I’ve got 8 online business lessons from the amazing story of Pinterest below. But first, here’s a primer for the uninitiated.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest was founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp. It’s a social photo-sharing site that allows users to post groups of photos around certain themes or categories (a.k.a. “pinboards”).

In January 2012, Comscore reported that Pinterest had 11.7 million unique monthly users – making it the fastest website ever to top the 10 million mark. As of June, that number’s over 20 million.

The site’s users are a staggering 79% female, largely between the ages of 25 and 54.

How Does Pinterest Make Money?

As of now, it doesn’t.

In May 2012, Pinterest went through its third successful round of funding. The site raised $120 million from investors at a valuation of $1 billion to $1.5 billion.

Investors have a lot of reason to be optimistic about Pinterest’s monetization prospects. According to e-commerce firm RichRelevance, the average sale from a Pinterest user following an image back to its source is $180, compared to just $80 for Facebook users and $70 for Twitter users.

For a website that hasn’t yet even tried to monetize, its prospects are looking pretty rosy – so much so that Fast Company said “Pinterest looks like the future of e-commerce.”

What You’ll Learn:

• What Pinterest has in common with Barack Obama
• How Pinterest’s founders learned from their biggest rivals
• What Pinterest’s growth strategy has in common with Facebook
• The one value Pinterest places above all others

8 Lessons in Online Business from Pinterest

#1  Visuals Rule Today’s Online World

United States President Barack Obama broke the record for the most popular tweet of all time this Tuesday (Nov. 6, 2012). The text of Obama’s tweet was nothing special (“Four more years”). What pushed the tweet into the stratosphere was the picture that accompanied it (above).

The prominence of the image is manifest on Facebook too. According to Mashable, Facebook “photos get as much as twenty times more engagement” than links, statuses, or videos.

While images are popular on Twitter and Facebook, they’re everything on Pinterest. The site owes much of its popularity to the fact that it all of its ‘pins’ are images arranged in a seamless, grid-based design.

#2  Stand on the Shoulders of Giants

From 2006 to 2008, Silbermann worked at Google’s advertising division doing customer support.

In 2010, just as Pinterest was launching, co-founder Evan Sharp took a job at Facebook.

Working with two of the world’s biggest, fastest growing websites surely informed Silbermann and Sharp as they steered Pinterest on its own course to gargantuan online success.

If you have a chance to learn from the best in your industry, take it.

#3  Learn from Mistakes

In 2008, Silbermann quit his job working for Google and began a startup with his college friend, Paul Sciarra. They successfully raised seed funding and worked furiously on the project for over a year, but the resulting shopping app (called “Tote”) never became popular. Worse still, the few people who were using Tote didn’t tend to make purchases with the app.

But what they were doing instead was even more interesting. Silbermann noticed that users liked to send themselves pictures of products that they liked so that they could see them again later. Embedded in that realization was the seed of the idea for Pinterest.

Of course, that’s just one lesson of hundreds that Silbermann and Sciarra must have learned while developing Tote. This is just another example of how so-called-failures are really stepping stones to success.

#4  Grow One Community at a Time

Here’s something Pinterest has in common with Facebook:  both started out as exlusive communities.

Facebook was initially just for Harvard Students. Only after Facebook became extremely popular at Harvard did Zuckerberg and crew open Facebook up to additional markets. They grew incrementally to include all Ivy League schools, then all universities, and eventually everyone in 2006.

Pinterest co-founder Ben Silberman ensured Pinterest started out as a small community by making the site invite-only. According to Fast Company, “Many of the early invites went to a group of design bloggers whom Silbermann recruited personally. He gave each new user a limited number of invitations, urging them only to invite others whose taste they respected.”

Thanks to Silbermann’s selective savvy, Pinterest started out as a small community of visually adept designers. By giving them all a limited number of invitations, he encouraged organic social growth.

When stoking a fire, you must be careful not to smother the embers with too much kindling. Growing an online community requires a similar patience. Start with a small, exclusive, and loyal group of people; expand incrementally taking care never to scale too quickly.

On August 10, 2012 Pinterest was at last opened to everyone, no invitation required.

#5  User Experience is More Important than Page Views

Most online startups take the following for granted:  the more page views, the better.

