Pinterest is Perfect for Artists

Pinterest is perfect for me.  I am very visually motivated and inspired.  When I first saw all the beautiful pin boards, wonderfully organised, with so many gorgeous pictures, I fell instantly and hopelessly in love.  It had me hooked. 

What is Pinterest?  Pinterest is a social networking site with a twist.  It is an image based, virtual pinboard.  Pinners find pictures on the web and pin them on categorized boards.  These pictures could be of recipes they want to make, fashions they want to buy, ideas for parties, products they want to buy, etc., all arranged on neatly organised pin boards.

What I've discovered in the short time I've been pinning, is that Pinterest has the potential to be a fantastic marketing tool, especially for creative, crafting and art based businesses.

Pinterest is growing rapidly with about 1.5 million unique visitors visiting the site daily.  It is driving more traffic than Google+, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn combined, and more referral traffic through it's images  to major retailers than Twitter does through tweeted links.

Bloggers have already caught on to this and a new trend in blogging is to create attractive word/subway art blurbs of their post so that pinners can link that picture to Pinterest, which will bring more readers to their blog.  Clever.

Pinterest provides the perfect marketing tool for artists.  It is visual.  It attracts a creative and visually motivated crowd, more inclined to buy what you create.

In case some of you have heard about the big artist freak out over Pinterest let me set your mind at ease, before I move on.  There was some uproar that Pinterest's Terms of Service were not friendly to artists.  There was worry that Pinterest would steal your art and sell it themselves.  Good news.  Pinterest has recently changed their terms and removed the wording that caused the confusion.  Pinterest said it was never their intent to sell anyone's work.  The new terms go into effect April 6th, 2012 and you can read them HERE .

If you are still leery, but want to pin your art, you can watermark your images, or pin only products with your images, or lower resolution copies (72dpi) of your images.

Know that others are probably pinning your images from your sites.  If you really don't want images from your site to be pinned, Pinterest has a piece of code which can be added to the head of the page you don't want anything pinned from.  It must be on every page that you want excluded from pinning.  You'll find it HERE .  Scroll down to the bottom of the page, under "Linking to your blog or website".


How To Share Your Art and Increase Your Fan/Customer Base on Pinterest




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Happy Arting!  Happy Pinning!

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