Do you want to learn how to use Pinterest for business needs? When Pinterest first showed up a few years ago it was largely ignored by many businesses as a consumer time waster.

Many marketers believed in the myths: that their target market isn’t on pinterest, only women are on Pinterest, and the only things that are getting pinned are recipes and food ideas.

But now several business owners are noticing massive traffic spikes and increased purchases from these pinners.

Plus, pinned items on Pinterest last longer than shared items on Facebook. In fact,  pins shared on Pinterest last 1680 times longer than a Facebook post!

So how do you get started? In this article I’ll show you how to use Pinterest for business and grow your traffic.

Why Is Pinterest so Popular?

This viral pin infographic shows just how one pin on Pinterest can go viral and continue to bring large amounts of traffic to your site.

One thing to note is that these repins don’t necessarily happen in the same day or same week, but rather organically and over time so your traffic back to your website increase over the weeks as people repinning your information when they find it.

Below we’ve broken down the steps you can take to dominate PInterest for your business.

Set up Your Pinterest Account
Grow Your Pinterest Followers
Make Money with Pinterest
Using Pinterest to Boost Your SEO
Bonus Items

First, go through the process of setting up Pinterest for your business.

1. Set up Your Pinterest Account

Here are a list of resources you can follow to get your Pinterest account setup quickly and painlessly. Make sure you verify your website with Pinterest so you can view Pinterest analytics and how your website is doing. Pinterest show some basic site analytics and how often images on your site are pinned, repinned, etc.

Setup Pinterest for Business by SERPs
Getting Started on Pinterest by ProBlogger

2. Get More Pinterest Followers

When you get Pinterest followers, they see all your pins and if they like them, they’ll repin and their followers will see it. So getting more followers is somewhat like getting Facebook likes for your Facebook Page and the more you can get, the larger your audience grows.

Pinterest Famous by Digital Trends
12 Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers by SocialMedia Examiner
Build Your Pinterest Audience by Entrepreneur

3. Make Money with Pinterest

If you run a local company like lawn company, salon, or any other kind of business, then your ultimate goal should be to get more business. With Pinterest, make sales in a few different ways. It might be from a direct product purchas or generating a lead that turns into a client later down the road.

To make money with Pinterest just follow these articles and get started today.

Turn Pinterest into a Revenue Generating Channel by Quicksprout
7 Ways to Drive Sales and Traffic with Pinterest by Shopify
Buyable Pins by Pinterest

 4. Using Pinterest to Boost Your SEO

An added bonus of using Pinterest for your business is that it can boost your site’s SEO rankings if you know what you’re doing.

Pinterest SEO: 7 Tips From a Pinterest Engineer by Search Engine Land
Pinterest SEO: A Guide for Businesses by wishpond
Pinterest Marketing Tips for SEO, Traffic, and Online Reputation Management by kissmetrics

5. Bonus

Here are case studies and tools you can use to help you get started using Pinterest today.

How I Got 25,000 Blog Subscribers from Pinterest — in 2 Months Flat by Make a Living Writing
Useful Pinterest Tools by Hongkiat
The Marketings Guide to Pinterest by Hubspot
Pinterest Business Guide by Business News Daily
Shopping Stats: People Pin in a Buying State of Mind by Pinterest

Conclusion

Right now is the perfect time to get your business on pinterest and start growing your followers. Don’t let the process scare you. Just take each step at a time before moving to the next one and by the time you’re finished with all 5 steps, you’ll be using Pinterest for your business.

Have you been using Pinterest for your business? We’d love to hear the results you’ve seen in the comments below.

If you liked this article, then please follow us on Twitter for more useful tips.

The post How to Use Pinterest for Business: The Ultimate Resource appeared first on ThemeLab.

Do you want to learn how to use Pinterest for business needs? When Pinterest first showed up a few years ago it was largely ignored by many businesses as a consumer time waster.

Many marketers believed in the myths: that their target market isn’t on pinterest, only women are on Pinterest, and the only things that are getting pinned are recipes and food ideas.

But now several business owners are noticing massive traffic spikes and increased purchases from these pinners.

Plus, pinned items on Pinterest last longer than shared items on Facebook. In fact,  pins shared on Pinterest last 1680 times longer than a Facebook post!

So how do you get started? In this article I’ll show you how to use Pinterest for business and grow your traffic.

Why Is Pinterest so Popular?

This viral pin infographic shows just how one pin on Pinterest can go viral and continue to bring large amounts of traffic to your site.

