So…Pinterest!
Some of you guys probably read my silly Pinterest Post…some of you did not. If you did…I may need to apologize..it was meant to be silly and I hope people got a good laugh with it. Oh well, it made me laugh writing it.
Due to a few friends mentioning that they just “didn’t get Pinterest” or “didn’t understand how it could help their blog”, I decided to do a quick How to on it!
If you have absolutely NO knowledge of Pinterest be sure to check out this link to Pinterest 101.
First I want to talk about how it can benefit your blog.
- Pinterest is an awesome place to come up with ideas to blog about! Just be sure you aren’t stealing someones idea or pictures or anything! You so don’t want to get into trouble for that!
- You can EASILY share images with a vast variety of people. Remember that each time someone re-pins your image it is providing a totally new audience with a link to your blog! The more something is pinned the more “discoverable” it becomes.
- A simple and fun way to connect with your readers! What better way to figure out what your readers are interested in that to search through a few of their boards?!? People are pretty honest in what they are willing to re-pin and their comments/descriptions often give great feed-back!
- You can quickly find people online to influence you and help out. It is amazing the amount of new resources I have found by playing around on Pinterest!
- You can quickly and easily save images and articles that you would like to blog about later. If you use the Pin It button it makes it simple to pin things that you find from any website during the course of your online life.
- People browsing through boards are actively looking for products, How to’s, DIY’s and general information. This means that because about 80% of pins are re-pins if you upload original content with catch images/slogans onto your boards people are much more likely to pay it some attention!
- If you started out as a personal account be sure to switch it to a business one for FREE so that you can get Pinterest Analytics!
Here is a list of AWESOME Pinterest Helpers:
- http://pinstamatic.com/#caption Makes it idiot proof to pin literally anything and everything without having to take the time to edit images.
- http://www.pinpuff.com/ lets you figure out your influence in the Pinterest world.
- http://www.repinly.com/ let’s you search the most popular pins/re-pins to figure out what people are looking for.
- http://photopin.com/ a searchable database for pictures to use in your pins
- http://about.pinterest.com/goodies/ apps and tools for your browser and website
- http://www.woobox.com/ & http://www.votigo.com/for contests and such
- http://pinterest.com/source/YOURBLOGURLHERE you can see what people have pinned from your site!
In order to make your blog Pinterest worthy, you will need awesome pictures (preferably with a watermark or something similar so people see your name).
Picmonkey is an amazing website to use for free photo editing.
It helps to put a Pin It button near each of your wonderfully edited pictures to encourage your readers to pin it! (I still haven’t gotten this one figure out…but I will!!)
You need to get followers! This is where my last post on being a Pinterest whore came about! The more followers you have the more people are going to be exposed to your pins and possibly re-pin them which means..you guessed it…even more re-pins! (That pimp I was looking for would be awesome to help with this! Or you could go the legal way and join in on the Pinterest Blog Hop!)
Don’t be afraid to pin your own images! Heck, pin them in several of your boards so that the possibility of them being seen is even higher!
Make sure it is set up to share your pins on Facebook and Twitter. By doing this your friends and followers will see your posts even more often. Also, make sure that you have a Pinterest tab on your Facebook page. You can check out this How to on About.com to find out how to install the Pinterest Tab. ( I used the woobox option)
Please let me know if you have any questions about Pinterest and how to do certain things. I would be happy to help one on one or do a more detailed (with pictures) post on it.