Currently the most successful and popular online photo management and sharing site is non other than Flickr. It is reported that there are more than 500 million photos stored on Flickr. Flickr’s traffic grew 448% to 3.4 million from December 2004 to December 2005, according to Internet measurement firm Nielsen/NetRatings. In the nearly 12 months since Yahoo purchased it, the site went from 250,000 registered users to more than 2 million. Flickr’s distinctive tool lets bloggers simultaneously post photos on their own blogs and at Flickr. With “tagging” — adding a few words of text to each posted photo — photos stored in flickr can be easily searched online and can be a good source of traffic for your site. Below are 3 simple ways to drive traffic from flickr to your site.
1. Use proper title and tags
Tags are like keywords or labels that you add to a photo to make it easier to find later. Photos with proper tagging can be searched and found easily others. In Flickr, you can tag a photo with phrases like “blue hydrangea tsurumai park nagoya japan.” Later if you or other visitors would like to look for pictures of hydrangea, photos can be easily located by just clicking that tag to get all photos that have been tagged that way.
Proper title is also recommended for all photos stored in Flickr. Instead of using default names set by your digital camera e.g. DSC0231, proper naming enables your photo to be easily indexed and searched by search engines. Recently, Yahoo Image Search has added Flickr images into its image index. Now, Yahoo Image Search is serving over 300 million Flickr photos in its query results via a live feed from Flickr; so once an image is uploaded to a Flickr account, it’s available via Yahoo Image Search too.
2. Add descriptive hyperlinks
In order to drive visitors from Flickr to your site, just enter the hyperlink in HTML format into the description box for your photo as shown below.
Then when you click save, the description will look like this:
Visitors that are interested to know more about your photo will click the link to go to your site.
3. Submit pictures to Flickr Groups
Flickr is not just an online photo storage site, but it is also an online social networking site. If you have a good photo that is interesting and good, one of the best way to promote your photo in Flickr and to attract more viewers is to add your photo to the group pool. The easiest way to add a photo to a group is to go to the photo’s page and click the “Send to Group” button between the photo title and the photo. Then choose the group you want to send it to, and you’re done!. A photo can be shared with multiple groups.
That’s it. Hopefully Flickr will drive more traffics to your site. If you have any suggestions or comments, please share with me.
