Z-Blog

I spent last week at a number of events organized by different groups of people around social media. One of the most often question I got asked was, how do we offer our images to bloggers using Zemanta?

Essentially there are three sources you can try to get images into:

• Getty Images
• Wikimedia Commons (that includes English Wikipedia)
• Flickr – Creative Commons licensed

Since it’s unlikely that you’re photos will get into Getty Images, unless you are professional news photographer, we’ll focus on second two options.

Image via Wikipedia

Uploading into Wikimedia Commons is relatively easy. You just have to to register on site and follow their their instructions. They’re always looking for good photographs that are as license free as possible for inclusion into Wikipedia articles and other uses around the web.

Make sure that you provide a good and keyword heavy description of your image, so that the editors and also Zemanta can then find your image in connection with different displayed concepts.

Other alternative is to upload images to Flickr using Creative Commons license. Here approach is similar, get a Flickr account and start uploading well tagged images with longs descriptions and good titles. What you want to do is to just write tags for each image for a few minutes, and also allow other users to tag you images.

Image by m e r c e n a r i o via Flickr

This way you’re raising your chances that someone will write about something that you took a photo of, include it in their blog post and drive traffic to your Flickr photostream. You’re then free to use the stream to show off your great work and of course, provide a way to contact you for commercial ventures.

Alternative reason for doing this, would be to make sure that your well prepared photos are actually used by bloggers as opposed to less quality ones that are taken e.g. with mobile phones, but released to Flickr.

When you’re adding your photo, make sure that you’ve set Creative Commons license to your images, so that you give explicit permission to bloggers to actually use your photo and that computers understand that.

Want to know how good you are doing? Enable your Flickr stats and see who likes your photos!

(All the photos in this blog post, provided by Zemanta while writing and using a bit of Filter feature to select a best one)

Related articles by Zemanta

• Getty signs deal to sell Flickr photos
• The coming challenges for Wikimedia Commons
• On Creative Commons