Increasing your Flickr Views: The Basics. Part 2
About Part 2
In Part 1 I discussed the two main ways to get an audience for your pictures: Having Contacts and Joining Groups.
In Part 2 I'm going to talk about tagging and getting your pictures into the 'interestingness' feed.
Once you followed these steps, you're on your way to increasing your views.
"Diversity"
Tag Your Pictures
If you've ever tried to search for anything you know who frustrating it can be, either you can't find what you're looking for or you get too many things that aren't relevant to what you're looking for. Good tagging is the key to making sure people can find you.
Why tag?
- Flickr searches are done by picture tags only. Any text in your descriptions is ignored.
- People will do searches they're looking for specific things, both groups and pictures. if you're not tagged then you won't show up.
What type of tags to use
There are 3 types of tags you can use:
- Genre
- Photo specific
- Detail
Genre tags are general high level tags. If you have a photo of a house you would look at tags like house, home, the country it was taken in, architecture
Photo Specific tags describe the picture. These would be things like the town or suburb and the style of house.
Detail tags are areas of the picture you wish to highlight because of some kind of interest. This could be thatched roof, red roof, garden, green door, detatched house.
When you go searching for groups, note the terms you use to describe your interests. Those terms are probably used by others too, so make sure you add them to your list to use on your photos.
Make sure your tags are appropriate.
You usually only have one chance to grab someones attention. If you drag them to your site using inappropriate tags then you've probably lost them as a regular viewer.
Making the "interestingness" list
This is a hard one. I have had 4 pictures in the Interestingness list and they share very little except they belonged to me.
Interestingness is calculated by where your views come from and the number of comments. Groups and your contacts checking out your stream won't do it, you need to attract people who would not normally look at your pictures.
These views can come from blogs, other people's favourites, or from you posting the picture either in a group discussion thread or in the comments of someone elses picture.
What catches people's eye on any given day fluctuates. Have a look at the interestingness pool though, the one thing (and sometimes the only thing) the majority of the pictures have in common is that they are beautiful.
If you make the list then the first inkling you may have is when suddenly the views will shoot up for a day.
I'll discuss the monitoring tools in another post. If you do make the interestingness thread you probably will never know until way after the event.
http://www.howtoliveonline.com/2007/07/how-to-get-into-flickr-explore-revised.html
What Next?
Now you're set up you're ready to start posting and improving your views.
Future posts will cover:
- when to post to reach the widest audience
- consolidating your viewer base
- the types of photographs to post
- choosing your style
- using the flickr tools to monitor your stats
- What makes a good site
If you'd like to see something else included, just ask.