Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business by Karen Leland.

One of the hottest and fastest growing social networking sites is Pinterest. A good number of people haven’t heard about this unique site. If you like pictures, you will love Pinterest. If you like to scrapbook, you will love Pinterest. If you like to create vision boards, you need to check out Pinterest.  If you want a unique and visual way to reach potential buyers – you need to learn more about Pinterest.
On the surface Pinterest looks like it is just a place to share your pictures and to trade or collect recipes. But there are very real and very effective business promotion options on Pinterest. However, you must know what you’re doing and how to utilize this website. That’s why you need to learn more about Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business by Karen Leland.

Why You NEED to Learn More About Pinterest - 

Pinterest has over 10 million users and is the fastest growing social media site in history. Beyond that, the various and sundry stats that are shaping Pinterest include:

• A review of Google Display Network Ad Planner, a free tool for building online media plans, shows that 72 percent of Pinterest users are female, and 66 percent of those are age 35 or older.
• A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey of US adults found that nearly 20 percent of women using the internet are on Pinterest.
• According to Experian, a global information services company, the average amount of time visitors spend surfing the Pinterest site is an hour.

If these statistics don’t make a small-business mind sit up and take notice, nothing will.

About Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business

Whether you think Pinterest is the hottest thing since sliced bread and you know you need to be on it or you’re already a member and looking to achieve peak performance, it’s the aim of Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business to help you use Pinterest to its maximum capability.

The book aims to provide both beginning users and seasoned veterans with the ability to find their specific area of interest “at a glance.”  It uses step-by-step how-to, sidebars, examples, case studies, expert interviews, and tip sheets to show you how, from setup to strategy, you can use Pinterest for your promotional, branding, and marketing objectives. To this end, the book explores:

• The ins and outs of signing up and getting started on Pinterest
• Building boards that get noticed, drive traffic, and convert fans into customers
• Creating your Pinterest community through high-engagement activities, contests, social media outreach, and smart pinning strategies
• Specific marketing applications of Pinterest to small businesses, from architecture firms to theater companies
• Strategies for becoming a power Pinterest user and creating an enthusiastic following
• Best practices for pins that promote, including image optimization, consistent branding, social media integration, and high-value content
• Pinterest etiquette
• A plan to implement all the “to-do” items you generate out of this book.

Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business aims to provide both beginning users and seasoned veterans with the ability to find their specific area of interest “at a glance.” It uses step-by-step how-to, sidebars, examples, case studies, expert interviews, and tip sheets to show you how, from setup to strategy, you can use Pinterest for your promotional, branding, and marketing objectives.

7 Ways To Increase Your Pinterest Following

Excerpted from the new book

Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest For Business

What pushes one person or companies Pinterest past unknown to being a star player? In short it’s your ability to curate and promote content that is meaningful, attractive, social media friendly, and on message with your brand.   To build up a bigger audience on your Pinterest put these 7 strategies in place.

1. Build More Niched Boards

Take a look at the most popular players on Pinterest, and it will become clear they have a plethora of boards, usually between 50 and 100, on average. It’s also obvious that those same users have gone to great efforts to make their boards as niched as possible so they stand a better chance of being found (and followed) by a targeted audience. For example, if you’re a cookbook writer, a single board named “desserts” that features all manner of sugary goodies would work, but you might draw more followers if you took that same board and split it into four:

• Pies and cakes
• Cookies and bars
• Chocolate
• Ice creams, sorbets, and puddings

By refining your boards to be more relevant to the people who are the most interested in those specific topics, you increase your chances of getting followers.

2. Jump on the Trending Topics Bandwagon

People, places, and events that are popular at the moment make great bait for finding new followers. Topics that are trending will be getting keyword-searched on the site, and if you have a pin that fits, you stand a good chance of picking up some of that traffic. Reachli.com says that pins related to trending topics see an average 94-percent increase in click-throughs. So it pays to pay attention to the trending topics on Pinterest and to what’s trending on other social media sites. A few great resources include:

• http://trendsmap.com/ provides a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world
• http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends shows the current hot searches in the United States

Post to Your Most Popular Boards

For those boards of yours that have a significantly larger following than others, post with slightly more frequency. Since more people are following these boards, your chances for a higher rate of repins—and hence new followers—is greater. 

