by Jennifer Cario

Pinterest is a virtual pin board that allows you to collect images and links to things you like on the web. If you’ve ever seen someone pull out a scrapbook filled with recipe clippings or a binder full of wedding or home remodel ideas, you’ve got the general idea. The difference with Pinterest is the fact that it all takes place online in an environment where you can share your collection with your friends and vice versa. To put it in the simplest of terms, Pinterest is an image based version of bookmarks.

Pinterest is Growing Rapidly

A few months ago, I would have forgiven you if you hadn’t heard of Pinterest. It was like a sneaky, lovable cat. The kind that curls up in your lap and gives you the warm fuzzies while you pet it, but that remains quietly invisible to anyone not already in the know. The past month or so though, it’s all begun to change. Pinterest has finally reached it’s tipping point and the masses are starting to pour into the site to explore what it has to offer. If you are a marketer, a blogger, or a business owner, it’s time to invest some effort into learning whether or not Pinterest needs to be part of your marketing strategy.

I first heard Pinterest mentioned last summer by a friend who is a professional photographer. She mentioned it as a great place to stash your collection of ideas and inspiration. It sounded intriguing, but not enough so to actually visit the site. (Since I was sort of busy with an out of state move and planning a wedding of my own.) I found my way back to the site last fall while hunting for some Christmas ideas online. Every other crafting site I ran across had a “Pin it” button showing up s part of the blog post. Within ten minutes of finally visiting the site, I was hooked.

Since then, I’ve been a daily Pinterest addict. It’s my new time killer when I’m waiting in line or killing a few minutes of boredom. It’s my source (and storage) for inspiration on food, my home, and a huge portion of the things I do in my every day life.

Intrigued yet? You should be.

Let me give you a tour.

When you head over to Pinterest, you’re going to see a bunch of random picture with commentary and some numbered tallies underneath them.

There’s no rhyme or reason to it because when you first log in, you’re just going to see the current most popular posts. At this point, if you click on an image, you’re going to get a notice to sign up for an account.

When you fill out the request for an invite, don’t fret. Most folks seem to get their invite within 12-48 hours these days. You’ll be up and running in no time. Of course if you have a friend using the service already, they can send you an invite which you’ll receive almost immediately.

Once you get your invite, click the link in the email to get started. It will take you to this page.

You’ll have the choice to link your account to either Twitter or Facebook. It’s a personal preference that doesn’t hold a LOT of weight because Pinterest will only share your pins via those networks if you ask it to. For the purpose of this article, we’ll go with Facebook. Clicking on it will take you to your Facebook sign-in page.

Once you’re signed in, you’ll need to approve the app to work in Facebook.

To note, if you haven’t already upgraded to Facebook Timeline, you’ll need to do it to get Pinterest synched up. Consider whether you want to leave things set to display to all your friends or if you want narrow the friend group, then click through to move along. From there, it’s onto finally setting up your Pinterest account.

Once you’ve finished this step, Pinterest will try to get you started with some people to follow.

My suggestion? Refrain from picking categories you like unless you want Pinterest to fill up your boards with people you don’t know. For the sake of this article, I set up an account for my husband and it set him up with a dozen people to follow. I had to then go unfollow them all. It will also look to see which of your Facebook friends are on Pinterest and will follow them as well, so plan to edit people out accordingly.

Your next step in the process is to create some boards. Boards are Pinterest’s version of visual filing cabinets. They are usually topical and give you a chance to categorize your pins for easy access. Take a minute to set one or two up, but realize you can add more at any time.

Once you’ve set up your starter categories, you’re ready to get going. At this point, you’ll be able to view your Pinterest stream. In this case, that stream looks like this:

Of course chances are high you’ll see a lot of things you aren’t interested in. Just because you’re friends with someone on Facebook doesn’t mean you’re interested in every little thing they want to save in their scrapbooks. There are two different ways to work around this. The first is to delete people totally. To do this, click on the username that shows up under the photo. This will take you to their Pinterest page where you can find the greyed out “unfollow” button under their avatar. Click this button and you’ll remove them from your stream.

Now, let’s say you’ve got someone in your stream that you want to follow, but who posts WAY more content than you are interested in, or things you simply don’t care about. Say, for instance you have a friend who has great taste in food, but also has a love for polymer clay and crafting that is flooding your stream. Find one of their posts, click the username and go to their page the same way you did when you planned to unfollow someone. Click the unfollow button again. At this point, each of the “boards” (categories) the Pinterest user has created will have a follow button associated with them. Scan through their list and follow any of the boards you think you might be interested in. This will segment their feed and serve up only a portion for you. (One of Pinterest’s strongest features, in my opinion.)

Once you’ve done this, you’ll find your feed has cleared out a bit and feature more post you are interested in.

