Pinterest Archives - Page 2 of 6

6 Tips To Make Your Pins Spread Farther

December 31, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Pinterest is a rapidly growing social network, and many businesses and entrepreneurs are utilizing it to grow their presences on the web. Some businesses send out pins that are routinely seen by millions of people. Others are approaching that stage and are using Pinterest to bring in more blog traffic than ever before.

The key to getting more blog traffic from Pinterest is to make your pins spread as far as possible. You want your pins to appear on numerous boards and to appear close to the top on Pinterest’s search engine for your keywords. If you want your pins to reach out to more people, follow these six tips.

#1: Optimize your pictures.

Before you pin something on Pinterest, you need to make sure this is the type of picture that would get repinned often. The pictures that get repinned more often are the taller pictures. Having multiple colors in one picture, a 50% color saturation, less than 10% background, no faces, and smooth textures all boost your chances of getting more repins on Pinterest.

There are free online editors that make it easy to utilize color saturation, and if you are in the search for a tall picture, you can create one with PowerPoint or KeyNote by changing the dimensions of the presentation. Optimizing your pictures is important regardless of the size of your audience. Even if you only have a few hundred followers, you can still get thousands of repins. When I only had 500 followers, one of my pins got liked and repinned over 1,000 times.

The people who repinned that particular pin allowed their audiences to see the pin. As more audiences of different sizes got to see the pin, I experienced a skyrocket in repins even though I did not have a large audience at the time. Do not wait for the moment when you have a large audience to optimize your pictures. Optimize them now.

#2: Use hashtags

Ever since hashtags became very successful on Twitter, numerous social networks have adopted them. Pinterest is one of the social networks that utilizes hashtags, and just as they are significant on Twitter, hashtags are also significant on Pinterest. Hashtags boost the SEO of your pins on Pinterest’s search engine.

When someone clicks on the link to a hashtag, they are brought over to a page containing recent and popular pins containing that hashtag. If you use this hashtag in many of your pins, the people who click on the hashtag will be brought to a page that displays numerous pins, and most of them would be yours. Giving your followers another chance to see your pins will allow you to get more repins.

#3: Pin often

The more times you pin, the more people get to see your content. This method may sound like common sense, but it is a method that few people implement. Most of the time people spend on Pinterest is spent by surfing the site and not pinning any new content. Surfing Pinterest used to eat up a lot of my time which is why, with 10,000 followers, I temporary abandoned my account. No new pins came in for a while, and my traffic from Pinterest at the time was nonexistent.

Even with 10,000 followers at the time, there were some people with 500 followers getting more traffic from Pinterest than I was. Looking back, all I can wonder was what was I possibly thinking. Now I send out three pins every day, and those three pins get repins, likes, and lead people to my blog.

Some of the experts recommend pinning 10 times every day. One day, I decided to give it a try, and I got a dramatic increase in repins, likes, and blog traffic from Pinterest.

It is important to note that pinning often does not mean sending out 50 pins in five minutes and then not sending anything else out for the rest of the day. Sending pins at this frequency will annoy the followers who see them, and the people who log in 30 minutes later will not see any of your pins for the entire day.

You need to schedule your pins in advance so they can get sent out throughout the day. On a typical day, I pin at 2 pm, 4 pm, and 8 pm. I spread my pins throughout the day because I am not annoying my followers, and I am accounting for different time zones throughout the day. I schedule my pins with ViralWoot which is a free service. The free version only allows users to schedule 100 pins every month, but upgrades are available.

#4: Interact with your audience

Interacting with your audience will allow you to develop stronger connections. These people may promote your content on a normal basis. Some of the people who I interacted with on Pinterest continue to share my content, and it all started with me saying, “Thank you for sharing my content,” or something similar.

The more you interact with someone, the more that person will trust and remember you. Some of the people you interact with may decide to tell their friends about you. Some of those friends may decide to follow you on Pinterest and tell their friends about you. In this case, word of mouth marketing allows more people to know about you, and it all started with a conversation you had with one of your followers.

#5: Repin other people’s pins

Although most of the pins on your boards should be yours, it doesn’t hurt to repin someone else’s pin. When you repin someone else’s pin, you are adding content to your boards for your followers to see. In addition, the person you repinned may decide to repin and/or like one of your pins in return.

As you repin more of other people’s pins, these people may decide to promote you to their followers. If these people are not following you, some of them may decide to follow you after getting the notification that you repinned one of their pins.

You can also repin the pins your followers send. Doing this will make the follower happy to be following you, and that follower will be more likely to repin one of your pins. That follower may remember you when having a conversation with a friend. Then, your messages reaches out to another person.

