This Simple Trick Helped Me Reach 2,000,000 Unsplash Views in Less Than 6 Months

### This Simple Trick Helped Me Reach 2,000,000 Unsplash Views in Less Than 6 Months Properly tagging your digital content can be the difference between viral success and fading into digital oblivion.

Back in June, I finally did it. I joined Unsplash and posted my first set of photographs to the site. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it, Unsplash is a relatively new platform that’s become increasingly popular. They’re focused on rewriting the rules of stock photography with a more expansive set of creative guidelines, introducing a more altruistic business model, and promoting the creation of photographs that artists actually enjoy creating.

Now, if you’re like most people, you might think of the following images when you think of stock photography:

Nowadays, these comically staged and uninspired photographs really only make sense on insurance pamphlets or in kindergarten books on “learning your fruits!” As you can see, these images are also aggressively watermarked in an attempt to dissuade people from using the images without first paying the stock photography company for the ability to download non-watermarked versions.

For comparison, here are a few photos currently on Unsplash’s home page:

Refreshing, right?

In any case, I’ll save my deep-dive comparison of old vs. new stock imagery for another time, but all that is to say that Unsplash intrigued me enough to begin contributing to the site.

Let me get back to why you’re here: To learn how, in less than six months, I was able to reach nearly 2,000,000 views and over 15,000 downloads on a total of about 15 images that I uploaded to Unsplash.

Alright, I’ll tell you. It’s actually quite simple.

The key is what I call “Figurative Tagging”

When you post content online, whether it’s a blog post, a YouTube video, or a photograph, many platforms give you the ability to add contextual data to the media your posting. This includes, but isn’t limited to, the title, location, category, etc. These are all ways that the platform can enlist you to help them learn a bit more about what you’ve just uploaded.

With a video, for example, it’s a lot easier for YouTube to simply ask you to categorize the video into “Beauty,” “Travel,” “Food,” etc. as opposed to them investing in technology that can instantly deduce the subject matter by watching the actual video content.

For Unsplash, they allow (and encourage) creators to add additional data like the location of where the photo was taken, a description, title, and most importantly, tags.

For example, let’s use this image that I’d uploaded to Unsplash a few months ago. What tags would you think to add to it?

Have your answers? Now let’s see how I actually tagged it:

Notice anything unique in the types of tags I used? About half of them are quite literal: “around the bend,” “sunrise,” “maine,” and others. But more importantly, notice that the other half are **figuratively tagged. **Words like “calm,” “change,” “happy,” don’t actually appear anywhere in the image, but they are non-objects that I expect some Unsplash users to be searching for at some point.

So next time you post a photograph on Unsplash or anywhere else online, remember to think about how that photo may be used in literal *and figurative *ways.

I don’t know if the fact that I figuratively tagged my images led to Unsplash choosing to feature a number of them, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt my chances.

How do I know that my images are used in figurative ways? Well, I’ve reverse image searched a few of them and look where the one above showed up: someone’s life coaching consultancy.

Long story short, be smart about your tagging. It only takes an extra 30 seconds to add a few figurative tags which can instantly increase the future reach of your work.

I’d love to hear your questions and comments as well. Leave a comment below or email me at jack@jackcohen.com.

And happy Thanksgiving!

Jack

Originally published on Medium, November 26, 2019