It’s true that page views are an important metric to measure for an aspiring website. Each new view indicates increased popularity and potential for revenue from advertising.

Unfortunately, some websites overpursue page views, spreading their content over as many pages as possible in order to inflate their page view statistics. I know that I personally loathe it when sites make me click over and over again just to read one article. That’s why at Income Diary, we put the entire content of an article all on one page, even if it’s a list that’s 50 long.

Pinterest takes it one step further.

Silbermann and company recognized that the amount of time a person spent on their site and how engaging they found the experience were far better measures of long-term success than mere page views.That’s why Pinterest was one of the first big websites to utilize “infinite scroll” on their home page. That means somebody could see literally thousands of ‘pins’ without once having to click a link or visit a new page.

The amount of page views a website gets is just a statistic. The quality of the user experience, on the other hand, plays a major role in how a person perceives and enjoys your web page. If you want long-term success, I recommend that you never trade page views for a worse user experience.

#6  You Don’t Have to be a Programmer

Mark Zuckerberg has said, “My number one piece of advice is: you should learn how to program.” Facebook owes much of its success to that fact that Mark was able to code early versions of the site by himself.

In fact, most successful technology startups (including Google and Microsoft) were founded at least in part by programmers or computer engineers.

But here again, Pinterest bucks the trend. Silbermann holds a degree in political science. And while Evan Sharp had enough web development know-how to create the first versions of Pinterest (with the help of a hired-on engineer), he was going to graduate school to be an architect at the time.

Forbes reports that the lack of “technical founders” initially limited investor interest. But Silbermann emphasizes that Pinterest’s early hurdles weren’t technical:  “We didn’t have an engineering problem. We had a design and community problem.”

Good programmers and engineers will always be vital to the success of online startups. But Pinterest has proven to the investors in Silicon Valley that a founder doesn’t need to be able to code a website in order to make it a runaway success.

#7  A Well-Curated Community is a Happy Community

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all operate under a similar paradigm; they see their users as creators.

Pinterest sees their users as curators. Instead of putting up their own content, a Pinterest user primarily uses the site to sift through the content of others and curate it by ‘repinning’ their favorite images to their own board.

According to Flowtown, 80% of ‘pins’ on Pinterest are ‘repins’. Compare that to just 1.4% of tweets that are retweets.

For Pinterest, this means less self-promotional content, less overly-personal “what I ate for breakfast this morning content”, and more of what people truly, objectively love out of hundreds of different options. As you read this, the Pinterest community is looking through an endless stream of images and rewarding their favorites with ‘likes’ and ‘repins’.

The cream rises to the top and, in my experience, a quick visit to Pinterest’s home page is much more likely to yield something truly engaging than the often banal updates of Facebook and Twitter.

#8  Stay True to Your Values

Authenticity is one of Pinterest’s major values. On their about page under ‘Pin Etiquette’, they advise their users “be authentic” because, “we think being authentic to who you are is more important than getting lots of followers. Being authentic will make Pinterest a better place long-term.”

Silbermann offered more insight into the value of authenticity in his interview with Fast Company. When writer Max Chafkin asked about how Pinterest could capitalize financially on the “paid-for-pins” phenomenon (in which power Pinterest earn money from a company by plugging their products), Silbermann’s answer had nothing to do with monetization. Ben simply said, “We’re just trying to preserve the authenticity. Pinterest is a young platform.”

Silbermann’s got his priorities in the right place. MySpace crumbled after it became a den for sleazy marketers. Facebook’s still going strong, but their recent foray into letting users pay to promote their personal posts indicates to me that they’ve forgotten what made their network beloved in the first place.

It will be interesting to see how Pinterest monetizes when the time comes. But it sounds like Silbermann and company will be very careful never to sacrifice their precious authenticity for more dollar bills.

Want to Know How to Get Traffic by Using Pinterest?

Josh Dunlop has written a pair of highly informative articles about how he drives 10,000’s of visitors to his photography blog through Pinterest. Josh says that he gets about five times more traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook and Twitter combined, even though his audience on Pinterest is a small fraction of the size.

If you’re thinking about getting started with Pinterest marketing, read Josh’s Beginner’s Guide to Seeing Massive Pinterest Traffic.

