Friday 23 October 2009

Wildlife Photography Blog: Full steam ahead

Three months ago Wildlife Photography Blog was a twinkle in my eye. The initial concept of an RSS aggregator for wildlife blogs. It was only after I started working on it that the idea to publish its stream via Twitter occurred to me. Now heading towards November, it is the Twitter feed which is enjoying the most success.

The main site gets a reasonable amount of traffic, and performs well on Google searches, but it is not generating many clicks for its member sites. The RSS feed so far has less than ten subscribers and I have seen no evidence of it generating any traffic at all.

By contrast the Twitter stream has 350+ subscribers and is definitely referring traffic for member sites. At present the numbers are not huge - between 7-20 clicks for a single tweet. Where a WPB posting is retweeted by other twitter users this can increase to 40+.

The experiment is still live; it is too early to tell if the page rank element will be successful. For traffic generation, however, Twitter definitely seems to be the way to go.

So how can you help? Even one retweet of an entry significantly increases its visibility. And more followers means more traffic. So if you’re a wildlife photography blogger you can help the other members by retweeting their posts and encouraging your followers to follow WPB.

There are some wonderful blogs being written with fantastic photography, and I know there are hundreds of people out there who love great wildlife images. Hopefully over time WPB can be a way of connecting that audience with our blogs! Lets keep it moving…

4 comments:

  1. Hi Ian,
    I did not think about that at all. When I discovered new blogs thanks to you, I just added then in my blog list and then visit time-to-time WPB!! I'll change that right now and will try to pay a visit to WPB more regularly. I've been doing that once a week approximately but will try to do more!!

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  2. Hi Chris

    Thanks for the comment. I'm actually not too bothered about traffic to WPB itself - if you are discovering blogs through it and reading their posts then it is doing what it set out to do. I've always seen WPB as an experiment, but it has surprised me how well the twitter stream has taken off relative to everything else!

    Ian

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  3. Ian I will bookmark your post and consider this method too. Just have so much on my plate right now ... Thanks for sharing. Anna :)

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  4. Hi Chris,

    I am commenting here because I could not use your email (The button doesn't work.) on the wildlife photography blog...

    I wanted to ask...Why doesn't a photo show up next to my post? Most other blogs do, but it seems mine never includes the photo. Hannibals Animals

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Thanks to everyone who takes the time to comment on my blog!