Advice for Using Pinterest (A Guide for Beginners)

Hey everyone! The magical Christmas holidays are over, but New Year's Eve and 2015 are really close and coming soon. Do you have any resolutions or plans for the new year? Pinterest has made a theme page with good resolutions for 2015, featuring many cool pinners, including me. ;)
I am normally not a big fan of resolutions, but I love making plans and lists, because they help you to stay focused and prevent you from forgetting what's most important. Thus, I have created a pinboard with my plans for 2015:

Some of my plans are going to the seaside again, develop more own products, keep on finding beauty in the little things and seeing the mountains again. ;)

Advice for Using Pinterest (A Guide for Beginners)

Because I love Pinterest so much (next to my blog and Instagram it surely is my fave social media platform and website), I have prepared a little (beginner's) guide for how to use Pinterest. Have fun with my tips! :)

Pin your style Let your pins and boards reflect your personal style and interests and while using Pinterest, display your own consistent aesthetic concept in all boards and on your profile. I love white with many pops of color and this can also be seen when looking at my board.

Use Pinterest as a visual portfolio tool Why should one only have a written portfolio or a detailed presentation? Pinterest is a great tool to also build up a visual portfolio with pinning photos from press clippings, carreer milestones, photos of own projects and also customer appreciation photos if you are an indie business and sell handmade products. Moreover, this makes it even more important to varify your profile to make you more trustworthy and build a connection to your blog and brand.

Make navigation easy When new followers come to your profile, make navigation easy for them: name your boards properly so that the names are representative for the content, use cover photos that are appealing and make everyone want to dive into the board's pins. Also sort your boards by name or importance so that the content can easily be found.

Make your website pin-friendly First of all, optimize your photos. Make sure that each blogpost contains not only horizontal but also vertical photos. When those are pinned, they are much more visible in your follower's timeline on Pinterest. Also make sure that you have bright and appealing images on your blog that are worth being pinned. Moreover, don't forget to include the pin-it button to make pinning for your readers easy and comfortable. There's usually one below every blogpost and you can also add the button which appears when a reader's mouse hovers over your blogpost photos (which is the button which my own blog is still missing ;)). When writing a how-to blogpost or when publishing a wrap-up post with several different DIYs, recipes, etc, make sure to create an image or graphic which is representative for the whole content so that it can be pinned and lead new readers to your blog.

Own content vs. external content When pinning on Pinterest, pin a balanced proportion of own content and external content. Everyone will be bored when only seeing ten different photos of your recent project, so make sure to also bring new external content to Pinterest and share other people's great photos and inspire each other.

Add a value to your pins No matter if you are pinning your own content or photos taken by other people, make sure to add a value to your pins. This may for example be educational content like DIY tutorials, recipes or a guide for how to make a great media kit, or this may be hair styling tipps or a good photography tutorial. You could also pin a travel or city guide with your favorite places (like my Potsdam guide above), because Pinterest has implemented a map on which you can mark your favorite spots. People like to learn from each other and Pinterest is a great platform to enrich each other's lifes.

It's about community, not about competition Sharing is caring, so support each other, share great content from other bloggers and help each other to grow. Use theme group boards or open interest-based group boards onto which you pin with other pinners. This way, you can learn and profit from each other and at the same time you have a much bigger audience.

Use Pinterest as an organizational tool Pinterest is not only a great place to share visual appealing content and to search for inspiration, it's also a great tool for organization. On the one hand, you can use your own or other pinner's public boards to browse for ideas, on the other hand, you can make secret boards to collect ideas for gifts, projects or party planning (like I made this secret board for planning my tropical food table last year). This is super helpful and especially the visual collection of ideas which is based on Pinterest's visual character is great for getting a good overview and gives help when imagining the outcome of a project.
Create outstanding boards Most people have a board for fashion inspiration, for DIY projects or home decor ideas. Why not specialize and open a board for DIY door stoppers, perfect accesories for the first day at school or a board with pretty decor ideas for a girl's theme party with dinosaurs? Those niche boards help you to stand out in the masses and specialization in a topic is so much fun and will let you find the coolest pins.

Have lots of fun with these tips and let me know if you have any must-do Pinterest secrets! :) Lu