One thing to note is that these repins don’t necessarily happen in the same day or same week, but rather organically and over time so your traffic back to your website increase over the weeks as people repinning your information when they find it.

Below we’ve broken down the steps you can take to dominate PInterest for your business.

Set up Your Pinterest Account
Grow Your Pinterest Followers
Make Money with Pinterest
Using Pinterest to Boost Your SEO
Bonus Items

First, go through the process of setting up Pinterest for your business.

1. Set up Your Pinterest Account

Here are a list of resources you can follow to get your Pinterest account setup quickly and painlessly. Make sure you verify your website with Pinterest so you can view Pinterest analytics and how your website is doing. Pinterest show some basic site analytics and how often images on your site are pinned, repinned, etc.

Setup Pinterest for Business by SERPs
Getting Started on Pinterest by ProBlogger

2. Get More Pinterest Followers

When you get Pinterest followers, they see all your pins and if they like them, they’ll repin and their followers will see it. So getting more followers is somewhat like getting Facebook likes for your Facebook Page and the more you can get, the larger your audience grows.

Pinterest Famous by Digital Trends
12 Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers by SocialMedia Examiner
Build Your Pinterest Audience by Entrepreneur

3. Make Money with Pinterest

If you run a local company like lawn company, salon, or any other kind of business, then your ultimate goal should be to get more business. With Pinterest, make sales in a few different ways. It might be from a direct product purchas or generating a lead that turns into a client later down the road.

To make money with Pinterest just follow these articles and get started today.

Turn Pinterest into a Revenue Generating Channel by Quicksprout
7 Ways to Drive Sales and Traffic with Pinterest by Shopify
Buyable Pins by Pinterest

 4. Using Pinterest to Boost Your SEO

An added bonus of using Pinterest for your business is that it can boost your site’s SEO rankings if you know what you’re doing.

Pinterest SEO: 7 Tips From a Pinterest Engineer by Search Engine Land
Pinterest SEO: A Guide for Businesses by wishpond
Pinterest Marketing Tips for SEO, Traffic, and Online Reputation Management by kissmetrics

5. Bonus

Here are case studies and tools you can use to help you get started using Pinterest today.

How I Got 25,000 Blog Subscribers from Pinterest — in 2 Months Flat by Make a Living Writing
Useful Pinterest Tools by Hongkiat
The Marketings Guide to Pinterest by Hubspot
Pinterest Business Guide by Business News Daily
Shopping Stats: People Pin in a Buying State of Mind by Pinterest

Conclusion

Right now is the perfect time to get your business on pinterest and start growing your followers. Don’t let the process scare you. Just take each step at a time before moving to the next one and by the time you’re finished with all 5 steps, you’ll be using Pinterest for your business.

Have you been using Pinterest for your business? We’d love to hear the results you’ve seen in the comments below.

If you liked this article, then please follow us on Twitter for more useful tips.

The post How to Use Pinterest for Business: The Ultimate Resource appeared first on ThemeLab.

Creating social profiles for your business has become an important factor in social proof marketing where you show new visitors that you are known, liked, and trusted by clients.

Facebook is an important social profile to set up for your business. With over 1 billion users on Facebook, your ability to connect with others is great. But many small business owners forget to do this one step: create a Facebook custom URL.

If you don’t create the Facebook vanity URL, then your Facebook page can look something like this:

facebook.com/pages/yourbusiness/123456789

That makes adding the link to your website difficult and adding it to your business card almost impossible. Plus, who’ll remember that link?

How to Create a Facebook Page Vanity URL

Once you have your Facebook page setup:

1. Go to facebook.com/username. From here you first need to create a username for your personal profile first.

After creating your personal username, then you can move to personalize your Facebook page username.

There are guidelines to follow when choosing a name:

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you create a custom username:

• You can’t claim a username someone else is already using.
• Choose a username you’ll be happy with for the long term. Usernames are not transferable, and you can only change your username once.
• Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (“.”).
• Periods (“.”) and capitalization don’t count as a part of a username. For example, johnsmith55, John.Smith55 and john.smith.55 are all considered the same username.
• Usernames must be at least 5 characters long and can’t contain generic terms or extensions (ex: .com, .net).
• You must be an admin to choose a username for a Page.
• Your username must adhere to the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

2. Type in what you’d like to use and check availability. You want to make it easy to remember and make it about your business if you can.

If Facebook shows that the name you typed in is available, congratulations, you can use this for your Facebook Page. Click confirm to use it for your page.