Now that you’ve gotten everything set up, you can begin using Pinterest. There are three primary ways to do this. You can browse the overall database of pins you can browse your individual feed or you can go looking for new things to add to Pinterest.

We’ll explore those options coming up in part two of this series on Pinterest.

Want to learn even more about Pinterest and how to use it to market your business or drive traffic to your web site? Join Jennifer Cario for a FREE Market Motive workshop on Pinterest next Thursday, February 9th at 12:30pm EST. Registration is required.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: French Court Fines Google $660,000 Because Google Maps Is Free Google faces a $660,000 fine after a French court ruling that the company is abusing its dominant…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

by Mike Fleming

Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few?  You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence…If you can’t take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the wrong metric for your business…the simple process of identifying a metric as your key performance indicator and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights…before you diagnose how to improve a metric, you have to identify all the influencing variables…analyzing the variables will help you identify where the true opportunities for improvement are…it forces you to dig in a methodical manner and let the data, not opinions, drive action…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

 

We’ve talked about what makes a good metric to look at for your business.  But, you have to be careful here.  There is soooo much data wrapped up in what seems at times like an endless amount of possible metrics. If you are not careful, you will catch yourself wasting your time lost at sea with no idea how to get back home where you belong.  By “home” I mean those critical metrics that will measure what needs to change at this specific point in time for your online efforts to improve.  So, before you dive in and drown in data, the first and maybe most important thing you can do is determine where to focus your attention.  By doing this first, you create a map that will guide you to the right places to dive for those golden insights you so desperately need to make your next decisions for action.

This is what you want, right?  Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to take a few moments and bask in the glory of your achievements or sulk in the pain of your failures.  Both can be tremendous motivators.  But the bulk of your time looking at all the pretty charts, graphs, numbers and arrows should be to find out what to do next.  What should you do more of?  Less of?  Who should get a raise and who should get fired?  Remember, these decisions shouldn’t be faith-based initiatives.  Don’t let your opinion get in the way.  They should be backed by solid data that tells a story that leads you to conclusions that show you actions that give you results.

But, remember the data you’re looking at should be that which will tell you if what you were shooting for with your previous actions was accomplished or not.  This is how you and everyone else working with your site should be judged.  If what you were shooting for was to sell 20% more stuff than last year, who cares if visitors went up by 40% if it didn’t result in 20% more sales!  There’s a problem.  And who cares if visitors didn’t go up at all if sales went up by 20%!  Someone deserves some love.  Sure, the two will most likely be intimately tied together, but why worry about what doesn’t directly matter.  Focus on what matters and figure out what you can do to make it better.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

by Stoney deGeyter

In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.

How are you perceived?

My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer’s perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you’re going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you’d think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can’t take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site’s of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!

The little things matter the most

Businesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don’t follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn’t always fall on the marketer’s shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO’s job doesn’t include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO’s area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We’ll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn’t great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can’t change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It’s not just website design, it’s also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you’re perceived to be. That’s true whether you believe it or not.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

How do your employees feel about their jobs? For a small business owner, the answer to this question is crucial. Employees who are happy at work and passionately engaged with their jobs are more loyal to their employers, more productive and just plain better for your business.

A recent study of employee job satisfaction and engagement has some useful insights for entrepreneurs. The Society for Human Resource Management’s 2011 Job Satisfaction and Engagement Research Report,Read More

From Small Business Trends

Employees Are Satisfied With Their Jobs: Or Are They?

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

StumbleUpon, who happens to be one of the more popular and successful social media sites with over 20 million users (doubling from 10 million in about a year and a half), recently launched one of the biggest redesigns I can remember… basically changing everything about the site as a whole. Having…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

As performance marketers, it’s our job to find the valuable clicks and filter out the crap. By tracking specific events through cookies and pixels, we attribute revenue to clicks and keywords. Newer tools like conversion funnels allow us to further identify which clicks lead to subsequent clicks…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

Fact or Fiction? Writing search PPC ad copy promoting B2B brands, products or services isn’t as fun as promoting some sexy, fabulous, coveted line of B2C goods because B2B, by nature, is boring. Fiction! Fiction, I say! Clever marketers embrace the opportunity to market B2B because they…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

Telling people what I do for a living has always been a bit difficult. If I say that I do pay-per-click management they ask me how I could possibly spend all day managing “paper clips.” If I tell them that I am responsible for the ads on their Google search results, I get a groan followed by “You’re that guy.” After explaining in more detail, I usually have a very intelligent conversation and people are fascinated at how interesting PPCRead More

From Small Business Trends

Are PPC Ads Following You?

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392

While search engine marketing conference attendance for agency staff is almost a given of the job, in-house search engine marketers may find themselves more challenged to justify the expense, both in time and money of conference attendance. Conferences like Search Marketing Expo (SMX) provide a…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Source: RSSMix.com Mix ID 2843392