This article is about a photo-sharing community by Elizabeth Henson.
If you manage niche blogs online, there is one important social networking weapon you must consider adding to your marketing and promotional strategies: Pinterest. Pinterest can help your blog reach new heights by attractive a massive worldwide audience. Pinterest is the fastest growing website of all time, according to Fortune magazine, and the fastest to hit 10 million monthly unique users.
So, what exactly is Pinterest? It is an entire virtual photo-sharing community that allows users to create their own pinboards organized by various categories. These categories may include fitness, fashion, and exotic foods, for example. Users can then “pin” relevant images to their boards that they may find themselves or “repin” images from other users’ boards. Among the most popular content themes on Pinterest include fashion, beauty, fitness, foods, recipes, home decor and inspirational items. As you can imagine, these themes appeal mostly to women and it’s no surprise that 80 percent of all Pinterest users are females. Pinterest really has created an excellent virtual community platform in that “pinners,” as they are called, can follow other pinners who share similar interests, and users can engage in a dialogue through comments left on images.
So, now let’s approach the million dollar question: How can you utilize Pinterest to market and promote your blog? Read on, curious blogger…
Can You Pitch Your Niche?
Your niche will be a determining factor in terms of how much Pinterest can be of service to you. As mentioned, if your blog involves items pertaining to fashion, beauty, fitness, foods, recipes, home decor or inspirational items, you can really tap into Pinterest. If you manage a fitness blog that truly features useful and engaging content, you can create visually appealing “eye-candy” pins that can be displayed on your blog’s Pinterest profile page. The more pleasing and inviting your images look, the better the chance “pinners” will take notice. If you are trying to market and promote a product, it may be in your worthwhile to hire a seasoned digital graphics designer who can create gorgeous pins for you. It’s also worth noting that Pinterest drives Ecommerce sales at a far greater rate than either Facebook or Twitter.
Follow Plenty of Users
Once your blog develops a respectable presence on Pinterest, it is in your best interest to follow and connect with plenty of other pinners, bloggers and companies who are interested in or belong to the same general niche as you. If you manage a blog that provides home decor tips and ideas, you should follow pinners who are interested in home decor and companies that may be providing home decor services. There is a chance that these users may repin some of your images to their own boards, which really helps to get your brand out there as much as possible on Pinterest. Repins are essentially the same as backlinks in the SEO world, which make them incredibly valuable in marketing and promoting your blog.
Add a “Pin-It” Button to Your Blog
If you manage a WordPress based blog, you may already know that there are many social networking plugins available that make it convenient for users to share content items. You can and should add a “Pin-It” button to your blog that makes it easy for Pinterest users who visit your blog to pin images to their pinboards. As you can imagine, this nifty button will begin to work for itself almost immediately. It will also increase the likelihood that your pins will be repinned throughout Pinterest. This is very good news for you and will result in greater traffic directed to your website.
Pinterest is a powerful tool you can potentially tap into for marketing and promotional purposes. If used properly, Pinterest can drive a massive amount of global traffic straight to your blog.
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Elizabeth Henson is an enthusiastic “pinner,” web content strategist for BabyChangingStation.com. Elizabeth enjoys using Pinterest to find amazing recipes to make delicious food items that stun her family and friends.