5 Ways of Marketing with Pinterest

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PINTEREST, an image-based social networking platform is growing at record speed. Direct sales content is not allowed at Pinterest, according to their Terms of Service. However, this doesn’t mean businesses can’t get creative and use Pinterest for brand-building and to drive revenue. Here are five creative ways to use Pinterest as a platform for indirect marketing purposes in your social media marketing mix. It’s free and easy to use.

The visual aspect offers great opportunities for authors to connect with readers by “pinning” their book cover images and illustrations from within their book.
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1. Create several pinboards
Depending on the story of your book, you could create custom product pinboards that indirectly market through topics of your book. For example, when you wrote a historical novel, you can create a pinboard with historical photographs of the area, where the novel takes place and a pinboard about events happening at the time. A pinboard about the characters… etc. Or if you wrote a thriller, set in the financial sector, pin images of Wall Street or offices of investment bankers. However be careful to show images of persons only after getting their written! consent.  Images of Banks such as Merrill Lynch, Rothschild or Bank of America are ok.

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You could also create a pinboard, showing images of your old typewriter, a pile of notes, your laptop, cute writing paper with a pretty pen, you – sitting on your desk and writing or you – at a book signing or giving a talk.. you get the idea.  And always add a cover image of your book, including an mage of the back side if it is a paper book, to EACH of these pinboards.

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2. Informal Market Research
Use Pinterest to show several drafts of the cover images of your next book. Ask visitors to share their thoughts through comments and vote for their favored image. Encourage them to invite their friends on Pinterest, Twitter, Google+, FB or LinkedIn to partizipate and give an e-book version of the upcoming book as prize drawing for the most popular cover image, choosen by them. You can also ask for feedback on illustrations, video, your book trailer, ads, and much more.

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3. Create a Contest
Contests can get really creative on Pinterest. You could hold a contest for the best image story, pinned by a Pinterest user / customer taking
images of your books or photos to create it. You could ask people to pin images to Pinterest as part of your contest.

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4. Video Pinboards
When publishing How-to videos on YouTube or on your business blog, pin it on Pinterest and share that useful content. Create a pinboard for all of your helpful content to give it broader exposure.

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5. Promote Your Pinboards
Cross-promote the content you publish on Pinterest pinboards – on your blog, Twitter, Google+ and other social media profiles – and vice versa, your social media appearance on Pinterest pinboards. Help your potential customers to spread the word by putting a button “Follow Me on Pinterest” to your website/blog as well as a “Pin It” button. It’s an easy way for people to pin your image or your video with a single mouse click. You can install these buttons within seconds; it makes your content more shareable.

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Excerpt from the brand new e-book: ***** 111 Tips to Create Your Book Trailer ***** featuring valuable tips and links to video tutorials, free music downloads and free images, available on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008Y15YYO

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Hyper Smash