A Comprehensive Guide to Using Flickr for Traffic Building and Brand Marketing

Flickr is a social photography website which allows you to upload and share your pictures with friends and family, registered Flickr users as well as the general internet audience.

Like its closest rival Photobucket, Flickr functions as an image host but its main attraction lies in the social sharing of images with a large community of the interested viewers.

Many amateur and professional photographers use Flickr to showcase their work in return for constructive criticisms from others. Bloggers are also avid users of Flickr because it helps them to save on bandwidth while providing image backup in the unlikely scenario that all their files are wiped out from their servers.

Flickr’s built-in social features, strong user community and growing mind share has transformed it into a viable platform for marketing your website or business. Some bloggers like Barry Schwartz and Matt McGee have written about how Flickr can be used to drive traffic to your website or online business.

Like my previous article on optimizing for more google image traffic this article will explore Flickr in greater depth by providing a detailed tutorial on how to use Flickr as a long term traffic source for your site or blog.

Why Should I Use Flickr for my Website?

According to HitWise, Flickr is currently the #2 photography website in the U.S, UK and Australia, while holding a U.S marketshare of 38%. While it still trails Photobucket in all three markets, Flickr’s global presence means that it possibly has a greater market share in various other countries.

Flickr’s recent integration within Yahoo! Image Search meant that Flickr pictures will be displayed when anyone uses Yahoo to search for images on specific topics. HitWise’s data shows that this has clearly lead to the increased and continued adoption of Flickr by new users.

Flickr’s photos are also listed in Google’s search results, Technorati, personalized start pages (Netvibes etc.) as well as various other portals, websites and blogs which pull in and display public Flickr pictures via RSS.

All of these sources direct visitors to individual photo pages and each of them can be funneled to your website or at the very least, made aware of your business or personal brand.

This is also the slight benefit of having link juice from Flickr: All the links you place on Flickr are currently followed and so they do benefit your website’s link profile in some way.

Getting Started with Flickr

Head over to Flickr’s homepage and sign up for an account if you haven’t already got one. After which, log in and edit your settings by filling in some information. Here are the items you should complete:

• Buddy Icon. The avatar size is a small 48 x 48 so upload and use an avatar that is noticeable and visually appealing. You can either use your favorite image, company logo or site brand.




• Screen name: You would have already chosen this earlier but you can edit it now if necessary. McGee suggests that you could use your site URL (DoshDosh.com) as the screen name but I don’t think that’s really important. You can use the handle that you’ve always used around the web or simply go with your brand, site title or an abbreviated version of your name.




• Profile. Write a little about yourself or your business and include some relevant links (link to your About page etc). HTML is accepted so use proper anchor text links instead of a string of URLs. You might want to add in your location and some of your interests to personalize your profile even more.




• Your Flickr Web Addresses. You can create your own Flickr web address which makes it easier to share your pictures with others. I’m using ‘DoshDosh‘ as both my screen name and Flickr address. My Flickr address will therefore be: http://www.flickr.com/photos/doshdosh/

Here’s a screenshot of my Flickr profile:

Should I go with a Free or Pro Account?

According to Flickr, there is a bandwidth limit of 100MB per month. This limit is reasonable if your blog does not see a lot of daily traffic, although I would recommend trying the Pro Account because there are a lot more benefits as well.

The Pro account is $24.95 a year and you’ll get unlimited bandwidth along with unlimited sets and permanent archiving for high res pictures. Free accounts are limited to 3 sets and your photos can only be posted up to 10 group pools (instead of 60 for a pro account).

If your website receives a lot of traffic and you use a lot of images everyday, the pro account would be much more useful for marketing purposes.

Alternatively, go with the free account and test Flickr on your site first to see if it actually works to send you any traffic at all. You can always upgrade later.

Uploading and Tagging Pictures

You can easily upload pictures through the Flickr web interface or you can use their uploading tools, which I highly recommend. I’m using Flickr Uploadr, a fast loading desktop program and its a really quick way to upload and tag images.

