Photography and web communities

Photography and Social Networks are really something merging each other, is really hard to separate photography from the wide range of common Social Networks.

Today many companies use Social Networks to share immediately the characteristics of a product, they are a great way to collect feedback in real time.
If you have any on-line business is in fact an essential part to manage and keep up the relationship with users and potential buyers.
This kind of websites are usually visited more often by search engines spiders that are always looking for fresh content indexing new pages.

I have tried to select here Social Networks mostly related to photography, in all of them you will be able to create your network, store your photos, rate and share them with you friends community.

A forum can be described as a discussion group that allows people to write about a particular topic and to comment what has been written by others.
This type of on-line community is usually managed by moderators.
The owner, or who is in charge of the forum, through the coordination of moderators, follows the forum’s technical maintenance, the application of the forum’s policy, and check the user-created content.

Rules are clearly written but are never exactly the same, depend on the kind of forum, read them always.
Use properly a forum is not easy and it can also seriously damage a business or a reputation.
You must first select the niche you want, look for the best forum and register, then start your life there participating actively posting often and giving valuable advice and useful information without trying to sell anything.
Need to work hard to establish a good reputation, trust takes time and perseverance and you really have to be patient thinking on long term basis.

The following forums cover several interests in photography related fields.

Actually the next websites listed below are not forums about photography, but forums about web developing and programming, and they are really strict on rules. Anyway they include nice sections about digital photography, with an active community.

Surely Yahoo groups is a platform that offers an incredible variety and a wide range of topics and discussions.
If you know how to use them properly can be a very powerful marketing tools, you can actually touch a large number of users and targeted traffic.
First of all understand well the different guidelines of each groups on advertising issues to avoid spam.
I must say that today many are full of fake members, however, the mass is so huge that posting messages in the groups can bring some really targeted traffic.
It is a must also to diversify efforts so inspect also the new Bing’s groups, and those of Google’s.

Directories are websites basically made of lists of links gathered together in categories and subcategories.
Can be used to promote a business related to photography or to discover unknow but really interesting websites.
To submit your website must navigate to the category which best describes your photography works and submit it.
The paid options guarantee a faster review procedure and a better placement of your link.
The free listing option, when available, require usually a reciprocal link to be set on your own website.

You will be able to find free directories, paid directories, niche directories (only related to a specific topic) and reciprocal directories (require a reciprocal link).

Back links is arguably one of the most important part of modern day SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and directories are a good way for a webmaster to promote a website because it will build back links quite in reasonable time increasing also exposure and traffic.

I suggest you first to read the directories lists published on-line where you will be able to find information on them and so decide your strategy.
You can decide to submit to free directories, maybe to use some paid directory investing some amount of money, or to use only niche directories in case you have a photography related website.
You can decide to submit your website manually or using semi-automatic software that can help with the task but do no trust the full automatic procedure.
Remember that links alone do not solve SEO issue; you must always have a good contents rich websites.

Last but not least I listed also a bunch of useful on-line resources, for all photographers.
You can use them to create a website, to upload and store your photos on-line, to present works, or to sell them on-line on micro-stock websites.