I use Flickr to host a lot of the photographs I feature in blog posts.
The reason for this is that Flickr pictures often get indexed well in search engines, and sometimes people will steal bandwidth through a technique called inline linking.
Anyhow, it's fine to host your own images for a blog. I do it sometimes myself, but Flickr is a good alternative.
But the merits of Flickr are not limited to being a quality photo host. It can also be a traffic source directly to your affiliate site or through one of your affiliate links.
The way it works is that you've got an area to write a description of a photo, and you can either include a full URL or add in the HTML code to create a link out of a phrase in your description.
If you take a look at the yellow area below, the phrase “Toby Keith” goes through my Amazon affiliate link to the results for his name on Amazon.
In order to optimize your photos on Flickr, you'll also want to enter a descriptive title and relevant keywords.
If you're going to use Flickr, I would suggest going with a Pro account, which has lots of benefits, including unlimited uploads and storage and stats on your account.
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