Boosting traffic to your Flickr page?

trican

Hey all,

I regularly enough upload photos to flickr, submit them to groups, sometimes add tags (could do more though in this regard), etc. Yet the majority are never viewed. So my question is: what do you do to increase traffic to flickr/pix.ie/your photoblog? ....aside from take great photos! (this is probably what I have to improve most I suppose!!!)

.Longshanks.

Stick it in a lot of groups with the following in the comments......

jpb1974

Question -

Why do you want to boost traffic to your Flickr page?

Paulw

Keywords and tags are the way, aside from just taking great picts.

trican

jpb1974 wrote: »

Question -

Why do you want to boost traffic to your Flickr page?

I suppose to get constructive feedback

jpb1974

I suppose to get constructive feedback

Awesome

Better than God

Gold Star award

???

trican

jpb1974 wrote: »

Awesome

Better than God

Gold Star award

???

:-) ok I see what you're getting at!

jpb1974

Flickr is a good... but not for critique.

I wrote a critique for a guy once, slightly critical but in a genuine and honest fashion... and he blocked me from his photostream.

Some fantastic photos about the place oft serve me those moments of inspiration and idea.

Sometimes a few good technical discussions about the place too... managed to solve a few camera and development problems in the past thanks to Flickr.

Some of the Groups are decent as well... I use a Mamiya TLR and I enjoy seeing what other people are producing with this camera via the Mamiya TLR group.

But mostly for me.. it's an image hosting site.

Paulw

If you just want hits - keywords like sex, naked, woman, girl, ... you can guess, will get you lots of hits.

But, it won't do your photography much good.

Trev M

Its a strange one, but I understand were your coming from...whats a picture without anyone to veiw it? Are you looking to learn or for people to appreciate your fabulous work? (To be fair I think your stuff is pretty good)

The groups thing is fine but I find its only rewarding if you contribute more than just pictures. Adding genuine comments to other users, contributing to discussions and arranging meet ups are a good way to get people interested in what you do etc.

Personally I find there are a small number of people that I keep up to date with and there appears to be a small number of people that comment on my stuff. Its generally people who shoot the same kinda stuff and we trade locations, tips and Ive met up with a couple of people around my local area which has been a bit of craic.

Flickr is great, but its so chock full of mediocrity (err.. my own included), ya cant expect a whole lot from it unless you contribute.. at best you'll get as much as you put in is my experience.

mehfesto

Yeah, there was a page a while back - the great flickr experiment.
It was a bloke who took pictures and added tags like 'sex' 'lesbiens' etc and took pictures of his elbows etc so that when they were viewed as a thumbnail they looked somewhat relevant.

He had millions of hits per image.
Granted I saw the story on the NY Times site - which linked to it, so its hard to tell if it was from there too.

But the tags that get me my most hits are
'Jedward', 'Paolo Nutini' 'uniforms' and 'Irish Girls'...

I wouldn't worry about traffic. It seems important at the start, but it really isn't.




...and tags aren't important either. The 'most interesting' pics of any given tag has pictures of transvestites in the top ten. Almost always. Even feckin 'Ireland', if I remember right!

magicbastarder

how many photos have you uploaded?
nothing turns me off more than someone with thousands and thousands of photos without a 'best of' gallery.

says he who doesn't have a best of gallery on his site.

Trev M

jpb1974 wrote: »

Flickr is a good... but not for critique.

I wrote a critique for a guy once, slightly critical but in a genuine and honest fashion... and he blocked me from his photostream.

Genrally I wont critique anything unless I have kinda built up a bit of familiarity with the person , people are crazy sensitive when they beleive they are "creating art".

I think you need to know where you stand so to speak... a couple of my contacts are like me , just shoot pictures....a couple though are very serious about their "art" and Id rarely add a critique.

One of the first genuine bits of feedback I received was from Animal Rights , At the time I thought it was really strange cause he went to a lot of bother to actually explain technically what he felt could be improved ... I was genuinely stunned that he made the effort cause to me I just took a picture no more no less, admittedly since then though I have tried to get more technically proficient and have become a bit more precious about shots Im proud of .

jpb1974

nothing turns me off more than someone with thousands and thousands of photos without a 'best of' gallery.

I have a couple of thousand photos without a 'best of' gallery... but I never asked anyone to look at my Flickr stream nor do I publicize it.

For me it's my photography diary... times/dates/places/people/memories etc etc.

You can grow out of caring what other people think about your pics... sometimes you just gotta 'free your mind'.

Trev M

magicbastarder wrote: »

how many photos have you uploaded?
nothing turns me off more than someone with thousands and thousands of photos without a 'best of' gallery.

says he who doesn't have a best of gallery on his site.

Ive a load of ****e up there , but hey that where I keep my ****e...ya know for posterity an all.

