Pinterest Kickstart

by Heather Morris & David Todd

reviewed by Anita Edge

Like most Pinterest books, this one covers the basics of how to set up an account, how to pin, and tools for creating images and monitoring Pinterest activity. I found a few good tips I hadn’t seen before, but otherwise this book covered tools in a bit less depth than other books.

My rating of  Pinterest Kickstart went south when I got to the section covering practical uses for Pinterest. The authors suggested using Pinterest to plan shopping lists, club meetings, curriculum, careers, reading lists. I would never use Pinterest for such tasks – there are far better, more efficient tools. My reaction to this section was that this book was written for people who have nothing to do. I was bored and felt their suggestions were shallow and impractical.

One exception was the idea to use Pinterest and smart phones for a scavenger hunt. This was clever and they gave good guidelines on how to run the event. I haven’t seen this anywhere else.

This morning I was checking out my Pinterest feed for Denver Green Chili. I zeroed in on a gorgeous slow cooker yam recipe – perfect for Thanksgiving. I am always looking for great slow cooker recipes … and so are my readers.

This recipe was a repin of a recipe on the site SlowCookerfromScratch.com. Right away I wanted to check out the Pinterest boards belonging to Slow Cooker from Scratch, so I went to the web site and looked for the “follow me on Pinterest” button. I was pretty sure I wanted to follow this pinner!

The site is a gold mine of crockpot recipes with beautiful photos and a “pin it” button above each photo. At the top right I saw these standard social media buttons.

I clicked on the Pinterest button, expecting it to take me to the boards and profile for Slow Cooker from Scratch. Instead, the link was to http://pinterest.com/source/slowcookerfromscratch.com/.
This means it was showing me all the images pinned (mainly by visitors) from the site – not the Pinterest account itself. That was of no help to me – I wanted to find the Pinterest account so I could follow it!

In order to find this elusive pinner, I googled “‘slow cooker from scratch’  Pinterest” and the link I wanted came right up. It turns out that “Slow Cooker from Scratch” was one board in the Pinterest account belonging to Kalyn of Kalyn’s Kitchen. The actual Pinterest account is at https://pinterest.com/kalynskitchen/.

I might want to follow Kalyn (all her boards) or just her Slow Cooker from Scratch board. She could have made it easier for me to follow her by having the Pinterest button link to
https://pinterest.com/kalynskitchen/. If you copy and paste the button code from http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/, that is the exact link you will get.

The Pinterest button or Follow Me on Pinterest button is just an image with a link, so Kalyn could have set it up to go straight to the link for the board at https://pinterest.com/kalynskitchen/slow-cooker-from-scratch/.

Kalyn could have even put two buttons on her site, “Follow Me on Pinterest” and “Follow My Slow Cooker from Scratch Board on Pinterest.” That way, I could easily pick one or the other.

Think about exactly what you want your site visitors to do, and – please – make it easy for them. Remember, I’m trying to follow you!

I’m handing you the simplest Pinterest strategy designed to get you real results for your business.

Why? I’ve researched Pinterest and many Pinterest training programs, full of great information. Most tell you that you need a strategy, then give you lots of things to do without a clear, overall plan, just tips in no sequence. Most often the results are mixed and disappointing at best. So I’ve set out a step by step plan, each pin-tactic supporting the overall strategy.

You will be receiving emails with detailed explanations of each step over the next 2 weeks.

Just go through these basic steps to build your Pinterest presence to effectively help your business – you only need to spend a few hours a week. Follow this plan on schedule, and you will see significant results in a few months.

Your Streamlined Pinterest Strategy

Lay the Foundation – 1 to 3 days

1. Your Pinterest Profile Checkup. [< 1 hour]
   Is your profile properly set up to promote your business?
2. Your Pinterest Board Checkup.  [< 1 hour]
   Do your boards effectively represent your business, products and services? Do they also address related interests for your target audience? Do they engage and entertain?
3. Updating your Pinterest account. [2 hours]
   If you haven’t yet, you need to convert your Pinterest account to the new Business Account format. You also need to verify your domain. Neither is urgent, but should be done within a week or two. Now make sure your website/blog is Pinterest-friendly. Add “follow me on Pinterest” and the Pin It button to your website/blog. Make sure your site has lots for you and others to pin.
4. Find people to follow. [2 to 4 hours]
   Sounds easy, but if you want a high-leverage strategy, you need to execute specific steps that connect you to influential people in your industry and niche. This will escalate your results while reducing the time you need to spend on Pinterest.

