When you look back at the evolution of social media and social media marketing, you’ll see that it has come a very long way in just a few short years. In fact MySpace seems a distant memory now and although it was once the Mac Daddy of the social scene I bet the average teenager has never heard of it. This is how fast the social media scene changes online.
Once upon a time, Pinterest was just a fledgling social network, but since late 2010, its popularity has skyrocketed, and now Pinterest is a major player in the Social Media world. One of the main reasons this site is so popular, is because it’s beautiful; Pinterest is all about the images.
You could be forgiven if you haven’t heard about Pinterest before, as it was somewhat underground for a time, but it can no longer be ignored as a major source of targeted traffic that can be tapped into by the savvy online marketer.
Seriously, wouldn’t it have been pretty awesome to be in front of the traffic avalanche Facebook could bring, instead of trailing from behind? Where would you be now if only you had known how huge it would be ahead of time? What about Twitter? Were you there in 2006? Did you know it even existed?
Now this great opportunity has reared its head again and this time it’s called “Pinterest”. We’d be a bit crazy not to harness the power of the pin ahead of this game!
What makes Pinterest different from other social networks is that it is completely made up of pictures. Beautiful images that millions of people pin every day. Vacations, weddings, food, recipes, styles and the new catch-phrase… Instructographics. (Instructions + Graphics = Instructographics)
What pinners do is repin images from each other’s boards, or upload their own images to share with other pinners. If you have high quality, beautiful images on your Pinterest boards, then there’s a very good chance your followers will want to pin them as well, and this is where the magic of the ‘repin’ can spread your marketing message far and wide.
So how does this come into play with online marketers? Traffic. And a lot of it! Big, fat, juicy traffic! This is not just some theory. While we were researching Pinterest to see how it was going to play in the social media mania, we did a few of our own experiments.
We knew Pinterest was going to be a great social media site to be able to send traffic to blogs and websites, and there were a few articles about Martha Stewart and how she had increased sales on her website by a few million dollars through Pinterest. We knew we wanted to find the way for other online marketers to tap into this phenomenon.
So we kept searching and researching because we knew there was a way to be able to use Pinterest the way it was meant to be and not do anything black hat or illegal or robotic just to get traffic and followers and we were going to find it!
We took one of our own domains that was empty and hadn’t been used in a couple of years, loaded it with a fresh installation of WordPress and began posting just a few articles with some related images. We were making some tutorial videos for NonstoPinterest 2.0 and wanted to demonstrate how to set up boards correctly for maximum SEO.
While making the videos, some images from this new site were also pinned to brand-new boards in this brand-new Pinterest account and within hours, there was traffic going to the site! It was unbelievable just how quickly the Pinterest traffic was sent to this cold, lonely blog!
What happened next was simply amazing! The lonely blog was left alone while we finished developing the product and a few months later, we discovered that the site had continued to receive traffic from Pinterest despite the fact that it hadn’t been updated it in all that time!
Now these traffic numbers weren’t huge by any means, but it was quite a few hundred unique visits every month over a 5-6 month period and looking at the traffic stats before and after Pinterest was pretty amazing! It was like night and day because before we started using Pinterest on that site, it was only getting 2 maybe 3 vists per month!
With that kind of information and evidence, as a marketer you simply can’t ignore Pinterest… and here’s another interesting fact: Pinterest users spend more money from recommendations of other Pinterest users than from any other social network.
The typical Pinterest user is female between the ages of 25 and 50, well educated and earning between $50,000 and $100,000 a year. So, with that kind of money floating about, there is plenty of opportunity for the online marketer to make money on Pinterest. So… Pinterest has traffic and money? Sounds like a marketer’s paradise!
And just like any youngster having a major growth spurt, Pinterest has had some of its own growing pains. At the beginning of 2011, you had to have an invitation to get in and Pinterest accounts could only be used for personal use. In August of 2012, Pinterest was opened up to everybody and you didn’t need an invitation to get in and in November of 2012, they opened up the site for businesses.
Pinterest for business is probably the best thing they could have done for us as online marketers. The reason it’s great for internet marketers is because before they introduced business accounts, Pinterest tried their hardest to keep marketers off of their site because of all the crazy, black-hat, spam accounts.
During Pinterest’s quick rise to its’ millions of users, there were a lot of questionable tools being developed for Pinterest marketers. There were autobots that could automatically pin images and get followers, which sounded like a good idea for spamming marketers or somebody who wanted to try to beat the system. There were also autobots that could pin affiliate links automatically, and that probably sounded like a good idea at the time, but turned out to be nothing more than a really fast and easy way to get your account suspended or banned.
