Jentan Bernardus

Since Pinterest’s emergence as a popular social network in early 2012, SEO and marketers have been asking the same question: what’s the best approach to increase both traffic and links to my site?

First of all, we have to look at the demographics behind Pinterest itself. In the past month, Pinterest has grown to over 10.4 million registered users, 9 million monthly Facebook-connected users, and 2 million daily Facebook users. Can the site sustain this growth in the coming months? I believe so. But in this melting pot of users, there’s one thing that stands out: the site is nearly 97% females.

If you are a male marketer that finds himself unable to talk to or relate to females, not to worry. First of all, females on Pinterest LIKE THE SAME THINGS MALES DO. That’s the first step to developing a solid Pinterest strategy. Cat pictures, rage comics, memes, and advice animals all run rampant on Pinterest in a similar matter to that of Reddit. Luckily for me, my girlfriend runs a very unique and creative online sunglasses boutique and has allowed me to test several methods on Pinterest in the past month. Through trials and tribulations, many failed posts and infographics, I believe I finally have a solid grasp on what works and what doesn’t in the Pinterest world.

Step 1 : Building Your Pinterest Followers

Just like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, or any other social network building a following is the utmost important thing. However, with Pinterest, it’s imperative that you have a following before you post any site or product related material expecting significant traffic.

How did I build my following? Simple. I created boards and pages related to humor, advice animals, travel, wedding ideas, and rage comics. I also created several pins related to a specific niche that would force users to follow my account only if they wanted to see similar content again. The best example would be my girlfriend’s “Hot Guys in Sunglasses” pinboard which received nearly 200 followers in a 24 hours period. While I’m not the buffest man in the land and have never been featured on the board, I have to admire her creativity when gathering followers. For myself, I focused mainly on my “For the Home”, “Humor”, and “Food Porn” boards to gain on average 225 followers per board. To make thing simple, a little Chrome plugin made life and pinning extremely easy. While browsing your networks in the morning, simply one-click upload anything interesting to your Pinterest boards. After 100 pins or so, it becomes habit and you will instantly see your following begin to grow.

Once you feel you have a significant following, it’s time to start with the good stuff: viral marketing.

Step 2: Creating Your Content

Before creating any viral content your marketing team should always consider the demographic of the social network they are going after. For my 8 years of marketing the majority of this time has been developing content that is favored by Digg and Reddit. While Digg is essentially dead and 9Gag contributes nothing (I’ll get to this in a later post), I’ve always found success in thinking like a Redditor. So what works on Reddit and how is it different than Pinterest? To be honest, there’s not much of a difference between the two sites. Within my first few days on Pinterest, I found myself struggling to gain “likes” and “repins” on Pinterest.

However, my girlfriend flourished by topping me with a monster shirtless picture of Ryan Reynolds (by the way, WHO LOOKS LIKE THAT) and received several hundred repins and likes. That’s when I knew it: Pinterest is just Reddit on a female level.

After I began viewing Pinterest as such, that’s when the real success started to happen.

You have 2 options for creating viral content specifically for Pinterest. I’ll give you a hint: one works and one is painfully time staking without any results.

Option 1:

Simply uploading your products and hoping that they will be shared. The verdict: it’s excruciatingly time consuming and rarely will people actually visit the product site in the first place. If your goal is to get people onto your site and interacting with your products, then option 2 is the only way to go.

Option 2:

Taking your time, thinking out the content, and creating something that will force the user to visit your page in order to see the content. So how can you ensure that people will visit your site? I found the answer very simple and in a way, cheating (I’ll call it a simple ‘Trick and Click’). After creating any infographic to be placed on Pinterest I made sure the text in the resulting pin was too small for the user to read. As you can see below, the graphic, while visually appealing, was too small for the reader to actually see.

So did the users actually click through to the actual Darkashadeonline homepage? You tell me (Edit: I only gave this 24 hours before taking a screenshot):

While some may see it as a tricky tactic I can confirm this: it works and it works extremely well. Not only did the content receive nearly 46,000 page views, but the average user spent a total of TWO MINUTES and TEN SECONDS on the site. In all my years of viral marketing, I have never, not even on the best of infographics, been able to sustain an average time of over one minute. What can we conclude from this? Pinterest users actually read the content and click around. Amazing if you consider the average Reddit user’s attention span (it’s 12-13 seconds per piece of content for me). Why is this? Well, according to SCIENCE! females have a much longer attention span than their male counterparts. After studying the analytics, I can 100% confirm that this is the case.

Finally, the last step, marketing your content.

Step 3 : Submitting on Pinterest

Like any other social network, Pinterest has a nice little algorithm to determine what will receive the “popular” status and what will fail. There are several important things to keep in mind when you submit a piece of content to Pinterest.

Rule 1: You have 10 minutes to determine if it’s going viral or not.

Within the first 10 minutes of a post any skilled marketer will be able to determine the success of the content based on the communities participation. Since there is no real way to cheat the Pinterest system (that I know of at this point) it is important that you create a funny and eye-catching title for your submission.

Within the first 10 minutes, I like to see my content with 30-40 repins before I decide to start over again.

Rule 2: You can only submit once per category.

From everything I’ve been able to tell, if you resubmit the exact URL into Pinterest after a failed attempt you will automatically be blocked from the Pinterest homepage. But not to worry, I have developed a nice little work around to give marketers a second chance. Simply upload your photo to Imgur and submit that URL to the Pinterest category of your choice. After it is pinned, “Edit” the pin and replace the URL with your original page. Success! A second chance. Feel free to repeat as many times as it takes.

Rule 3: Don’t Drown Your Followers with the Content

This rule is important because if you don’t follow it, you will be guaranteed to lose followers and potential traffic. The rule I keep is simple: one submission to one category every hour. By keeping the content spaced out you will avoid the “spam” effect and increase your chances of going viral.

Conclusion

Pinterest is an exciting site with the potential to triple in users by the end of this year. Learning early on how to properly navigate the waters early on will be beneficial to any business when Pinterest begins to grow. And if you have a boutique client and you’re not on Pinterest yet, then honestly, shame on you.

If you have any other questions feel free to email me at: colby.almond@gmail.com

Update: Nearly 60 hours later and still averaging over 130 Pinterest users on the site at any given time. Frankly, this is unbelievable.