Let's recap what you've done so far in this series.
First, you determined that your business needed a long-term focus, and that you'd set aside as much time as you could afford for building that focus. You decided that Flickr would be an important part of a multi-faceted Web marketing strategy for that focus. Among other things, you determined to use Flickr as "training wheels for blogging" instead of jumping off the cliff into blogging.
Then you determined what your focus would be, and that it would be a niche you would own. For illustration, I picked a pretend focus, 3 nearby subdivisions in Antioch, IL that will have about 1,600 homes when they're completed. I guesstimated that my pretend focus can yield me nearly $750k in gross income, after the split with my (nonexistent) broker, 5 years from now, when I'm up to 50% market share in resales. My income projection doesn't include referral fees for referring out buyers, since I'd only be working with sellers.
With a firm grip on your focus, you made some decisions and created a Flickr account that reinforced that focus, and stayed tightly on focus. You then took a brief detour to note how Google took my Flickr photos (I'm a few steps ahead of you) from zero to # 1 in 1 day.
Next, you began to learn how to socialize on Flickr in a low-impact way, by selecting some Flickr Favorites from other users and thinking about how that helps you.
You're about ready to begin adding some of your photos to your Flickr account. Before you start, you have two things you must do.
The first is to break yourself of some bad habits. The second is to plan how you'll organize your Flickr photos into sets / albums and make some decisions about how to tag and describe those photos. The first task is critical. There's no point in going forward if you don't accomplish it. The second is not so critical at the outset. Flickr allows you to change, delete and add information and tags to your photos at any time, and add and rearrange albums.
Start talking in a human voice. The odds are high that you have a bad habit you need to break: speaking in real-estate-speak rather than in English (or whatever language you're doing this in).
In real-estate-speak, an elegant home nestles amidst abounding rustic trees, awaiting your discriminating taste.
Would you ever talk that way to anyone? Have you ever spoken most of those words out loud? You do - in your ad copy, in voice-overs on your virtual tours, in marketing brochures, etc. Do you realize how utterly silly you sound?
Starting now, you're going to speak in a human voice to people instead of parroting real-estate-speak gibberish to leads. If you do that across the board, without even trying you'll break another bad habit that you probably don't even know you have: burning leads (a word I hate).
Learn how to nail the facts. If you're a typical real estate agent, one of the messages you communicate to people - again without knowing it - is that you really don't give a gnat's butt about facts.
You don't spell city names correctly. You don't spell street names and suffixes exactly. You don't pay enough attention to directional indicators in addresses. You're too lazy to look up ZIP codes. You either make up a neighborhood name, don't take the time to learn the correct one, or deliberately lie about it to draw more traffic. And then you waste hours trying to figure out why no one's finding your listing, and wailing about how people don't regard you as a professional. Duh?
From my 20 years' experience in doing the advertising for and looking at the listings of over 100,000 real estate agents, I could go on and on along this line. Hopefully you get my point and change this bad habit.
Everything you put on Flickr must be correct. If it is, you'll have a long-term valuable asset that grows in value as you add to it. If it isn't - don't bother. If you can't find the time to do it right, as the old saying goes, where will you find the time to do it over? Do less of it, and do that right.
Don't even think about talking about yourself. I've made this point before, but it needs to be repeated. Your Flickr photos and the tags, titles, descriptions you associate with them do all the talking. They show off your knowledge and brand you as a professional if you've done it right. They want to make people learn more about you - as a person and / or as a professional.
The people who visit your photos get to decide when they want to know more about you. If you try to make that decision for them, you're going to lose most of the people who would have otherwise done business with you.
Break the habit of putting yourself out front now. You're talking to people here, not hustling leads (I hate that word).
Stop thinking about search optimization. Every piece of advice you've ever been given about search optimization, except what I'm about to tell you, doesn't apply to your behavior on Flickr. Put it off to the side.
Chances are your search enginen optimizer (SEO) has loaded up your Web pages with all sorts of junk that has nothing to do with you or your real capabilities. You're partly to blame for that, but so is your SEO.
In a misguided attempt to draw search engine traffic you probably have your site littered with the names of dozens of suburbs and neighborhoods you claim to work in or know, although the fact is you've never even set foot in most of them, don't even know where some of them are, and have misspelled half a dozen of them. In the same vein, your Web copy is keyword-rich - and impossible to read.
All of your Flickr tags, titles and descriptions must make sense in the context of the photo. Make sure they're about the photo, and nothing else. Don't add a "real estate" tag to a photo of kids at the carnival. When you want to make friends, you don't bait them into one thing and deliver another.
If you blow this, you'll be right back to where you are now - wondering why your lead (I hate that word) conversion ratio is so low. It isn't hard to understand that unqualified (word I hate) don't translate into business.
Learn how to spell and use proper grammar. This should be self-evident, but it's apparently not. It's something professionals do as a matter of habit. If you have trouble doing it, get help from someone who doesn't.
I fear I've overstayed my welcome on this post.
Next: planning to organize your Flickr photos for maximum traffic.
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