Letters From Dan

So I’ve figured out a little something with Pinterest. It’s not rocket science and it isn’t going to blow you away, but I bet  you’ve neglected it and I bet you’re going to be really happy to start doing it again.

And this concept is the same for YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and any other image based account that ties into Twitter.

The concept started to sink in a bit after seeing the “likes” that Crystal Collins of TheThriftyMama.com was getting on her Instagram account. It took a bit for it to sink in, but then it all made sense.

For instance take a look at Stabiano on Instagram. He’s got 35,353 followers of his Instagram photos. And Yaron007 has almost 6,000 followers for the same reason. That reason is right here in this picture.

What is a Marketing Matrix?

Before you get too far into this Pinterest marketing article, I want to explain the kind of marketing matrix I promote. One of the hard things about marketing online is exposure and links. Building a quality marketing matrix makes that a bit easier. The idea is simple, find five people in a similar or related niche who are interested in marketing their site and agree to help each other.

It’s hard to find 5 people that you can really work well with, so it may take involvement in 3 or 4 groups before you put together one that works efficiently. In a matrix each person agrees to help the others in the group market what’s important to them that week. So in a six week period someone new is helping to market your projects to their audience for 5 weeks. Take a look at the matrix below:

I got this question via email today and thought it was probably a universal question:

Question: How could I utilize this for my local lawn mower repair business or my local taxi business?

Answer: Let’s break down the value of Pinterest to local businesses into two sections. First let’s discuss the SEO benefits, and 2nd let’s discuss the community engagement

Local Business SEO

I hate to break this down into two parts, but Pinterest pins can be found by searchers on Google. And they can help your website’s rankings improve.

After learning how to pin pages without images, we realized that an entire campaign could be built on Pinterest – not previously imagined.

Users of our Marketing Calendar Blueprint product know that the marketing of a campaign is only part of the overall business marketing calendar. Determining when that campaign should start and stop, integrating that campaign with SEO, buyer mindset and 3 other factors were important as well.

The addition of Pinterest to that matrix provides additional traffic, insurance against SEO changes, a method of capturing user intelligence like never before available. and the ability to repurpose images one more way.

Taking cues from Chapter 3 in the Marketing Calendar Blueprint, let’s look at Google Trends to see when we should start and end a campaign for “4th of July Party Ideas”. You can see that 4th of July search starts in June and ends on July 5th or 6th. You can also see

Holy Moly! Did you know you could pin pages without pictures?  Did you know you could pin images on Facebook? Did you know that after you pin something you could change the location that users land when they click on the pin? While testing  out images based on my “how to make images go viral on Pinterest post”, I learned a few new things.

How to pin pages without pictures

So the basic idea of Pinterest is to categorize things that you like and find out in the world wide web onto your Pinterest wall. When you find something cool, you “pin” it. That means Pinterest goes to that webpage and finds an image it will use to represent that page on your board. In the end you have a wall full of images that are are really just links to webpages. BUT. . .

Pinterest gives you a little control over these pins. When you hover over the image, a pop up “Edit Pin” button becomes visible. When you click this button, you can edit the description, change the board it is categorized on AND you can edit the link. That means you can change the link.

I thought it would be hard to figure out how to make photos go viral on Pinterest, but I was wrong. It’s fairly easy.  I’m not about to tell you that this is the only way to make an image go viral, because you’ll surely be able to point to another way someone else made their photo go viral on Pinterest. But you can check the “most popular pins” on Pinterest category at any time, you’ll find they all follows these rules:

Pretty

This rule is going to sit all by itself because if it’s pretty, people are going to repin it. That’s everything from a tree lined street to a fabulous bow window. But pretty doesn’t mean viral. It will certainly be repinned, but it takes more than “pretty” to get 30,000 repins.

Clarity

The image needs to clearly be about one thing. Not only that, but the caption needs to be in sync with that one thing. A beautiful sunset overlooking the harbor is great. But that won’t go viral if the caption is “I would love to be drinking a smoothie”. Cute, but that clarity isn’t there.

Take a look at this summer-y sangria looking drink. Beautiful picture of the drink. And the caption makes it even better. You look at the picture and say “that looks awesome” but then you read the caption and say “ooh I gotta pin this so I can make this later”.

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