Do you have good images for your business? Do you create products that make good photographs? Can you take photographs of the service you offer? Do you want to improve the traffic to your website and increase sales.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest resembles online pinboards or noticeboards. Imagine you are trying to find the perfect wedding dress. Traditionally you might have cut numerous pictures from magazines and pinned them onto a board or put them into a folder. Users of Pinterest can create separate pinboards for any category and ‘pin’ any online images within that pinboard, thereby creating their own personalised files or boards.
How does Pinterest work?
Before people sign into pinterest, they can see a medley of the most recent and most popular pinned pictures. Anyone who has a picture on Pinterest can tell how many people have repinned and liked their photo.
Once they log in, they can see the pictures belonging to those they are following, they can also look under particular categories or search for a keyword such as ‘Christmas’, ‘Easter’, ‘wedding dresses’, ‘wallpaper’, ‘gardens’, ‘recipes’ and thousands more.
People can follow each other on pinterest, send messages to each other and see each others boards and pins (pinned pictures). It is a veritable eye candy store.
How will it drive traffic to my website?
Once you (or somebody else) pins a picture from your website or your blog, that picture should always cite the source.
As many people use pinterest as an online source of pretty pictures, your aim is to have your pictures ‘repinned’ into other people’s boards where they will be then seen by more and more people. Some may use your images in their blog posts and they should always cite the source as the original.
As ‘repins’ are often also tweeted and/or shared to facebook, pinterest is very much like an online ‘word of mouth’:
- If you have a product or service that is visual and can be photographed, it should work well on Pinterest. From knitting to vegetables, architecture to weddings, wallpaper to recipes, shoes to gardens – the possibilities are endless.
- You simply need to download the ‘pin it’ button onto your bookmarks bar and whenever you see a photograph you like, click the ‘pin it’ button, choose your pinboard and enter your description.
- You do need to take care when naming your boards and describing each picture making sure that you use selected keywords within your descriptions but you can see how the possibilities of getting your product seen by hundreds and thousands of people by ‘repinning’.
- However, Pinterest does warn against pinning just your own pictures. A true ‘pinner’ must be someone who pins pictures of objects or scenes that they love and of course, you can include your own work but don’t limit your pins to your own.
Who uses Pinterest?
Pinterest grew by 4000% in six months and its potential is huge. As the links to your site are being created and clicked on by real people, it can give your
How do I find followers that would be interested in my product?
The ‘Help’ section on Pinterest is very good, explaining the basics of how to pin and pin etiquette. If you sign in using your facebook or twitter usernames, you will be able to follow any friends already on pinterest and invite others.
If you wish to find people who may be interested in your product, then I would suggest searching for that product and following the people who have pinned pictures of that type of product.
You can find me on pinterest right here. You may need to request an invite to join so do get in contact with your email address if you would like me to send you one.