Pinterest caught on to all the spammy marketers and started cleaning up and deleting accounts. In fact, just a few weeks ago a lot of users lost followers because they weren’t real and Pinterest was taking care of all the accounts that didn’t have a genuine person attached to it.
With that said, if you want to do anything commercial using Pinterest, you need to be set up as a business account there. By commercial we mean if you’re going to promote or pin anything that takes the user off of the Pinterest website whether that be for affiliate marketing, lead generation or even simply for driving traffic to a website or blog that has a commercial element to it.
So if you’re pinning from your personal blog for purely recreational purposes or pinning from somebody else’s blog for that reason then you can do that with a personal account. Practically every other scenario if you’re not just repinning pictures within the Pinterest site or uploading your own pictures will definitely mean you need to have a Pinterest business account. There are so many new and inventive ways of using Pinterest as an online marketer, and everything is covered in NonstoPinterest 2.0 and also our monthly membership site, The Pinner Circle.
NonStoPinterest 2.0 is a hands on multimedia course that will get you set up and started fast and lays out the steps to becoming a Pinterest Pro. The Pinner Circle is exclusive training month after month of the different aspects of getting Pinterest traffic, viral images, blogging, branding, third-party applications, anything and everything you want to know about Pinterest…
so come on over and join us and use Pinterest to take your business to the next level!
Enjoy!
Chris and Lisa
This is a guest post written by Chris Shaw and Lisa Hernandez, if you would like to be considered for a guest post please contact me.
Discover more from John Thornhill's Internet Marketing Blog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I agree Pinterest can be very powerful, I’ve been using it quite a bit this year and was asked to speak to a leadership group of Real Estate Professionals on how to use it to bring traffic to a blog and got a very good response from them.
My best suggestion is to use Pinterest first and see it from a pure user first and it will become very clear how to use it for marketing.
I just got my Pinterest account created recently and I’ve not really gotten a grip on it yet.
However, I’ll take your idea Jeremy, and just use Pinterest for some time, I’m sure to see the opportunities myself pretty soon.
Thanks for the idea.
Cheers!
Very good advice there Jeremy. This is a social network first and foremost and avid pinners care about the images, not your marketing message. You can use both together keeping you marketing subtle and everything should be ok.
Chris and Lisa
Hey this is a really nice post thanks Chris and Lisa
Pintrest is something I need to get on top of and this page describes it really nicely !
Thanks for the information 🙂
regards
Carl
You are most welcome Carl and thanks for your kind words.
Yes, you don’t want to be left behind….!
I have a personal Pinterest account basically for pinning some of my own images relevant to what I am doing. I also like and repin images from others.
My pinboard is in four categories..health. wealth, relationships and success motivation…
Now that I gathered from this article that Pinteredt allows business accounts. .i would certainly operate one to atjtract traffic to my website.
Hello Chin,
Well what you can do is either leave your personal account as it is and open a new business account or Pinterest are encouraging people who’ve been using personal accounts for business to convert them to a business account.
From now on, you should avoid using your personal account for anything commercial or with commercial intent, i.e. affiliate links, lead generation, traffic generation.
Chris and Lisa
Thanks Chris and Lisa,
I actually set up a personal account at Pinterest, but after reading your post, I think I need a business account. I’m impressed with Martha Stewart’s results! Thanks again for the informative article.
Galen Anderson
No problem Galen, glad you enjoyed it. For sure, you need a business account to do anything that’s commercial. Convert what you have by going to business.pinterest.com or open one just for your business and keep them separate.
Chris and Lisa
Hi,
I find it quite diffizile to get into this whole Pinterest thing. I use Twitter and Facebook for social marketing, but right now I can’t really warm me up for Pinterest. Maybe because I don’t really know how to use it effectively…
Phil
Hi Phil, I know where you’re coming from and I suppose it’s horses for courses or what you’re used to using for social marketing.
Personally, I don’t get the whole Twitter thing and it’s fair to say that’s probably because I haven’t really bothered to learn it…
I find Facebook can be a big time suck as well but on Pinterest there’s so much less ‘chatter’ shall I say. People don’t converse so much, it’s more about those images and my niece tells me it’s very addictive!
For guys, maybe not so much on the addictive side which is good so we can concentrate on harnessing that traffic! The fact that there is more money spent by the Pinterest demographic keeps me interested.
Chris
Hello Chris and Lisa, I hope you are fine.
Pinterest is a great way to get traffic from a different source.
It makes a change to article or blog marketing.
This site will only get bigger and bigger, and people love to see pictures, as they do with videos.