Build Your Community – ongoing

5. Your daily plan. [15 to 30 minutes, daily or every other day]
   You only need to spend 15 to 30 minutes a day on Pinterest, but how you spend that time makes all the difference. Working this step exactly is key to results about 3 months down the road.
6. Your tailored strategy [2 to 3 hours]
   2 to 4 weeks after starting Your Daily Plan.
   Here you take the observations and statistics from working your plan for a few weeks and lay out the exact steps for taking your Pinterest results to the next level.
7. Your Daily Plan, Upgraded. [15 to 30 minutes daily]
   This is a refined version of your daily plan, tailored by the last step. You are moving on from semi-random pinning to more strategic pinning that helps you develop key relationships.
8. Implementation of full analytics. [1 to 2 hours]
   You have been noting which boards and pins create the greatest effect already, but closer monitoring of key analytics is now called for if you want to take your results to the next level.
9. Website / Marketing Strategy / Pinterest Strategy Tuneup. [4 to 8 hours]
   Now it’s time to step back and look at your entire business with its online presence and social media strategy as a whole. Here you optimize your integration with other social networks for even bigger impact.

You might approach this like an exercise program. Commit to following this strategy to the letter for at least a month. Remember, it takes at least 21 days to change a habit or create a new habit. After a month, interacting on Pinterest should have become a pleasant part of your routine.

Ready to start? Follow this link to Your Pinterest Profile Checkup to get the ball rolling!

Please leave comments and email us to let us know how it’s going. Happy Pinning!

What steps are needed before you step out onto the baseball diamond for your first official game? You need to acquire the basic skills (throwing, catching, batting) and you need to put on the uniform.

When you set up your profile, you were putting on your uniform. To acquire the basic elements (i.e., skills) to start playing the game, you need to set up your boards. If you follow Pinterest’s directives, you would use the default boards and just start pinning. That’s like running out on the field and chasing after any ball in play regardless of the position you are supposed to be playing.

Just as you must assume a specific position on your team in order to play baseball, you need a basic strategy to your boards in order to interact meaningfully with others on Pinterest. What do we mean by a strategy?

Basic Strategy Building Blocks

Before you begin actively networking on Pinterest, you need about a dozen well thought out boards, each with at least a half dozen pins. You want to look like you are in business, not like you are just getting started. Here is what your boards might look like:

1. One to three portfolio/showcase boards that show off your product or service. For a non-visual service like financial education, consider using videos.

2. Who is your target audience? What do they care about?
- for children’s toys, mothers of pre-school and grammar school age kids.
- they care about child education, nutrition, family activities, getting time for themselves, children’s parties, child safety, etc.

3. Are there related audiences?
- If you have created your own line of children’s toys, you may want to attract retail stores that carry children’s toys. Many merchants have attracted new distribution channels through Pinterest.
4. Are there events that appeal to your audience(s), either national or local?
- Scenes from events can be compelling, and you may be able to get visibility for your business through the boards and social media of those events.

Did You Do a Good Job Setting Up Your Pinterest Account?

Check it out using this checklist to make sure you are on the right track.

