Pinterest Tips for Hubpages

Pinterest and Hubpages make an awesome duo. If you haven't tried Pinterest yet or are a little puzzled about how to use it with Hubpages, here are tips for that. I find the site lots of fun and you'll see lots of Hubbers on Pinterest.

With no further ado, let's jump into some tips for how to use Pinterest to increase traffic to your hubs, get ideas for new hubs and have a good time doing it.

Cork board with sticky notes by joxxxxjo

1. Ask a fellow writer or a friend on Facebook for an invite to Pinterest. That gets you onto the site faster than going to Pinterest and requesting an invite from them.
2. Sign in and set up your profile, just as you would for any site. They start you with a few generic boards and you can start adding more topics as you go along. Set up pin boards for your niche topics on Hubpages. For myself, I added boards for genealogy, Civil War, library stuff, Kansas, memoir writing, and other topics that I write about.
3. Click on the PINTEREST logo at the top of the page. It takes you to the latest pins. Browse around and pin a few of the images that catch your eye. You don't want your pin boards to only contain your own hubs.

1. You can pin using the Pinterest button on any hub. It posts the introduction photo and the first few sentences from the introduction. Change the text if you don't feel it does justice to the hubs you are pinning. (hint: your first few sentences on a hub should be able to stand alone for this type of use or for a Google search).
2. Pinterest will let you choose which pin board topic you want to pin the hub to. If none are a good fit, scroll down to the end of your list and you'll get a blank slot to put in a new topic. Click on PIN IT.
3. I added the Pinterest PIN IT to my bookmarks toolbar on Mozilla Firefox. With it, I can pin any image on my hubs (any image that isn't too small). Add a few keywords or a sentence to intrigue viewers on Pinterest. Then PIN IT on one of your pin boards. You can also highlight any text in your hub, then click your PIN IT bookmark tool and it will pin both the picture and the highlighted text.
4. To catch the eye of browsers on Pinterest, I prefer to keep the text part of the pin quite short. You want them to visit your hub, NOT read it all on Pinterest.

One writer friend said, "It is great exposure. I have a hub that was pinned over 7,000 times, and not by me. Where else can you get that much exposure?"

JohnGreenstone commented, "I couldn't believe the amount of traffic I got from Pinterest. I will definitely use it in future."

Note that some focus on showcasing my hubs, but many are just topics that interest me and may/may not end up being hub topics in the future.