The Power Of Pinterest

First off, if you are not on Pinterest, sign up now! I absolutely love Pinterest. Planning a party? Get on Pinterest to instantly have tons of great ideas. Need a new recipe for dinner? The options are endless. Need some design inspiration? They have that too. Have no idea what I am talking about? Check out this short animated video the explains all about Pinterest:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJzD4vF5dFA&w=560&h=315]

I have been amazed at the power of Pinterest to drive website traffic. Pinterest is the number one source of traffic to my blog, next to google search…

I have really witnessed the power of Pinterest in the last couple of months on my other blog, Sunny Slide Up – where I post weekly with a few very talented friends. We went from having about 1500 visitors to our blog in November to having over 30,000 visitors in December. Already this month, a little over halfway through and we are already at over 40,000 visitors. CRAZY!!!!

What was the cause of this? Chicken Pot Pies.

I’m not kidding. I did this blog post on Sunny Slide Up back in October. I took the photos and created the layout with Pinterest in mind….knowing that long images took up a lot of real estate on the search pages. It took about a month, but then that pin started spreading. People were pinning and pinning….and then coming to our website to see the recipe. If you are on Pinterest now, go search for “mini chicken pot pie” and you will see something like this…

Check out that red circled pin. Over 1000 people repinned that one. WOW!

Pinterest for marketing. ABSOLUTELY. Here are some tips:

9 Steps to Pinterest Web Traffic Success from Social Media Today:

Start with an eye-catching, topic related image. Pinterest is all about the visual. Make sure every blog post you publish has an eye-catching image. There are a number of places you can get free stock imagery for attribution such as Flickr and Zemanta.
Create pin boards that relate to your content. It is important to segment your content into boards. Setup boards that you can pin your content to in the future. Don’t go crazy with the board creation since you will want to build followings for each eventually. A good rule of thumb is to use your main blog categories as a guide for board creation. This is one area that I admit I didn’t do well at the beginning and I have undoubtedly missed out on visitors from not being more thoughtful in my original board creation.
Repin topical content from other users to the boards you pin your content to. You’ll find that many Pinterest users prefer to follow one or many of your boards, rather than follow you outright.
Find other users that pin similar content and invite them to pin to your board. I knew this feature existed, but I never considered the potential for it until I began to get invites. This really is a great way to build a mini-community around your board. I have now participated in a few of these types of boards and it really works.
When pinning a post, be sure to make the caption descriptive, but a bit of a tease. You will see quickly that many Pinterest users like and repin images without ever clicking through. This is unavoidable, but the more enticing you make the caption, the better your chances are of generating traffic.
Make sure your blog offers visitors the ability to pin your posts. There are a number of handy plugins for each of the major blogging platforms that make this easy to do. You can also pickup a code snippets from Pinterest to create your own here.
Give your readers the ability to follow you on Pinterest directly from your blog. You can do this easily bad adding some quick code that you can get here.
Blog about Pinterest. OK, you don’t have to go to the lengths of creating a blog about Pinterest, but set aside a post a month and find an angle that ties Pinterest into your overall blog topic. Users of new social networks like to read about and share news about that network.
Give it time! It takes time to find the right Pinterest marketing strategy for your blog. It took me a few months to really start seeing solid traffic from my pins. Much like blogging, don’t give up. It will pay off with creativity and persistence.