You’re going to love Pinterest!
You’ll want to go directly to business.pinterest.com to set up a site specifically for businesses. You’ll be presented with a “Join as a Business” button. There are also links to learn about Pinterest but if you want to jump in and get going, click the big red button.
Fill out the provided simple form. There’s a drop down to select your type of business. You’ll add a contact name. Enter your email address and select a password. Type in the name of your business below that and select a user name.
You can upload an image here. This will be your profile image of sorts. You’ll likely want to use your logo or an image that specifically reflects your business. Don’t worry if you’re not sure. It’s easy to go back and change. Add a short description of your business in the box labeled “About”, key in your web address, and then click on “create account”.
Voilà! You’ve got a Pinterest site. There are a few helpful thing to do next that are a little more challenging. We’ll give some instruction here to make it a little more clear. But don’t sweat it. If this is beyond your technical ability, it’s about a 15-minute quick job and a technical friend could help you or your web developer should be able to do it for very little expense. If you don’t have those options, give us a call and we’ll set it up for you for next to nothing. If technical talk makes your eyes glaze over and your shoulders start edging toward your ears don’t sweat it. You don’t have to do anything technical if you choose not to. Just skip the next few paragraphs by clicking here.
Once you fill out the general information form, you’ll land on a page with four areas to explore. First, you’ll be asked to verify your web address by downloading a file and uploading this file to the to your server. There’s a button to click on the Pinterest site and that begins the download automatically. I recommend just saving the file to your desktop. It will be easy to find and easy to delete once you’re done. If you are not familiar with FTP uploading, your webmaster should have access to an FTP application. You or your web master will launch this and connect to your server, navigate to your desktop and locate the html file already downloaded from Pinterest. Upload this HTML file to the root HTTP docs folder on your server. Return to Pinterest and click the “Verify web address”. You can skip this step but it is helpful with searchability.
Next up is an option to add a “Pin it” button to your site. This way, when visitors want to share some of your imagery on their Pinterest board, they can just click the button and Shazam! It’s there. And more traffic for you!
You’ve got to do a little HTML work with this. Again, this is simple web programming and your developer should have no problem adding this line of code. If you’d like to give it a go, I’ll offer some simple instructions here.
From Pinterest, select the button style you’d like by selecting one of the radio buttons across the top of the Button Builder. Leave the default selection of “One Image” or select it if another one is selected from the provided radio buttons. You can select to have a pin counter displayed above, below, or not at all using the counter dropdown. Leave the URL and Image fields as they are and add the name for your Pin It button.
Now select “Build It”. More information will immediately display below.
Find the “Insert the Link” form field. Copy and paste all the code provided. It will look something like this:
<a href="//pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.flickr.com%2Fphotos%2Fkentbrew%2F6851755809%2F&
media=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm8.staticflickr.com%2F7027%2F6851755809_
df5b2051c9_z.jpg&description=Next%20stop%3A%20Pinterest"
data-pin-do="buttonPin" data-pin-config="above"><img src="//assets.pinterest.com/images/pidgets/pin_it_button.png" /></a>
It will display something like this.
You’ve got to get the above code into your site. If you are using WordPress, you can open a page, use the “text” tab selection in your content editor and paste in the code you’ve just copied. Preview your work. If you like what you see, publish it!
If you have a basic HTML site, you can always open the page in notepad, and using the same cut and paste method, paste the code into the page. Your html page has a bunch of code at the top but the code that displays what you see on your page starts after this tag: <Body> and finishes up before you see this ending tag: </Body>. Your paste must go somewhere between these two tags. Also, most HTML is wrapped with these kind of symbols: “<” and “>”. You’ll want to stay outside of any of these already in your content.
I recommend saving a backup. Let’s say you open the “aboutus.html” page. Copy all the code first and paste it into notepad and save as aboutus.txt. Then experiment with your pin tag. If the results are disastrous, you’ll be able to quickly grab the code from your text backup file and return the page to it’s original form.
Again, if this seems too technical or makes you nervous you can easily find someone who can help you.
Don’t sweat it
However, if you are feeling overwhelmed by all this, forget it. You don’t have to add a Pin it button. You need never have to deal with any code or HTML! You can go ahead and create some pins manually. You’ll create boards from the drop down under your Pinterest name. Give them names that relate to your business and then upload some of your own imagery. You will need to be sure once you’ve uploaded the image to go back, click “edit”, and add the URL you’d like the image to link to.
Create several of these and then go peeking around at some other boards for ideas. It’s really fun once you get going!
Next week we’ll talk about how to build your Pinterest site and your community!