A Comprehensive Guide to Using Flickr for Traffic Building and Marketing

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.

A Comprehensive Guide to Using Flickr for Traffic Building and Marketing

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