Just to prove that Pinterest is not just a women's site for crafts, snacks and D.I.Y. home projects, here's a collection of weird vehicles the site popularized. One man helicopter? Hell yeah.
Pinterest, very simply, is an online version of a bulletin board, cork board, or the walls of your cubicle. It's a place to collect and look at photos of really cool stuff.
We all have dreams. We have goals. We may have a Bucket List of things we want to do, or places we want to go before we kick the bucket. We also have an internet chock full of billions of photos. When you sign up for Pinterest, you get a dashboard, like any other online social media platform. You build "boards," which is a section where you can look at photos from Pinterest itself, and pull others from all over the internet, and collect them. You can also create your own pins to share with others. Then you collect photos, or "pins."
Every time you open the site up, Pinterest shows you a whole bunch of new photos it thinks you might like. You scroll though, click on the icon on the ones you like, decide which "board" you want to pin it to, and click again. Though I got into Pinterest to promote and help sell my Sharpie drawings (which it did help, search #sharpiescribblestyle" on Google images, Instagram or Pinterest), I wound up just liking the site. In the evening, when my brain's usually tired from the stuff I did all day, I love to listen to something online, a podcast or show, and add pins to my Pinterest boards. For me, it's pleasurable and relaxing. So I've been doing this just for the hell of it. I really dig Pinterest. Here are a few of the boards on the new Block Bikes Pinterest page.
Evel Knievel
Mat Hoffman
Huge Bike Air
Bike memes
There are personal pages, and you can open a business page, which is why I'm writing this blog post today. Over the last month, as I've been blogging and doing other social media for Rich Bartlett's Block Bikes Online BMX store, I've also been building up a Pinterest page. I have well over 1,000 photos pinned to the various boards at this point. And I'm just getting started. You can check it out here: Block Bikes Pinterest page, but you need to sign up to see it all. You can get a good glance without signing up, but need ot sign up to dig into it all. It takes a few minutes. No biggie. Here are a few more of the boards I've made on it:
Dream BMX road trips
Crazy bike bails
Tweak: Leary's and lookbacks
Tabletops
So what is Pinterest good for? There are several things. For one, like your cubicle wall or a cork board, it's a cool place to put photos of places you want to visit, or cars, bikes, motorcycles, airplanes or other big purchases you want to get some day. It's a good place to put visual representations of your goals. It's a good place to collect photos on any theme or area of interest. Pinterest is a great place to get inspired, either by the thousands of quotes, or by the art, design, cooking, craft, or DIY projects. It's a great place to get ideas for most anything you want to do. You can collect photos of epic cars or motorcycles, hovercrafts, or ice cream sundaes. On my personal board, I have something like 800+ pins on a board called "Ridiculous desserts." Hey, that's me. I also have a board with about 75 pins of pizza, and one called "Cinnamon rolls and pancakes." I also have over 1,000 photos pinned of Bruce Lee, my first hero as a kid. A thousand. Meanwhile, here are a few more boards on the new Block Bikes Pinterest page.
DIY projects for old bike parts
Old school BMX skateparks
Bikes jumping cars
Banana seat bikes
Now, if you have a business, any kind of business, you should have a website, blog, and some social media. That's simply part of the game these days. With a business page on Pinterest, you can create your own pins with text and a link to your site tied to the pin. Pinterest is a good way to drive traffic to your website, blog, or social media, which is a part of what I'm doing right now, with this blog post. A small part. There are only about a dozen linked pins of the 1,000+ pins on the page. Plus the link is on the front on the page, under the title. If you want to buy a bike from us, you can find the site. I'm not worried about that.
As I mentioned up top, I got into Pinterest when I Googled Sharpie art online, an image search, and saw none of my drawings come up. One big thing I noticed was that about half of the art that did come up in my search was photos from Pinterest. So I built a Pinterest page, tagged my own art with tags, started using one main hashtag, #sharpiescribblestyle, and my stuff comes up big time now. If you ask about my art now, I say, search #sharpiescribblestyle. I don't care if you search on Google images, Instagram, Pinterest, or even Twitter, you WILL find my art. The problem was that I was starting from below zero financially, and my original drawings didn't sell for enough to make me a living. I couldn't come up with the capital to jump up to a profitable level. So now I'm telling you business people some tips on using Pinterest, which can drive a bunch (technically, a shitload) of traffic to your sites, and really build your web presence. All this while I'm doing the same type of promotion for Block on their Pinterest page. Here are a few more of the boards where I've collected photos on individual riders.
Brian Foster
Chris Doyle
Morgan Wade
Corey Martinez
Dakota Roche
There are a handful more. The guys I picked are kind of random so far. And I'm just getting started. Like I said, I just plain LIKE doing stuff on Pinterest. So I'm going to keep doing this. It would be cool if you check out the Block Bikes page. Some of you will, no matter what I say here. That's cool. More than that, I want you guys to check out Pinterest itself, because it does have a ton of stuff that's cool for men. And the more guys that get into it, the better the whole thing gets. In addition to collecting photos, you can message others, do joint boards, use it to relax, or use it to blast a ton of people to your own business sites and social media.
Here's my personal Pinterest page, and my biggest board is "Street Art/Urban Murals," which has 2,470 pins. My second biggest is actually "Action Sports Women." But there's a bunch of BMX freestyle, art, 1,010 pins of nearly every Bruce Lee photo online, some punk rock, 818 crazy desserts, and a bunch of Mark Twain quotes, among other things.
So that's it. I think Pinterest is cool for guys. It will get cooler if a bunch more of you get on it as well. If not, whatever. I'm not leaving it, and it will help us sell a ton of shit here at Block Bikes in the coming months and years. What you do is up to you. Have a good weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment