Pinterest is certainly a hot topic these days as can be seen by all of the Internet marketers who are targeting the platform. To be honest it’s taken me a while to get into the whole pinterest thing, it just didn’t grab me like Facebook or Twitter did, but as an additional traffic source it needs to be investigated. The demographic is mainly women, according to statistics 75%. I’m sure as time goes by though this will level out, that is unless Internet marketers masquerade as women and I know quite a few people who do. (on pinterest at least)

I mentioned in an earlier post about sex.com achieved an incredible spike in traffic because of copying the Pinterest model and I must confess that got me curious enough to want to investigate Pinterest further. I purchased a couple of pinterest bots, but I wasn’t really grabbed by pinterest, I just associated Pinterest with women posting images of shoes and fashion items and I just wasn’t sure if it would fit into my Internet marketing software niche, but I think I just wasn’t being creative enough.

Pinterest marketing strategies
Pinterest is concerned with connecting and interacting with others and this gives us three potential ways to market our products to people.

• Re-pinning
• Commenting
• Following

Re-pinning an image gives you  the opportunity to drive traffic to your website. When you repin an image the person pinned the original is notified. We can also expect some of these people to check out our pinterest page, you therefore want to ensure that you have interesting content for visitors to read

Making comments is another strategy that can drive traffic as well, you can catch peoples interest in this way, so be sure to leave a useful comment, because nobody likes spam.

Following others on pinterest is yet another way of arousing interest and by connecting with people in your niche you can build relationships.

Working with pinterest is like any other social network, you don’t want to excessively promote yourself, you want people to get interested in you. Concentrate on building relationships and trust, try to add value and try to make yourself look as interesting as possible. Try to share a little bit of your personality and look for interesting images from your blogs to entice people to visit. Pinterest looks to be a very good marketing tool, but it needs to be used correctly.

Create videos showing how your product works so potential customers can see the further use for it. Another suggestion is to produce “How to videos” related to your niche. You can also use pinterest to announce any forthcoming events at your company.

One of the exciting things about pinterest is that your images can go viral, potentially resulting in a lot of traffic. To get pinterest working well for you though you can need to be actively engaged, this is going to take time, so where possible try to automate your activities. This is not especially easy because a bot or a program is unable to make decisions based upon looking at an image like we humans can.

One lesson I’ve learned in this game is that if you’re going to succeed you are going to need to interact and work with others. Think about the way that you communicate with other pinterest users, keep away from the hype and the sales spiel, be engaging and interesting.

One resource I found which could potentially be very useful for creating viral images is http://www.quickmeme.com/ here you can create witty quotes, combined with images which with a little creativity could get some great results.