Oh Tags are useful if you have the view that someone might want to use an image of something/someone you shot ...."Schmap" for example, they've used a pic of mine that gets a few hits.

trican

wow thanks for all the feedback guys - going back to the earlier question regarding the why I'd even want to boost traffic, fundamentally I want to improve my photography skills. I've been taking photos for a about a year and half but I think I've hit a plateau. I think I'm fairly comfortable with the technical stuff (still beat myself up afterwards when I realise I've forgotten to change the settings [ISO in particular] from a previous set of shots or something) but I think the creative side is lacking. Thus thought getting more feedback would help matters

Trev M wrote: »

The groups thing is fine but I find its only rewarding if you contribute more than just pictures. Adding genuine comments to other users, contributing to discussions and arranging meet ups are a good way to get people interested in what you do etc.

Trev, that makes a lot of sense, i.e. take a quality not quantity approach.

Trev M wrote: »

Ive a load of ****e up there , but hey that where I keep my ****e...ya know for posterity an all.

thats sounds like a good way to use flickr and pix.ie in combination

Trev M wrote: »

Genrally I wont critique anything unless I have kinda built up a bit of familiarity with the person , people are crazy sensitive when they beleive they are "creating art".

I'd have zero problem with people being critical

melekalikimaka

i find series get lots of hits, like a relevent series of photos, story telling etc.

mehfesto

Oh, or get famous in another field and use this to boost you photography credentials. People will instantly think your an AMAZING photographer and offer you jobs based on your non-photography work...

Fenster

mehfesto wrote: »

Oh, or get famous in another field and use this to boost you photography credentials. People will instantly think your an AMAZING photographer and offer you jobs based on your non-photography work...

WTF?

mehfesto

Fenster wrote: »

WTF?

Dave Gorman is a comedian. He started photography as a hobby - taking pictures of rocks he stacked (hence the username). He was soon offered paid work from skating magazines, papers etc. after his Flickr page attracted thousands of followers. Nothing to do with his quality of shots!


[/rant]

achtungbarry

This thread really good.

It invokes the spirit of the unicorn!!!!



You have to be really really good to get one of those on flickr. Takes years in fact....

Simplicius

achtungbarry wrote: »

This thread really good.

It invokes the spirit of the unicorn!!!!



You have to be really really good to get one of those on flickr. Takes years in fact....

Oooooh I want one of them !!!

Arciphel

As opposed to some of the stupid responses the poor OP has got, trican I'd suggest you could start maybe geotagging your images by adding them to a map? I think a lot of people search for images this way, at least in my experience, and also that way when someone looks at pictures of, say, Cork, if you have a lot of images tagged in that area then you will show up. Just my 2 cents...

AnimalRights

I find 97.3% of the time my best photographs gets the most hits on pixie...odd eh

swingking

Speaking of pix.ie,now that's a website I find I never get traffic to. It's very primitive compared to flickr. They should have a groups thing

melekalikimaka

swingking wrote: »

Speaking of pix.ie,now that's a website I find I never get traffic to. It's very primitive compared to flickr. They should have a groups thing

most of they users arent too keen on it... therers a pretty close knit posse there, regular commenting on each others work, works well.

dinneenp

Read this Thomas Hawk article TOP 10 WAYS TO GET ATTENTION ON FLICKR, ALL NEW, FRESH AND UPDATED FOR 2010.

good point, he says most groups are dumping ground. He says to add to active groups, active as in disucssions and groups where you have to rate other photos
I added this to the group he mentions below and have had 86 hits and others have gotten more views too.

I think as well comment on peoples pics and make them contacts.
In my gmail signature I have url for my photo blog and flickr account

-
6. Groups. Most groups on Flickr are a waste of time. Dead groups where photo whores dump billions of photos in dead pools that nobody cares about and nobody sees. Your photos are quickly buried deep, deep, in the pool, never to be seen or heard from again. Avoid these groups. They typically have names like “Baskets! Show us all your photos of baskets!” or “You Say Tomato, I Say Tomato, show us all your photos of tomatoes!” Don’t just dump your photo into 30 random groups.

Instead pick a few meaningful groups and actually hang out there and interact with people. You might consider a local group for where you live. Or a photo critique group. Or whatever. But find a few active groups (meaning several new threads are engaged in a day) and participate. I belong to a number of groups on Flickr, but 95% of my Flickr group time is spent in the critique group DMU. (Note, DMU is uncensored and not for everyone. Remember above where I told you that Flickr nuked one of our groups? yep.)

AnimalRights

swingking wrote: »

Speaking of pix.ie,now that's a website I find I never get traffic to. It's very primitive compared to flickr. They should have a groups thing

I'm coming up to 700,000 hits in little over 2 years. I'm great am.