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Given about an hour a week for online self-promotion, where should that time be spent?

Which are better for self gratification?

Which are better for the professional who relies on income from their photography?

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4 Answers

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I think Flickr gets the most views of any of the online photo sharing sites, and it is very cheap.

Picasa and SmugMug are also good, but much less community based than Flickr.

Photoshelter is excellent if you are trying to sell your photos online, but it is much more spendy than the others. They work really hard on Search Engine Optimization, but as far as the promotion part of it goes, you most likely need to do that by cross-posting your images to a blog or website.

Another very good option is Facebook. Obviously it's not strictly a photo-sharing site, but it has great photo-sharing capabilities and it is the most heavily viewed website in the world.

Personally I use Flickr, Photoshelter, Facebook, and my own website/blog.

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It's amazing what being linked to from a big blog like Boing Boing will do to bring eyeballs to your photos. – Michael McCarty♦ Jan 7 at 21:39
You are so right. I had a link to one of my Lightroom articles (on my techy blog) on this weeks "Lightroom Tuesday" post at heninger.org and that gave me a massive lift in hits! If only I could get someone big to link to my portfolio site! – Sean Phillips Jan 7 at 23:18
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What kind of Promotion? Commercial or just "Good vibes blatant self promotion" ;-)

Generally if I take a photo I'm particularly happy with, I'll throw through all the usual social networking/social bookmarking tools.

  • Twitter with #photography tag
  • Facebook
  • Stumbleupon
  • Reddit
  • Digg etc...
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Just Good vibes. If photography is your career it would take a lot more than an hour a week for promotion. – Michael McCarty♦ Jan 7 at 21:20
I tend to do the same as Eoin, upload the photo(s) / blog entry then post about it on twitter, facebook etc etc... Though in cases where I've been involved in local exhibitions, the group as a whole has contacted local media, sent out flyers etc. – dstrom Jan 9 at 2:26
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I have a "photo of the day" system where I periodically fill up a database queue with images and some metadata (caption, tags etc), and each day a script uploads the next photo in the queue to...

This is all held together by a perl script and a bunch of modules

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nice idea. I'd love to do the photo of the day thing, but while taking a photo each day is fine, I just don't have the time to post-proc & upload each evening... – Eoin C Jan 14 at 9:06
I don't take a photo each day, I just make sure I post one. A good chunk of last year's daily photos were taken during a 2 week trip. – Roger Jan 14 at 21:45
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When you have your photos on flickr, photovotr.com and the PhotoVotr group are a great way to promote the pictures. I've seen a huge boost in views after posting pictures there.

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