Attracting more visitors to your galleries by using forums
Using popular forums can significantly increase the number of people visiting your images. By using the comments and criticism (or C&C) forums, you’ll be able to attract a larger audience as well as get good feedback on your photographs. There are 3 main forums or message boards that I’ve found over the years.
DPReview.com is probably the busiest Digital Photography forum on the net. The people there have been friendly to me and have been helpful. To add a link to your gallery page, simply copy the link from your address bar and paste it into the forum post’s text box. Be sure to also link to your main gallery page.
The best place to start is the Samples and Galleries forum:
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1005
Photography-on-the.net is a good forum primarily for Canon users. The “Photo Sharing” forums are a great place to get comments and criticism on your photographs.
To create a link on POTN to your gallery page, use the following format (be sure to include the http:// part):
[url=http://www.thelensflare.com]The Lens Flare[/url]
Nikonians is a good forum for Nikon users. Most of the C&C boards seem to be located here: http://www.nikonians.org/forums/dcboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=103 Posting links on the Nikonians board follows this syntax: [link:www.thelensflare.com|The Lens Flare] The first part is the address, while after the | is what is displayed in the text.
Make sure your text is descriptive, and never have the link text display “click here”. When in doubt of what to put, use the title of the image. This is because the words displayed in the text help Google determine what your picture is about, which will help you get more traffic from Google’s search engines.
Not only will people visit your pages from the forums, but it will spark the interest of the main search engines about your page as well, which will help you get more visitors from Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Tags: Help, Promoting Pictures, using forums, web traffic
