Pinning for Business and your own Needs
Not that long ago I started using Pinterest in my social media strategy. For months I tried to talk myself out: I won’t need another platform, I won’t need more responsibilities which won’t make me money immediately, I won’t…. you call it and I had it in my head 😉 But then I made it a goal for a month to do Pinterest daily. It wasn’t a huge goal. I just wanted to post some pins and re-pin the one or other thing in my account.
The first days – expectedly – nothing happens and it seems that all my prejudices were right. Just another time killer it was!
But then I stumbled over a board from a huge women blogger’s platform, The SITS Girls. I saw that they had created not just one board for their account about blogging but several. That was the moment when I realized that this whole pinning thing could be good for something (I know I had a long line! LOL). It wasn’t just to get noticed but also to notice – other women bloggers who were are blogging about business as well.
So I started to create several board me and my readers would be interested in: Blogging Freebies (yes, I love those free printables from Blogging Planners to Social Media icons!), Blogging 101, Blogging Ideas and (drum rolls please because it took me that long to realize) Blogging Article Ideas. I mean what could be a better place to actually look for ideas and collect them as Pinterest? Each pin I look at has related pins, boards and bloggers on the bottom which will make it easy to collect a BUNCH of ideas!
When I realized that I started using Pinterest finally for what it is: Collecting ideas for your own needs and maybe your audience if you have a business. I just stopped seeing it as a ‘Must Do’ but made it worth for my business and my audience. So doing that it was well worth my time because I need to do research anyway and want to be helpful to anyone reading my blog here.
You can do that too, here are some things you need to keep in mind:
How to Use Pinning for Business
- Create a Pinterest account for yourself
- Add boards which interest you BUT
- Also create a bunch of boards related to your niche and optimize them: the title and the description – this is for your SEO
- These boards can be all and everything: If you have a recipe blog break things down – recipes for breakfast, holidays, parties, dinner – whatever you can think of
- Pin what interests YOU
- Follow just boards, not people, which interest you
- Visit blogs the pins are related to: You’ll find GREAT new Bloggers this way and can build connections
- Comment under other people’s pins. Not many people do that and therefore you really get noticed by the board owner who gets an email about your comment as well as from other people who visit that pin
- If you have a name which makes others interested (I have Living for Mondays here which I believe many people will think “Is she crazy? Mondays are the worst days and she wants to live for them?!”)
The results
After this not so good start and my new strategy I couldn’t get enough from pinning (shame on me). I lay on the sofa and pinned on my iPad, I was at the doctor’s office and …yeah you know it – pinned, commented and looked for ideas. The good thing about it is that I have a whole year worth of blog post ideas already 😀
Yes, it is time consuming but as I already said here Pinterest is well worth your time. Over the first month it brought me 539 visitors (which I considered a lot first) and a good amount of new newsletter subscribers. I cannot say how many exactly since I could see an increase but don’t want to say for sure that it was amount X which was from Pinterest.
Today I get a few 1,000 visitors from Pinterest every month – depending on how active I am. Your time there isn’t waisted because whatever you pin sits there with a link back to your site (even if it is no follow). And it will bring visitors. The more pins you have there, the more visitors will see them and come over – you get the point.
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Filed in: Blog • Social Media Marketing
About the Author (Author Profile)
I'm Monja, the owner of several websites, amongst others Digidesignresort.com and CMDacademy.de. I make my money online since 2011 and as a teacher I love to teach others how to do the same - personally. You can connect with me here and on Google +Subscribe
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Hello Monja,
Since pinterest is a purely visual platform, no matter what you pin, you need an excellent picture. The better the quality of image the more likely it is to be shared, because that’s where your new traffic comes from. And the most important tactic with pinning images, is to connect the image to the page that is the most relevant.