Pinterest Hunting: The Pins I Crushed on this Week and a Few Pinterest Tips

I love you. Sometimes, you are just my one minute one hour escape, but I love you because you inspire me with your creative ideas, your recipes, your fashion statements. I pin you. I like you. I dream through you. One day I got in a bad mood over and I wrote this post, but in reality, Pinterest, I’m glad you’re here. I love finding other great recipes, and I love when each month over 6,000 Pinterest readers click over to a recipe here at Spinach Tiger. This means I’m giving back as well.

These are the pins, found on in the past week that made me happy to find, ponder or gaze at. (Hey, it’s my time to waste and it’s better than drugs).

A Hat I wish I had Somewhere to Wear, and the Nerve

A Talented Graphics Designer on Etsy I’d like to Hire

This Thankful Tree

This Appetizer I wish someone would bring to my Thanksgiving Dinner

An Apple Walnut Tart that looks like a bed of roses

This dessert that screams Holiday

One more thing to do with Mason Jars

This Romantic Idea for a Christmas card

A Whole Board Devoted to Thanksgiving

This Fitness Quote that I Could Relate to

A Green Bean Casserole I would actually eat

This Southern Pie that won best pie of the month in my opinion

An idea I heart

Where I’ve always wanted to live

And, just to make you smile

Why am I talking about Pinterest?

I’m fascinated because outside of google and those type of organic searches, it’s now my number one referral source  surpassing, facebook, twitter, the Huffington Post, etc in attracting people over here. Why? It’s almost like a pyramid scheme. I’ve learned how to make Pinterest friendly pins (something I’ll share with you next week) and when pinned, just keeps getting pinned, like this coconut cake from over a year ago that seems to have no pinning end in sight, and is roaming the Pinning universe at all times, because it still looks pretty shrunken down to Pinterest size.

If you still don’t “get” Pinterest, it’s simply a bookmarking agent that saves pinned images in a category at your Pinterest account, which you can sign up for here. When you go to your account, click on that image, it will take you back to the website. You can pin directly from the coconut cake page to save your pin, or you can pin it from another pinner’s pin. It’s perfect for recipes, design, travel, fashion, etc. which is why it’s a woman’s dream world.

As with anything, there are pinning dead ends, and things to keep in mind.

My Personal Pinning Tip for Polite and Proper Pinning

1. Vet your pin before you pin it. Click it through to see where it goes. Sometimes a pin leads to dead ends, advertisers and weird places.
2. Follow only the boards you really like. You don’t need to follow every category. There might be boards you are not interested in, like silly cats.
3. When Pinterest hunting, use the search board in the upper left corner to edit your search. A lot of people forget about this. This is sometimes better than google when searching for a recipe, and you get to see a whole lot of pictures all at one time. This is a great way to find new pinners to follow.
4. Use your own descriptions when you pin. You can say “another pinner said xyz”.
5. Give credit to the blogger you just pinned. It only takes a second to say “from the xyz blog”.
6. Don’t forget to hit the like button or periodically leave a nice comment when something really grabs you.
7. Use your boards as a real source of reference. Don’t forget to go back to your boards and see what you’ve actually pinned. I have found myself sitting in my kitchen wondering what to do with chicken, when I have a whole board devoted to chicken.
8. Categorize wisely. I’ve done away with a few categories because they only had 2 pins, which means they didn’t deserve category space. I’m still working on this. It’s a real process and if you’re new, sit down and write out categories you would most like to bookmark for future use.
9. I shouldn’t have to say this, but if you want followers, pin beautiful pictures. Before I follow someone, I go and look at their boards, to see if I want to see those kinds of images when I visit Pinterest.
10. Pin responsibly. Spread your pinning out if you plan to pin the same pin to many boards. It’s not too much fun to visit Pinterest and see the same image times duplicated all over the page. Here’s a great article I found on Pinterest about that and covers Pinning manners a little more in depth.

This doesn’t scratch the surface of pinning and I would love to hear from you. Tell me, what’s your best Pinning tip? Best Pinning success? Or any pinning experience you want to share.

If you like Pinterest like I do, please follow my boards. I love visitors. Next week, I’ll be back to tell you how I went from 500 to over 6,000 by focusing on my reader’s needs and making my pictures tell a better story.