Photo Blogging: How to Start a Family Blog with Digital Photos

If you have a busy lifestyle and tend to fall out of touch with your family, you must set up an online photo blog where you can write about the latest things in your life, add your photos and have your family visit you online and interact with you through your blog.

Setting up a photo blog is very easy. Free blogging sites like Blogger and Wordpress offer you web-space to host your writings. You can add as many pictures, and even videos, as you like. Simply upload the digital photos and videos from your camera to the blog and your blog post will be ready!

You can blog as often as once every day or once a month. You choose what and how much you want to share with your family. You only need to email your photo blog's link to your family so that they can periodically visit you. You can also set up your blog to alert them every time you have a new post.

In most free blogging websites, due to web space restrictions on your account, the digital photos you upload will be compressed into low resolution pictures. So if your family wanted to print them, they will end up with poor quality prints. You can get around this if sign up with web hosts that offer paid services to host your high quality digital photos.

Your online visitors can read your posts and leave comments for you. Others can comment on these comments too! This is a very effective way to set up a good communication network between all of your family members.

You can also configure your blog as a group blog. Here, you assign writing privileges to a group of people. So other members in your family can also post on your blog. As the main author you can retain control of the blog by moderating the blog posts and publishing (displaying) only the ones you like.

You can also monetize your blog by inviting advertisers to publish content based ads on your site. For example, if you travel a lot and you share your travel experiences on your photo blog, you can have travel companies advertising on your web space. You could make enough money from the blog to cover your expenses, if any for maintaining the blog. But remember that making money from a family photo blog is not the goal of this project.

On many free sites, blogs are generally open to the public - in this case, you must avoid putting a lot of personal information and personal digital photos on the blog. If you need to restrict access you may find paid hosting services, or you can set up a website of your own with built-in access privileges.