#6: Promote your pins on your other social networks

There is nothing wrong with promoting a pin or board on another social network. Facebook makes it easy to promote what you share on Pinterest, and you can get some of your friends to like and repin your content. Out of all of the social networks, you have the biggest advantage on Pinterest when other people, even a few friends, repin your pins.

It is important to remember that people are highly addicted to Pinterest. That means someone who has 100 followers could potentially get 10 repins if they pin a nice looking image. On other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, getting those same statistics is close to impossible. That means even if your friends only have 50 followers on Pinterest, they could potentially get anywhere from 2-5 repins. If you get 10 of your friends to repin one of your pins, your pin can get an extra 20-50 repins from your friends’ audiences. Then, those repinners have audiences of their own. That’s how one of my pins was liked and repinned over 1,000 times even when I only had 500 followers.

The only way you get those initial repins that start the chain reaction is by promoting your pins on your other social networks and growing your audience along the way.

In Conclusion

In order to be successful on Pinterest, you need to get numerous people to see your pins and share them with their audiences. Implementing these six tips will make that type of interaction happen more often. With any success, getting your pins in front of thousands of people takes patience, but after you reach that point of being seen by thousands of people, that patience will be worth it.

Do you have a 7th tip for giving your pins more exposure?

6 Pinterest Mistakes You Do Not Want To Make If You Want A Big Audience

December 8, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Pinterest is a unique social network in its design and usability. Many brands such as Nordstrom Rack have accumulated millions of followers that, as a combined force, make pins from these brands go viral. There are marketers who are utilizing Pinterest as well, and I can testify that Pinterest is a great way to promote your content.

Although I do not use Pinterest as often as Twitter, I have been able to accumulate over 15,000 followers. Pinterest users love to share other people’s content because the social network turns sharing other people’s pins into a reward. Many Pinterest users want to have boards with numerous pins. The Pinterest board with 100 pins looks way better than the Pinterest board with only 1 pin. Having more pins on their boards allows users to create a more enticing account for potential followers.

Pinning valuable content will allow your pins to spread farther on Pinterest, but there are mistakes that may prevent you from growing the big audience needed to go viral and build an authority on Pinterest. If you want to have a big audience on Pinterest, these are the six mistakes that you must avoid.

#1: Surfing on Pinterest

The double-edged sword fact about Pinterest is that it is highly addictive. The advantage of the double-edged sword is that if you have a large audience, some of those people will scroll through your entire boards and repin everything in sight. This means more exposure for you, and in some cases, more traffic for your blog as well. The disadvantage is that Pinterest can eat away a giant chunk of your time. The Pinterest memes on the web that say things like, “I’ll be on Pinterest for a few minutes hours” are popular for a reason.

Pinterest has millions of users that could benefit from your content which means with great power comes great responsibility. If you strive to grow a big audience on Pinterest, you must spend a bulk of your time on Pinterest sending pins instead of looking through other people’s pins.

#2: Pinning numerous pins in a row

Pinning frequency is an interesting topic of discussion. When you are a newbie, it is important to fill your boards with pins. However, once you have enough boards filled with pins and an audience, you need to pin smarter. If you send out more than three pins in one minute, you are pinning too much at one time.

Pinterest users who surf see their updates on a timeline, similar to Twitter, Facebook, and most of the other social networks as well. The only difference is that Pinterest users see their timeline in the form of large pictures that take up more space on the screen than a tweet.

I recently went on Pinterest to see how pins appear on my feed. Here is what I saw

Two pictures and their descriptions
Half of an infographic
Half of two pictures and no text

I was startled to realize that I only saw five pins on my feed, and I couldn’t even see everything that three of those five pins contained. On Twitter, I typically see five tweets from start to finish. Many Pinterest users like Pinterest because of the variety it has. If you send out 10 pins in 1 minute, there is no variety. It’s all you, and that results in some people clicking the unfollow button.

While pinning constantly in a short period of time is initially a great way to get more pins on your board, it will annoy your audience. A good fix to the problem is to create a secret board and add 100 pins or more to that board before publishing it. That way, you don’t have to annoy your followers with 100 pins in a few minutes.

#3: Not taking the time to craft an effective bio

Your bio is one of the most important components on any social network or blog. It is the make or break point of your authority. People will not know anything about you until they read your bio. Sure, having pins available related to your niche does help, but since Pinterest is all about variety, you may have some boards related to your niche and some boards that have nothing to do about your niche.

An effective bio allows people to know who you are, and this clarity makes people feel more confident when they click the follow button. In your bio, it is important for you to list your expertise, accomplishments, and hobbies. I let people know that I am a digital marketing expert, but I also let people know I am a runner.

