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Using Pinterest to Drive Traffic to Your Website or Blog
| You now have a Pinterest account, a few boards, and are working on building your following. You know how to search for and pin only excellent images. It's time now to use what you have created on Pinterest to drive lots of traffic to your website, online business or blog. Great Image? Think "Business First" You are on vacation, see a bunch of running sneakers lined up on a park bench and snap a shot of it for your Pinterest page. Upload it immediately to your Running board? NO! When you come across an incredible, exciting and unique image related to your business concept, don't think Pinterest first. Think Business First. "Business First," in the context of this eBook, means everything possible should link back to your site. Take the picture of all those running shoes lined up. Then, find a way to get that image on your business's website. Can you add it to the blog? Could you incorporate it onto a certain page? Get creative and find a way to upload it to your website or blog. Because now, you can visit your own website, use your pre-installed Pin It button, and pin your own image from your own website to your own Pinterest profile. Voila! Now anyone who loves your pin will have a direct link back to your website. If this pin happens to go viral, you will have your website address all over the Internet. That's a much better scenario than uploading an original pin directly to Pinterest and then having a viral hit pin lead only back to....your Pinterest profile. Which brings up the important point of original material. Let's tackle that next. Original Material It would be great if one could use the above advice to find any old picture online, post it to her website and then pin it to generate traffic. But that would be a copyrighting no-no. You can pin anything online to Pinterest, but you cannot "pin" anything online to your own website. Pinterest is a promotional vehicle. Pinning a bike you like doesn't anger the bike company. You are doing free promotion for them. Now if you post that image of the bike onto your website, now you are using the power of that bike to promote yourself. Companies don't like that. So quickly the blogger or online business owner finds that in order to continue using Pinterest to promote their website, she is going to have to come up with some copyright free or original material to start posting on their site. All the other finding of pins one does (searching Google images for original Pinterest pins or repinning within Pinterest) is simply to maintain one's Pinterest profile and create a presence and a following. Other direct website promotion quickly turns to needing to find or create original content. Ideas for Finding and Creating Original Content 1. Buying or using copyright free images. A safe, easy way to get great images for you website that you can then promote on Pinterest is to buy some copyright free images. That means when you buy them, you are free to use them as you wish, as if you were the owner/creator of this image. Favorite websites with quality & inspiring photos and images are: www.dreamstime.com www.istockphoto.com 2. Taking your own pictures.  Tips for taking your own photos to post on your website (that will also serve as Pinterest pins):
Let's brainstorm all the different angles we could take on this photo to promote our business or blog: 
4. Creating your own images, cartoons, and inspirational quotes. One of the most popular categories on Pinterest is inspiration. There are countless images of quotes that have been repinned hundreds of times. You too can take a quote you like, type it up and make it pretty, save it as a .jpg and voila! You have a Pinterest image.  You can use Microsoft Word to create a basic image, or a free online photo editor such as the one I used to create the above image: http://pixlr.com/editor/ You can also use PhotoShop or Pixlr to add quotes to your own pictures. One popular technique is to create a collage of inspirational words and quotes. This is a fun and easy task to create in a program such as Pixlr. If you aren't so artistically or technologically inclined, you also could have someone else mock something up for you.  Lastly, you can draw your own pictures. Freestyle a cupcake. Make a funny cartoon. These images can be very simple. Stick figure cartoons can say whatever you need them to say to promote your business. Open up a free drawing program like Sketch & Paint on OneMotion.com http://www.onemotion.com/flash/sketch-paint/ and go to work. Save a as .jpg and then download into Pixlr to add text. It's fun to get in there and just start creating. See what comes. If an idea for the "perfect image" for your Pinterest board pops into your head, open up Sketch & Paint and see what you can come up with. Always remember that simple if fine and often better.  5. Creating Polyvore Boards Polyvore can serve as your endless source of original content. You can create original sets, post those sets on your site, and then promote those sets on Pinterest. In this way, Polyvore becomes an endless and beautiful tool. Let's explore all the ways in which we can use this beautiful tool to bring traffic to your site. Source: Pinterest Traffic | |
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