3. Follow High-Profile and Highly Relevant People

While the criteria for whom you follow should first and foremost be the relevance of their pins to your business and brand, there’s a case to be made for having at least 10 percent of whom you choose be the big dogs in their fields. By following these power players, you increase the chances that they'll follow you back, repin, like, and comment on your images, and give you greater exposure to their large followings.

4. Use Keywords in All Your Pins

Paying attention to SEO is a significant part of pinning. The more on target you are with the keywords you use in your boards and pin descriptions, the more likely you are to draw followers searching for and interested in those topics. 

5. Promote Pinterest with Your Email Newsletter

Given the stringent no-spam requirements that exist for email marketing today, it’s a safe bet that the people already on your distribution list want to hear from you. Several ways to build your Pinterest following with a newsletter include:

• Announcing your presence on the site in a regular newsletter you send and encouraging readers to click through and follow you.
• Sending out a pithy, photo-heavy announcement about your Pinterest, inspiring your tribe to find out more.
• Enticing readers to visit your Pinterest by placing a Pinterest icon that links through to your page on all email newsletter communications and featuring a “hot” pin or two you’ve recently posted.

6. Add Pinterest to Your Email Signature Line

You have the opportunity with every email you send to anyone—client, potential client, friend, colleague, stranger you just met on the airplane—to promote your Pinterest and gain followers. Simply add the dedicated URL of your Pinterest to the end of your signature line, where the links to your other social media (website, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) live, and allow people to follow you with a single click.

7. Reciprocate

A good best practice is to always check out a new follower, or someone who has liked or repinned one of your images, and consider whether you want to follow them back. Some of the criteria to take into account include:

• Are they a major player in the same space? If so, consider following them, since your audiences are likely to be the same.
• Are they pinning interesting, beautiful, or highly informative content? If yes, they're worth following as a regular resource for repinning.
• Are they someone on whose radar you'd like to be? Following someone increases the chances they'll follow you back and gives you regular opportunity to comment, like, and repin their images.

A blurb about the book and the author

Pinterest is a social bookmarking site that allows users to create a visual, online pinboard with images they love organized around topics of their choice by category. It’s the fastest growing social media site in history, the third-largest network after Facebook and Twitter and has over 25 million members and 10 million unique visitors a month. 

The most recent studies indicate that nearly 20 percent of women using the Internet are on Pinterest, 72 percent of Pinterest users are female, and 66 percent of those are age 35 or older, and the average amount of time visitors spend surfing the Pinterest site is an hour.

Karen Leland, author of the new book “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business,” has created a comprehensive and easy-to-use guide to hitting the road running and quickly making Pinterest into a valuable source of prospects, promotion and profits.  

Karen Leland is the bestselling author of 8 business books including the recently released Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest For Business, which can be purchased at http://bit.ly/Amazonbook. She is the president of Sterling Marketing Group, where she works with small businesses and Fortune 500 on building stronger personal and team brands. She writes the Modern Marketing Blog at www.karenleland.com. 

She is a regular speaker for business groups and has spoken for the Young Presidents’ Organization, American Management Association and Direct Marketing Association, among others. Karen is a frequent guest of the media and has been interviewed on “The Today Show,” CNN, CNBC and “Oprah.”

She writes a regular branding and marketing column for Entrepreneur.com and has been published in Woman’s Day, Self, The Los Angeles Times and others. Her latest book is “Entrepreneur Magazine’s Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business.”

 “Great business brands are about telling compelling, congruent stories, and Pinterest is at its core about storytelling in pictures,” says Leland. “Pinterest has tapped into this visceral lover of visuals, and no small business, entrepreneur or corporation can afford to miss the boat on bringing what they offer beyond words and into images.”

About Ultimate Pinterest Guide for Business

“The Ultimate Guide to Pinterest for Business” is designed to help businesses use Pinterest to its maximum potential. The book provides both beginning users and seasoned veterans with the ability to find their specific area of interest “at a glance.” It uses step-by-step how-to, sidebars, examples, case studies, expert interviews and tip sheets to show how, from setup to strategy, to use Pinterest for promotional, branding and marketing objectives. 

The book explores the ins and outs of signing up and getting started on Pinterest and how to create boards that get noticed, drive traffic and convert fans into customers. Special chapters are devoted to creating a strong community and enthusiastic following through high-engagement activities, contests, social media outreach and smart pinning strategies.

In addition the book outlines specific marketing applications to small businesses, from architecture firms to theater companies.