And if you’ve already had some success promoting your website with Pinterest, but you want to take it to the next level, he’s also detailed his Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies for Dominating Web Traffic.

The post 8 Lessons Pinterest can Teach You about Online Business appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

This is part 2 of 2 on Pinterest Marketing, click here for part 1. I would suggest you read that first, because this is more complicated.

This is a fair bit of work, but it will absolutely 100% be worth it. One of strategies I walk you through in this guide took me 4 days to complete, but I saw results immediately. If you’re looking for massive traffic, you’ve come to the right place.

Lets start off easy by looking at…

Pinterest Specific Images

These are images that you create purely for posting on Pinterest. Have a quick browse on Pinterest, and what do you constantly see? Long images with useful information. There can be a lot of information, or just a very small amount.

Infographics. Yes, infographics work great on Pinterest because it’s a visual medium on a visual forum. They usually contain a lot of information, and get shared like a wild fire. No surprises here, lets move on to something more specific.

I’ve created a couple posts which have been purely for posting on Pinterest, lets have a look at one of them now, it’s the image on the right hand side of the page. It’s a range of images which show the correlation between the aperture size, and the depth of field in a photo. This might not mean much to you, but it means a lot to photographers.

This is a really simple, and very visual example of how this works, and it makes learning depth of field much easier for a photographer. This is exactly what people like to share, because it makes their board look good.

The pin on the right-hand side was pinned over 150 times, when I had far fewer followers, and that’s just from my board, not including how many times it was repinned after that.

Twitter Promotion

This section is especially important if you use TweetAdder for your internet marketing, as it steamlines the whole process with automation.

First of all, whenever you pin a link that goes to your website, you want to click on ‘Post to Twitter’, because not only will this drive traffic, but it’s driving traffic to your Pinterest at the same time.

If you’re using TweetAdder, then I recommend automating some tweets to encourage people to come to your Pinterest. It takes about five minutes, and can be left alone after that. Something like ‘Hey, have you seen my Pinterest board yet? Lots of cool links…’ usually works fine.

If you’d like to completely streamline this process, then add your Pinterest RSS feed to the RSS feed tweeter in TweetAdder. This will tweet everything you pin, and you can stop thinking about it. To find your Pinterest RSS feed, go to your boards and add /feed.rss so mine would be pinterest.com/photojosh/feed.rss

My Most Advanced Strategy Yet

Ok, now what I’m about to tell you has dramatically improved my traffic, and Pinterest presence, but it’s not for the feint of heart. The whole process took me four days to complete. Don’t get me wrong though, this is 100% worth it, and part of the reason it took so long is because of how many posts I’ve written (200+).

The general premise is that you take your website, and your put the whole thing neatly onto Pinterest.

Let me explain.

You should already have your posts in the correct categories, but you may want to be more specific. Last year, I went through all of my posts, and I added subcategories to each of them, so I could organize them in a directory. These subcategories then become my Pinterest boards.

Here’s how I spent my four days: On every single post I…

• improved the title so that people were more likely to click on it.
• changed the URL slug for better SEO.
• used the Yoast SEO plugin and improved the SEO on every single post (needed doing, and I was going through them anyway).
• created featured images with the title text overlayed (see below).
• installed a related posts plugin with some call-to-action text at the bottom, and added my featured image again, only this time with my logo and some ‘Pin It!’ text (see below).

The most important part of those steps, is where I changed the images.

When you have bold text on an image, it’s hard for people to ignore, because we’re drawn to text, so just by adding text to your images you have the upper hand over your Pinterest competitors. Here’s what mine looks like. As you can see, it’s a pretty simple design. I used a graduated filter to add a dark fade to the bottom half of the photo, and then I overlayed the text on top. Using layers in Photoshop makes this a really quick process.

Lets have a look at the footer for my posts now. The text flows straight into this, so it looks like it’s part of the post.

You’ll notice that the image is slightly different, with my Logo, and a Pin It! button at the top. Whenever someone hovers over this with their cursor, the button appears, and they can easily pin the image onto a board.

Because I’m seeing so much Pinterest traffic, people are more likely to pin the image again, and this gentle reminder at the end of a post can be really helpful.

