by
Marcela De Vivo

As Pinterest, the picture and board-based social networking site, has exploded in popularity. Many businesses have been scrambling to use it to drive customers to their websites.

For ecommerce businesses this has not been much of a challenge due to the product and photo-based nature of their websites. They can create relevant boards and promote their products with elegant and sharable photos, driving a lot of traffic — and hopefully purchases — to their website. By interlacing their own product images with other interesting and relevant images, they can create appealing Pinterest boards that drive user engagement.

What about the rest of us?

How to use Pinterest for a Commercial Website with Few Images

Many businesses that operate online are not product-based or may not have a lot of photos to work with. Are they simply out of luck when it comes to Pinterest, or are there creative ways to use this network to drive customer engagement and traffic?

Fortunately, as creative social media SEOs and marketers, we proudly proclaim that all hope is not lost! There are a lot of ways you can use Pinterest to interact with your customer base, even if you’re not a photo-centric business.

Inspirational and Motivational Images

If your business has a motivational or inspirational purpose behind it, you can use Pinterest to share these values with your customers. If you haven’t noticed that motivational images have been exploding around the internet, it’s time to open your eyes.

These types of images — a beautiful picture with inspirational text overlaid on top — are some of the most shared images on the internet. They spread through Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter like wildfire and can be very effective drivers of traffic.

Pick out some values that your company stands for and turn them into motivational images. Throw them up on Pinterest boards and share them via all of your social networks. If you do your job properly you should see a positive response.

You can use a tool like PicMonkey to edit your images, add text, and make them fun and easy to share. You may also choose to add your watermark to improve your branding.

Curating Pins From Your Niche

If you can’t make the above strategy work, you can always act as the gatherer of information for your niche. There is ALWAYS value in aggregating all of the content related to your niche and organizing it into neatly consumable boards on Pinterest. A few websites have had major success using this technique. The best part: you don’t have to OWN or CREATE any of the content yourself!

Don’t get me wrong — this isn’t stealing. You’re going to pin and repin related content into boards that are organized. This way anyone interested in your niche can go to one place on Pinterest — yours — to get all of the information that they need.

Final Thoughts

Remember that Pinterest is just another social network. It’s not going to be the end-all of your social media strategies. It’s just another arrow in your quiver when it comes to delivering value to your customers and gaining their attention and hopefully their business!