Internet Marketing – Drive traffic to your website with Pinterest

Internet Marketing professionals are always looking for the next big thing to promote their brands, and Pinterest is the latest online sensation for driving traffic. Over 200,000 publishers are already on board, using the site to generate 260 million unique page views a month. In January of this year, it referred more visitors to retailers than Google+ and YouTube combined, which demonstrates how effective it can be for promotions. In this blog post, you’ll learn how to advertise your business on Pinterest. Internet Marketing Tips and tricks to drive traffic to your website from Pinterest will be covered briefly.

Internet Marketing Basics on Pinterest

The obvious first step in marketing on the site is to set up an account and flesh out your company profile. Make sure to include your website’s URL as well as any associated social media profiles for your accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Once you’ve taken care of the basics, you can go about spreading the word about your brand. Pin your products to popular collections where appropriate, and network with users who have a lot of followers. The unique “Taste-makers” feature recommends curated collections to follow, so you’ll want to focus on getting your products into those collections.

Running a Contest

Easily one of the most effective ways to market your brand on the site is with a contest. Many major brands have already taken that route, including names like BMI and Whole Foods. A popular method for running a contest is with a “lottery” promotion, where users are encouraged to “pin” your products for the chance to win a prize. In such a scenario, a product giveaway is rewarded at random. Another method is to reward the user who pins a certain product the most times or drives the most page views to your site. You can look at what promotions and contests are currently running on the site’s dedicated contests section.

SEO Tips and Tricks

Like any other web portal, Pinterest presents its own Internet Marketing challenges which must be overcome by modifying SEO techniques to fully capitalize on the new paradigm it introduces. Remember that traffic for this particular platform isn’t a one-way street, so make sure to link to your profile from your website, your blog and your marketing articles. Also, keep in mind that the entire point of the site is to provide a visual experience. Don’t skimp on pictures, and make sure to include tons of photos of your product line in your profile.

One characteristic of this platform that many have already noted is its overwhelming popularity among women, 68.2% are women and 31.8% are men. That’s really more of a momentary fluke than a defining characteristic, and it should become more balanced as more men sign up. In any event, there’s no doubt that this visual pinboard is a rising star and shouldn’t be ignored by businesses for internet marketing. Using contests, promotions and clever SEO, it’s more than possible to leverage the explosive growth and forward-thinking business model of this social sharing platform to expand your visibility on the web.

Pinterest users, how would you like to see brands use Pinterest? Have you engaged with promotions and contests on this social media platform, and if so were they successful?