Now it’s time to bring this all together. I mentioned before that I had subcategories, and I used them to organize my posts, well, now it’s time to turn them all into boards. If you have a look at my boards here, you can see there is a total of 15 different boards, 14 of which come from different categories.

Put yourself in the shoes of an amateur photographer. You turn up to a page, and you see all of the tutorials you could possibly need, all organized neatly, with images, into their respective categories. Does this look like something that may be useful? I think you’re going to be quite likely to follow it.

So that’s what I did, and this is what it looks like. I can click on any board, and almost every pin has at least a couple of repins. People browse, see what they like, and repin it to their own boards, often as a replacement to bookmarking.

So this is a pretty lengthy progress, but there’s actually a little bit more to this than meets to eye, because all of my boards have covers, detailing the content that’s inside them. To find out how I did this, we need to look at plugins.

Advanced Plugins

Category Images

This next step will allow you to add an image to your category pages, so that you can then pin this image to your board, use it as the cover, and have the pin go back to a relevant location. It’s an important step to making your board look good; these finishing touches count.

You need to install this plugin, called Then go to Appearance > Editor, and find your category file. It will be one of the five files listed here. Then input this code where you want the image to appear.

<ul>
<img src=”<?php echo z_taxonomy_image_url($cat->term_id); ?>” />
<a href=”<?php echo get_category_link($cat->term_id); ?>”><?php echo $cat->cat_name; ?></a>
</ul>

I chose to input this right at the bottom of my page, just before “</div><!– /#main –>” so that it was inline with the content, and not the footer. Don’t worry, it’s not hard to do; I have zero training with any coding.

Then you simply edit your categories and upload the image that you want to appear. When this is done, pin this image to your board, and set it as your cover. This all may sound complicated, but it’s not, and it looks way better.

Specific Social Notification Bar

This is one of the only paid plugins that I pay for, and it’s only $8 so check it out. It’s a notification bar that appears at the tops of my page, which I can apply a message to. I can also animate it, and I can change what appears, depending on where my visitors have come from. Specifically, if they came from Pinterest.

When you visit my website through Pinterest, the notification bar appears in the Pinterest colours, notes how many times it’s been pinned before, and gives you the option to both follow me, and pin the post. It looks like the image below. 

This is a really handy tool to have, because I’m directly targeting a very specific type of visitor. This kind of visitor is very used to sharing posts on Pinterest already, and by using this plugin, I can show that my post has already been pinned many times before, which gives it more credibility.

Check this plugin out because it does more than just this, you can do the same for Facebook and Twitter, etc. or you can just use it to promote a product at the top of your page.

Pinterest Analytics

If you search Google for Pinterest analytics, you’re going to find yourself bombarded with products to trial. Too much choice in my opinion, which is why I stick to just two. Google Analytics, and a website called Pinfluencer. I mentioned in the last post that I wanted you to get setup with this program, so you should be ready to go. Lets look at Pinfluencer first.

The first thing I recommend that you look at is the most engaged, and most influential pinners. These are the people that pin the most of your content, and the people who produce the most repins. You can look at this on a number of different time scales, but I suggest weekly for now. You need to suck up to these people as they are providing you with lots of lovely traffic.

A good practice is to go onto the boards of these people, follow relevant boards to you, and ‘like’ 5+ pins of theirs, especially your pins. What this does is helps you to take up space in their notification window, which will help them to notice you. If you’re an authority in your niche, you will be recognised, and they will appreciate being noticed by you. They will then be more likely to pin your content, because they’ve had some personal interaction with you. Leave a thank you comment here and there too.

Makes sense right?

When you select the Pins tab, you can see all of your pins, over a selected period of time (7 days for me), and see which have generated the most traffic. You can organise by engagement and visits, but you can also see all the details such as pageviews generated, repins, comments, likes, etc.

There are also tabs to see your most influential followers tab (although sometimes I find that these are people I’m following, not following me), and more tabs for your boards, metrics, and competitors. You can explore these all for yourself for now, although I may come back and write a post on them. It’s pretty self explanatory.

Google Analytics also plays a really important role, because it’s all in real time, where as Pinfluencer works a day in the past. You can select your period of time, then select Traffic Sources > Referrals > Pinterest, and it will list all of the pins that are linking to your site. I have about 10,000 in total, with 6454 of them in the last month. 

