Pinterest: Your free biz, church & org booster!

​If you thought Pinterest had gone the way of the dinosaur, nope! It’s alive, well, improved and being used around-the-clock by millions of people!

At its core, Pinterest is a search engine that finds info for you via linked images called Pins. Users can just view a Pin, or further their experience with it by clicking the Pin to visit its source, such as an eZine article, blog post, website or video.

​Users can save Pins they find to boards that keep them organized, or save their own Pins to boards to promote their own interests, businesses, hobbies, or other interests.

How does this help you?

​To gather information...

​When using Pinterest.com, you can get a broadly represented bird’s eye view of exactly what you’re looking for. You just key in whatever info you’re hunting into the Pinterest search option and your screen will populate with an amazing amount of Pins depicting linked images and (usually) textual explanation, on exactly what you’re researching, whether it’s ideas for a recipe, a bathroom remodel, building an off-grid cabin from pallet-wood or how to start an organic garden on your patio.

The topics covered are nearly inexhaustible!

​To promote information

If you’re a blogger, business owner, organizational spokesperson, church outreach minister, Pinterest is a fantastic social hub to house your information where others can easily find it. It’ll show up in specific searches as well as in general feeds that populate their screen when they visit the site.

The information is colorful, engaging, and far more fascinating than other search engines, populating your machine’s screen with row after row of ads and text with minimal visual enhancement.

Pinterest passes them by miles with their mental and visual WOW! Factor.

Like many of us, using Pinterest may steadily spark your interest in a variety of topics and genres you never considered engaging with before. You may be an avid classic car hound who has an eye-catching experience with ultra-light aircraft, or an organic gardener who ends up being compelled to give carpentry a try, and set about building their own patio with reclaimed materials.

​How Pinterest has helped me as a blogger, can help your endeavors in the same way!

​Before my health deteriorated, about a year ago, due to cancer (which is all gone and I’m about to finish up my last chemo treatment, in just a few days) I maintained a weekly publishing schedule. But, health challenges began interrupting it, and I wasn’t physically able to maintain it for many weeks. It became sporadic at best, depending on my treatment/therapy schedule and how I was feeling.

However, largely thanks to Pinterest, I still maintained at least light traffic to By the Way, and have never stopped getting traffic to my older site, flashPress. Even tho I was too ill to work, sometimes for a month or more, Pinterest kept the traffic coming. 

Too, I’ve not added content to flashPress since 2019 and it still gets traffic from Pinterest, even as I’m migrating the content to By the Way and deleting it as I go, from flashpress. That’s especially impressive!

And so, imagine your church publishes a regularly scheduled blog post on its website. If a Pin is made for the post and attached to a Pinterest Board housing linked images to the blog, you’ve just opened the doors for millions of others to learn about your church activities. In regards to church bloggers using Pinterest to promote their services, folks may see it that aren’t in your region, but they may have kith and kin who are, and they may be inclined to share the info with them. Pinterest Pins are shared easily with individuals and nearly all social networking platforms.

It’s FREE!

Pinterest is available in both a free and paid professional version. I’ve been using free from the get-go with my business, but I’m a small, on-chic operation and haven’t needed the professional version, yet... (Grin!)

The free version has still topped the list on social media platforms, driving traffic to my website. It’ll work the same for you.

Maximum results with even minimal interaction

​Like every social media platform, interaction with others is how to get them to interact with you. Pinterest is no different, with exception of frequency. I do spend a good deal of time on Pinterest researching a wide array of topics, not only for my blog posts, but also, at least occasionally, for colleagues and friends.

I do follow several other Pinterest users who share similar interests with me, and take the time to leave comments on their Pins, when time allows, but as often as possible. However, that usually comes down to less than 20 minutes a week, and yet, I still get interaction with my Pins and traffic to my website. So, point is, to get Pinterest users to visit your site takes minimal effort. Quality effort yes, but it doesn’t have to eat up a bunch of your work-day or social time.

Making Pins

​I’ll only touch on this briefly because I plan to give it more attention and detail in an upcoming post, but for now, Pin quality is important. It’s one thing to share a link to a video you like, a blog post or an eZine article, directly with the “share to Pinterest” option offered on whatever site you’re visiting, It’s another to make your own Pin to share your own information to Pinterest.

Pins worth making are worth taking the time to make attractive, with both text and graphics. This can easily be done with a screen-shot and photo editor, directly from your mobile device, pc/tablet, whatever. They aren’t at all difficult to make, but making a small bit of extra effort to present a polished and interesting Pin will make a difference in how your Pinterest guests notice and interact with it.

In an upcoming post, I’ll share a tool that is my favorite to make Pins with, as well as other graphics I sometimes use in blog posts. You’ll probably end up liking it as much as I do!

That’s a wrap!

I pray you’ve found this information helpful and I encourage you to share it with anyone else you think it may benefit. Also, if you’ve information to add, please leave a comment! Your interaction is always appreciated!

​‘Conduct business until I come.’ Luke 19:13 World Messianic Bible

​‘Til next time,

Shalom