Homebuilder Photo Galleries - Where to Post Photos (3 of 5)

In the first article in this blog series we outlined the growing importance of photos to the online world. In the second post we showed you how to build a photo gallery that helps generate search traffic and spread your message virally. With today’s message we’d like to help you get your photos online using some great free services.

There are literally thousands of online photo sharing websites on the net. We only talk about two in this post, Flickr and Facebook. You can post photos on MySpace, PhotoBucket, Picasa and others, but we believe that Flickr is the single best website for photo sharing and Facebook is the best social networking tool that integrates photo sharing.

Flickr helps you share your photos with the world. Basic accounts are free and you can upload 100MB of photos each month. Flickr (owned by Yahoo) has made uploading, labelling and tagging as simple as possible. As we discussed in the previous post this is vital to helping your photos increase your search traffic.

Advanced functions - Flickr has basic photo editting capabilities built in so you can crop, add text, etc. You can map your photos in Flickr to attach a physical location with your shots. Organization is simple. You can create albums for each neighborhood or each home you build. You have complete control over your privacy settings. You can share some photos and hide others.

To get started using Flickr go ahead and sign up. If you need some more coaxing, take a quick tour.

Here are some builders that are using Flickr well: Campbell Homes, Lennar Orlando, Stylecraft Builders, MD Custom Homes

Facebook has become the go-to business networking tool over the last year or so. Custom homebuilders are finding ways to engage with prospective buyers and national builders are using Facebook to build tribes around their brand. More photos are uploaded everyday to Facebook than any other website, so it’s safe to say that Facebook would be a great place to put photos of your homes and neighborhoods. If you don’t have a Facebook Page for your company, get one. The team at Facebook has included some simple tutorials to help you along the way.

Once you’ve got a Facebook Fan Page for your company, you can start uploading photos. Again, start by creating albums for your neighborhoods or floorplans. Uploading is simple. Make sure to include keywords in your titles and descriptions to help people find you.

Here are some builders that are using Facebook well: Jeff Click Homes, Lennar, Bowen Family Homes, Hubbell Homes

If you’d like a little more control of your photo albums another option is to build a photo gallery inside of a blog. This is much simpler than you may think. Blogging sites like Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad make it easy to get started with a blog in a matter of minutes. We exclusively use Wordpress because it has tons of third-party plugins and is really simple to use. Wordpress is search engine optimized so you only have to focus on posting content, and there are dozens of photo gallery plug-ins that you can use to build a photo gallery in minutes. Here is a tutorial with step-by-step instructions to set up your own Wordpress photo gallery using the NextGEN plug-in.

We’d love to hear any other ways you’ve found to get photos of your homes out to prospective buyers. Any thoughts?

Tomorrow, we’ll be giving some advice about what photos to post and how to label and tag them.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Picli, a Hybrid of Digg and Flickr, Returns with a Redesign (mashable.com)
• Photobucket Now Makes Sharing Easier (readwriteweb.com)
• Tweeting Picnik Photos Now Simple with Twitgoo (readwriteweb.com)
• Kodak and the free photo storage trap (dailyfinance.com)