You can view the most popular pins coming to your website, and then follow my advice mentioned earlier, about going through to your followers, and thank them.

This is all good practice, but you may see it as tedious. Work hard now, and it will pay off in the long run.

A Note to Finish

I know this seems like a lot to do, it really does, but it just doesn’t feel like it to me. And remember, I’ve done it.

Everyday feels like a little win, as my traffic gets better and better, I’m seeing the results of my hard work. Remember that great feeling your get whenever you get a new ‘most traffic in one day’, or the first time you broke 1,000 visitors? It sort of feels like that.

So yes, there’s a lot to do, and you may find some of it boring, but I guarantee that if you follow the detailed steps I’ve left for you here, you will start to see the results you’ve dreamt about! And when there’s more traffic, there’s more opportunity for monetization.

Thank you,

Josh Dunlop

Read more: ‘10 Article Headline Examples That Got Us 10 Million Readers’

The post Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies for Dominating Web Traffic appeared first on How To Make Money Online.

Well, I have 8,350 Facebook fans, 10,200 Twitter followers and 1,550 unique Pinterest followers. Last week, I saw five times more traffic from Pinterest, than from Facebook and Twitter combined.

So yes, it’s amazing. Here, have some proof:

If that doesn’t convince you to listen up, then I don’t know what will.

This post is a BS-free zone. I’m not going to leave you snipets of information, or little tips that you can quickly forget, I’m going to provide you with the process I’ve gone through to see the traffic I’m seeing. If you want to master Pinterest, then this is the post for you, so stop making excuses.

A little heads up here, this is a long post, and it will take time to take it all in, but this is only part 1 of 2. My advanced strategies will be with you soon (see bottom of post for more details).

Pinterest

Imagine a website sort of like Facebook, only instead of people liking a post, they shared it instead. And then their friends shared it too if they liked it, and so on. Can you start to imagine the sort of traffic you might see from this?

Ok, so we’ve already established that you need to be on Pinterst, but I’d imagine that most of you already knew this. You were probably like me, knowing that you should be on it, but couldn’t really be bothered to divide your time over another social network (hello Google+), and kind of just hoped that you wouldn’t have to.

When I first got started, I felt like I had missed out on being an early adopter (I saw my first Pinterest traffic about a year ago), but after a few months of using it, I don’t feel that way at all, because it’s not that hard to catch up.

I’m going to show you exactly what I do to see so much traffic, but first, lets start with the basics.

How does Pinterest Work? (Read this)

From a marketing point of view, it can be hard to get your head around how pins are counted, and how it converts into traffic, so let me give you a little run down.

You post an image to a board, where other people can browse, see what they like, and either like it, or pin it to their own board. This image links back to the webpage that you pinned it from, and most people will click through and read the post. If the image is an infographic, and all the information they need is on Pinterest, then they probably won’t bother so much. Hold a little something back (although Pinterest does make long images very narrow when you click on them).

So lets say I pin something to my board, and it gets repinned 10 times. That counts as 10 repins for my pin. If someone takes one of those repins and repins it again, that does not add towards my total number of repins, because it was pinned from another source.

I’ll give you an example.

Choosing a board at random, I can find a pin with 7 repins. If I have a look at who’s repinned my pin, I can see that the majority of them receive just a couple likes and repins. Except for one. One of them has 26 likes, and 103 repins. And I could go on further, and look at how many times it’s been repinned from there, but I think you get the picture. It can start to spread like wildfire.

The point is, just because you can’t see how many repins you’ve received, that doesn’t mean you’re not seeing big traffic. Use Google Analytics to have a better look.

Setting Up

This is pretty basic, so I’m going to speed through it, but it’s worth reading.

When it comes to choosing a name, I suggest something along the lines either the name of your website, or whatever other name you use in social media. I like to associate myself with my website, so I go for PhotoJosh (which I use as my twitter name), which is good, just don’t call yourself something that doesn’t have anything to do with your website or brand (such as SamSmith).

Looking for a bio? You should already have a pretty solid one with your Facebook/Twitter so use that. If you don’t, then just make sure that you use your keywords so that they come up in searches.

