How to Get Thousands of Visitors from Flickr (And over 450,000 Account Views)

Glen / 25 Comments / April 16th, 2009 / Subscribe via RSS

Note to all PluginHQ / ViperChill Readers - This is officially the first post of the blog coming ‘back’. Thanks to all of you who never took us out of your RSS feed, I will not disappoint you!

Flickr is one of those sites where you see an odd guide here and there about optimising your images or getting traffic, but I like to think I take things a little further than that. This post is going to look at how a personal account gets around 4-5,000 views daily, and has amassed over 450,000 views so far. And trust me, those views result in traffic.

What is Flickr?

For those of you who don’t know, Flickr is a photo sharing (and now video) community that allows photographers, hobbyists and designers to upload their works for the world to see. Flickr has a real community feel about it, and with active groups, commenters and genuinely nice users, it’s a friendly place to spend your time.

The site was taken over by Yahoo and you’ll see why this is important to know later on in the guide. Flickr was founded in February 2004, and now claims to have over 3 billion images on their servers. My favourite aspect of Flickr is the ability to mark photos of favourites. Whenever Adam does a new post highlighting some top images, I save most of them so I can recall them later whenever I’m writing a new blog post.

My Stats

Before I get onto how you can get traffic from Twitter, I thought we should look at the traffic potential. Bare in mind that Flickr traffic isn’t going to be a huge wave of visitors flooding your server, similar to Digg or StumbleUpon. Instead, Flickr traffic is a lot ’steadier’ and tends to be traffic that you can receive for months and months without doing anything extra.

Over the last few months, Flickr has been consistently sending me around 100 visitors per day. While this is not a massive amount by any means, this is targeted, relevant traffic that is coming to my site and actually converting in ways that I want them to. An extra 3,000 visitors per month for doing nothing but uploading images (and then stopping) is not bad in my opinion.

I believe that the reason traffic drops off is that newer images take the first page of Flickr search results and tend to get the most traffic. The good thing is that with Flickr’s detailed analytics, I can go in and see which images have lost traffic, or which traffic sources have dropped, and work to improve that.

For any photoshop detectives out there, all I did was move the text on the left closer to the images (there is a huge gap), all the figures are still intact - feel free to zoom in ;). Notice how I am getting traffic to both sets and collections, I’ll discuss this in more detail later.

Getting Flickr Traffic

The great thing about uploading Flickr Images is that in the description for each you can include links to your website. These are actually no-follow so they won’t help much in the search engines, but they do send traffic.

However, for any link junkies out there, links to your site from the sets and collections pages are dofollow and you can use any anchor text that you like. I’m not sure how long that ‘hole’ will stay open now that I have mentioned it here.

Choosing the Right Images

One thing you should know is that 99% of the traffic to my Flickr images comes from the Yahoo search engine and the Flickr search engine. Funnily I get single figure visitors daily from Google Images (apart from to my site) but Yahoo really sends a ton of traffic to your Flickr page, unsurprisingly as they own the site.

On this note, that means that you need to upload pictures that people actually want to find; some tips I have on doing this include:

• Upload Pictures that Already Get Traffic - Do you have images on your site that already get a lot of visits? If so, upload optimised alternatives onto Flickr and see if you can boost traffic to your site that way.
• Upload Wanted Images - It’s not hard to think of images people might look for on a daily basis but of course you should try to think of relevant ones as well. Pictures of celebrities, sporting events and famous landmarks will always be a hit when it comes to traffic.
• Look at Popular Groups - If you look at the popular groups on Flickr, you can start to tell which photos people are interested in, and this generally means they want to see more of them. For example if there is a popular group about Beyonce Knowles, and you own a celebrity blog, then it might be wise to upload some pictures of her (that you have permission to use, of course).

At the end of the day, it is still important that you upload relevant images to your account. There’s no use getting lots of celebrity traffic if you run a hotel that is situated near a theme park. In that example, it would be much better to have images of the theme park or surrounding interests in the same area.

Optimising Your Images

Now that you have your pictures up on Flickr, you need to optimise them. If I’m totally honest, I have optimised my images to the point of ridiculousness (I know that’s not a word) and you really don’t have to go this far. Why did I? Simply because I test every single thing possible to work out what is best, and because it is on Flickr’s site, I don’t think there is something like over-optimisation.

There are several ways you can optimise your images on Flickr:

• Image Titles - This is probably the most obvious and definitely the most effective tactic to get more image traffic. The title of the image should be relevant to what the image is and not something like 00002.jpg or whatever it was when you uploaded it. If you are uploading multiple images that are around the same subject, add a number or extension word to the title i.e. Beyonce Knowles, Beyonce Knowles Smiling, Beyonce Knowles 2 or similar.
• Tags - For each of your images you are also allowed to put tags that describe them. Here I honestly go overboard and include a large number of tags in that describe my images. What I also do is add misspellings that people might use and this is especially handy for getting traffic directly from the search function in Flickr.
• Sets - Flickr allows you to create sets that group together all of your images. So for example, staying with the celebrity theme, you could have a ’set’ that shows all your photos of Beyonce, a set that shows all your photos of Madonna and so on. Of course, the celebrity theme is just an example but you should know how you can separate your own photos into different sets based on relevance. Again, the title of the set should be optimised so that it is relevant to what the images it contains are about.
• Collections - This is why I say I went a bit overboard on the optimisation, and that is because I took advantage of collections as well. If sets are a group of like images then you should see collections as a group of like sets. Your collection could be about ‘celebrities’ and include the sets Beyonce and Madonna. Another collection could be about ‘theme parks’ and show Six Flags in America and Alton Towers in the UK.

The reason I make use of all these is that you get a lot of internal links to your images from the same site. One of the reasons Twitter profiles rank highly in Google is because they have a lot of internal links from other profiles, and this method with Flickr is no different. Some of my sets pages have amassed a PR 3 and 4 with nothing but internal links from tags and other areas of the site.

Linking to Your Site

As I briefly mentioned earlier, the links from a Flickr photo page are nofollow but they do send traffic. If people are searching for pictures of landmarks from a certain area, and you have a hotel in that place, that visit might result in someone paying to stay with you. That is just an example, but if you use your imagination there are literally thousands of ways that you can get this image traffic to convert how you want them to.

• Images - When you upload images you are asked if you want to give them a description. This is where you place the HTML code for your link. Your text should be inviting so for example you might say ‘for more pictures of X go to myurl.com’ or ‘Like this picture? Find out more about this area at myurl.com’. Of course you can test this to see what works best for you.
• Sets - Your sets page contains all the images that you want to put in a certain group. Sets do get indexed by search engines and they also do not have the no-follow tag on their links, so you can get a relevant backlink from a very trusted domain.
• Collections - Just like sets, collections allow you to name them uniquely and their descriptions also do not have the no-follow tag on links. Collections, as stated, allow you to group all your sets together and these pages can also acquire some decent pagerank if you organise all your internal linking effectively.

The more images you upload, the more chances you have of getting people to your Flickr pages and the more chance you have of getting them to your site. Of course, it’s better to be able to upload images that get a lot of searches, rather than lots that don’t get any.

I use this method with a few sites, uploading relevant niche images and pointing the description back to my site. It might only bring an extra 50 visitors per day, but a few thousand visitors per month is not bad for less than a days’ work.

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