[Mr. Ken Russell]

Pinterest is a social website that is sweeping the nation and grabbing up fans. It’s a visual, online bulletin board. You pin what you like and put it on boards that you name from fitness to food what seems like a simple concept is simply addictive. Some people spend hours pinning what they fancy and spend even more time cruising around for more. Some say it’s the new Facebook; the hours that they use to spend on Facebook are now allocated to Pinterest. It’s the new go-to social network that’s gotten retailers excited. There are already ways to leverage all pinners into dollars.

Back in the 70’s you found a picture of something that you want to buy, cut around it and put it into your own scrapbook and keep it under your pillow. Fast forward to the 90s, the internet storms all over the world; people are scurrying all over the web and right clicking is the way to grab a picture of something you want to buy, but then you had to save it and put it on a floppy disc and risk to use it. It’s a new world, there’s got to be something better than this..use Pinterest!

Pinterest lets you link pictures on your browser from your computer, laptop, tablet and even your cell phone. You post these pictures on your board and you can create however many boards you want from, cute animal babies, delicious looking cookies you just baked, things your husband wants for Christmas, or your proud collection of every single Chuck Norris movie.. you can create a board of anything you can really think of.

Your Pinterest is shared with other pinners who can re-pin them on their own boards. You can also follow other pinners to get updates on their pins. It’s a fun, simple way to share things you like and meet others with similar interests across the globe. It goes beyond just sharing pictures, Pinterest can be used to organize events, share recipes or do-it-yourself projects, and promote stuff. If you don’t already have an invite for Pinterest, you can go on their website and request for an invite or have someone who already has a Pinterest account to send you one. Once you get accepted, you can start pinning about your favourite things!

[ForumGuru]

Originally Posted by RussellK

If you don’t already have an invite for Pinterest, you can go on their website and request for an invite or have someone who already has a Pinterest account to send you one. Once you get accepted, you can start pinning about your favorite things!

Erhmm....You don't need an invite to join as Pinterest dropped the invite thing about 10 months ago!

[curationsoft]

What is this???

[Mr. Ken Russell]

Today I’m going to be talking about how you can make money on Pinterest. I get asked a lot about this because you aren't allowed to promote your own products on Pinterest. I want to lay it out right on the line and let you guys know what we’re dealing with. When I talk about promoting your products on Pinterest, I’m not talking about flooding your own Pinterest feed solely with your products; that’s not going to get anybody anywhere. What I want to show you guys are some tools and strategies to encourage other people to share your products on Pinterest. Now, just so we’re totally clear, I did pull up interest etiquette and number 3 says “Avoid Self Promotion – Pinterest is designed to create and share things you love. If there is a photo or project you’re proud of, pin away! However, try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.” So I want you to know that this article is in no way trying to beat the system or get around Pinterest rules in any way. What I want to show you is how to use Pinterest as a really effective marketing and promotional strategy without having to spam everyone who’s following you with pins of your products all day long.

Alright, now that we’re clear on that lets get started. For those of you who've been living under a rock, let’s talk just a little bit about what Pinterest is. Pinterest is a social bookmark site where users share photos that they find around the web. So what makes Pinterest different than the other social bookmark sites out there? It’s very imaged based; it’s all about posting and sharing pictures with minimum text. Users can group their pins (items they’re collecting) onto different boards, they can categorize them and sort them. Because it’s a social site people can follow other users, re-pin things, like them and it’s integrated with your other social media – you can push out what you’re pinning and liking onto Twitter or Facebook. So really what it is is it’s a tool for connection and this is the way I want you guys to think about it as creative business owners. Pinterest is a tool to help connect people with your products and drive traffic back to your site. That’s all it is plain and simple, it’s not the “be all, end all” marketing solution that others might make it out to be. It’s just another tool to help connect customers with your products and that’s why it’s so valuable.

