Pinterest offers hope to the world of online marketing in many ways, offering a great way to increase the power of your website traffic. The platform is very easy to use and is designed to highlight the best content on your website. Any website that does online commerce can benefit from creating an active presence on Pinterest, although not all websites should use Pinterest in exactly the same way.
Pinterest provides you with a place for you to collect and compile your own links, broken down by categories of your choice. In other words, it’s all about deep linking and handcrafted indexing. The visual aspect is similar to an online scrapbook or collage, which is why users are so addicted to it. Pinterest is a universe of wish lists, favorite clothes, beautiful ideas, and well-curated content. It is a marketer’s dream.
One of the best features of Pinterest is its ability to build a highly motivated audience through “repins,” which are essentially users taking advantage of your content and moving it to a board of their own. Users are quite adept at finding new niches they hadn’t thought to attract, and retailers often find that their products cater to certain groups that they may have overlooked.
If you’re not sure how to use Pinterest to amplify your website’s visibility, traffic, or increase your sales, here’s a quick introduction, broken down by website type.
Pinterest for bloggers
While Pinterest generally focuses on images, many bloggers have been successful in targeting their audience by starting boards on their favorite topics to write about. Pinterest works best with content that is easy to share. It’s a great idea to find other bloggers to connect with on Pinterest and ask them to share a board. By using board sharing, you can have other contributions to your Pinterest board, creating new content for your active followers without having to blog all day.
Because Pinterest is a visual social network, you will only be able to post blog posts with visual images. Search engines are looking for visual content too, so if you’ve been writing text blog posts without images, now is the time to invest in some good archival art!
Headlines are usually as important as the image you choose. Pinterest allows you to write your own headlines and does not pull that content from your blog. Get creative and experiment with different headlines. You can’t go wrong if you offer the answer to an intriguing question or promise “the best brownie recipe in the world.” It is also the perfect place to launch memes about your brand or product.
Pinterest for business
Businesses can take one of two approaches to their pins. It is quite easy to categorize your products and approach Pinterest as a huge online catalog by pinning your products one by one. In fact, many businesses join Pinterest as a business account and choose Pinterest to advertise new products and sales.
Other companies use a different approach. They create dashboards based on topics and sometimes invite their users to participate in pinning. Sometimes companies create boards with recipes from their active followers or run photo contests. The more you get involved, the more likely people are to follow your business on Pinterest and become interested, maybe even intrigued, by your brand.
If you want to fund real success with Pinterest, don’t just pin your products and forget about them. Find a better way. If you sell services, do not put an icon with the word “SEO”; no one will want to repaint that kind of image and you will not actively interact with others. If you are a tree removal company, highlight the biggest and baddest tree you ever had to transport. If you sell gourmet food, click on recipes and photos of gastronomic creations. If you sell business services, create fun memes and infographics that highlight problems and solutions. If you are a retailer, create boards that highlight decorations for fancy rooms. Set up boards for seasons and holidays. Invite users to upload pins for your products in use.
Pinterest allows retailers to list the dollar amounts of the products you choose to display, but don’t pin them all at once because they will be lost in a flood of other products. Pick a few products to highlight each day and pin them on every board you can. The great thing about this feature is that people will click and buy.
Pinterest for Nonprofits
Nonprofits can advocate for their cause with Pinterest. Make sure your content is pin-worthy, interesting, eye-catching, and unique. Pinterest should reflect your mission statement with appropriate dashboards that show the problems your organization seeks to solve.
Nonprofit boards of directors should be filled with hope, information, and action. highlight your nonprofit organization that provides vital services. Create infographics and memes that explain why your nonprofit is needed. Show your events and the smiling faces of your staff.
Don’t forget that Pinterest allows users to display items for sale. Nonprofits can set up donations this way by adding a dollar amount to the uploaded images. Use the most attractive images you have and tell users where that $ 25 donation will go: to buy a pair of shoes, feed a starving family in New York, or send a life preserver to a soldier fighting in Iraq.
As you can see, Pinterest is a fun and versatile social network where it’s all about what you can show the world. Cultivate relationships with other users and join shared groups to maximize your exposure. Due to its addictive nature, you will soon find that users around the world “love” your pins and leave comments that provide insight into future promotional efforts. Make sure to monitor your growth, monitor what works, and continue to pin all of your visually appealing content on a regular basis to keep your followers engaged and drive traffic to your website.