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.

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.

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, recommend to try 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. 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.)