[Mr. Ken Russell]

Why does Pinterest matter and why is it so important and getting so much attention? Well besides that it’s a huge traffic site, it’s really become a major traffic referral site for people; I’m hearing more and more from people when they check their sites that a large portion of their traffic, in some cases evens the majority of their traffic is coming back to them from Pinterest. Pinterest matters because lots of people are on it and using it. The other reason that Pinterest is great for creative businesses is that it’s very visual based; it’s really about putting the images out there and really sharing it with people. I think the most important reason that Pinterest matters is that increasingly, people are making purchasing decisions off of things they’re seeing on Pinterest. You can see when someone pins something, more often than not they’re pinning it from the source and you can see on the image in the upper left, it gives you the source where it comes from and when you click on that it sends you directly to the site where it came from. If people are pinning products from your online shop, someone that finds your item on Pinterest can go back to your site. What I’m seeing over and over again is that people are making purchasing decisions based on things that they’re finding on Pinterest; it really is helping drive sales. The other reason why it’s great for a visual business is that it just gives people a different way to find and engage with your products. I think a lot of us, as visual creative business owners have seen that a straight up Google words search is not really the way people are finding our products; they’re finding our products through referrals and blogs, places where they kind of just see and stumble upon what we’re doing. This is what Pinterest helps accelerate, it takes products and it puts them out into this really easy, casual format that people are consuming like crazy because it’s beautiful, stunning and enjoyable and doesn't require you to think too much. If you’re not thinking about Pinterest, now is the time to start because it could have some major implications on the way people find and shop for your products.

[Mr. Ken Russell]

Now let’s talk about how to get your products on Pinterest. Now here’s the thing, you can get your product on it even if you’re not using the site..this is really important. I know a lot of creative business owners who say to me, “ugh, another social media site, I don’t have time for that, I can’t waste hours every day looking at pretty pictures.” That’s fine, my goal here isn't necessarily to get you to join Pinterest, it’s to help you get your products on Pinterest so other people can share them. The first thing you should know is that your products might already be on Pinterest, even though you’re not. There’s a really easy trick to see if your products are on it and that’s to go on the URL bar of your browser and type in pinterest.com/source/yoururl. Then you can see all the people pinning products from your site; this gives you a really great idea right off the bat if your products are already appearing on Pinterest.

If you really want to use Pinterest as a tool for promoting your products then you have to get people to pin and re-pin your products more than they already are. There are a couple of really simple strategies that you can use to do this. Give people something great to pin. Here’s the thing about Pinterest when I said it was a tool for sharing stuff, you have to have something great for people to share. If you got something things that aren’t interesting or you only have text on your blog, there’s nothing for people to pin on Pinterest. You want to make sure that you’re creating content that people want to pin and share.

There are some really key areas on content that people are sharing and the first one is great product photography. Great product photography can really make or break your business and this is a case where people with great product photography are just going to see their businesses accelerated on Pinterest because people want to pin these really luscious, beautiful products. The first place I would start in trying to promote your business on Pinterest is to make sure that you've got really great product photography.

The next area where you can really work to get Pinterest to get you more traffic back to your site is make sure you have great life/lifestyle photography. If you’re taking really great images of your life, studio and surroundings, really of anything that’s going on, you want to get those images onto your blog and website so people can share those on Pinterest because that’s always going to bring people back to your site as well.

Another area is really great content. One of the things that people are using Pinterest for is to bookmark and remember tutorials, do-it-yourself projects, how to use other great content that they want to remember for later. Think about some style or how to content that you can put on your site because that’s going to generate a lot of interest on Pinterest as well.

If you’re really thinking about trying to get yourself on Pinterest, it’s important that you spend some time immersing yourself and figuring out what types of images are getting pinned. What are people sharing because you want to make sure your images stack up. For instance if you’re trying to figure out what kinds of jewelry people are pinning, you can go on Pinterest and search for jewelry and see what’s being pinned. Now ask yourself, do your products, images or videos stack up to what’s going on online. If what you’re doing isn't the state of the quality being shared on Pinterest, it’s time to up the up the ante to improve a little bit to make your content more share able.

The next key is to make it easy for people to pin. You want to make it as simple as possible for people to find an image on your site and get it onto Pinterest. Now most people that are heavy Pinterest users take the little pin it bookmark and put it in the top of their browser bar in the bookmark window. That way any site they’re on regardless if the person has additional pin it buttons, they can pin something. This is fine, but this leaves it up to your audience to see something and remember they want to pin it, so I recommend putting pin it buttons anywhere on your website where you have a lot of images and content that you want people to share. What this does is when people are looking at your site it gives them an easy reminder to put a product they like on Pinterest. It also makes it easier to pin on places like the iPhone where it’s not crazy to install that browser button. You can add pin it buttons on any website where you have control of the html, whether it’s a page, blog or product description.