Once you have changed your page to your vanity url you can use this shorter link for all your communications with potential clients.

The post How to Create a Facebook Custom URL appeared first on ThemeLab.

Creating social profiles for your business has become an important factor in social proof marketing where you show new visitors that you are known, liked, and trusted by clients.

Facebook is an important social profile to set up for your business. With over 1 billion users on Facebook, your ability to connect with others is great. But many small business owners forget to do this one step: create a Facebook custom URL.

If you don’t create the Facebook vanity URL, then your Facebook page can look something like this:

facebook.com/pages/yourbusiness/123456789

That makes adding the link to your website difficult and adding it to your business card almost impossible. Plus, who’ll remember that link?

How to Create a Facebook Page Vanity URL

Once you have your Facebook page setup:

1. Go to facebook.com/username. From here you first need to create a username for your personal profile first.

After creating your personal username, then you can move to personalize your Facebook page username.

There are guidelines to follow when choosing a name:

Here are a few things to keep in mind when you create a custom username:

• You can’t claim a username someone else is already using.
• Choose a username you’ll be happy with for the long term. Usernames are not transferable, and you can only change your username once.
• Usernames can only contain alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (“.”).
• Periods (“.”) and capitalization don’t count as a part of a username. For example, johnsmith55, John.Smith55 and john.smith.55 are all considered the same username.
• Usernames must be at least 5 characters long and can’t contain generic terms or extensions (ex: .com, .net).
• You must be an admin to choose a username for a Page.
• Your username must adhere to the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

2. Type in what you’d like to use and check availability. You want to make it easy to remember and make it about your business if you can.

If Facebook shows that the name you typed in is available, congratulations, you can use this for your Facebook Page. Click confirm to use it for your page.

Once you have changed your page to your vanity url you can use this shorter link for all your communications with potential clients.

The post How to Create a Facebook Custom URL appeared first on ThemeLab.

Word of mouth and customer referrals have always been a big part of business growth and with 88% of customers trusting online reviews as much as they do a personal recommendation, it’s important to add different elements of social proof to your website.

These elements are trust factors that help new visitors see that you’ve dealt with other customers before and they like your work.

In addition to adding social profiles to your page with social counts on your site, there are types of social proof you can add to your site in the form of customer testimonials and how your clients know, like, and trust you.

Below are the 5 top social proof items you can add on your site to show visitors what your customers think of you.

1. Testimonials

If you’re doing a great job for your customers, you’re likely getting responses from them on how much they liked your work. When they email you or call you with their praises, ask if you can use it as a testimonial on your site.

Then make sure you put that testimonial in an easy to find place on your site. All our WordPress themes have a built in testimonial section so you can show off your best work to your visitors.

2. Better Business Bureau

Before website and the internet, this entity handled most company reputation and handled company disputes by customers. Today, if you run an offline, service based business, it’s still a good idea to make sure your company reputation is solid with them.

You can add a BBB image with a link back to your company profile on their website where visitors can see any past disputes or your overall company rating on the site.

2. Houzz

If you run a landscaping company or any business where you provide professional services for homeowners, then you want to sign up for Houzz and add your Houzz badge to your website.

This service can showcase all your previous jobs or project ideas that you can do for homeowners.

3. Yelp Widget Pro

Yelp is one of the oldest local business directories that lets customers leave reviews for your business. If you have several reviews left by happy customers, you’ll want to use the WordPress plugin to add the reviews on your site.

4. Google Places Reviews

For local search, you really want to work on getting your Google Places reviews on and get higher up in the local search results. These are the results Google shares when you look for Dentist, New York City. If you work on your local search, then your business can be one of the top results on the page.

And if you have a lot of reviews on your Google Places then you can use a plugin like Google Places Reviews to shows the reviews on your site.

5. Angie’s List

Angie’s List is very similar to Houzz and was really one of the first customer review services for homeowners. They have since expanded their reviews into other services like lawyers and other professionals outside of the home arena.

Angie’s List is free for professionals to sign up as they charge the homeowner a fee to see their list. When you are finished signing up, you can add a badge to your site that will link to your Angie’s List page.

Conclusion

As a local professional, having these tangible social proof items on your site gives visitors confidence in your business and makes choosing you easier for them since they see that others are happy with your work.

The post Social Proof Marketing: 6 Examples You Can Use On Your Site appeared first on IsItWP – WordPress Technology Lookup Tool.