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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

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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

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Once logged in, scroll to the bottom and click on the “upgrade” link

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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:

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!