An Internet Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest

Pinterest is the hottest little digital curation tool to come along in a while, and Internet Marketers are taking notice. Here are some ways you can use Pinterest to boost your online marketing efforts, and a bonus tip for keeping your content off of there.

Brand Awareness
To start, Pinterest can be used to share products your brand creates. Fans can then like a photo of a product, or re-pin it to their board.

While your immediate audience (followers) may be small, having the right person repin your content can be powerful (much like getting a RT from a Twitter user with thousands of followers). Tricia Meyer adds:

The key is getting others to repin. You don’t have to have as much of an audience yourself if you get OTHERS with an audience to repin for you.

SEO Benefits
Pinning a product gives you a backlink to the deep-linked product page (anchor text is the main domain name). This is a followed-link.

There’s also a no-follow link wrapped around the image. Unfortunately, the alt text of every image is “Pinned image” so that’s not giving you much value.

Affiliate Direct Linking
As Kim Rowley mentioned, if the final destination URL has your affiliate tracking information in it, you can pin your affiliate link and use Pinterest as your publisher’s site. (Make sure the program that you’re promoting allows this).

Amazon is a popular one that has your tracking link right in the destination URL. GrahicRiver is another one that you can deeplink to individual products, and maintain your affiliate tracking code (and lots of people are already doing this one).

If your tracking information doesn’t carry through, you can still pin the image from your site. Just remember it’s 1 more click before the cookie is set.

Gifts
Pinterest has a Gifts section, which will highlight products categorized by price ($1-20, $20-50, $50-100, etc). How do you get your product shown here? Simple: include the price in the description! I wish there was more to this trick, but that’s it.

Pin It Button
Don’t forget the Pin It button for your site! You specify the URL, the image URL, and can even pre-populate the description. Remember what I said about appearing in the Gifts section? Make sure your pre-populated description includes the product price!

How to Block Pinterest
Some people don’t like Pinterest because they make a copy of the original piece. I’m not sure which is worse: hotlinking the image, or copying it. If you’re one of those people who don’t want your content pinned, there’s a solution: block the user agent via .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Pinterest
RewriteRule .* - [F]
</IfModule>

If you’re running WordPress, some of this is already in your .htaccess file. Put the two lines (RewriteCond and RewriteRule) right under the “RewriteEngine On” line.

Pinterest is growing quickly (I’m seeing Server Error 500 daily now). If you run a website with Pinterest-friendly content, don’t wait any longer to learn how your audience is using Pinterest!