Letting people know about my expertise, accomplishments, and hobbies allows me to be compatible with more people. The more people you are similar to, whether the similarities are small or huge, the more people are going to follow you. We like to follow and listen to people who are similar to us.

#4: Not verifying your blog on Pinterest

Including your blog’s link in your Pinterest bio and verifying it on Pinterest is one of the easiest ways to get a backlink for your blog. In addition to providing a backlink, verifying your blog also gives you the checkmark that allows you to stand out from the crowd. The checkmark combined with a large audience will let people know that you are a big deal. You are verified which means you must be important.

Just as we like to follow and listen to the people who we are similar to, we also like to follow and listen to important people. Even if you have iPhones, iPads, and Macs galore, wouldn’t it be nice to meet Bill Gates. He is important, wealthy, and smart–and those are the types of people who many people enjoy listening about.

Although the checkmark may not give you Bill Gates status, it lets people know you are important. It lets people know you are worth following. It lets people know you are a valuable person in your niche.

#5: Having too many boards with not enough pins

The value of a Pinterest board is not just in the value of the pins. It is also in the quantity. The typical Pinterest user will not browse through a Pinterest board with five valuable pins as much as a Pinterest board with 500 valuable pins.

The more pins your boards have, the more someone will scroll through your board. Some of these people will repin as many pins on one of your boards as possible. Some individuals have repinned hundreds of pins from one of my boards.

Your boards need to have more pins, but it is also important to avoid annoying your followers. That is why I mentioned that pinning numerous pins in a row is a mistake before mentioning this mistake. You don’t want to send out 500 pins in 30 minutes at the cost of losing a good chunk of your followers.

#6: Not Having A Variety Of Boards

Pinterest is all about the variety. If someone searches for food on Pinterest (by the way, food pictures on Pinterest happen to be very popular), that person will see fruits, vegetables, meat, recipes, and more. When other people search for vacation destinations, they will find pictures on the beach, mountains, cities, and other places as well.

The great thing about Pinterest is that you can still let people know your expertise while pinning content related to both food and vacation destinations. Pinning content related to these two topics will result in your pins and boards related to those two topics appearing on Pinterest’s search engine.

When you are pinning about a variety of topics, you can easily let people know your expertise by putting all of the boards related to your expertise on top of your other boards. However, pinning about all of these topics will allow you to reach out to more people and grow your audience.

Some people may be skeptical because not all of these followers are necessarily targeted followers. Someone who only followed me because of my Pinterest board with cool bookshelves may not be as interested in my digital marketing articles. Growing your audience through this method has three major benefits:

You get better social proof
They are real followers
Most important of them all: You need a big audience to rapidly spread on Pinterest, and growing this type of audience will give you the leverage you need to reach out to more people. Some of the people you reach out to through this method may end up being targeted users.

Having a variety of boards will ensure that you get more followers, but you also need to make sure these boards are heavily populated with pins. My recommendation is to make sure that a majority of the boards on your account has under 20 pins. None should have under ten.

In Conclusion

Pinterest is a powerful social network that is highly addictive. Pinterest has the power to grab attention. As long as you are the one pinning content that grabs attention and not surfing, you will have the much needed time to implement the other methods and grow your audience.

Like any other social network or any blog on the web, it takes time to grow a Pinterest audience. It may take you a year to reach 5,000 followers, but each time you reach a certain milestone, it will be easier to achieve the same milestone quicker. If it took you 100 days to get your first 1,000 followers, it may only take you 90 days to get your next 1,000 followers. The reason it gets quicker each time is because you are learning new things about growing your audience and implementing them along the way.

Which tip was your favorite? Do you have any additional tips for the people who strive to grow a big audience on Pinterest?

6 Powerful Two-Sentence Tips To Grow Your Pinterest Audience

September 21, 2014 by Marc Guberti 2 Comments

There are over 70 million people on Pinterest, and the number keeps on growing as the days go by. Pinterest continues to grow, and the bigger you are able to make your audience at this stage of the game, the more popular you will be when Pinterest exceeds the big milestones such as 100 million, 200 million, or even 500 million users. Pinterest has been growing at a rapid rate, and it shows no signs of slowing down. That is why now is exactly the right time to grow your audience on Pinterest. That is why I am going to provide you with six ways for you to do that:

Pin every day. The more times you pin, the more chances you have of getting more repins and spreading farther on Pinterest.
Follow other people. Chances are some of these people will follow you back.
Create a variety of boards. This allows you to have multiple target audiences who get attracted to specific content that you pin.
Use Pinterest messaging. Pinterest messaging is a great feature to take advantage of to spread and interact with your followers, and I went more into detail on how to do that in this article.
Repin other people’s pins. Not only does this give you more variety, but some people will decide to follow you back for repinning their pins.
Use ViralWoot. ViralWoot, the Twiends for Pinterest, is a great way to build your Pinterest audience.

