I’ll start this post with a friendly warning: Pinterest is addictive! If you haven’t used it before, just keep this in mind when you sign up, and don’t come waving your finger at me when three days have passed and you’re still sitting in your PJs staring at your laptop. Got it? OK. Good! 
In this post:
- What is Pinterest
- How to use Pinterest
- The benefits of bloggers using Pinterest
- How to add the “Pin It” button to your blog
- How to find out if someone has pinned one of your images on Pinterest
- The Pinterest “Pin It On Pinterest” WordPress plugin
- Dealing with 404 errors (solutions kindly offered by readers – see the comments!)
- Stopping people from pinning your blog’s images & reporting copyright issues
First: What is pinterest?
Pinterest is described on its website as a “virtual pinboard” – a place for you to “collect the things you love”. Other useful descriptions you’ll hear are “online vision boards” and “image bookmarking website”.
Pinterest.com
What do you do with Pinterest?
As the descriptions above suggest, it’s a website full of images or YouTube videos that you love (each pic or flick is called a “Pin”). After registering for an invite (or receiving one from a friend), you sign in (using your Twitter or Facebook account if you set it up that way) and edit your profile. Within your profile are “boards” which – when compared to blogs – are like “categories”. They’re essentially topics that you categorise all the images that you like into. Examples could include: hairstyles, wedding gowns, shoes, decorated rooms etc.
Pinterest can also be used on your iPhone or iPad.
Pinterest boards
How do you add images to Pinterest?
You can save an image or YouTube video to the board in three ways:
1. Simply clicking on an image that’s already on the site and “repinning” it to an existing board or a new one that you create. You can also comment on the image or simply “like it”. Find images by looking at what’s on the home page, looking at what’s “popular” and driving discussion, or look at the images of other Pinterest users you are following (following is a bit like it is on Twitter, however you can follow all of the images they “Pin” or, you can follow individual boards which is akin to following individual Twitter lists).
How to "Repin" on pinterest
2. Add the “Pin It” button to your toolbar, which you then click regardless of which web page you’re surfing. To do this you first need to follow these instructions regarding installing the bookmarklet (it’s basically a matter of dragging and dropping the bookmarklet to your toolbar). Then, you simply surf the web, find an image you like, click the “Pin It” bookmarklet. Next, a box with all the the images on that page will pop up and you then select which ones you want to add to your boards.
The screen that appears after clicking the Pinterest "bookmarklet"
3. Uploading images from your computer or adding an image via its URL. This is very simple to do, and can be done by clicking on “add” then “pin” in the top right hand corner of the Pinterest website. This screen is what you’ll see:
Uploading an image / adding an image URL to Pinterest
Regardless of which option you choose, you will be prompted to select a board to add the image to, write a caption, and – if you wish – add a tag, mention a fellow pinterest user using the “@” symbol and even prices.
Adding an image to your Pinterest board
What’s in Pinterest for bloggers?
So you may be thinking, “This looks like fun, but how’s it going to help my blog?” and that’s a valid question. Here are five reasons bloggers should use Pinterest:
1. Drive traffic. People may see images from your blog on Pinterest, and then click through (if they link back to your site) for more information. This is particularly true of images of food (people want the recipe), hairstyles (people want the instructions) and crafts (people want the “how-tos”). Motivational quotes and manifestos also get “Pinned” a lot (so think about creating your own!).
2. Networking. Like any social network or forum, your profile is yet another chance for you to promote your blog’s URL. By searching for images in your blog’s niche, you can not only find people to follow with similar tastes to yours, but find people who may be interested in your blog (and want to follow you back).
3. Finding images to use. Now, this is a bit of an “iffy” issue. There are rules in regards to which images you can use on the web – most bloggers are very aware of this – but Pinterest can be a great source of pictures for your posts. Just remember to track down the owner of the image and get their permission to use it first. Everyone loves a blogger who plays nice. If Pinterest doesn’t lead you to the image source, you may want to try using TinEye to find it.
