It was not long ago that Flickr was an emerging phenomenon, which captivated people with the wide array of pictures it had, and got millions of users in no time. In a relatively short period of time Flickr has matured as one of the leading photo sharing platforms and been snapped up by Yahoo!

The reason for that is: Flickr has evolved from a photo sharing platform to something which can be effectively utilized to market your website, products or services, and is easy to use as well as effective. Not a lot of people look at Flickr that way, but it is a great source for referral traffic.

Referral Traffic Comments

A pretty picture, which is tagged well and shows up in searches, is quite likely to get popular very soon on Flickr. If you see such a picture and it is filed under the Creative Commons License, you can use this picture on your website (on a related post) and then link back to it.

After linking back; in the comments section — thank the photographer and write a couple of lines describing the context in which you used his photograph. Be sure to leave the link of your webpage, so that people can see and click it. The key here is giving a crisp description about the context in which you have used the picture.

This makes your comment stand out of the crowd, and people take notice and click on it. This can help drive more traffic than you ever thought possible because of the huge number of Flickr users.

Digg

Flickr has a big tendency of getting into the front pages of Digg. As a frequent Digg user, I see that a lot of pages that make to the Digg front page are from Flickr. And once you reach the front page of Digg; millions of users will be headed your way. It is only natural that these Digg users read the comments on those pictures to try and find out more about the story of the picture and what others thought about it.

This means that millions of Digg users are going to see your links and some of them will eventually click it too. Whenever a picture that you have used from Flickr features on a Digg page “ you will also see a spurt in traffic. This spurt will be temporary, but, a lot of these first time visitors will subscribe to your RSS feed and this will give you a boost in your average traffic forever.

Conclusion

The best part about using Flickr as a medium to drive traffic to your blog is that you get great pictures that enhance the quality of your website, and after Flickr made all its outgoing links “ Nofollow; a lot of people have lost interest in it “ meaning the spammers have left the party and there is plenty of room for people with genuine content like you.