techniques.

Every day I get up and trudge over to my Caribou Coffeeshop and pound away on the blog. My 100th post is coming very soon, today is 96. Why do I do this? Sure, coffee is a good enough reason, but what started as a timid toe-in-the-pond experiment has turned into my first thing in the morning ritual. By choosing to post daily I have set a high standard for myself, but it has brought many benefits. I’ve met some very cool people around the world and in my own backyard. I’ve also improved my photography and because of my style of commentary, learned to explain what I am doing and think through my shots more fully.

A lot of my visitors are other photo bloggers and I wonder what got them started. Photography hobby, interest in their own city, desire to meet others around the world? Are you a fellow professional photographer? What got you into it? Let me know in a comment.

I started blogging to learn how to build a custom blog for my client Paul Fricke, I’m a designer by trade. Since he started, we talk a lot about motivation and site traffic is a big one. Thankfully the CDPB and it’s theme days has brought me lots of traffic, but like every other ingrate, I want more. The more people who see what you do, the more value it has.

It’s one thing to read about photography and it’s another to take a good picture everyday and post it to a world audience. I’d like to investigate traffic-building the same way — not theory, but practice. And I want to bring you with me.

The main force behind improved ranking and thus traffic is links to your site. The Theme Days are incredible for this, so if you are a CDPB’er, make sure you join in on this. Another powerful force for bloggers is technorati.com. If you aren’t registered there, do it! It’s easy. You’ll thank me later. Once you have an account, you can ‘favorite’ other blogs. Just search for the blog address on technorati and click the ‘favorite it’ button (it’s red). I’d write more about it, but this post is getting long and like photography, I recommend learning by doing.

So here’s the ‘assignment’ for learning by doing. Go get on technorati if you aren’t already. Then favorite the blogs you like and as a bonus, if you favorite mitchster.com, I’ll favorite you right back. If you link to mitchster.com in a post, I’ll also return the favor. Technorati also has an ‘authority’ number and a ranking, but I’ll talk about those next time.

I know a few of you aren’t interested in traffic and rankings, but how about a few new friends and some more compliments on your pics? It’s not a race, it’s a fun run. Smile, and enjoy the day.[/lang_en]