So, I started playing around with Pinterest.
If you aren’t familiar with Pinterest, here’s the official blurb:
Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.
Honestly, that doesn’t do the site justice. Once you’ve signed up with Pinterest, you can add a little button to your bookmarks toolbar (in Firefox, anyway). It’s similar to the button you get with Evernote. Anyway, when you visit a website, you can click the ‘Pin It’ button, which opens up a window on top of your tab.
Choose an image, and a little window pops up where you can ‘pin’ it to a board (or create a new one):
Once you click ‘Pin It’, the picture shows up on your board where other people can find it. Simple, right?
So, you might be asking yourself – where’s the tip here, ATFMB?
Simple. Add images to your blog posts.
Pinterest is growing beyond the initial idea for the site. More and more people are using it. Look at my boards – Technonerdology, Writing and Publishing, and Comic Book Stuff. Three things that interest me and they have already begun to gain followers – people who also like this kinda stuff. So as I’m surfing the web, going through my Google Reader or whatever, I pin interesting things to one of my three boards. Other people see those pins, click through to those sites, read that content.
But if there’s no image, I can’t pin it. Neither can anyone else. See where the tip comes in?
Example. I follow lots of different blogs on writing and publishing. Loads of great content and I’ve only been able to share a fraction of it via Pinterest due to a lack of images.
Now, you might ask where to find images. It’s not like you can just search the Internet and take the images you want (you totally can’t do that, people. Copyright…). So my suggestion is, believe it or not, Microsoft Office. If you have Office installed on your computer, and the odds are pretty good that you do, you have access to Office Clipart and images. You can also search for images using the online Office search site. This is one of the few perks, IMHO, of Office. Last, do a Google search for free images, just be careful what you click on, and make sure the licenses are on the up and up.
Anywhere, there’s my marketing tip.
~P
