Small Business Bonfire

How Do YOU Use Pinterest In Your Small Business?

If you haven't at least poked around on Pinterest yet, now is the time do it. While I don't think it's the right social network for every small business, there are already businesses using it to make a huge impact on the web, find new customers, and increase sales...all with a few eye-catching images.

If you are one of those business owners who is loving what Pinterest is doing for your business, then I want to showcase you!

I'm working on a blog post for the main blog that demonstrates creative, useful, and smart ways small businesses can use Pinterest. So if you are using Pinterest in your business, comment on this post with a link to one of your Boards and a short summary of how it's working.

Tags: pinterest for business, pinterest for small business

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Comment by coachlisab on April 4, 2012 at 12:00pm: Yep, we need to stay on top of it. I don't care if they turn regular links into affiliate links so they can make money off of my pins. But it's uncool to strip my affiliate links. Yesterday, I had a little trouble with the tinyurl.com link having the affiliate code stripped out, so I worked my way down a few url shorteners until I found one that worked!

Comment by Larah Ritchie on April 4, 2012 at 3:02pm: I read about this too. I've had a few of my clients who earn a measurable percentage of their income from affiliates recommend using LinkTrackr (http://www.linktrackr.com/). It cloaks your affiliate links into a friendly, shortened URL. There's no way for Pinterest or other sites that strip/edit affiliate links to know your link is an affiliate link. At least, they haven't found a way around it yet.

It isn't free, but you can start using it for $9 a month...which is totally justifiable if you're making money from those affiliate relationships.

Hope that helps!!

Comment by coachlisab on April 4, 2012 at 5:55pm: Nice to know, Larah!

Comment by Denise OBerry on April 5, 2012 at 6:57am: Rather than using a link shortener from a site someone else controls, why not use your own? If your website is on the wordpress platform, you can get the Pretty Link plugin and create your own short links.

Pretty Link Pro is a premium plugin that you install on your wordpress site so you can do that. The single site license is only $37 and the multi site license is $97 (this is what I have and it is well worth it). I have one website where most of my affiliate links live, but also have the plugin installed on other sites. Here's an example with my affiliate link for Pretty Link Pro - http://www.doblikes.com/plpro

Comment by coachlisab on April 5, 2012 at 1:17pm: Sounds great, but I'm not on Wordpress.

Comment by Sabrina Espinal on April 5, 2012 at 2:14pm: Just a note of caution on Pretty Links from my personal experience with a client. Pretty Links is great but if you begin to get heavy traffic on the pretty links it creates it will significantly slow down your website because the links go through your site and on to the desired url. WP Engine ( Hosting company will not allow Pretty Links on their servers). Also, if you remove pretty links from you website the url's that you create will become broken links. That is just my painful lesson this year. I personally use the free version Pretty Link Lite but I have it for only one url.

Comment by Sabrina Espinal on April 5, 2012 at 2:28pm: Hey, there is a new plugin call PinUp Pro - My girlfriend sent me a link last night and I already bought and installed it (lol, sounds like a sales pitch...but it isn't). IT IS FOR AFFILIATE LINKS THAT YOU WANT ON YOUR PINTEREST AND TO bring your pins directly back to your site!

Here is the video and her affiliate link to buy the product http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmCoZSsnwp8

Comment by Sabrina Espinal on April 5, 2012 at 3:27pm: Also, here is her blog post and you can see how it works on her site. The pin next to the word "Recently" is part of the plugin. http://www.yourvirtualgirlfriday.com/social-media-marketing/pinuppr...

Comment by Denise OBerry on April 5, 2012 at 7:07pm: Thanks Sabrina. Point well take about Pretty Link and traffic.I've been using this plugin on various sites for a while now without issue.

That type of situation can happen with any shortener and I'd sure rather be promoting it from my own site where I have a bit more control than some place like tinyurl or bitly where I have no control at all.

Comment by Sabrina Espinal on April 6, 2012 at 7:39am: @denise. There is also a way to build your own shortener connected to your domain....don't have the details but I know business that has done that....I'll look it up and post it. There is also another great product that masks urls for affiliate links that is amazing. It is from Jason Fladlen..I'll post that too. I should buy that one!

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