Everybody should be using pinterest for the new year.
Great post, keep up the good work.
Matt Morgan
Hey there Matt,
Thanks for the appreciation and yes, you want to be stood in front of the traffic that Pinterest can bring and article marketing took a bit of a hit after Panda. I wouldn’t say it’s dead but it’s a shadow of what it once was back in the day.
Chris and Lisa
Thank you Matt! 🙂
Its good to see that Pinterest is no longer being as spammy as it was and the result will be more ever green.
I am using it at present as a regular user and hope this helps me get to grips with its potential .
As its totally reliable to images its very handy if you have a smart phone , hopeful Apple will respond to that fact and include it and addd it to the share feature like they have a Facebook share.
Hi Dave,
Yes thankfully Pinterest took a very strong stance against spammers right from the start but it did seem that they were getting a bit overwhelmed at one point but we think they have their anti-spam measures in place now pretty well.
Pin too quickly and too many, you might get suspended, same for commenting, liking and repinning. There are a number of bots out there using all sorts of fancy ways including proxies to try and fool Pinterest but is that a way to build a sustainable business? We don’t think so.
You may get away with it or you may find you account closed. Better to play by the rules especially now that they’ve given us business accounts to market with.
Regards,
Chris and Lisa
Hi John,
A very interesting post. Heard so much about but haven’t signed up…..I have now.
Regards
Donald
I agree John…Pinterest has taken the internet by storm. It currently is outdoing Facebook & Twitter as a medium to advertize one’s business.
Bottom line, if you want to get the word out about your business, you better get to adding Pinterest to your arsenal.
Thanks for the post!
Yes George, it’s now #3 in the world and with the introduction of business accounts, you might as well take advantage.
Keep your boards interesting though, not all product images from your catalog. Add some variety in there.
Chris and Lisa
John,
I am excited about Pinterest, especially after learning heaps about the platform with NonPinterest. There is so much one can do with it, especially when attracting even more traffic to my ebay listings.
Regards
Gareth
Yes Gareth, for your type of eBay-based business, very good. eBay likes Pinterest hence the little ‘Pin it’ button next to the other social media icons on every listing. That is really handy but in reality, that just helps eBay!
Chris
Hello.
Pinterest might work for the Hispanic market?
Greetings.
Sure Israel, it will work in any market, any country because the draw of Pinterest is the images and there’s a universal attraction to beautiful pictures.
Pinterest knows this which is why they offer the site content in various languages.
You can select your account’s language on the Settings page. Pinterest currently supports English, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (American), Portuguese (European), Portugese (Brazil), German, Dutch and French.
After logging in, go to https://pinterest.com/settings/
Language is the third setting on the page.
After selecting your preferred language, click the red “Save Profile” button at the bottom of the page.
That’s it, your done.
Chris
I haven’t got into Pinterest yet but I get the impression that it’s an invaluable resource for people in IM. As a relative newbie I’m still finding my feet in IM but once I get some more momentum I’ll be sure to check it out some more
Yes Glenn, Pinterest is gaining so much momentum over the last year and maybe its’ advantage is that it doesn’t require a great deal of interaction with other users if you don’t want it to because it’s more about the images than anything else.
Chris
Spot on John
Pinterest is a great tool for traffic & with their new business pages it should be even better.
Regards
Mark
Yes Mark. They deliberated over whether to allow businesses on Pinterest for a long time but finally made what we believe is the right decision.
You can guess this could go the way of Facebook in time because for sure, Ben Silbermann is going to want to monetize the site at some point and you can’t do that easily without some form of commercial interest in there.
Chris
Hey Chris and Lisa
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’ve been using Pinterest for a few short months now and it can be quite addictive to start of with, just like with other social media.
I have a personal account myself, and have some business accounts for our clients and has been bringing in some great traffic for them.
The traffic isn’t all that targeted but it’s traffic never the less.
Do you cover any tips or advice regarding the business accounts for Pinterest in the course.
Many thanks
Danny
Hello Danny,
Glad you’re enjoying Pinterest and thanks for your comments.
That’s a good question and yes, our training course is really geared towards the marketer whether that’s on or offline and how they can use Pinterest to help promote their businesses. It’s not really aimed at people who just want to use the site purely for social reasons.
In our monthly Pinner Circle membership, we go into even more detail that’s right up to date with what’s happening with Pinterest and little-known ways we can leverage the incredible power this site has to send you traffic.
You say that the traffic your clients are getting is un-targetted? That really shouldn’t be the case if their boards are set up correctly as we describe in the course and in particular if the images they’re using in their pins are highly relevant to their theme.
Chris and Lisa