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Are they worth it?
Are they worth it?
odd it missed off the last line
Blogs
are they worth it?
For advertising your work, for generally letting people your out there
would you run it along side a normal website?
Yes.
Website with no blog, updated occasionally with new galleries but no text, so google et al don't see anything new.
Website with a blog, talking about shoots, technique etc means there are regularly new pages loaded with relevant text which can all lead to adding to your search rankings.
You can also fall into the Create-Share-Sustain cycle. I've just had Chase Jarvis's latest drop into my reader, which is where it comes from.
With a blog, you really want to be updating it with relevant content regularly, as this will all draw attention to it. Mine's focused predominantly on retouching techniques, and so I'll not be posting recent snow shoots on there as they're not relevant to what I'm blogging about. I have one on my website which is updated about once a month, covers shoots etc and is more succinct than the retouching one.
Some good advice I picked up early on, write one for a month before publishing about it, just to see if you can get into and maintain the habit of writing it, then when you advertise it, people can see there's more content than just one page and keep coming back.