I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with blogging. On the one hand I find it useful and somewhat of a necessity, on the other I find I dread writing them, never really knowing what to say. Partly that is because of contradictions within myself. I am a very private person, but on the other hand I am also very open about certain things.

Blogging is useful as it isn’t always possible to talk to potential clients in person, so my blog posts can give the client an idea of what I am like, and what it is like to have a session with me before making a booking. It also allows me to expand on various things beyond the short summaries I place on the main part of my website, which is why I link to particular blog posts from some pages in my site.

It’s also useful as it allows me to showcase photo shoots that I have done over the years with particular models to a greater extent than what I can within a gallery on my main site. This has the added advantage in that it becomes the primary source of my photos.

By this I mean that if someone copies my photos and puts them on another site, and I decide to put in a DMCA claim against them, I can use the blog post of the shoot with that model as the original publishing source of the material - It strengthens my claim.

Between the blog post, contacting them using my domain email address, the EXIF data embedded in the photos, the domain name being registered in my name and a few other things it puts me in a position that makes it likely that a claim will be dealt with promptly and successfully, which wouldn’t be the case if I was primarily posting them on other sites like flickr.

It’s a necessity as having a blog, updating it regularly and cross-linking it to your network in various ways can have a very positive effect on your search results. Search results are important as most clients (apart from aerial clients) find me through search results. So a lot of what I do in regards to blogging and social media is to enhance those results.

This creates a pressure though, ideally for good results you need to mix up words and images, and have at least a certain number of words in a post. Often I don’t have much to say and just want to post photos, so I end up in a bit of  a holding pattern waiting for words that I can match up to photos – which is why sometimes a couple of months will go by without my posting anything, and other times I will post in quick succession.

I also feel as though there is an expectation from people viewing the blog that there will be words as well as photos - that could be entirely in my imagination though.

I’ve also been a bit hesitant to post much fetish work here, as it can negatively affect my search results, as it would mean you would be more likley to need to have safe search switched off for my site to show up. I know that in some places my site, blog and even the separate roller derby photo site are blocked and I don’t want that to increase too much.

I think going forward I will mix up the blog post types, not worrying so much about having things to say or not, occasionally just putting up posts with only photos along with the model credits and sometimes publishing some like this particular post where the photos don’t really have anything to do with the words on the page. I’ll probably also start to post fetish articles a bit more often that I have.

We’ll see :)