How to Make Money with Pinterest

If by chance you have only heard of Pinterest and don't know all that much about it, here is a quick primer on what it is.

"Pinterest is a Virtual Pinboard." Consider if you were reading a magazine and saw an picture of a great lamp that you really liked. In the good old days you could clip it out and pin it up on your pinboard. With pinterest you basically do the same thing, when you see something on the web that you like you simply pin it up on your virtual pinboard.

This gets powerful when you add social media to it. Now everyone can see all the great items you love and you can see what they like too and like anything interesting on their pinboard. As you can guess, this means that popular and interesting items can spread quickly and produce a lot of buzz. Pinterest can be used to organize a wedding, plan a party, organize recipes, and store a million other things you might want to save for later and share with people.

The essence of Pinterest is that it generates links. These links should direct people to places where you want them to go, such as your Etsy shop, eBay pages, your articles, affiliates, or your corporate website.

If you don't happen to own a business or have a shop on Etsy or eBay, don't worry. Get into writing articles on websites like this one and then take advantage of Pinterest to drive traffic to your lenses.

Ok, this is where the difficult part comes in. Stock photographs that are most commonly used on websites and articles are not very exciting and not likely to be clicked. In order for them to get some attention on Pinterest they need to be interesting and eye catching. They need to be a story in and of themselves.

If you look on Pinterest at what gets clicked on there are some definite trends. Most of this stuff comes down to old school advertising. The same pictures that get you to stop and take a second look in a magazine are the same ones that will get a second look on Pinterest.

Examples:
Good looking people (as they say, sex sells)

Cute pictures, especially babies

Funny pictures, cartoons

Beautiful Scenery

Wedding planning

Trendy items, such as jewelry and clothing (especially when combined with good looking people)

Delicious looking food

Memorable quotes, especially when combined with a good photo

High quality tattoos

1. Build pages around gift giving.
They could be for specific occasions or holidays and then use affiliate links or if you happen to sell the items, even better.

2. Find interesting trendy items and build articles around them with your affiliate links embedded.

3. Find interesting trendy items and just use your direct affiliate links.

4. Pin up the photos of items you post on your blog, Etsy , and eBay sites to generate additional traffic.

5. Pin up photos of work you do for people to drive traffic to your corporate website.

6. If you are in a business like wedding planning, make a little area on your website that showcases interesting stuff and write short articles with them. Then pin them up and generate traffic to your business.