Connect your Facebook and Twitter too, that will help you to see some more traffic.

When it comes to your profile image, use a photo of yourself, not your website logo. It allows people to feel that they’re connecting with a person, rather than a brand. It’s my experience that I find better interactivity this way.

Your Boards

Start of with one main board, the one that’s going to be followed more than your others. For me, this is ‘Photography Tips, Tricks, & Tutorials‘. This is where you’re going to pin your very best content, with diverse sources, not just yourself.

Now it’s time to learn from my first mistake.

Pinterest can be a lot of fun (and I say this as a young, heterosexual male), and you might find the urge to pin other interests that you may have, which for me were male fashion, food, and architecture.

This is a big no no. Rather than people clicking on the ‘follow all’ button, they chose to follow individual boards instead. The problem with this is that when you add new boards, only the people who are following all of your boards will be following your new boards automatically too.

Stay within your niche, and keep the titles short. They can all be searched for.

To start with, I would suggest building perhaps 4-5 boards to begin with, before we look at more advanced techniques in the next post. Here’s how I started in my photography niche.

1. My main board, where I pin mixture of content, related to photography.
2. A gear board. This links to a bunch of Amazon Associates posts on my website (you can’t earn commission straight through Pinterest any more, it has to link to your own site).
3. 30 Day Photography challenge. This was a niche within my niche, where people could find all the relevant links to a challenge I had set.
4. A group board. This is powerful for finding traffic, and followers.

If you look at my boards now, you’ll notice that there’s currently 15, but I will get to the rest of those boards in the next post.

The Group Board

This is my first little trick for you to start seeing more followers and traffic. On Pinterest, you can allow multiple people to pin to a board at once, so why not allow your fans to pin with you?

Create a board, invite all of your fans and followers to come and pin with you. You have to follow them to add them to the board, but that’s fine, and you’ll undoubtedly get a follow in return. Then you have a board that gets lots of followers, and all the pinning is done for you. You can occasionally take links and pin them to your other boards, and promote your own stuff there too.

It’s easy to do, a great way to find followers, and in my experience, the great content that gets pinned on there sees a lot of repins too. Check mine out.

Follow Pinterest Etiquette and Find Pinterest Love

Ok, time to bare with me as we have a look at the house rules of Pinterest, or rather, the etiquette.

This is hugely important, because you don’t want to scare off potential followers.

You don’t want to stand out as a bad pinner, and it’s really not hard to use Pinterest effectively, so adhere to the following rules.

1. Don’t solely pin yourself. Ease off the constant self promotion (spam?), and try to pin 50/50 on your main board, of your content, and someone else’s. Your followers will appreciate this, and you’ll actually see more of them.
2. Credit your sources. This means don’t take a nice looking infographic, host it on your website, link back to the source (on your webpage), but pin your webpage. This isn’t playing fair, and people actually want to see the source.
3. Pin to the correct board. Don’t go posting graphic design on a photography board. Similar? Yes. Right place for the pin? No.
4. Write a description. Sometimes the image doesn’t tell us much, and a few words will help people to click on those links!
5. Don’t go too mad with the pinning all at once. If you’re brand new, then this is fine, but you don’t want to spam followers. I pin 1-5 times a day at the moment.
6. When you see something you like, like it.

How to Pin Effectively

As I’m sure you’ve worked out by now, Pinterest is very image heavy. You may think that you don’t really work with images, so it’s not relevant to you, but it is. Even if it’s just an image of some fancy text, including your post title, that’s enough to get pinning.

But how can you best use images to your advantage?

Images

There’s a few things you need to remember. Firstly, when we talk about visual weight in photography (as in, what do we look at first and longest), writing come pretty high in the rankings, because we’re so used to looking at it. Add text to all of your images to let your followers know what they’re about.

You will also notice that on Pinterest, there is a maximum width for images, but no apparent maximum length. This means that you can add some serious Pinterest real estate by making long images, and pinning those. Check out the image to the right that I used.

Rather than pinning a single image, I took five minutes, added all of the photos to a single image, and pinned that instead. Trust me, this works wayyy better.

You will also want to consider watermarking your images. Perhaps with your website URL or your Pinterest name; it’s a good idea to brand your images.

