While Pinterest is a visual delight and it’s great to share other people’s content, the real power comes in when you upload your own creative items. Pinterest allows you to upload links to websites, blogs, videos, and photo sites. In my post yesterday, I showed you how to get your account setup and get your display boards ready to go. Today, I want to show you how to upload your own content.
Adding Pinterest Content
The first thing you’ll want to do is add their “Pin It” button to your browser menu bar. Once you install the button, you can grab an image from any website and add it to one of your pinboards.
The easiest way to do this is navigate to this page: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/
Click and grab the pin it button and drag it to the menu bar in your browser. Pinterest has a short video on the procedure if you have problems. Once the button is installed, navigate to a webpage that contains a graphic that you want to share. For this short tutorial I’ll use a page from my blog that contains a couple of graphics.
One area that seems to be of interest to the Pinterest community is organization. To share my daily planner with my audience I navigate to that page in my browser.
Now we click on the Pin It button we have saved in our browser’s toolbar
This opens the graphics selector box…
Since Pinterest will pull up all of the graphics saved on the page, you’ll need to select the one you want to use. In this case we select our daily planner graphic.
This opens a selection box.
We need to select which “board” we want to save to and include a helpful description for Pinterest users. In this case we’ll save it to the “Downloadables” board with a description of “Top Six Daily Planner.”
This puts it on our board along with any other graphics we have shared.
That’s all there is to it. Now when Pinterest users click on their board they will see your graphic listed along side all the others. Here is what My Board looks like.
If a user clicks on the picture it will open the graphic in a bigger box.
From this page, if the user clicks on the graphic they will be taken to the web page. They can also email the link, tweet it to friends, or share it with their Facebook friends. All in all a great way to get visitors back to your website and to share your content via Twitter and Facebook.
My traffic has exploded since I started sharing content. The best links are those that will be of interest to women, since Pinterest is currently has 80/20 ratio of women followers. Topics like diet, exercise, fashion, travel, and household organization are very popular. Be sure to sign up soon and get pinning!
Tomorrow we’ll look at Pinterest for Bloggers…
Question: Have you added Pinterest content yet?
