Pinterest is becoming very popular and more and more friends are jumping on the bandwagon. I have notice many people are making time wasting mistakes. If you are new to Pinterest and you want to use it to drive traffic to your website: Don’t make these four novice mistakes!
Mistake #1:Pinning photographs rather than websites
People new to Pinterest see boards with pictures and then create their pinboards with photos they have stored on their computer. You may end up with pretty boards, you won’t get any traffic from the Pinterest community. The strength of Pinterest is that the pictures are links to websites.
What to do:
1. Click on the Add button.
2. Choose “Add Pin”
copy the URL of your website page
3. Copy the URL of your website
4. Pinterest will then give you options to:
- Choose the image you want if your page contains multiple images.
- Choose the board you want to pin it to
- Add a description
Which brings me neatly on to Mistake no. 2
Mistake #2: Not adding a proper description
So many people don’t bother to fill in the description or add only a very short description. You can 500 characters to your description. Make sure you spend the time to add the following to each of your pins.
- A description containing your keywords – Pinterest has a robust search function make sure you add words that you think people might be searching for.
- An URL! Yes your picture contains the URL, but not everyone knows how to use Pinterest so make it easy for them to find your article or product.
- A price (if appropriate) – If you are selling products on your website then you will want to add a price because it displays the Price and it adds it to the Gifts section of Pinterest. See below.
Mistake #3: Not Installing the Pin it button
The Pin it button makes Pinning very quick and easy to share content on Pinterest. You will find it by click on the About Section and choosing the Pin it Button.
What’s really clever is that they will show you how to install the Pin it button according to the browser you are using. They even show you a video to make it very easy to install.
This makes it incredibly easy to share content from any webpage. When you find content you want to share:
- click on the Pin It button
- Select the Image you want from the available images on the page
- It will then allow you to choose which board you want to add it to. The default is always the last Pinboard you used. Make sure it is the right one! I have added so many pins to the wrong board, by not paying attention to this! You can repin them to the right boards, but it wastes some of your time.
- Make sure that your description has keywords
- If the content is from someone else’s website make sure that it contains their orginal headline and it links to their website.
Mistake #4: Not using Pinterest to source pins
Pinterest is not just about you and not all your pins should be links to your website. Millions of beautiful images and useful articles have already been pinned.
Use the Search function on Pinterest to find Pins or Boards that will be useful and repin from theses boards. Repinning is like sharing on Facebook and Pinterest users love being repinned. If you want to create an inspirational board such as Dream holidays or your Bucket list, you can spend hours trawling around the web to find suitable images or you can use Pinterest for inspiration and speed. Your choice!
These are just some tips about Pinterest. Let me know if you want more by leaving a comment.
P.S. You are very welcome to Pin this post.
Do you have dreams that you not ready to broadcast to the world? Pinterest is a great place to create vision boards, plan events and collect ideas for gifts, but do you want everyone to know what you are up to?
