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Marketing: The Flickr Way

When I first started thinking about selling my photos online, I was considering using this blog and my SmugMug site as the focal points of my online marketing efforts. I figured Flickr would stay in the background because I couldn’t sell photos there and, unless I changed my settings, people could download them or “blog” them for free. Then I woke up. Flickr is the ultimate photographer’s network! How could Flickr not be used by the aspiring professional photographer?

So I started thinking of how I could use Flickr to market my own photography. After a year and a half of browsing through Flickr and uploading almost 3,000 photos, here are a few things I came up with…

NOTE: Some of these things I’ve done, others I have yet to do… Your mileage may vary.

JOIN Flickr!

This may seem like a no-brainer but, over the last few months of browsing photo blogs I’m astonished at how many new photographers don’t appear to have a Flickr account. I’m not saying it’s impossible to build a photo business without it, but when you can get an account for free and a pro account for only $25, why wouldn’t you? It’s arguably the best (and most engaging) way to get eyeballs on your work. All you need is a Yahoo! account. Go now.

Put some effort into your uploaded photos

Upload in the right order

Flickr allows you to change the layout of your main page. The layout I use can be seen below:

Click on image for larger version…

Let’s look at this a bit. There is one main image and a few sets that you can see as soon as you visit my page.

After the jump, tips on tagging, groups, cleaning up your stream, and being social!

The main image

While you can re-order your photos once they’re in a set, Flickr orders them on your main page by date uploaded, with the most recent being first. Some of the Flickr uploading tools allow you to re-order them before you upload them, thus allowing you to choose the first image. If the tool you’re using doesn’t let you do that, considering uploading in two batches. The first upload will be all of your images, except the one you want first. The second upload will be, of course, your desired main photo.

Remember, this is the storefront for your virtual photo store. Put some thought into what image should be first.

Sets and Collections

By default, the newest sets will be listed first in this layout. Don’t do that. On the Flickr Organize page, you can re-order your sets in the order you like. I would recommend creating at least two specific sets for people to see first:

Your most “interesting” photos – You can create this set by using fd’s Flickr Toys SmartSetr.
Your favorites – This is pretty obvious. Put what you think are you best photos here.

If I view someone’s profile for the first time, the first thing I look for are sets similar to the ones described above. As someone who is trying to sell their photos, make sure you push your best stuff!

Titles

Pretty obvious, right? Unfortunately, too many aspiring photographers (including me sometimes) keep the default file name as the title. That’s not very exciting is it? Just imagine:

“Announcing the 2009 World Press Photo of the Year: IMG_0566.jpg”

Yeah. I don’t think so. So think of something! It could be descriptive, deep, emotional, abstract, or even a simple numbering scheme. “White House XII” is better than the default file name. But you ask: “How can I possibly come up with a unique name for the 500 photos I just took today?” You don’t have to. More on that later…

Tags

Come on, people! This is Web 2.0! Tag those photos! In the last few days I’ve seen countless photos on Flickr without tags. I understand it’s tedious to add them to all of your photos but it’s worth it. How else are people going to find that awesome shot you just took?

So how do I tag my photos?

Well, first you need to understand that a tag is a keyword. Nothing more. They’re used to help organize information on this massive web of ours. For more information on tags, see Wikipedia. But how do you assign tags? Well, I’m sure there are those that would disagree with me but I prefer simple, one-word tags. For example, if I have a photo of New York City, I might use the following:

new, york, city

That way if someone searched for “new city”, “new york”, or “city”, my tags would match. You could also bunch them together with double quotes, dashes, or make it all one word:

“new york city”
new-york-city
newyorkcity

I’m not really sure there is a right answer here… Your goal is to just make them searchable.

Popular Tags on Flickr

Also, in addition to tagging obvious stuff, you also might want to add tags that are a little more abstract, such as adjectives, emotions, or even colors that describe your photo.

For example, if you have a photo of a cute puppy, instead of just tagging:

dog, puppy, labrador, retriever

You could also add:

brown, cute, cuddly, furry

Flickr allows each photo to have up to 75 tags, so don’t be shy.

Descriptions

This is a place that, I think, is left blank far more than any other field. The description area is a chance for you to really express yourself, talk about your photo, or advertise your work. Yet it is underused way too often. I suspect this is out of laziness (I know that’s why mine are blank so often). We get in the habit of uploading 40 images at a time and we simply don’t have the energy to add a description to all of them or we simply can’t think of anything unique to say. I hear ya. Later on in this article, we’ll talk about uploading less images so this won’t be much of a problem, but what do we do in the meantime?

Well, write something. Talk about how you took the photo or what it means to you. There’s even a Flickr group for photos with a story at least 5 sentences long. Check out that group here to get an idea of what I mean.

You can also use the description field to link back to where people can buy a print of the photo or, if the photo relates to something particular on your blog, link to it. One of my contacts, the blogger for Photo-Projectz, Chica-X links to a specific blog post in every photo description.

