Use Pinterest To Grow Your Blog & Business

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networking sites around. Millions of people became attracted to the site and so did many companies. Pinterest is driving many visitors to blogs and sites, plus many are building followers and most importantly their brand. If you use Pinterest effectively, you will be positioning your business to gain much greater success.

The World Wide Web is going towards the direction of visuals and being social. As I mentioned in previous post, Google and Bing are relying more on social media sites such as Pinterest to determine how popular a website is. If people are sharing the links to your site via social media, your site will benefit more in the long run than if the links weren't being shared. Google looks at shares as votes, and if you don't have a lot of votes, you wont receive a lot of visitors which means your business will suffer.

Neil Patel, who is the Owner of the popular blog Quick Sprout and the co-founder of the internet companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, talked about how to leverage Pinterest like a power user. Here is what he had to say................

Tactic #7: Leverage Pinterest like a power user

The image-driven new social media powerhouse known as Pinterest can also provide you with massive traffic. But you have to know how to get people to pin images of your content and products from your website and blog.
Here are 6 techniques that are tried-and-true methods for creating a flood of visits using Pinterest.
  1. Formatting photos - First off, your blog should be set up to allow people to share content on Pinterest. This means having a simple Pinterest button on your site. However, have you ever considered whether your photos are even going to work on Pinterest? You can check by going to this page and replace your URL with “YourWebsite.com.” That little test will help you see what people might see on Pinterest. If your photos are not optimized, then use these great tips on optimizing images for Pinterest.
  2. Put messages on your images – You probably put a lot of effort into writing great content, but do you do the same with your images?  To get people to pin these images, share a great message about your content on your featured image like this one from a blog post title from Complex Style. You can use tools like Pixlr,FotoFlexer and Gimp 2.6 to create these messages.
  3. Daily theme board – If you want to take the text-based message image idea into overdrive, then create a board in your Pinterest account that is based on a theme. Sevenly has done this very well with their Daily Inspirational board.
  4. Run contests and giveaways – Do a simple search for “giveaway” on Pinterest and you will see that contests are very popular. The reason they are popular is because of their ability to stir up traffic. Create a contest where people have to go to your site to enter, and you’ll get that spike that you’ve been dreaming of.
  5. Share pics of people, animal and cool technology – Since Pinterest is hugely visual, images of people and animals work really, really well. GE has created an account with boards that show off their badass machines , full of photos of trains, airplanes and huge turbines. The U.S. Central Command has done a really great job of humanizing their institution with a board called Interesting and one on their military dogs.
  6. Follow the golden rule – This one is simple and basic…if you want people to pin and share your pins, then  you need to do the same. You need to develop relationships with targeted users  and share their stuff. The karma will come back to you…I promise. Read more from Neil Patel here.

I read Neil Patel's blog often because he has such good and in-depth blog posts on how to do things and to me this post he recently wrote was one of the best. This is exactly what anyone who wants to gain more exposure for their business, blogs, and sites should be doing. 

Pinterest will change the way people shop online. Why, because Pinterest will help people realize they want to buy something when they see it. For example, when a product gets re-pinned by lots of people, this can be looked at  proof that a product is very good to have or use. The re-pinning will serve as a good review for the product. Just think about it like this; a person can see that nice picture you posted from your kitchen utensils website of the beautiful new non-stick frying pan set with 10,000 re-pins and be one click away from making the purchase from your website.

Pinterest won't be going anywhere anytime soon and everyone with a business, online or off, should have a Pinterest account. Having an account can open up several opportunities for you.  Make sure you have your site set up to be "pin friendly" where people can "pin" your pictures and encourage them to share your stuff. And make sure you follow the golden rule Neil Patel gave and re-pin and share other people pictures. Make sure you follow them too. 



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