This is a Guest Post by Sandra Mason.
Are you interested in significantly driving up the traffic to your blog or business website? Do you want to add a potent tool to your marketing and promotional campaign that will help your brand reach a variety of new users worldwide? If so, you must add Pinterest to your social networking arsenal. Pinterest is a pinboard-style photo sharing community that has become the fastest growing website ever. The unprecedented growth of Pinterest has surpassed that of social networking powerhouses Facebook and Twitter at the same time in their development.
Pinterest provides its users a platform to organize, share and disseminate photos and videos found throughout the web. Some of the most common content themes on Pinterest include beauty, fashion, home decor, exotic foods and inspirational items. As you can imagine, these themes cater more to the interests of women rather than men. In fact, 80 percent of all Pinterest users are female.
There are several different ways you can utilize this photo sharing community to really market and promote your blog or business website. Let’s take a look at some of these ways.
Join the Community
If you want to use the Pinterest community for marketing and promotional purposes, the first step, of course, is to join the community. You should play around with Pinterest to truly understand how the social networking tool works. You can create your own virtual pinboards that are organized by different categories that interest you. If you are a fashionista, one of your pinboards may be titled “fashion.” This pinboard is likely to be populated with such photos as clothing, shoes and styles that appeal to you. You can follow other Pinterest users who share similar tastes as interests as you. Once you get the hang of Pinterest on your own, you can create a profile for your business or blog.
Attract the Women
As you know, 80 percent of Pinterest users are currently female. Does your business offer products or services that would appeal to women, such as clothing or home decor services? Is your blog niche centered on fashion? If so, you can create eye candy pins that immediately capture the attention of women. If your business has a product to sell that would appeal to women, Pinterest absolutely is the way to go to generate sales. Data analysis has revealed that Pinterest drives both more traffic and sales than Facebook.
Diversify
They say that variety is the spice of life. It’s no different with Pinterest. It is important that your business or blog’s Pinterest page feature a variety of different attractive and appealing pins. You may want to consider hiring a professional graphic designer to help you create those eye candy pins that will appeal to women. Also, remember that your pins do not have to be limited to just images. You can create video-based pins that showcase satisfied customers using your products. A creative idea is to convert a positive customer testimonial into a text-based pin.
Use the “Pin It” Button
As your business or blog develops a respectable presence on Pinterest, you should add the sleek and stylish “Pin It” button to your site. This will allow users to easily pin appealing content directly to their personal pinboards. This will also increase the number of “re-pins” that you content will receive, which is very similar to backlinking in the SEO world. Essentially, this is an excellent way to get your content and brand out there as much as possible on Pinterest. As you can see, this button will begin to work for itself in no time.
Monitor Analytics
As the owner of a business or blog, you have the ability to track your site’s analytics. You can follow and understand exactly where your traffic is coming from through Pinterest. Whatever seems to be working, do more of it.
Pinterest is hot right now, and getting hotter. You should really consider adding this popular photo-sharing tool to your marketing and promotional campaign.
Sandra Mason is an online English instructor for College City. Sandra is also an avid Pinterest user who has purchased products through promotions on the networking site. Sandra has come to understand how businesses have tapped into Pinterest for marketing and promotional purposes.