Those are the six ways to grow a big audience on Pinterest. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have a seventh tip? Please share your thoughts and advice below.

One Simple Way Grow Your Pinterest Audience

September 9, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There are numerous tips to get more followers as well as 100 Amazing Pinterest Tips that will show you how to really optimize Pinterest. If you do not have the time to read those two articles, you can do one simple thing to get more followers on Pinterest (you can tell it’s simple by how long this blog post is)

Being active is a big way to get more followers on Pinterest. When you are active on Pinterest, you need to be pinning the kinds of pins on Pinterest that would get more repins.

Being active is a very simple way to get more Pinterest followers. If you want to learn how to optimize your Pinterest pins and get more repins, you can subscribe to this blog (if you have not done so already) and receive the free How To Master Pinterest Video Tutorial.

Is Social Media Overrated?

August 18, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

On the social media blog of all places, responding with a big yes would be problematic. I’ll take the safe route this time and say that it depends on the individual, but I will also say that for most people, social media is overrated. Social media is a place to build connections and grow an audience. Many people use social media to procrastinate and escape their work. In this scenario, social media is completely overrated. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “You can’t escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

If you are spending more than an hour on your social networks every day, then it is overrated. That is too much time to delegate away from your work. In order to make revenue from social media, you need to have products that people would want to buy in the first place.

The worst part is that most people get addicted to the social networks. Some people are on Facebook for 6 hours every day. That’s absolutely ridiculous, especially when most of that time is you feeling bad about yourself because your friends posted pictures of themselves having a good time. Many people could write five extra blog posts every day if they cut down on the amount of time they spend on social media.

There is a way to use social networks that makes them pivotal to your success. By getting more done in a shorter amount of time and growing your audience, you will be able to tap into social media’s full potential. Some leaders got to where they are because of social media. In this case, if these people do not spend over an hour a day on their social networks, they are not overrated.

Social media has the power to grow your presence and allow you to become very successful. It can also eat away at hours of your precious time every day. With great power needs to come great responsibility. What’s your choice?

7 Advanced Pinterest Tips

August 7, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There are millions of people on Pinterest, one of the fastest growing websites on the entire web. Pinterest’s growth has led to some people growing powerful presences and audiences of over 1 million people. These same people do not have nearly as many followers on the other social networks. Some of the people with over 1 million Pinterest followers have less than 1,000 Twitter followers. Does Pinterest randomly pick names in a hat and promote those people? Not quite. These people are using Pinterest differently in a way that gets Pinterest’s attention. Then, Pinterest promotes that person’s board to a large audience. Most of these people implement seven common methods which I am dubbing the 7 Advanced Pinterest Tips.

Have multiple boards with over 100 pins. The more pins you have, the more content your followers are able to browse through. It is important to remember that some people are addicted to Pinterest. What was meant to be a 10 minute visit turns into being trapped on the site for three hours. If you have a board with over 100 pins, chances are some of your followers will go through that entire board.
Focus most of your time on one board. The board that you focus most of your time on should eventually make its way to having thousands of pins. The Pinterest Power users have many boards with over 100 pins, but the boards they focus most of their time on have over 1,000 pins. Some of these boards even have over 10,000 pins.
Pin every day. Pinning every day will allow you to be consistent. Whether you are sending out 5 pins every day or 100 pins every day, you are consistently pinning every day. When you are able to pin every day for months at a time, more people will notice, share your content, and allow you to grow.
Create group boards and be a part of them. Many of the people with over 1 million followers on Pinterest either have their own group boards or are a part of someone else’s group board. Group boards with over 100 contributors ensure that those boards are getting updated whether you are logged into Pinterest or not.
Pin about a wide variety of topics. Pin about great vacation getaways, sports legends, and other things as well. The more variety you have, the more followers you are going to get because you satisfy the desires of multiple audiences.
Focus on one niche. You can create boards on a wide variety of topics, but it is important that 80% of your pins are all based on one niche. That way, your Pinterest followers know exactly what kind of content you provide on Pinterest and which niche you fall in.
Have a story behind all of your pins. If you have a story behind all of your pins, your audience will be eager for you to come out with other pins so they learn about another story behind another pin. If the stories behind your pins are powerful, then more people will spread your content across Pinterest.

These are the seven advanced Pinterest tips that the pros use. Implementing these tips may allow you to become the next person with over 1 million Pinterest followers. What are your thoughts on the list? Do you have any additional tips? Please share your thoughts and advice below.