It’s common for many professional illustrators these days to have a blog. Many however, have a blog which is entirely separate from their portfolio site - hosted on a service like Blogger or WordPress.com or their own, separate domain name.
The good news: Having a blog is a very smart strategy to market yourself online, better engage visitors, potential clients and fans of your work and provide an insight into what makes you as an illustrator, unique, talented and hire-worthy.
The bad news: Having a blog which isn’t integrated within your actual portfolio site means you lose some of the key benefits of having a blog in the first place.
Here are the top 3 reasons why we’d recommend integrating your blog into your illustration portfolio website…
#1 It creates a better user experience for visitors to your site
Instead of sending visitors off to another domain/separate blog somewhere else, you keep them on your site and encourage them to explore more of it.
This not only increases an important website metric - time on your site - but it also provides an opportunity for the visitor to get to know more about you in a single, integrated place without having to jump about from site to site. The user experience is smoother, less confusing and far more pleasurable.
#2 It helps your SEO efforts
You probably already know that a site which has fresh, relevant and regularly-updated content is likely to generate better search engine rankings than a static site which rarely changes.
That’s why integrating a regularly-updated blog in to your portfolio website will improve the overall SEO of your site - you’ll be constantly adding relevant, illustration-based content which is a good strategy if you’d like to rank highly for your style/type of illustration when people search on Google.
#3 It keeps things streamlined
Managing two sites - a portfolio website and a separate blog - is unnecessarily time-consuming. You already know that keeping your blog up-to-date is as important as keeping your portfolio up-to-date with your latest/best work.
The chances of you doing this when you have two separate sites to maintain are often far lower than when you just need to log into a single site to do everything. The same goes for if you decide you want to re-brand. More often than not, an illustrator finds it too complex and time-consuming to re-brand their blog when they re-brand their portfolio website and so it doesn’t get done.
*****
You probably also know that we are big fans of self-hosted WordPress sites - this makes it simple for you to integrate a blog into your portfolio website in much the same way that Jonathan does on his.
We will be running a 4-day class in November, specifically for illustrators, to walk you through the nuts & bolts of setting up your own self-hosted WordPress portfolio website with an integrated blog.
If you’re interested in joining us for this, please make sure you’re subscribed to the zero2illo newsletter which is where we’ll be sharing details of this first. There will be limited places.
*****
Thanks guys for this one, what a timing! After some months of thinking i finally moved my blog to my website last week, but i still had some doubts about leaving the whole wordpress-community behind.. this helped me to get that last piece of confidence that i made the right decision. Just what i needed now!
Thank you again for sharing all these informations with us.
I have been thinking over this in the past few days. I currently have a single website with a blog integrated, but have been thinking of changing to seperate. One of the good things of having blogger blog is the blogger network with other artists. Also i like the idea of posting rough sketches, and being a bit looser on a blogger blog, without worrying about turning off potential clients who i just want to show examples of the final product, and may not understand the artist process that i would demonstrate in a blog post for example. I’d like the site to look as polished and professional as possible. Would be interested in hearing your thoughts about it.
[...] provide amazing visual impact to your illustrations with the help of digital technology of today.Book illustration is just one of the types of illustration that is being used in almost all print me…lp in delivering the idea or message left in the contents of the books. Every piece of writing is [...]
Hi Matt - it’s a good question. If the audience & goals for your portfolio and your blog are significantly different, then there is an argument for keeping them separate. In fact, I recently wrote about the issue of deciding whether to start a separate site on my personal blog (not specifically for illustrators but it’s still relevant): http://www.leawoodward.com/10-questions-to-help-you-decide-if-your-idea-needs-its-own-website-or-not/
So if the goals & audiences you have for your current blog and portfolio site are different, then yes, consider separating them. With that said, an integrated blog on a portfolio site can be an excellent marketing tool if the content is engaging, relevant and obviously still professional to that audience. It can be a great way to enable potential clients to get to know more about you as an artist and as a professional to hire.
I was actually thinking about going the other way. Converting my website onto blogger, using pages and links, because a website domain costs, and blogger is free. Also, don’t you get charged more, if and when your site receives more traffic? Any thoughts?
Hey Teri,
As far as i know you don’t get charged extra for more visitors. But you do have to pay extra if your site exceeds the storage limits.
Hi Teri - Veronika’s right…you shouldn’t get charged more for visitors, unless you’re on some sort of hosting package which does this, but you may get charged for the bandwidth used. That’s only normally an issue if you get *lots* of visitors and/or you exceed your storage amount (usually quite hard to do).
The hosting companies we recommend cost around $5-7 per month and have unlimited storage etc. It also gives you way more flexibility than blogger when it comes to layout and design.
Blogger is great for anyone on a very tight budget but if there’s a choice, for brand image, flexibility and control I’d always go for a self-hosted WordPress site.
[...] Cet article est une traduction (libre) d’un article publié il y a quelques semaines sur Zero2illo, ici. [...]