Migrating photography articles to new site
I’m still trying to boost the sales of my Fine Art prints, which is a slow process! As part of that, I’m adding more photography or particularly travel photography related articles to my main photo portfolio site, BackyardImage where I have added a blog area. I also joined a group of bloggers from Fine Art America where we are all writing photography articles aimed more at a general reader, linking actively between each other (using a “Follow” setting on our comments for search engines) to try to boost our rankings. Each of us is then linking to our Fine Art America sites from within the articles in the hope that someone might click an image and be tempted with a print or a product with that image and at the same time, provide more links for Google to follow to that art site.
My first three articles over there are:
The ten places you must visit on Kauai. This was originally published here, but I have brought it up to date with some newer images and its new home is on BackyardImage.
What do you see on a Kauai boat cruise. This was also here, but again has been updated with new text and images.
Queens Bath on Kauai – beautiful but dangerous. A quick outline of an interesting but problematic location on Kauai
You can sign up to be notified of new posts over there (and I’d be happy if you do!), but I also plan to mention new posts here as well. So if the subject interests you, you will still be notified when it goes live. I’ll also mention interesting posts from within this blogger community as I find them. It will help their ranking to get a link from here I hope. The first one is BeyondEssential.com from a photographer who had just sold up everything ready to retire in France (from the USA) when the virus hit and of course everything was cancelled. Sounds pretty harrowing!
I am so confused about what to do with respect to that group. I cannot use plug ins in my blog because I don’t pay for the business plan. I was thinking to migrate the blog to wordpress.org, but I won’t be doing it until next year when my current plan expires.
Yes, it is tricky. I had a bit of a search for ways to remove the “nofollow” tag from comments – it is possible in business plans as you say, but it doesn’t seem to be possible in any other way. You could migrate your site to a standalone hosting plan from someone like Bluehost. I think they have plans for 4.99 or $5.99 a month and then you would be in total control of the site. WordPress is pretty easy to implement on your own site and you could have a normal URL rather than the wordpress.com one.
The issue the group is facing is that if anyone comments on your site the comment URL (the site they include) and any link they put into the comment will not count as a beneficial link back to their site. So commenting might be a nice thing to do, but it is not a “valuable” thing to do. You can comment on their sites and get the benefit of a backlink but they can’t do the same. If you have a plan to eventually come into line, I don’t see why you can’t explain that and still be a member of the group. You might not get many comments, but any that you make will help you (although if you are going to redo your site it might be better to do that). As it stands, any valuable backlinks are going more to wordpress.com I guess.
Steve
Steve, I hope you don’ mind a stupid question but, if I migrate to bluehost, how do I post here? You and others seem to do it from another host. I DO have a domain (alessandrachaves.com) but I am hosted on wordpress.com and cannot do much unless I pay for the expensive business plan. I would be migrating my domain as well.
Do you mean how do you post on someone else’s blog using a WordPress account? I do that because you can just get a free WordPress account just to manage your own site. Is that what you mean?
It sure about what I mean, I will keep try to undrestand
Let me try to be a bit clearer. When you self host a wordpress site, you set up a hosting contract with someone like BlueHost for a shared server. You can point your URL at this and also set up email addresses under your URL. You then download and install the free WordPress software and you would be able to export your old site from WordPress.com and import it into the new one. So you shouldn’t lose anything. Part of WordPress is an app called Jetpack that provides site statistics, some spam blocking features etc and that is also produced by WordPress, but to work properly, you need a WordPress account (free). It is that free account that I use to comment on other people’s wordpress sites although strictly speaking you can comment with any user name and email address. You don’t need to have anything to do with WordPress to comment on one of these blogs.
Does that help?
Steve
yes, thank you for your patience!
And if you decide to do this, I am always there to help if needed!
I have a question. What plan do you have on Blue host? I don’t need anything fancy, this blog, then a direct link to my pixels site, and to install this follow thing. The two latter things I cannot do with my premium plan on WordPress and the next one up 25 a month (business).
I paid $208 including tax for 36 months. It was choice plus web hosting, but I do have several sites hosted there
Steve
Thank you
Interesting experiment, keep us posted Steve!
I will – I am tracking my visitors and I will watch my domain rating. It is currently 10 on the ahrefs site with 112 backlinks. This site is has a rating of 32 with 22,300 backlinks. Quite a difference. But it gives me something to watch.
Steve