Offer Closed
***
In just over 3 hours as I write this, today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) and one hour before the Olympics start, I’m kicking off a weekend sale for a very powerful little plugin.
In my email and post yesterday, I said that I’d realised that with the advent of some very big changes at Google how important it was to kick up your social marketing.
It couldn’t be simpler.
Not so very long ago, ranking was decided by backlinks and then by social indicators (likes, pluses, follows).
It seems that it’s the complete opposite now, and I’ll talk about this another time as it’s very important to both your business and your clients.
What I have for you today is a plugin that leverages the power of the fastest growing social network out there.
Pinterest.
The reason it’s gathered so many users is because… dare I say it?
It’s EASY and it’s FUN.
The interface (unlike G+) is nice and simple and can be picked up in minutes. It works how you expect it to work (unlike G+ – I’ll shut up about that now) and is a very nice experience all round.
You sign up, add the pinmarklet to your browser and off you go.
When you see an image or a video on the web that you like, then you can pin it to one of your pinboards. People can repin and comment on what you’ve found. You can follow people and they can follow you.
For many people it’s addictive and they want to show their friends what they’ve done.
How does this affect us?
Well, it makes it easy for us to start using the Pinterest system to market ourselves, our products and our clients.
Every time someone pins something from our site (or repins it) then you get a backlink. People will then click those backlinks to get to the original sites the image or video came from.
Because people are pinning your stuff, then all you need is a few images or videos on the site you want traffic to. It helps if they’re colourful or interesting and these pinnable items can be photographs or videos.
“But I don’t have any videos” I can hear you say. (Make some!)
But YouTube does. On every topic imaginable. And you can embed most of these on your site. 😉
The Pin-It plugin allows you to set things up so that you can add videos to any of your sites, and then add a “Pin It” button that when clicked pins the media to one of your visitors pinboards.
Pinterest believes it’s been done by the Pinmarklet in your browser.
However, the button can link to ANY URL you wish, not just the originating page. 😉
The plugin also allows you to add various styled “Follow Me” buttons to your blog so that you pick up more followers.
So what you’re doing with the plugin is reminding and encouraging people to use the “Pin It” button and add it to one of their pinboards.
You can even get the whole ball rolling by pinning the media to your own pinboards and then go commenting on and liking other peoples pins on Pinterest. Many people will click through your link to look at your pinboard as a result and may well follow you or repin some of your stuff on their pinboards. Every re-pin is a link back to the site you decided.
Apart from YouTube, the Pin-It plugin also supports Vimeo videos too, which is something the browser pinmarklet doesn’t yet do.
Okay?
Sound complicated?
It isn’t. It’s REALLY simple to do – I guarantee you that.
And if you get it right you’ll start seeing traffic back to your sites from buyers.
Because it seems that by many accounts, Pinterest is crawling with buyers. Some businesses rely solely on Pinterest traffic alone for their entire income. A click through from Pinterest is far more likely to result in a sale than from any other source. – there’s lots of reasons why and I’ll cover that another time.
All I’ll say in closing is I’m switching BIG time to social marketing.
I like to tell myself that it’s not because I’m a bit slow, it’s just that it’s only really now come of age due to the changes in Google search algorithms. Ahem. 😉
I think you should too if you haven’t been doing so already. Backlinks aren’t enough any more.
Today at 6.00pm GMT (1.00pm EST) I’m kicking off a weekend sale for the Pin-It plugin. When it’s over the price will go up immediately and I’ll be doing some updates to the plugin which you’ll get for free when they’re done.
This is your chance to get the plugin at the lowest possible price if you go for it now.
I’ll add a video later today to show you how it all works.
It’s fun and easy. 😉
-Frank Haywood
Frank:
I confess I know very little about Pinterest, but based on your post I think I might want to learn.
Question for you. You say “I think you should too if you haven’t been doing so already.
Backlinks aren’t enough any more.”
Unless I’m misunderstanding you, Pinterest is all about getting links back to your site. So it seems very backlink-focused. Did you perhaps mean to say “Search Engine rankings aren’t enough anymore”?
Thanks!
Scott 🙂
Lol! Well. That sounds about right-ish.
What I meant was relying on backlinks to increase search rankings isn’t enough any more. I’ve been experimenting with social on a couple of clients sites that got a small loss when the big update came and just by doing some really small social stuff, they got their rankings back.
The particularly nice thing about Pinterest is that apart from being a good social indicator, if you put your thinking cap on then you can start to get some viral pinning going on and pull in genuinely interested buying traffic to your sites.
-Frank
Hi Frank,
I have just purchased this little plugin as I see no end to the possibilities of using it
thanks
albert
Hi Albert,
Thanks for that, clearly you and the other people that have already purchased this plugin get it.
I took me a while to see it, but now it’s all very clear to me.
There’s no two ways about it. I see Pinterest as my #1 friend from now on with YouTube 2nd and FaceBook in 3rd place. I’ll be talking more about how I’ll be using these sites and any tools I get developed to assist me in doing that over the next few weeks.
Stay tuned. 🙂
-Frank
Before I settled down to watch the Olympic opening ceremony last night, I watched a new video that Michelle MacPhearson has just made that showed her VERY interesting and timely findings on what Pinterest can do for your page rankings. Great stuff.
She found that in an experiment to make a page rank well for one set of search terms, she (by accident) made it rank on page 1 for another set instead.
In my last few emails I’ve talked about how Google is paying less attention to just backlinks, and paying more attention to the social signals. These are things like FB likes (where it can see them), G+ likes, friends, followers etc, anything that gives a clear public signal to Google that this or that is liked by a lot of people.
Backlinks are still good, but social signals are better. Combine the two and you’re onto a winner.
What Michelle found was that an image of a pair of shoes she’d pinned was repinned by a lot of people. The page from one of her own sites that she’d pinned the image from suddenly started ranking for the caption she’d put on it rather than the text she’d optimized the page for.
Aha!
The learning from this? Google sees the text on pinned images and videos as the anchor text for the link.
(Apparently the same is true for Twitter tweets and retweets too – I didn’t know that. And I BET it’s true for comments on YouTube.)
That means if you create a viral image (funny, interesting, notable) on one of your pages and then pin it to your pinboard using a caption with keywords you want to rank for. Then with a little bit of legwork to get it all started (30 minutes a day on Pinterest, or farm it out to a Fiverr gig) you’ll start to see your image pinned and repinned and a few days later you’ll see your page start to rank for those keywords.
Is that the coolest thing ever or what?
-Frank
Just bought, looks great! Any developer rights with this?
Hi Julia,
I’m sorry I should have said. Not with this version, it’s personal use only, but v2 (free upgrade) will have developer rights. Be about a month to release of v2 as I’m compiling the feaure list now – if you have any ideas, now is the time to say. 😉
-Frank