At this year’s NAB Show, Chris Do, CEO, and Founder of Blind, controversially stated that vlogging is effectively dead. As social media continues to evolve, with the introduction of Cake.co and other networks, can the same be said for traditional blogging?

Blogging has been around since the mid-90s and has been a staple of the internet world. Whether it’s keeping up with your family’s adventures to finding the latest and greatest recipes, blogs make up a big piece of the worldwide web.

For photographers, blogging has been a way to get our work seen by the public — whether it be our clients, family, friends or community members. But as the internet has evolved, so has our way to share our work. Blogging is no longer first to mind for many photographers — instead, we rely on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

The Case for Blogging

Blogging not only lets you display your work, but it lets you do so in a controlled environment. Your post on your website and control how it looks and how it’s displayed to your readership. It gives you ultimate control over everything.

It lets you highlight multiple photos at once, with multiple captions or a small story associated with them. It lets you create your own way of showing your craft.

The Case Against Blogging

While blogging gives you control, it doesn’t necessarily give you views. You’re limited to the audience you can organically reach unless you post your blogs on social media. And even then, you’re less likely to get clicks on links than you are on photographs.

Sharing your photos on social media gives you a platform for both your organic audience and a more public audience who you may not have a close connection with. You instantly reach your followers and the public through the use of hashtags, brand mentions and more. You can still post multiple photos on most social networks, and attribute small stories and captions to them.

If you’re a storyteller and want to write more with your photographs, using a platform like Cake.co or Medium is a great way to get both your stories and photographs out there. These platforms let you post your stories and have conversations surrounding them.

The big thing here is you’ll most likely get more views on social media than you ever will on a blog. Unless you’re a famous photographer, which, let’s pretend that you and I aren’t for a moment.

Conclusion

Does blogging still have its place? Yes. The most useful photography blogs I’ve seen are for wedding photographers, as it gives you a way to showcase your work when brides are shopping on your site to see if you’re a good fit for them. It gives them an inside look at the experience of the wedding day as a whole.

But outside of that, I can’t tell you the last time I’ve blogged on my personal website. I’ve started using platforms like Cake.co to share my story behind a photograph and regularly post on Facebook and Instagram to have my photographs seen by my followers and the rest of the world. I get a much broader audience, and it’s helped me to reach new clients as well.

 

For more on Photography Marketing, see our weekly column.