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.

Posterous Integration

You will now need to configure Posterous to push photos to your new photo blog. To do this, simply sign into your Posterous account, go to “manage” and click “Autopost to Everywhere”.Click “Add a Service” and then click “Wordpress” and follow the onscreen instructions.

You will need to supply your blog address as well as your Username and Password.

Any time you want to publish to your photoblog, simply email blog@posterous.com

The CKG Photo Blog Option

While the Wordpress.com option is lowcost, it lacks the ability to seamlessly match your photoblog with your existing website. For those looking for a more streamlined option, we can create a custom photo blog on your domain matching your exact look and feel of your current Website or Blog. CKG will handle all the setup for you. We’ll take care of the domain setup, configuration and loading. We will then supply you with step by step training on how to get the most out of your photoblog ensuring that you receive the maximum search engine optimization and value out of every photo you populate on your photoblog. For more information contact us here at CKG International.

Here are several examples of customized photo blogs:

Of course we had to implement this idea ourselves! Checkout our CKG International Photoblog!

We believe this facet of your online presence will enhance your ability to woo Google!

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!