4. Promote products. Sell products via your blog? Perhaps an ebook? Pin them to Pinterest for extra promotion! However, like Twitter, don’t use Pinterest as purely a self-promotional tool. It’s OK to pin your own images or YouTube videos, but remember to also join in the “conversation” and use it for what it is meant for: LOADS of fun!
5. Bookmarking. I’ve also noticed that Pinterest is being used as a bookmarking tool. My blog’s header has been pinned by some people as way of noting blogs they like to visit and read – a bit like a favourites list.
Promote Your Pinterest Profile
Just like you would with your Twitter account or blog Facebook page, you can promote your Pinterest profile on your blog via a button (get it here). There are a few to choose from and they look like this (these link to my profile, by the way – do drop by and follow!):
How to add the Pinterest “Pin It” button to your blog
[UPDATE 1: It appears there has been a little hack created that means you can add a Pin It button automatically to every WordPress page! Good news! However, it's a bit of a geeky process, so you will probably need a geek-skill level of intermediate to implement. Check it out here. Cheers to Kate from DDGDaily for alerting me to this! This is what I've used to add the Pin It button to my blog.]
[UPDATE 2: There has been a workaround created for Blogger users too! Check it out at Kelsey Creates. Cheers to HiLLjo from Daisy To Sunflower for sharing this link with me!]
[UPDATE 3: There is now a Pinterest plugin for WordPress - see end of post]
There are three steps to adding a “Pin It” image to your blog. Unfortunately – at present – it is a manual step that you need to do for every image on post you want to encourage people to pin images from. Fortunately it’s very easy using the tool on the Pinterest website:
Creating the Pinterest Pin It button
There are five steps you need to do for EVERY IMAGE you want to sit the button next to. It’s easiest to create your post, save it as a draft and then do the following:
1. Enter the URL of the page the image will be located
2. Enter the URL of the image (right or double click the image to get this and then copy and paste it)
3. Enter a description (optional)
4. Choose your button size (vertical, horizontal with count, or horizontal without count)
5. Copy and paste the code into your post within the HTML editor. Place it somewhere noticeable. If putting more than one “Pin It” buttons per post, place them near the relative image. Like this:
How to add Pinterest "Pin It" button to your blog
That’s it! Hope you’ve found this post helpful!
[UPDATE]
How to find out if your blog images have been pinned on Pinterest
To find out if someone has pinned one of your images on Pinterest, use this URL, replacing theblogstylist.com with your own domain name: http://pinterest.com/source/theblogstylist.com/
[UPDATE]
The Pinterest WordPress Plugin
At last! Someone has created a Pinterest WordPress plugin. If you use WordPress, this plugin certainly makes adding the button to your WordPress posts easier (you do it from within each post, giving you control over which posts and images can be pinned). It looks as though it is limited to one image per post, but hey, it’s a start, right?
Another WordPress plugin you could use is Social Discussions. It adds a Pinterest Pin It Button to your posts, along with the options to also add Twitter, Facebook and G+ sharing buttons too.
And finally, if you want to display your recent pins on your WordPress blog, you might like to try the Super-Simple Pinterest Widget plugin.
[UPDATE] The best WordPress/Pinterest plugin – by far – is the Pinterest “Pin It” Button plugin. It adds a button – much like the one on all of my posts – and is easy to install and set up. Depending on where you want it to sit, it may require a little styling with CSS to get it in the right position, but you’re new to CSS the plugin developer provides examples on his website to help you on your way.
What if you DON’T want people pinning your blog’s images?
[UPDATE] That’s cool. Pinterest isn’t for everyone, and understandably, some photographers, graphic artists etc may wish to protect their copyrighted work. In this case, you need to add a line of code to the <head> section of your blog:
<meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" />
Anyone who then tries to pin an image using the Pinterest bookmarklet will be shown this message: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”
Of course, it won’t stop anyone from saving your image to their computer and manually uploading it to Pinterest. But if you need to report copyright infringement issues to Pinterest, visit their Copyright page for details on how to do this.
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