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Building Blog Traffic: Using Flickr

Written by Brandon on December 16, 2007 – 4:48 am -

Flickr is an online photo sharing website that also has a strong social element to browsing photos. Like most social websites, Flickr has strong social tools such as Flickr’s Contacts, Blogging Capabilities, Groups, and Tags. Using these capabilities to their fullest extent is paramount to gaining traffic to your site from Flickr. I can say that if the content and posts are well done, then you may be able to drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site in no time. I will explain exactly how to drive traffic to your site, but first I wanted to give you a scenario: Let’s say your site is on the subject of architecture and you use Wordpress. Also in this scenario, it’s crucial to use a plugin called FeedWordPress which is a tool that lets you post RSS feeds as individual posts on your blog. I’ll explain why a tool like this is important in a moment. Now that we have a premise, let’s use Flickr to the Max!

Before you start blogging, I suggest you put up a bunch of photos on Flickr that is of your blog subject. Then join as many groups as you can find when searching for your subject. Keep in mind that your subject may fit within literally dozens of groups and will be seen by thousands of people. I also like to start making everyone in groups I like a contact of mine. When these people are contacts, it means your photos will show up on their page and they will check out your stuff. So, in the end, you may have thousands of contacts.
Then: Uploading a picture and writing out the tags. I’m going to assume you already have an account on Flickr and that you’ve already managed to figure out how to upload pictures. During the upload phase is probably the most important phase of this exercise. When you upload a picture you are given two forms: tags and description. (HINT) In the tags form, I like to write as many tags to describe a photograph as possible. This will make it much easier for people to find your photograph, which they will. You are allowed up to 75 tags and if you can use them all then do that. You might not want to write all these tags out every time, so I use a text file to keep all my most used comma separated tags. Finally, don’t forget to add one tag with your website’s name. You’ll know why you add this in a moment.
Next, there is the description form. This description will eventually become the text of your blog post. I tend to write a description that is maybe a couple of hundred words long with many keywords to describe the photo. At the End of the description I write “you can find more photos like this at www.mysitename.com” which will show up as a link in the description.
Now that the photo is uploaded, tagged, and described, you will want to add the photo to the appropriate groups on Flickr. Let’s say you have an architecture blog, for instance, there are possibly dozens of groups you could add your photo to. Add this photo to as many groups as possible.
If you would like to go one step further, you could even add a location to your photo which will make your data that much more easy to find. I personally don’t tend to see much benefit from this.
Now, you’ve possibly created a great deal of buzz for your photo or at least exposed the photo to potentially thousands of viewers. Next, you want to get the photo on your blog as a post. I do this by using Flickr’s awesome and very flexible RSS feeds. With Flickr, you can literally choose an RSS feed for one of your tags. Here’s an example of a feed for my “baby” tag. So, all photos for your website should have a tag with the name of your website. Then, you can create an RSS feed just for the photos for the website.
Using the plug-in mentioned before called FeedWordPress, I can import each feed item as an individual post on my website. What happens is that the website just updates itself. Pretty Spiffy!

FeedWordPress Screenshot: Adding a feed to your blog

To recap, I’ve shown you how to:

build an audience on Flickr for your photograph
link that photograph back to your website
turn the photograph and description into an automatic post using Wordpress

I also wanted to point out that you can track your photo’s popularity because Flickr tells you how many times your phot was viewed. So, you can kind of figure out a photo’s click through rate by checking your referrals from Flickr in your stats compared to Flickrs “times viewed” stat. Some more great resources include: