Run a search on Flickr in ActiveRain blogs, and the results may give you the impression that Flickr is nothing more than a way to share and organize photos.

Flickr is much more than that, and it can be extremely valuable to you in a number of ways.

I'll sketch the ways you should consider using Flickr in a series of posts beginning here.

The overall theme of my posts will be that you should approach Flickr as a set of training wheels that will keep you upright as you learn to ride confidently around the world of social networking on the Web.

Blogging is a part of that Web world of social networking, so the skills you learn in using Flickr will help you blog. As a bonus, Flickr has a number of features that add content to your blog and make it easy to post photos to your blog.

As an even bigger bonus, if you use Flickr properly it can be very effective at driving targeted traffic to your blog. I'll elaborate on that in another post, but offer two simple illustrations here.

First, all of your photos can contain a link directing viewers to your blog or to a specific post or page on your blog. See the link in this photo description, for example.

Second, if you organize your photos into Flickr sets, those sets are likely to rank high on Google search.

An illustration - annual downtown sidewalk sales are popular events in Chicago's affluent north shore communities, and we've posted hundreds of photos of them on Flickr. A Google search on Glencoe sidewalk sale or Winnetka sidewalk sale returns our Flickr photoset in the second position in search results, a short step away from our related blogs.

Next: Getting started with Flickr.