Or, you can follow the lead of another one of my contacts, Satirenoir, who puts a poem or some verse in the description field for almost all of her photos. While her photography is great, the verses and poetry definitely add to the images. A great idea!

Be selective

Clean up your photostream

With the unlimited space that Flickr offers its Pro users, it’s very easy to use Flickr as a photo dumping ground. I often see people upload 10-20 photos of almost the exact same thing, each of them not very different from the others. I’m guilty of this, too. If you’re looking to market your work, uploading every photo you take is not the way to do it. A potential buyer of your photos isn’t likely to browse through 50 pages of your photostream unless each shot is phenomenal and unique. So you know those 100 photos of Aunt Gertrude’s birthday party? Get rid of them. Make them private or put them somewhere else where your family can see them. Asking your family to jump through hoops to see the family photos you took last weekend is much better than asking potential customers to browse through 4 pages of snapshots of people they don’t know. One way to do this might be to create another Flickr account for your personal stuff. You may not even need to upgrade it to a Pro account, though you certainly could for only $25. Keep your Flickr stream professional.

Upload less

OK, you’ve just removed those photos of your grandparents’ anniversary. Now what? Well, considering pruning even more. For example, I have 37 photos in my Jefferson Memorial set. Are all 37 photos worth having there from a marketing standpoint? No. I could probably remove 35 of them and improve the quality of my stream.

Look at this way… You don’t want potential customers viewing your photos as a commodity. You have a unique product and image that doesn’t exist anywhere else. However, if you’re uploading 50 shots at a time, all of the same or similar things, you’ve just said “My photos are a dime a dozen and it didn’t take much effort to produce one, so I produced 50″. Make sense?

This is also where photo descriptions can be helpful, too. If you’re only uploading one or two images at a time, you can definitely find something to say about them. The more you can talk about the work that went into each particular image, the higher the perceived value. I’m not saying you should lie and make it sound like it took an hour to set up one shot… but describe what you were going for, where you think you succeeded, where you didn’t, etc. If you don’t tell me about the photo, I’m going to assume this image may not mean a whole lot to you and, therefore, I may not place a very high value on it. Tell me why this photo is valuable! I may agree with you and buy it!

So what do I do with the rest? Well, if you really think they can sell, leave two or three that you believe are the best shots and, in the description field of those three, let someone know how they can browse the rest of this set or purchase prints from this set. One thing I plan on doing is linking back to my SmugMug account, where I will have more photos from the set available for someone to browse through. In addition, since I have a Pro account at SmugMug ($150/year), I can set custom pricing on all my photos and let SmugMug deal with the back-end credit card processing, printing, and shipping. All I need to do is collect 90% of the difference between SmugMug’s price and my own. Not a bad deal!

Show me where I can buy!

In addition to writing about the photo in the description field, it’s also not a bad idea to tell your customers where they can buy a print or see more images of this kind. If you take 100 photos of the White House and believe that 10 of them might be marketable, upload one to Flickr, and tell me where I can see (and buy) the rest. This could be a link to your own custom site, a SmugMug page, or whatever. Remember, Flickr is the best networking tool for photographers and those that love great photos, so treat Flickr as a virtual storefront, enticing people to walk in and see more.

Protect your photos

One of the greatest aspects of Flickr is that the site is set up so that photographers can easily share photos or embed them on other sites. This is wonderful, unless you’re trying to make a living from your photography. Flickr does offer some options to help you protect your photos, though.

Choose a license!

Many photographers fret about making their images available in a digital world. And rightfully so! It’s never been easier for someone to grab your image off the web and repost it, print it, or otherwise market it as their own. But, on the other hand, it’s also never been easier for you to market your work to such a large audience at little to no cost. So, what’s a photographer to do? Choose a license. Of course, it doesn’t guarantee your work won’t be stolen. That’s still very easy to do. But, with a license, you’ll at least have a some legal basis for going after those who would steal your work.

What kind of license?

Flickr offers a couple options in your profile settings:

Screenshot taken from http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/license/.

So what do all those licenses mean? CreativeCommons.org has a list of all available licenses complete with easy-to-understand examples.

Also, don’t forget, that this is just the default for all photos. You can change the license for individual photos (or batches of photos) in the Flickr Organize page. (Batch Organize Tab -> Permissions -> Change license)

Privacy Settings

If you click on “You -> Your Account -> Privacy & Permissions”, you’ll be greeted with the following Global Settings:

As someone trying to market their photos, here are some settings you may want to try:

Who can download your photos – Only you
- This will enable or disable the “All Sizes” button above your photos that allows people to download different sizes of the image. It also places a transparent image over yours that prevents people from right-clicking on the file and saving it.
Please Note: This does not really prevent people from downloading the image. Once it’s displayed in a browser, it can be saved locally. This only prevents the least educated thiefs from stealing your photo. All you need to do is browse through the page source code in your browser to find the path to the file.
Please Note: This setting is overridden by your license choice. The “All Sizes” button will still appear unless you chose “None: All Rights Reserved” as your license.

