If you’re an affiliate marketer (or you just sell things on your blog) and you haven’t yet heard of Pinterest, brace yourself for a great new way to showcase your favorite products. Okay, so maybe Pinterest isn’t that new but it’s only been around for a short while outside of beta testing.
Yet another social network
Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. The goal of Pinterest is to connect everyone in the world through shared tastes and the “things” they find interesting. Users of Pinterest do their sharing using photos with links to the image they choose to showcase. If you are an affiliate marketer you know there is nothing better than an image and link connected by a like/favorite/thumbs up.
Visually appealing pin boards
Pinterest works like all the other social media websites where you set up a profile and follow your friends and other like minded people (Pinterest will recommend a ton of people to follow when you first set up your profile). You set up your boards by pinning images of the things that fit in the category of your board. There are several starter boards to begin with, boards such as ‘Favorite Things’, ‘Favorite Places’ and the like, or you can create your own board with your own criteria. You can pin any image, video, discussion and gift to your board. When ‘pinning’ you can link to the products you recommend or sell.
Corporate takeover
Companies are already mining the marketing capabilities of Pinterest and having great success. Real Simple magazine is already getting more traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook and Land’s End just finished up a campaign where 10 Pintrest users received $250 gift cards for creating pinboards of their favorite Land’s End products.
Of course like Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest can be a huge time suck if you aren’t careful. The nature of the site is visual which makes it extremely appealing to the eye. Certainly much more attractive than looking at yet more words that have been shortened to fit into a Tweet. I could spend hours looking at all the beautiful imagery used on each board and strive to make my own board look as attractive.
Bottom Line
If you are an affiliate marketer, small business, author or anyone who sells a product or service on the web you need Pinterest.
Pinterest is still invite only, if you would like an invite please let me know and I will send you one.
Related articles
- Pinterest: The Next Big Thing or a Waste of Time? (roundpeg.biz)
- Pinterest (karlawheaton.wordpress.com)
- How Businesses Are Using Pinterest (readwriteweb.com)
