Pins and Pinboards, Pinterest does it work?

As a marketer or online business entrepreneur, it is sometimes necessary to use social platforms to promote your work and get referral traffic to your sales page or website.

Of the social platforms available today the main four are Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Others are usable and can deliver great results and I have worked with quite a few but for me, these four are where the main traffic can be made.

For this post, we will discuss the advantages of Pinterest and does it work.

Pinterest what is it all about?

Pinterest is a social visual platform and is used by pinning images from websites or personal computers of items that users wish to share or store in Pinboards for future reference.

For example, you can create a board of your favorite clothing websites and save a Pin or image from each one so you can find them easily later on.

As another form of social bookmarking Pinterest has grown from strength to strength from launch in March 2010 when users could only join by invitation.

As of March 2012 two years later it was the third-largest social website behind Facebook and Twitter a remarkable feat.

You can save pins (images) from any website that allows image copy.

Consideration must be made for sharing images however, for instance, stock images from photographers would not be allowed.

Most of these would have some sort of watermark on them to stop this anyway but it’s always prudent to be careful.

As a good rule if the site you wish to share from has sharing buttons including the Pin button then you are good to go.

Pins are saved into Pinboards and can be managed from within your account.

The Pinterest feed is a collection of pins being pinned from around the internet onto Pinterest from the interests you have signed up for when registering and other users you are following.

You can also search Pinterest for interesting ideas and to see how others are using Pin.

As a marketer using Pinterest to save pins from your websites is useful to generate referral traffic and can be done in several ways.

As you create content on your blog or website remember to add an image that explains the post as best as possible.

Then when you post your page make sure to Pin the post so your image is saved in a Pinboard for that niche.

As you write more content Pin the new content into your Pinboard so your followers can see the new Pin and check out your post.

Be inventive with your Pinboard names!

Another nice trick for Pinterest is to create a Pinboard but instead of just calling it something mundane like “home crafts” be more inventive and search for a keyword that is very low in competition for your niche.

“Purple cushion covers for sitting rooms”, for example, and by adding over a period of time (say a few weeks) thirty pins you can rank that Pinboard in Google as a stepping stone for traffic back to your site.

I say low competition and if using Jaaxy I would only consider keywords of less than 100 Quoted Search Results (QSR) and I would check out the competition on the first ten places.

You need it to be weak that is to say low page rank and low backlink numbers in those first ten.

As with all website ranking techniques we want to get our Pinboard as close to number one spot in the search engines as possible.

This then gives you the most available traffic for that given keyword.

If the competition is strong then this will not happen easily as a quality written article for your keyword will always outrank a Pinboard unless you get an awful lot of likes and shares.

Low hanging fruit….keywords

So we want to aim for the low hanging fruit and easy pickings.

This is a technique I am working on as I create content.

I aim for higher traffic and higher competition keyword on my article posts then use low competition keywords for Pinterest to get referral traffic back to it as a bonus.

One other thing you must check Pinterest to see that Pinboard is not already available.

It is not going to work if it already exists.

So search by putting the following text into Google making sure to put your keyword between the quotes.

inurl:”Purple cushion covers for sitting rooms” site:pinterest.com

Once you have created the Pinboard you need to give it a decent description and put the keyword you choose in there also.

This helps with the SEO for the Pinboard.

Do not spam links on Pinterest.

 When adding pins make sure to add pins already in Pinterest plus from around the web as you don’t want to spam all your own links.

This will give your followers a better experience when checking out your Pinboards.

As an extra incentive, it is good to put text into pictures to make a call to action Pins.

For example in our purple cushion cover Pinboard we may be getting traffic back to our website where we have a review of a very detailed exclusive purple cushion.

If we pin a picture where we have added the text “Check out the review for this awesome cushion cover”, we will get more viewers clicking on the link and making it to see the review.

From there we can hopefully make enough of a sales pitch to entice them to click through to the sales page or affiliate website and make a purchase.

Buying keywords you say!

 I find that buying keywords work best for this type of traffic as most Pinterest users are searching for items to purchase so it doesn’t really make much sense to bring them to an information post.

You can, of course, do that but you are not likely to get many sales.

It’s better to target the buying phase of searching.

You can also create different accounts for each website you own and have access to analytics for your pins or put them on one account and get your stats from Google Analytics it’s up to you but all you need is a different email address and website for each account and add the metadata into the head section of your website for it to take effect.

So to sum up Pinterest does it work?

 I can verify that it does and if you are prepared to put a bit of effort in and create interesting Pinboards for your followers you will be rewarded with good referral traffic to your websites.