Pintactics Optimization Checklist:

1. Naming:
   Does your first name, last name best suit your business? Does it communicate your brand? You can change this – you just can’t change your username. Note that a business name can
   be put in these fields. For instance, ours is “First name: Pintactics  Last name: .com“, username is pintactics.You also need to take into account your username; your username will be your account url and should either have your company name (brand) or core keywords. Google will index this!More examples:
   Whole Foods Market – username = wholefoods, first name = Whole Foods, last name = Market
2. Description and Keywords:
   Does your account description clearly communicate what you do? Would someone seeing that description for the first time get it?Have you conducted a complete keyword analysis? Have you identified your top dozen keywords? How about very specific long tail keywords? Save those long tail keywords for a few of your boards.Your profile needs to communicate to humans and also must have your top 2 to 3 keywords.  For example, here is the Whole Foods profile:
   “Wow! What a ride. Back in 1980, we started out with 1 small store in Austin, Texas. Today, we’re the world’s leader in natural & organic foods, with more than 310 stores in North America & the U.K.!”
   Note how the first sentence appeals to humans, but their profile also includes their major keyword phrase, “natural & organic foods.”
   
3. Social Media:
   Are your social media links there? These are little icons beneath your description. You should definitely have links to your other social media profiles.
4. Link to your Website:
   Is there a link to your website? It appears as a globe icon beneath your description; this changes to the url once you verify your domain. Remember, this link is the only obvious way for visitors to directly check   out your company. Of course, you should also be pinning images from your site, which will also create links to your site.
5. Domain Verification:
   Have You Verified your Domain Name? Pinterest recently added domain verification to fight fraud and spamming, and verification adds to your credibility. Here are instructions on how to verify your domain.
6. Branding:
   How well does your profile image reflect your business? When you comment on someone’s pin, this image shows up as a thumbnail. Does that thumbnail convey what you want? If you are using a logo that becomes unrecognizable as a thumbnail, you may want to have a simplified version designed.

Did your Pinterest account pass all these steps?

If so, you are halfway to presenting a professional image. Next you need to establish a focused, yet diverse set of boards and populate them with enough pins to establish credibility. Yes, we will walk you through that also – just go to Your Basic Board Strategy.

This is a presentation from Phyllis Khare where she interviews Kristin Porter about her astounding results from using Pinterest. A few months after starting her Pinterest account, Kristin’s site went from about 6,000 views a month to over 100,000.

Like all wildly successful social networks, Pinterest has become a hotbed for spammers.

And You could be an unwitting accomplice! You could be spreading spam unknowingly. How? By repinning without checking the images you are pinning.

What the spammers often do is pin or repin an image and then change the link for the image so that it goes to porn, a get rich scheme, or some other spam.

Then you come along and repin – yes, the image and its spam link can go viral and promote that spam all over the universe.

So …. as a standard practice, everytime you repin an image, be sure to view your repin and then click on it to see if the backlink goes where it’s supposed to.

Pinterest is a social network, got it? Social Network! That means you go there to socialize. People don’t want to be bombarded with your pitches!

Can you make an exception? Of course! There are exceptions to everything!

Here are some basic guidelines to live by when it comes to pinning:

• Is it entertaining?
• Is it inspiring?
• Is it in any way enriching or just somehow worth viewing?
• Would you want to share it with others? Do you wish others would share it with you?

If so, who cares if it is an ad??? Here is an example that has been  viewed on YouTube over 5 million times. I predict we will see more video ads like this … and they will be shared on Pinterest. BTW, I’m pinning this on my “Awesome Advertising” board.

Part 2 of 2 (see part 1 here)

Do you know what “brandjacking” is? Per Wikipedia, “Brandjacking is an activity whereby someone acquires or otherwise assumes the online identity of another entity for the purposes of acquiring that person’s or business’s brand equity.”
On the web, brandjacking first appeared as the purchase of obvious corporate domain names by individuals not affiliated with the businesses. In 1994, Joshua Quittner, a writer for Wired, discovered that McDonalds.com was available and the corporation had no plans to buy it. So Quittner bought it himself and published an article alerting companies nationwide that their domains were in jeopardy. For years after, well-known names and brands were often registered by individuals hoping to make a profit; and some companies even registered domains of their competitors.  Internet law has advanced to reduce this risk, but this danger still exists.

The use and ownership of your business name and brand now goes well beyond domain names and into social media. How many of you have tried to set up a Facebook business page with your company name only to find it was already taken? This is very, very common.

