I’m sure you’ve heard the rumblings of a new kid on the social media block....you know, the one that has grown 155% just from December 2011-January 2012 and beat out Linkedin and Google+ on Hitwise’s list? . If you haven’t heard about Pinterest it is the new social media platform that has changed the way marketing is done today.

Many were surprised and shocked at the meteoric rise of such a new baby in town, but I wasn’t surprised. I had been using it for about a year by that time and it is truly addicting! For me and many of my friends it was something that we could do in the middle of the day and totally check out even if it was for just 15 minutes . During that time we could look at pretty pictures, dream a bit, shop a bit, start a new hobby...it was a very quick and easy way to digest a lot of information.

But what is Pinterest? In this 3 part series I am going to explain what it is and how to use it to increase traffic to your site; how it will help your search engine optimization and how to effectively market your products and services...so let’s get started!

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest is a social media platform that uses one of our most prominent senses of vision to generate a happy feeling....well, that’s probably not how most would describe it.., but at the root of it all that is what it does! Anyway, in “technical” terms, Pinterest is a social media platform that uses images, videos and vision boards to visually share, curate and discover new ideas, talents, interests, products and information.

Marketing use to be so much easier, well...if you had a lot of money! Typically a business would have a budget to do direct mail, trade shows, advertising, seminars, and everyone’s personal favorite...the cold call. With a boat load of money and some effort, you’d see the leads pour in.

Now people are just overwhelmed with advertising, commercials, spam, billboards...you name it, it’s in your face 24/7! And it’s so much easier to block those messages out with “do not call list”, spam blockers, caller ID, digital recorders to fast forward through commercials.

Enter in the 21st century new marketing, one that is about attracting the prospect not shoving a message in their face! Today it’s about getting the prospect attention through inbound marketing or attracting the customer. However, this new type of marketing requires the use of so many different messages in many different platforms like blogging, tweeting, Facebooking. There is an abundance of platforms, sites, software and techniques that are all disconnected, and although many are free they take time and knowledge to figure it all out.

Search engines are the mainstay of our society today, honestly what would we do if we didn’t have a search engine to seek out a product, a location or information from the most mundane question? Therefore, the first goal of a business website is to generated targeted traffic to it’s site and the most efficient to do that is to have the site indexed in the search engines and prominently placed in front of it’s audience on a regular bases.

First, let’s get some myths about search engine optimization out of the way

SEO is not Witchcraft, Voodoo or Shamanism:

Neither does it require any special chants, ceremonial fires, or vestments, although some of us do like to howl at the full moon, on occasion. There are no "Top Secret" practices which a reputable SEO guru can not tell a client, a judge, or his mother, for that matter. The very nature of the Internet has always been cooperative and there is nothing about SEO that can't be learned, with a heavy dose of time and many times money.