Be a Professional Pin-up on Pinterest and Extend Your Brand Online

The Pinterest boards for my websites and blogs

Image-driven content online is not just for selling and promoting products and retail entities. Professional services and, by extension, professional profiles online can and do benefit from images. Images are enhancers we can no longer afford to ignore as we create digital content and promote ourselves online.

Look at the trend on Linkedin to images in profile backgrounds, post images, group logos, and slide decks. Your Linkedin Groups page now shows each group's logo  as images going down the screen similar in look to Pinterest's boards .

Image-driven content, unless you are a products company or retailer, is a waste of digital space, bandwidth and scrolling time. However, great images succeed and are equaled only Buzzfeed's catchy titles in attracting viewer attention. Content may be king but images rule. Taking every opportunity to use image-driven content is crucial for professional promotion, online branding and visibility.

Pinterest represents the opportunity for professionals to extend brand visibility and promotion using their boards to post images of blog posts, website pages, and self-images.  When the Wall Street Journal first started posting their articles on Pinterest, every article they posted from their paper featured their boring grey logo. It was a sea of gray going down the screen with no differentiation of the articles except by title. Their titles were not Buzzfeed quality.

In less than two weeks, they quickly read (or saw) the tea leaves and started using amazing images and photos to engage viewers and drive traffic from their Pinterest board posts to their website. Of course the obvious, practical profitable application of Pinterest boards is by Etsy members to attract attention to their products and drive customers to their Estsy store page for purchases. 

However, we professionasl can expand our digital footprint by setting up Pinterest boards for our website, blog and Linkedin posts, and other social-content sites.  Each new page or post is then "pinned" to its respective Pinterest board by the image. The images above are from my Pinterest boards for my websites and blogs.

Pinterest's image-driven content boards are a free online billboard that drives traffic to a website or blog or social profile for any professional. In addition, a presence on Pinterest can improve your Google name search ranking. And, of course, we all want to be found online.