Why do you want to be using Pinterest as part of your business lead generation and sales strategy?
There’s a lot of good reasons:
- Pinterest is the 29th most visited site in the world and even though it gets less traffic than Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, it generates more referral traffic to other websites than all of them combined.
- 80% of Pinterest users are women and on average, each woman has 67 followers.
- There are half a million business accounts on Pinterest.
- The average Pinterest user spends 15 minutes per day on the site.
- The average order made by a Pinterest shopper is $160.
- For every pin you post on Pinterest, there is an 80% chance of it getting repined, and if it is, it will be repined 10 times on average.
- 28% of Pinterest users have an income higher than $100K.
Pinterest has come a long way since it was launched in March 2010. In less than 2 years it reached over 10 million registered users and today it has over 70 million registered users.
Tips for Using Pinterest
The maximum horizontal width of a picture is 554 pixels. Anything wider than this will be resized automatically. If you want to avoid having your image modified, make sure you keep it within the 554 pixel width.
Make sure your images are of good quality and that your text is easy to read.
You are allowed to use up to 500 characters in a description but the shorter your description, the better as far as user experience goes.
Don’t go overboard with your keywords and descriptions. You can always use the comment section if you need to add more information.
Important: don’t pin more than once in an hour. If you pin too frequently it will prevent you from getting on other people’s ‘Popular’ lists. This is because Pinterest will see you as a possible spammer.
Pinterest Search Optimization
As far as SEO goes, your description will be searched for keywords that will be used to determine when and if your pin will be shown in the search results.
For boards, keywords will be searched from the board title.
For searching people and business, the keyword search will be referenced from the profile name.
Creating Links within Pinterest
If there are images on your own website that you want to add to Pinterest, it will link back to your website.
To add these images to Pinterest, select ‘Add a Pin’ and it will ask you to paste in the url of the page. Next, you will be able to select the image you want to pin.
You can also ‘Upload a Pin’. In your description, type in the full url of where you would like to link to. Pinterest will automatically make it a clickable link.
Getting the Most Out of Pinterest
If you want to use Pinterest to get more traffic to your website, you really need to engage people and be social. If you think you can just upload a ton of images and you will somehow get a lot of traffic overnight, it’s not going to happen.
There are a few ways you can interact with others on Pinterest.
One way is to ‘Like’ pins that you like!
Another way is to make comments on pins.
A third way is to ‘repin’ a pin. When you repin a pin, you are adding that pin to one of your own boards.
Whenever you take any of these actions, the person that you liked, commented on, or repinned will get an email notification.
This is a great way to form relationships with like-minded individuals on Pinterest.
On your own website, put a Pinterest ‘Follow’ button so that active Pinterest users that visit your website can instantly follow up on Pinterest also.
Also on your website, place a ‘Pin it’ button next to your images, to encourage your website visitors to pin your images on Pinterest.
When considering how to get the most out of Pinterest for your market, think outside the box!
For example, if you were a vacuum cleaning company, how would you make boards that would be interesting to people? Well, one vacuum cleaning company has been able to do it by creating a board of beautiful floors (floors that their vacuums have cleaned).
If you have an organization, let your employees create their own boards so that your company can create its own culture.
Pinterest and Copyright
It’s highly recommended that you watermark all the images you pin on Pinterest. You can watermark them with your brand name and or website.
If you’re pinning anyone else’s image or using it somewhere, make sure you don’t remove any watermarks, logos, copyrights or other identifying marks.
If you’re not sure if you’re infringing on someone else’s copyright, just leave the image. If in doubt, don’t use the image.
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