Let’s take a look at how this issue pertains to Pinterest. The other day, I ran across an interesting Pinterest account. I have a website, denvergreenchili.com, and a Pinterest account for it. Both focus on recipes and particularly on cooking with chiles. I was searching on Pinterest for chef superstars to follow, particularly ones who use chiles and cook Southwestern food; so I searched people for “Bobby Flay,” a Food Network superstar known for his chiles. The very first result Pinterest showed me was this site:

The username on this account is “bobbyflay.” The first + last name is “Bobby Flay.”  All the boards refer to bona fide Bobby Flay properties – his restaurants, cookbooks, and recipes. The profile photo is a headshot of Bobby Flay. I followed this account believing I was following Bobby Flay.

The only sign that this is not actually Bobby Flay is the disclaimer in the description, “This is not an official Bobby Flay account.” Perhaps this is just an enthusiastic fan. There is no sign that the account owner is trying to profit by usurping Bobby Flay’s name. It is possible that he could, though. Perhaps he is seeking to build a huge following before he tries to monetize.

Could this somehow be affiliated with the real Bobby Flay? If you look at the official website, bobbyflay.com, you will see that Bobby Flay appears to have no presence on Pinterest. There is no “follow me on Pinterest” button and no “pin it” buttons.

The big warning here for you, as business owners, is the username. The username is the only part of the profile that must be unique – unique in the same way that a domain name or a Facebook business page name must be unique. And this individual now has the username “bobbyflay,” so if Bobby Flay later decides to set up a Pinterest account, he will find his name is owned by someone else.

Have you been postponing the use of Pinterest for your business? Do you have just a personal account? Remember, not only can someone else take the username you would want; they can also simulate your brand and siphon off traffic and potential buyers or clients.

To get your business presence on Pinterest going quickly, just download and fill out the Pinterest Quick Start Workbook. With just a few hours using the workbooks and setting up your business account, you can secure your business and have a respectable presence on Pinterest.

Food Network and Food.com, both owned by Scripps, have shown us just how powerful Pinterest can be for boosting traffic and the bottom line. In May alone, Food Network drove over 305, 000 visitors and Food.com sent more than 445,000 visitors to their respective websites from Pinterest. For both sites, sales on their websites have increased accordingly.

Pinterest is now sending more traffic to Food Network than Yahoo or Bing. Some individual pins have been pinned over 500 times. Food.com boasts 2 chicken recipes on Pinterest that together have driven over 700,000 page views to their site.

These phenomenal results are a testament to more than the power of Pinterest; Food Network and Food.com are working a clearly defined strategy. Let’s take a look at the key components:

1. Understanding their audience, monitoring what they respond to, and addressing their interests from the audience perspective.
2. Treating their audience as a community and fostering that community. Food Networks boards focus on “Let’s …,” such as “Let’s Get Healthy,” “Let’s Share,” “Let’s Watch,” “Let’s Celebrate: Spring.” Their boards range from solutions to everyday problems to inspirational recipes.
3. Cross promoting with the newsletter. For both sites, their newsletters have been around far longer than Pinterest. At the same time, Pinterest introduces new subscribers to the newsletters.
4. Monitoring stats for power pinners and cultivating the relationship. Food.com established who its power pinners were, then followed them, began liking them and repinning them, and @messaging them.
5. Cross promoting with other social media networks. Using its other social networking platforms to promote Pinterest has produced significant results for Food Network. One Facebook call-out brought in over 3,000 new Pinterest followers. Additionally, a call for new board ideas on Twitter produced 1,000 recommendations from fans.

Note that there is a difference between automated social media integration and cross promotion. Both Food Network and Food.com are using social media for specific strategic cross promotions. This takes careful planning as opposed to using tools to automatically posting all pins to Facebook or Twitter.

With the payoff realized by these two food sites, we can expect their strategies and relationships with viewers evolving. “It’s fun to watch how Pinterest changes on a daily basis,” said Mark Levine, VP of Emerging Brands at Food.com. “It makes stars of our recipes over night. It is almost like an informal focus group that helps shape our ideas of what people are looking for.”