Increasing your Flickr Views: The Basics. Part 1

So, you post your pics to Flickr and maybe get 5 - 10 views in the first month or so and wonder why more people aren't admiring your pictures? Take heart, that's about normal for Flickr.

For a while I used to publish to Flickr regularly and built up a following of around 100+ views in the first few hours of each new picture being posted and would regularly get up to 1000 views each day over all the pictures on my stream.

Over this and the next few posts I'll give you the basics of positioning yourself to widen your audience, some tips on how to improve your posting style to get attention and some of the lessons I learnt.

When I stopped following my own advice the views died and my stream slipped into the obscurity you see today. So I know my tips work.

Flickr is a social networking site without been overtly socially networkable. So if you want to increase the views of your pictures, you have to understand the ways your audience will come to you.

There are 4 main ways to get your viewers attention:

• via your contacts
• via posting to groups
• via tags
• via "interestingness"

The first three of these are quite straightforward and just require a bit of effort and some monitoring/tweaking of your results. The fourth one is the holy grail. It's not impossible, but it's difficult. Out of probably close to 800 pictures I posted, I only made it onto the interesting list 4 times.

But that's 4 more than most do.

If you want people to see your pictures, you need to at least have a potential audience. To do that you need contacts.

Why do you need contacts?

• Your pictures will show on on their homepage if your picture has been recently loaded,
• People also check their full contact list to see who else has been posting,

So, if it's an eyecatcher of a picture or you have built a relationship with them they'll come and check out your new posts.

• People also check out the contacts and favourites of streams they like. They're looking to see if they can find other posters who are just as good.

How to find contacts

If you're going to post in a specific genre (travel, kids, puppies, boats etc) do a group search and check out the group for people who regularly post or who post stunning pics or get lots of hits for their pictures. Make these a contact. 99% of the time you'll find they'll make you a contact too.

If they do all three, make absolutely sure you make them a contact.

Make sure the majority of your contacts have the same interests as you. That way they're more likely to check out your pictures when you post new ones.

10% of views from 100 contacts is only 10 views.. 10% of 1000 contacts is 100.

..and everyone loves to have lots of contacts so very few people will not reciprocate a contact.

In a later post I'll give you some tips for developing relationships and binding your contacts to you.

Your main drive-by viewers come from groups. Getting your groups right is essential to widening your viewer base.

Why post to groups?

• Group members have an interest in the topic. Basic but true.
• Most people have favourite groups that they check out regularly or get a RSS feed for.
• You'll get invites to post to other groups that you may not have heard of because one of the members discovers your picture. It will give you a chance to widen your potential audience.

Don't just limit yourself to groups that are specific to your genre. For example, if you like to take pictures of houses you could look also look for architecture, door, window, time periods (say 1940 houses), thatched cottages. If you use photoshop or gimp or any other tool then join those groups or even the groups that are around for those who don't do any post processing.

Always be aware of the posting rules and don't post pictures that aren't suitable.

If the group is moderated then you may just have the picture removed and get a warning or you could be removed and banned from the group all together.

These are the two main ways to find your main audience. From these pools of people you will build your regular viewers.

In the next post I'll talk about the last 2: tagging and the Flickr Interestingness stream.

I've included links to my two main photo sites. My Flickr site is more of a what not to do these days and the Ipernity is a different approach to posting. I'll dissect and discuss them in greater detail in later posts.

I hope you've found this useful. If there's something you'd like me to discuss in future posts just ask.