Who can print your photos – Only you
- This will prevent the “Prints & More” button from appearing above your photos. This is a must! How can you make a living off your photos if anyone can get them professionally printed straight from Flickr? You won’t make a dime on it.

Who can blog your photos – Only you
- This will disable the “Blog This” button from appearing near your photo. Flickr has some limited capability to actually post photos to your blog for you. I’m not a big fan of it because it’s not very flexible. However, if you let someone blog your photos, Flickr embeds the path to the photo in the code of the page, essentially, allowing anyone to download it.

Full-Size Photos

Since you’re not planning on sharing your photos like most Flickr members, there is no reason to upload the full-size originals. You could if you feel like the photo is much better at a larger size, but, for the most part uploading a photo that’s around 500×300 is enough to display them on Flickr at a reasonable size and definitely prevents others from downloading a hi-res printable copy.

Watermarks

Another good idea is watermarking your photos. Watermarking is the act of embedding some sort of text or logo in the image itself. It’s up to you where you want to place your watermark, of course. You can place it in a corner of your image, but that could be cropped out by a thief. Or, you can put it right across the center of the image, but that might compromise the image’s beauty. It’s your call. Most photo manipulation programs supporting watermarking, making it easy for you to embed your logo or name in every image you have.

Be social!

Groups

There are thousands of Flickr groups and they are really what makes Flickr so great! There are groups with rules, groups with no rules, groups with requirements, groups that require an invitation, groups about photos of numbers, photos of specific cities, photos of animals… If you can think of it, there’s probably a group for it. However, there is one thing that you must remember about adding your photos to groups. From the Flickr FAQ:

“Adding a photo to a group pool allows any group member to view your photo and add notes, tags, and comments, regardless of the photo’s privacy setting.”

Depending on how you have set your privacy settings, this is something to definitely keep in mind.

Having said that, groups are a phenomenal way to market your photos. The process can be tedious, however. I am currently a member of 230 groups. I frankly don’t have the time to add photos to every appropriate group, especially ones with specific rules such as “Post 1/Comment 6″. That’s a great idea! Unfortunately, though, I would need to do this full-time in order to share as much as I would like. If you follow the guidance above regarding uploading less, it will become a lot easier to make sure your photos are in the right groups.

From a marketing standpoint, you may feel that putting your photos in groups with the most members is the best option. It can be. But remember that, groups with thousands of members also have thousands of photos. Yours can easily get lost in the shuffle. Consider adding your photos to groups that are more focused, but active. For example, the Canon DSLR Group has almost 20,000 members and each member can post up to one photo per day. Even if only a fraction of those members post a photo each day, that still can be over a thousand photos. Yours will get lost very easily. Consider, instead, adding them to a group whose focus specifically relates to your photo. For example, if you have a great shot that is predominantly one color, consider adding it to a group whose sole focus is photos of that color. The photo you see above could be added to the group The Blues! where there are only 5,000 members. And, because of the nature of the group, you know that all 5,000 of those people are looking for BLUE photos.

I also mentioned taking a look at the activity level of a group. There are so many groups on Flickr that many get lost in the shuffle and people stop participating. There’s no sense in adding a photo to a group if people aren’t looking, right? Your best bet is to find a relatively small, but active, group with a relatively small focus. That way you know your photos will be seen by people who want to see your kind of photo!

Comment on other photos

Much like the blogosphere, comments on Flickr are often returned. At the very least, when someone comments on one of my photos, I almost always go check out their photostream and, if I like something, I let them know. And, again, just like blogs, you have a better chance of someone returning a comment or checking out your photos if you choose a photo that doesn’t have many comments. There are some photographers on Flickr that get so many comments on their photos that it’s unlikely that will respond to each one. So go looking for some photos that no one has noticed yet. There are plenty of them. I find photos everyday where I think “I can’t believe no one has commented on this yet”. In addition to getting more exposure for your photos, you might build some lasting Flickr friendships! I certainly have!

Make contacts and subscribe

Everyday I browse through Flickr, I find at least one or two new people whose photos impress me so much, that I decide to make them a “contact”. You can make someone a contact by viewing their profile and clicking “Add so-and-so as a contact”. I do this because I subscribe to my contacts’ photos. I don’t subscribe to them individually. That’s a little bit too much. But I go to my Contacts page, and subscribe to the feed there. That means, throughout the day, I see a sampling of my contacts’ photos in my RSS reader. Not only does it provide an excellent source of outstanding photos, but it often compels me to comment on the best ones and then find even more contacts. My Flickr contacts feed is one of my must-read feeds and I never skip it.

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That’s about it for now… As I mentioned in the beginning of the post, I still haven’t implemented a lot of these recommendations yet. This is more of an exercise in brainstorming ways to use Flickr to build my photography business. I’ll definitely keep this site updated with my progress and, if you end up implementing any of these recommendations, let me know how it works out for you!

Have any other tips? Leave them in the comments below… Thanks!

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