Using Photos to Build Inbound Links
By Matt McGee on Feb 14, 2008 in Link Building, Social Media
A lot of great photographers are scared to put their photos online because it’s so easy for other people to steal their work. I totally understand that. I’m hardly a great photographer, and I don’t want people stealing my photos, either! But I do want them to use my photos.
In the past year or two, bloggers and other content developers have clued in to Flickr as a great source of usable photography. And that opens up an opportunity for anyone with a camera!
I’ve been sharing photos on Flickr since 2004. I use Creative Commons licensing to tell people, “you can use my photos as long as you give me credit in the process.” That credit typically takes the form of a link to my Flickr stream, or to the individual photo that was used.
I love when I find my photos on other sites. Why? Because it helps increase my exposure and, perhaps, sends a little bit of link juice when the link comes from an Important Site. Consider the three links my Flickr photos received this week:
February 7: Discovery Channel’s Planet Green blog
February 11: Wired Blog Network’s Epicenter blog
February 12: Consumerist.com
Those are Important Sites, and those are nice links. Not great, but nice.
Consumerist, one of my favorite blogs, has used my Flickr photos four other times that I know of:
- Still Not Sure What To Get For Mother’s Day? Consumer Reports Has A Guide For You
- United To Unveil Miserly Compensation Policy For Delayed Passengers
- Despite Ban, Fries From Burger King And Wendy’s Still Contain Too Much Trans Fat
- IHOP To Abandon Trans-Fats By Year End
Why Does it Matter?
When these other blogs/sites link directly to an individual photo of mine, I like to go in and edit the photo description to add a link to MattMcGee.com, or some other blog/site of mine. I’m just trying to take advantage of that inbound link to my Flickr photos however I can.
When they link instead to my photo stream home page, it helps make that page a little stronger. That page is already a PR5, so I’ll gladly take any more links people want to send to it.
Either way … every little bit helps, I say.
- Flickr No-Follows (Some) Outbound Links
I suppose this was i - Build Links Naturally
I also suspect the s - How to Put Your Flickr Photos into Yahoo News
It’s not happe - SES Chicago photos
Party Vikin
20 Comment(s)
By iamjustinm on Feb 14, 2008 | Reply
Pretty cool. Unfortunately, I’m not one one thousandth of the photographer you are.
It would be cool though if there was a google trends or keyword research type tool for their image search. That way you can see what images folks are searching for and then go snap some photos.
Anyone know of anything like that?
By Napoli on Feb 17, 2008 | Reply
This is a great idea. I have a large database of office furniture images that can be used for a variety of articles and advertisements. Do you know a good place to publish them. Maybe Flikr would be a good place to start.
By Matt McGee on Feb 18, 2008 | Reply
Hi Napoli – I would be careful about just bulk uploading bunches of product photos like that. Flickr frowns upon using their service for that kind of purpose; they want you joining groups and contributing to the community. You might want to look at sharing your photos via iStockPhoto and other stock photo services.
Hope this helps, and thanks for leaving your first comment on SBS!
By PinkCakeBox on Feb 23, 2008 | Reply
Matt,
You’ve nailed it on the head. Great strategy.
We’ve also used this strategy for our bakery and have been very successful.
Invariably you’ll have to deal with people will end up using your photo without credit. In our case, we had a bakery in Chile, take one of our photos and print it out on their truck! A fan of ours sent us pictures – really unbelievable. You can see the pictures here – http://projects.jesseheap.com/stolen-cake-photos-2008-02-17.htm
Thanks,
jesse
By Matt McGee on Feb 25, 2008 | Reply
Hey Jesse – thanks for the comment. That’s crazy to see your cake on the back of the truck….
I checked out your blog — very cool. Great example of a small business blog. But I didn’t find any links to your Flickr account. ??
By PinkCakeBox on Feb 26, 2008 | Reply
Thanks Matt – our success is in no small part due to small business blogs like your own. Keep up the good work.
We actually interface with the flickr API to display our most “interesting photos” as defined by flickr. You can see the cake gallery here along with a link to our flickr account.
By Forrest on Mar 2, 2008 | Reply
I don’t think a hyperlink ( from Flickr or virtually anywhere else ) is a fair price to use a photo. I realize it helps introduce a person to new audiences (s)he would never have reached before, but … on the other hand, the site is benefiting from using them a lot more than you benefit from the link. At least that’s my estimation.
By PinkCakeBox on Mar 8, 2008 | Reply
Forrest – I think it depends on your line of business. We are in the business of selling cakes and putting our photos on Flickr has been extremely valuable. It has introduced us to new customers, attention from other bloggers, and helped lead to a feature spot on CNN.
Sure yahoo is benefiting as well, but we only include a small portion of our photos on Flickr. We encourage users to visit our site to get the full experience.
By Miles on Nov 25, 2008 | Reply
Have been using Flickr myself to build inbound links for quite a while and I think it’s slowly been paying off. Rather than marketing to the community of people who are on Flickr, I’m using my flickr account to attract some extra attention from google image searches.
I’m kind of going against their terms of service, and was warned about a year ago, but so far haven’t been thrown off yet. I’m auto uploading about 300 photos per day to my account and going through my referer stats looking for photos that attract google image search referals. When something clicks with image search, I spend some more time optimizing the specific pages by adding them to groups, writing comments, adding tags and adjusting titles / descriptions.
By Matt McGee on Nov 25, 2008 | Reply
Miles – do you still have the warning you got a year ago? I’d love to see it. You can email me if you prefer.
By Matt on Mar 20, 2009 | Reply
How do you keep track of when people link to your photos on flickr? If you have like a thousand photos, I imagine this could be difficult?
By Matt McGee on Mar 20, 2009 | Reply
I monitor RSS search feeds (Technorati, Google Blog Search, news search, etc.) for my name, my Flickr username, etc. It doesn’t catch them all, but catches a lot.
By George on Mar 26, 2009 | Reply
Does this technique still work?I think that flickr added the no follow tag to all image descriptions thus killing that beautiful seo tip
Please confirm
By Matt McGee on Mar 26, 2009 | Reply
Traffic is one of the main benefits. If a group of people click from Consumerist to my photo, and see a link below the photo that interests them, that’s new traffic I probably have had otherwise.
If all you’re concerned about is the link juice aspect, there are other places where Flickr is not no-following outbound links.
By TJ on Apr 3, 2009 | Reply
Hey Matt,
My name is TJ and I’m a web manager and admin for ModelRun.com. It’s a site for models and photographers but with a very limited budget. The site offers plenty of features but is having hard times in reaching wider audience. It’s a free site and as of now it doesn’t have any advertisements on it, so budget is the main issue.
Can you give me some tips on how I can use a similar to your approach to build a little popularity for it? We don’t have the right to distribute (and we won’t) any of our members’ work, but is there anything else that we could do, that is cost-effective?
Thanks a bunch in advance!
TJ
ModelRun.com
By Shailendra on May 7, 2009 | Reply
Great technique Matt, but how are you tracking who is using your photos and where. Some people might use your photo without linking you.
By Matt McGee on May 7, 2009 | Reply
Shailendra – if you scroll up a few comments, you’ll see my reply to that question.
By Todd Bartlett on May 17, 2009 | Reply
That is a really creative idea. I will have to start taking better and more pictures and getting them loaded. Thanks for the tip.
By Denise on Jun 23, 2009 | Reply
Hi Matt
Just found your site. Very helpful. Just working with small businesses myself in the North of the UK. Like the information on Flickr and learned a few things
Thanks
Denise
By Joel McLaughlin on Jul 1, 2009 | Reply
Great post Matt! I found this on sphinn, good ideas.