Stick a Pin in it: Marketing with Pinterest

By now I am sure you have heard of Pinterest and may have even received an invite to the online pin board sharing site.  At first look, it is exactly that, an online site that allows you to pin images to a virtual pin board and then share the images with your friends.  I am sure, on the surface, that doesn’t sound very exciting and that was my first reaction.  However, once you begin to look a little harder at Pinterest, it becomes clear that there is a huge marketing potential there.  Just think about it for a moment, Twitter gives you 140 characters to get your message across while Pinterest gives you a thousand words or so the saying goes.

In addition to the ‘1000’ words, each image you pin on your board also gets a link attached to them meaning that you can use Pinterest to steer traffic towards your blog or other selling platform.  In addition to self-promotion, you can also steer traffic towards some of your cross marketing partner platforms.  There is really no limit to what you can do and I am going to give you some interesting examples later on to illustrate this point.

I want to take a second to explain a little more about the pin boards themselves.  Each pin board lets you pin a lot of items to them, However, on your profile view, your friends will only see the last nine that you pinned.  When they open the board they can see the older ones.  You get to name the board as you see fit which allows you to group your images into easier to navigate themes.  I have a board that is named blog.candacemountain.com where I pin the best image from each post as another way to promote the articles that I post here.  I also have a board where I promote books I like which includes my novel, The Daughter of Man, as well as my favorites from other authors.

Now it is time for that example I hinted at earlier.  This example truly illustrates just how brilliant Pinterest can be as we theoretically set up our very own bookstore.  Pinterest allows you to add a lot of pin boards which you could then set up as the various genres.  You could have a genre for horror, romance, westerns, science fiction, mystery, and as many other genres you can think of.  You can then pick and fill each board with the appropriate books you wish to sell.  Here is where you make money; you would first set yourself up as an amazon affiliate and use your affiliate links for the books.  You won’t get rich off of this, however if you promote your Pinterest enough you will certainly make some money.

Keep the above example in mind because here is where Pinterest takes it one step further.  When someone likes an image on one of your boards they have the option to re-pin it onto one of theirs.  The book they re-pinned will come with your affiliate link thus if any of their friends buys the book going through their pin board, you make money on that sale too.  This is very cool and it illustrates the power of Pinterest.  If you have awesome images, they will get re-pinned and your brand with appropriate links attached will spread.

Sometimes sharing links comes with a bit of a stigma and a lot of people don’t like to do it.  Pinterest has completely bypassed this fear because people will view it as sharing pictures which has much less stigma attached.  Awesome pictures will go a long way and your brand’s reach will become more than you could have hoped for.  Pinterest is still the new kid on the block and it is going to grow and grow very fast as more and more people discover it.  This is a perfect time to get involved with Pinterest and get your images out there for people to see, re-pin, and experience your brand message.

I hope you have found the above information useful and I urge you to consider signing up for email notifications so that you will be the first to know when a new article hits.  I mentioned above that I am an author and I pay my bills when people buy my extremely awesome novel, The Daughter of Man.   Please take a few minutes and  visit the Amazon page and read some reviews or grab the free sample of my book as I would be greatly appreciative.  In closing, thank you for coming and please feel free to leave your thoughts on Pinterest below in the comments. I would love to hear what your first pin-board will be named or is named if you are already using Pinterest.