Once you've made it easier for people to pin your products, why not encourage people to pin them. If you’re producing content, whether it’s blog posts, tutorials or videos just remind people that if they like it, they should share it on Pinterest. Sometimes even if people who are heavy Pinterest users need a little bit of encouragement and reminding that they should put your product out there. If you want to go even step further you can really encourage people to pin by giving them some kind of incentive like a giveaway of something simple and small so you can get your products out there.

Like any social media, you will get the best results if you engage with Pinterest and not just get people to pin your products. I highly recommend to be involved with Pinterest yourself and create an account if you already don’t have one. Once you’re on there, you can really dive into it and find some people to follow and start making some boards, really dive into the experience of the site. Just a reminder, when you’re on the site, you can’t jump on and be a user to just promote your own products, don’t promote your products all the time, make sure you’re actually engaging within the community. If you’re engaging a lot Pinterest, you’ll start to be portrayed as an authority figure, whether you are a style or lifestyle authority, people are going to want to follow you and take in what you like and pin. Pinterest is a great tool to connect your products to people and bring those people back to your website.

[Mr. Ken Russell]

Pinterest is the new social network hitting the scene and it’s extremely popular among women. It’s a great tool for people that are more creative or visual to use social networking. Pinterest is a virtual pin board that helps you organize and share interesting things you find on the web; it’s basically a virtual version of that bulletin board that many of us have above our desks. People pin images from other sites onto Pinterest where other people can re-pin those same image onto their own boards. It’s a way to categorize and also a way to share with your friends and followers the stuff you’re finding helpful, inspiring and useful.

You may be wondering, “Why Pinterest and why now?” Well first of all something to understand about Pinterest that differentiates it is that it’s extremely viral. In fact, over 80% of pins are re-pinned and comparing that to Twitter, less than 5% of tweets are actually re-tweeted. What’s exciting about this is that means on Pinterest your exposure can basically go on autopilot. This is really a social media platform where you can sit back, there’s not much to do in terms of intentional pushing because there’s a lot of circulation that’s done for you on it. Due to its simple visual nature, people are clicking though to sites more. This is something I personally really enjoy about Pinterest; there’s a lot of other social media platforms where we’ve got ads, chat boxes, a lot of things that are putting our attention on different areas, but because Pinterest right now is so streamlined, it’s actually doing an incredible job referring traffic which is very exciting because driving traffic is an incredibly important part of an online business and getting that exposure. It’s very exciting right now to be learning about Pinterest because it is relatively new; you have an opportunity, unlike many other areas to get there first and to really become a leader in your industry.

As the experts are saying, there are some pretty impressive things about Pinterest. In fact it reached 10 million unique visitors faster than any other independent website in history! It’s actually now driving more referral traffic to websites than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. It’s also driving more referral traffic than Twitter alone. Pinterest is actually driving more revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter; it’s kind got more of a social commerce feel. There are over 10 million Facebook connected users on Pinterest right now. If you could leverage the pros of Facebook along with the Pros of Pinterest, you’re set! I know most of you have probably seen a Pinterest post on your Facebook newsfeed or people’s profiles where it showed what they pinned on Pinterest. Facebook and Pinterest are already integrating at a very exciting level and Pinterest is getting a lot of great exposure on Facebook which is already laying the groundwork of you integrating your Facebook and Pinterest marketing.

[Mkcoy]

Toooo much fluff!!

To be honest mate thats a lot of words but pretty much each sentence says what the last one does but in a different way.

Why keep talking like a politician and not just tell people straight?

[Declan O Flaherty]

Originally Posted by Mkcoy

Toooo much fluff!!

To be honest mate thats a lot of words but pretty much each sentence says what the last one does but in a different way.

Why keep talking like a politician and not just tell people straight?

This is his very own blog (so to speak) - he writes this stuff for the search engines and I reckon he gets a lot of traffic leveraging the authority of the warrior forum.