Flickr is a wildly popular photo sharing, photo search and social networking site. It's owned by Yahoo! and so will be around for a while.

Flickr can be an extremely valuable (and dirt-cheap or free) tool for building relationships with people who are interested in your focus area, and for enabling them to find you and ultimately do business with you. Flickr albums frequently surface very high in Google search results.

For starters, focus on the word "social" in social networking. If you make your Flickr account about you, or about your business, you'll waste most of its value and you may violate its terms of service and waste all of your efforts when your account is closed.

Blogging is also social networking. Flickr can be a useful, easy way for you to begin learning how to become adept at online social networking, and an easy introduction to some of the skills and habits that will make you a good blogger. Think: Flickr = training wheels for blogging.

I've started to build - and will be expanding - some illustrative Flickr albums about my pretend focus area of 3 subdivisions in Antioch, Illinois. Here's an album on Antioch, and one on Clublands. Flickr also offers detail and slide show views of each of your albums without any extra effort on your part.

If you're not experienced with Flickr, take a quick tour of its features, and read the page on how to get the most out of Flickr. In later posts we'll tell you how to turn some of those features to your advantage.

Free or Pro? Flickr offers a free account (100 mb of photos uploaded a month, only the most recent 200 displayed) and a Pro account (unlimited photos and more) at $24.95 a year. A Flickr Pro account also allows you to create unlimited sets (think of them as albums) in an ad-free environment.

You'll find the extra features in a Pro account valuable as you go along. Plan to spend the money for a Pro account, if for no other reason than to brand yourself as a Flickr "Pro."

Before you open your Flickr account, give a lot of thought to the following:

Your Flickr nickname. This is a "screen name" that will be displayed with each of your photos as a link to your Flickr profile.

Since I selected 3 subdivisions in Antioch as the focus of my pretend real estate business, I'd want a screen name that identifies me with Antioch.

If Antioch isn't available (nicknames have to be unique), I'd pick something like Antioch173 since my focus area lies along Route 173 or AntiochFan. Keep this neutral (no AntiochExpert or, even worse, YourAntiochRealEstateAgentForLife) or anything to do with you or your business.

You can change your screen name at any time if you become dissatisfied with it - but make any changes before you've developed contacts on Flickr.

Your Flickr Web address. Flickr allows you to select a unique URL in the following format: One of ours (we have several accounts) is http://flickr.com/photos/yochicago1 and the URL for our focus area (which contains some towns outside of it) is http://flickr.com/photos/yochicago14.

The last part of your Web address on Flickr should be your screen name.

You can create your Web address at any time after you've opened your account (it's in the Your account section of Flickr), but I don't think you can change it. Select it carefully.

Your buddy icon. This image is associated with everything you post on Flickr and is your most recognizable "branding" on the site. It's a small image, only 48 pixels by 48 pixels, so it can't contain much information.

Do not, under any circumstances, even think about posting your personal photo as your buddy icon. You're sharing photos here, and want people to pay attention to the information you're offering them that they care about, which is simply photos of your area.

Don't even think about using your business logo. No balloons, please.

Select a buddy icon that identifies you with your focus area. Clublands, one of the subdivisions in my pretend focus area, has a half dozen gazebos scattered around, so I'd go with one of those for mine.

Resize the image to a square before uploading it. Otherwise, Flickr may distort it to fit a square shape.

If you don't have a good image to use for a buddy icon, stick with the default one that Flickr gives you until you do. You can change this at any time.

Your Flickr profile. Provide minimal information about yourself. Don't disclose you're a real estate agent. You're not using Flickr to sell anything at this point, especially your services. We'll revisit this issue later in this series.

Flickr enables you to include a link to your personal Web site. Link to your online journal / blog about your focus area. The URL for that journal / blog should also not be about you, but about the area: I'd use something like AntiochUpdate.com or AntiochToday.com for my pretend site. If you're not ready yet with something that works to identify your focus area, don't include a link to a Web site.

Your first Flickr photo upload. Upload your best photo that best represents your area. Stop. Don't upload any more for a while.

Hold off on posting more photos until you've spent the time socializing and understand the environment and the ground rules a little better.

In my next post in this series, I'll talk about how to begin socializing with other Flickr users.

Previous posts in this series -

- Before you start to Flickr, focus

- My Flickr focus - a niche I can own

NOTE: I owe thanks to Kevin and Sherry Spengel for reminding me, in a comment on a later post, that Flickr holds your first few photos from being seen by the public until they've been determined to not contain offensive material. You can see them, but they won't be searchable for as little as a day or as many as several days.