Descriptions & Prices

Your description is important too, even if you have your text on the image. People can search for pins and you want your pins to show up in the results too. Cover all of your bases.

If you’re marketing products on Pinterest, then it’s a great idea to include a price in your description. Why? Not only is this important for your description, but Pinterest will very kindly add a price banner on pin for you, so everyone can easily see how much an item costs.

Become the go-to Board

If you post only your own content, then people are going to see this as advertising. If you post a wide variety of content, from the best on the internet, you’re going to find a lot more followers, because people see that you hold the board to a high standard. You can then include your own content, and more people are going to see it.

How to Find Followers

I’m going to start with the obvious here, as it’s all too often ignored. Promote your page through your other social media accounts. Post on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and let people know that you want to see their boards, while telling them about yours at the same time. Promoting a social account is not too dissimilar to promoting a website.

Cool, now that’s out of the way, lets look at Pinterest specific ways of promoting yourself. This is similar to Twitter marketing if you’re familiar with that.

Firstly, make sure you have at least two boards made, and then you want to go looking for other people posting similar content to you. Use the search bar, and type in your niche (for me, it was photography tutorials). Then in the top left-hand corner of the page, you will see the option to choose between pins, boards, and people. Choose boards.

Without even clicking on the boards, I can see nine of my tutorials pinned to three of the first 10 boards. Perhaps I’m doing something right here?

Start by following up to about 100 of these boards straight away. This will get you noticed, but there’s more that you can do. Go back to all of these boards, and like 3-5 of their posts. Quickly browse for what looks like the best content, and click like. I do this with all the boards that I follow, because you take up lots of room in their notifications, so they’re more likely to check out your profile.

Finding your first set of followers is really important, so don’t skip this step.

For example, if I click on the very first board that pops up, they’ve pinned 36 of my posts, and those pins have had a total of 498 repins. From one board.

Plugins I Use

You should be using some sort of social sharing plugin on your WordPress site, and I strongly recommend that you add the Pinterest button. The majority of Pinterest users will have a browser plugin or bookmark, but this does help to remind them. It’s also a nice way to see a count.

I also use a plugin called Pinterest Pin It Button For Images which isn’t the most popular Pinterest plugin, but I think I’ve probably tried them all by now, and this is my favorite for images. When you install it, you need to input the maximum width for your images in the settings, but after that you’re ready to go.

The reason I like this plugin is because the ‘Pin it’ button appears above every image in your post (except featured image), and then when you highlight the button, the image brightens, which makes it stand out. Very useful. It also skips the step that a lot of these plugins make you go through. When you click on the button, you don’t then have to choose an image, and it will also take your title text as the description. Perfect.

Always post your featured image at the bottom of the page too, to remind people to pin the post.

Another plugin you might like to consider when starting out, is called Pinterest RSS Widget and it will take your latest posts and display them anywhere on your website, in a size that you specify. I used to have mine set up in my footer because it would show people that I was on Pinterest, and allow them to follow me. I’ve found a good standing on Pinterest now so I don’t really need it taking up more page space (but I would recommend it for you).

So you should have your website optimized, as well as your other social networks. Whenever you post something to your main board, click on ‘Post to Twitter’ too, because this will tweet the pin, rather than the link.

Things I Don’t Do

I don’t comment.

This goes against what a lot of Pinterest marketers will tell you, but I have my reasons. Firstly, most people don’t comment. Secondly, have you seen the notification system? It’s pretty poor, you can’t look at all of them, so when people comment on my pins, I tend to miss them. I’m not looking for comments, I’m looking for repins and likes. If I want to give someone a nod for a good post, or to thank them for pinning my content, I like their pin.

What you Need to do Before Part 2

You need to get setup with an analytic service like Pinfluencer, as they have a 60 day free trial, and you can use that time to track your pins, see who follows you, who’s the most influential, which are your most popular pins, what your competitors are doing, and much more. Like Google Analytics, you can only track your progress after you set this up, you can’t look into the past, so the sooner you get started, the better.

I will see you in part 2, where I show you how I converted my Pinterest boards into a mini version of my own website, and I start to see the best traffic I’ve seen in a very long time.

Read more: ‘Advanced Pinterest Marketing Strategies for Dominating Web Traffic’

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