Pinterest Ultimate Guide: How It Works, How You Can Use It

Pinterest really took off in these 5 short years, growing into a social media monster with an impressive global alexa rank (at the time of this post) of 26.

So what is Pinterest, how can you use it, how can bloggers use it, what are some of the benefits and how do you add a Pinterest share button on your website? Before I answer these questions, a warning: Pinterest is extremely addictive if you haven’t used it yet, while this guide is a great way to understanding the social network, you may fall under the Pinterest spell and end up spending a few days scouring the website and repining everything that catches your fancy.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social media bookmarking site that allows you to “pin” images around the web and sort them into categories (aka boards). It is like a shareable scrapbook, that also enables you to follow other users who you like, comment on things, tag users and share content on Facebook and Twitter.

Whatever your interest is, you can probably find it on Pinterest. Brands range from blogging and social media, animals, cars and gardening, to Technology and humor. And as you can see, the interface is very user friendly and ‘pretty’ looking. After signing up, you can easily share things, send them to your friends, invite friends and repin images that you like.

The Pinterest user interface, as you can see, is simple to use and very intuitive, all you really need to do for a basic understanding is sign up and start exploring as everything is pretty self-explanatory. Of course, there is far more to Pinterest than just repining things you like (more on that later).

Before I discuss some of the benefits to businesses/blogs, let’s first go through a quick overview of some of the things you can do with Pinterest.

Pin

A pin is an image (or video) usually from a website. For blog owners, pinning should always be done with a short description and as you can see, people can easily re-pin your image or video.

Repins, which you can think of as shares or ‘retweets’, is simply sharing an image that has been pinned by someone else and then adding that image to one of your own boards. This is particularly great for bloggers as any source links that are on the image stay when the image is repinned.

Categories/Boards

Pins are able to be organized by their category, which are called ‘boards’. You can easily add pins to your board, but can also create new boards. Not all of your boards have to be public either, Pinterest gives you the option of creating a ‘secret board’ that only you and people you invite are able to see.

You can also download the “pinit” button directly to your browser so you can share any images you find on the web.

Benefits to Bloggers

So you may be asking, “OK this is great and all, but how is it going to benefit my website?” There are a few key advantages to bloggers using Pinterest:

Develop Relationships: Pinterest is great for getting some highly engaged traffic, this allows you to build up a community and interact with those who could be potential users or customers. Just repin, ask questions and join communities and you will build trust and relationships with other pinterest users.

Get Traffic: The most obvious reason for bloggers to use Pinterest. Pinterest can be (with the right link) a major driver of traffic to your blog or website. Simply repin an article you think others will enjoy (to the appropriate board) and hope for it to go viral.

Increase Your Visibility: Pinterest is able to assist you in gaining exposure. Easily share your work, offer some useful tips and resources and slowly start to position yourself as an expert in your field.

Link Building: Every time someone repins one of your pins or pins something on your site, Pinterest automatically pulls the image from your website and the website link. If one of your pins gets ripinned dozens or hundreds of times, that builds up some juicy backlinks. Searchengineland actually has a great post on that.

Promote Your Pinterest Profile

Similar to YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, you are also able to promote your Pinterest profile on your website via a widget. Most premium WordPress themes come with ‘built-in’ social media profiles that enable you to connect your profiles to your visitors on your website, if you have a free theme or non-WordPress blog then you can get your own Pinterest button on this page.

Add Pinterest To Your Website

Adding a ‘pin it’ button to your webpages is a cinch. You do it the easy way and simply install a social sharing plugin such as this one, to your WordPress website.

You are also able to manually add a pin it button to your blog. This is also easy to do and Pinterest provides a simple way to create your own pin-it button. First head over to the Pinterest pin it button page.

Next click on the make a pin it button and adjust the settings on the next page.

Simply adjust how big you want your pin it button, the shape, the color and copy the code, adding it onto the webpage you want your pin it button to show up on.

If you are an individual running a blog or a business, Pinterest will almost certainly have something for you, whether that be winning over potential customers, building backlinks to your website, or simple driving traffic, the benefits for blogs and businesses are endless.

So what are you waiting for? Get pinning, get liking, build some online relationships and better the visibility of your business or website.