I had a bit of flattery waiting for me in my notifications this morning when I woke up.
Awesome. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that someone read my blog, let alone to discover that I am the #7 photography blogger in the entire world. lol. As a student, years ago, I believed in monolithic gatekeepers who, if you could gain their favor, could shoe you into the circle of respected working photographers in whose laps fall thousands of 5-figure contracts. I thought these were mostly magazines like Popular Photography (which is all but out of business now), PDN, Communication Arts, etc. Now that I've had my images on the cover or inside several of those repeatedly, and have seen very little more than a self-marketing opportunity come from it, I have learned to see these things more for what they are.
This award was given to me by the founder of a website called "Feedspot," which aims to help subscribers curate their favorite blogs and websites and view their combined content all in one place. I have never heard of this website before, but they're doing things right. For a website to be ranked high in Google search results, it's valuable to have interesting, relevant content. It's important to have visitors, and it's important to have other websites with links back to your website. This guy had a great strategy. He posted a list of 50 photographers, all of whom will at least visit the blog. At least several of us who were awarded will write a post about the honors, most likely playing up the importance of the award to create credibility in the minds of our none-the-wiser readers. The Feedspot author provided a link via the award image above for us to post on our blog to make it very easy. So immediately this one post has garnered for him probably 20 back-links which will raise his search ranking. Nice job buddy! And it's mutually beneficial! Everybody likes having a gold ribbon on their website. I know I love a good trophy.
Maybe I should give out an award this way to likewise create for myself even more of the kind of search results which really do bring work inquiries falling into my lap more than any kind of award ever has.