Tagging your pictures with the relevant keywords is important for them to be found by search engines and other Flickr users.

For example if you’re uploading a picture of an iPhone in a New York Apple store, you could possibly use tags like “iPhone, Apple, New York, Gadget, Cellphone, Mobile” along with your site name or brand.

If you’re uploading something like a picture of Lindsay Lohan, you could go with a series of tags that relate to elements within or external to the specific picture:

• Profession (Actress, celebrity, singer)
• Name (Lindsay Lohan)
• Location of the Picture (Los Angeles, California, Tokyo)
• Medium (illustration, photograph, video screen)
• Type of shot (Magazine shoot, candid, swimwear)
• Accessories or Items in the Picture (Halterneck, brown skirt, Ferrari, iPhone)
• Affiliate or Relevant Publication (Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vogue)
• Your website name (LindsayLohanRocks.com etc.)

An Example of How to Tag and Title Your Pictures

Let’s start by taking a look at how I’ve tagged my Flickr Profile screen shot, which you just saw few paragraphs above.

For a closer view of how I tagged my screenshots, you can visit this page or by click on either any of the screenshots in this article.

There are three main elements to every uploaded picture:

1. Title. As you can see, I’ve used a descriptive title (“Flickr Profile“) along with my URL. I don’t think the URL is necessary at all but I’ve used it for the purpose of this example. Flickr’s internal search engine possibly displays results according to the titles, so do remember to include your keywords here.




2. Tags. This shows up in the right sidebar and I’ve added a bunch of subject tags which are broad but still relevant to both the picture as well as the related article. I’ve also added a location tag (“Toronto“) because me and my website are based in Toronto. This is important for businesses targeting a local demographic so do remember to include your location.




3. Picture Description. HTML is allowed in the picture description and I’ve added a link in it to the actual article instead of just linking to the homepage. Links with descriptive titles will get better click through rates. If the picture isn’t used in any specific web page, just put a general link to your website. Try to make your anchor text attractive.

Networking on Flickr to Promote Your Website

The Flickr community is close-knit and many of them interact through a great variety of Flickr groups, with each of them having their own discussion board and pool of photos. These groups are either public, invite only or completely private.

Joining a group and submitting your photos is a good way to get some exposure for your website and profile. Another networking method familiar to most bloggers is to actively comment on pictures that you come across.

This will get some users to click through to your profile page, which should have an introduction and link to your website or business.

Alternatively, you can also create your own group if you do not find any which fit your interests or website focus. Here’s how you can get started: Go to the Flickr Groups homepage, do a search using keywords related to your site or interests and then join the groups that are active or interesting.

Finding a group that is active is important. Some of the groups I’ve come across are dead, with the last image shared several months ago. The members aren’t interacting within the group anymore.

You should examine two main factors before you join any group: The overall size of the group and secondly, the date of the latest discussion post and last image submitted.

You can track their image sharing activity via RSS before proceeding towards deeper interaction.

Creating Your own Flickr Group

Starting your own Flickr Group is rather easy and only takes a few minutes. Creating a Flickr group is useful when you are unable to find a group that is relevant to your website or interests.

Starting a group also allows you to build a community around your Flickr account and will help to generate more traffic to your main website as your community grows. To create your own Flickr Group, visit this page and select the type of group you would like to start. Pick the public or invite-only option.

There are two main points to take note off when setting up a group:

1. Naming your Group. Pick a name that is relevant to your website’s field. For example, if you’re offering graphic design in Sydney, go with something descriptive like ‘Graphic Designers in Sydney‘. If your website already has an existing audience, you can use your site name as the group title, while possibly including some relevant keywords for Flickr’s search.




2. Writing a description. Write a brief introduction to the aim or goals of the group and lay down some rules, if needed. The description doesn’t need to be too long as you can always tweak it as you go along in the future.

After your group is setup, take a minute to go through Flickr’s tips on running your group before you get started. For an example of a Flickr group, check out Dosh Dosh’s Community Page: This was set up in a few minutes and you can see how it looks below.

Dosh Dosh isn’t really a popular or interesting topic of any sort and but I wanted to set up a group as an example for this article. Do feel free to join the group if you’re interested.

Flickr groups will naturally do better when structured around a specific topic, particularly if it is popular with many. These groups can get your pictures and profile some decent exposure so prioritize accordingly and spend some time on exploring the Flickr communities.


How to Promote Your Flickr Pictures and Community

The aim of promoting your Flickr pictures or community is to get traffic to your pictures which will in turn create brand awareness and direct traffic to your website.

There are several ways to promote your Flickr pictures and I’ll just list out some which are generally more effective than others.

1. Display Flickr pictures on Your Site

This means embedding a Flickr photo stream on your website or linking to your Flickr pictures. The main benefit of this is that visitors will see your pictures and may decide to use them on their own website.

Whenever anyone clicks on the pictures on their website, they’ll be taken to the individual page which has a link to your site in the description. Wordpress users can use the FlickrRSS or Flickr Photo Album plugin.

2. Go Viral with Social Voting Websites

Pictures on Flickr are perfect for social websites like Digg or Reddit. What you’ll need to do is to pick a specific picture that you’ll want to promote and submit it to the social websites. Here’s an example of a Flickr picture which received over 4,000 diggs and was on the Digg front page one and a half months ago.

Be sure to include a link in the description back to your site before you start promoting the picture.This is a useful strategy when your website or domain does not perform or fit well with the social websites in question.

Flickr is a relatively trusted domain by members of social websites and hosting your image on Flickr might allow you to be more successful. The downside of this is that Flickr will be getting all the links that come from going viral, although you’ll still get a decent amount of referral traffic (and some links) as more people are channeled from the picture to your website.

3. Use StumbleUpon

As some of you probably will know, I’m an active StumbleUpon user and a heavy photo stumbler. StumbleUpon allows you to stumble within Flickr and I can safely say that many serious SU users stumble and link to Flickr photos everyday, myself being one of them. To drive instant traffic to your pictures, you’ll only need to submit it to StumbleUpon.

There’s no real need to get people you know to stumble your picture although you can certainly do so. There are two ways to use StumbleUpon for Flickr: You can either submit an individual picture or you can submit a collection of pictures grouped within a set.

The benefit of promoting the set page is that you have an increased chance of receiving stumbles from SU users, who will usually pick and choose images that they fancy to stumble.

4. Get listed in Flickr’s Explore

This is a daily collection of the 500 most interesting photos on Flickr and being ranked high up on this list will guarantee thousands of views from users and other visitors.

Flickr doesn’t reveal its interestingness algorithm but hints that factors such as “where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite and tags” count when selecting a picture to be showcased in the Explore section of their website.

To get an idea of what pictures work, visit this calender page which displays the collection of pictures listed in the interestingness stream each day. Thomas Hawk has a great article on how to get popular on Flickr, which you should definitely check out if you’re interested in becoming a Flickr power user.

Try Experimenting with Flickr for Your Website

Flickr is a great website and photo sharing community that’s easy to use for any website or blog. What I really like about Flickr is the large amount of developers collectively using the public API to produce a whole range of third party Flickr applications.

These tools collate public photos, profiles and tags and integrate them with various browsers, websites and publishing platforms. All these efforts encourage more mainstream Flickr usage and I do see a lot of growth potential here for Flickr.

Setting up and optimizing your Flickr profile will only take less than half an hour and its long term benefits will far exceed the time and effort you invest in doing so.

I will personally be using Flickr a lot more for Dosh Dosh while keeping an eye on the referral traffic that I receive from Flickr. This will perhaps be documented and analyzed in a future article on Flickr marketing and optimization.

This article is a part of my tutorials on traffic building for websites and blogs. For more creative traffic generating strategies, do subscribe to Dosh Dosh’s RSS feed.