Thursday, March 29, 2012

Pinterest Pin It Button 101 (plus a guided pinning tour)

Preface: By adding a Pinterest Pin It button to your blog post(s), you are essentially telling your readers that you are "pin-friendly." In other words, if you don't want your images to be pinned, don't tease people with a button. In fact, you can prohibit pins to your site by following these simple instructions (on Pinterest).

***

Four score and seven years Several weeks ago I promised to share how I added the Pinterest Pin It button down at the bottom of each of my posts (where the other social sharing buttons are).


Note: Pinterest provides - on their Goodies page - some code for adding a similar Pin It button; however, their code must be added to each individual post, as it is being composed, and will appear in the post itself. In other words, if you want your button to automatically display in the footer of each of your blog posts, like mine, the code that Pinterest provides will not work.

So that you can see the difference in the two buttons, I added Pinterest's Pin It button (using code I got right off the Goodies page) below the following image. 



Image Source

Now, GO AHEAD AND CLICK THE BUTTON to see what happens.
(Note: If you don't have a Pinterest account, you'll be taken to a log-in screen.)


Did you see? Good, I'll come back to this in a minute.

Add a Pin It Button to Your Post Footer


Okay, so I don't know about you, but I don't have the time, patience or memory to go over to Pinterest and get the code to add to each post (or even each image) that I publish. So I scoured the web and found some good instructions for getting the button to display in my post footer, near my other sharing buttons.

Interestingly, it was at this exact time that I decided I needed to get my own Pinterest account, and here's why:

I wanted to bookmark those instructions so I could *come back later* and add the button to my blog.

So I did (join Pinterest and bookmark/pin those instructions).

And if you'd like to get them (the instructions), you'll need to go straight to my COOL BLOG STUFF Pinterest board - where they're waiting for the taking. ;)

(Note: You do not need to be a member of Pinterest to look at my board and simply access the instructions.)

Okay, so if you haven't already, GO TO my Cool Blog Stuff board.

Hint: The instructions I followed to add *my* Pin It button are here. However, since then, I came across another set of instructions (for Blogger and WordPress users), which seem to be simpler and more intuitive. (Just know that I have not tested them.)

So What's the Difference in the Two Pin It Buttons?


Remember what happened when you clicked on the Pin It button (below the above image) earlier? Good.

Now scroll to the bottom of this post and CLICK THE PIN IT BUTTON IN MY FOOTER.




Did you see?

So here's the difference: If you use Pinterest's code, you can link the button to a specific image/URL and you can even pre-fill a description of the image (so the pinner doesn't have to).

The footer version of the Pin It button, however, is more generic (although the page URL will always get pinned along with the image selected by the pinner).

I'm not sure I'm a fan of all this pinning business. I don't like needles.

So there you have it! All of this is simple, right?

:)

P.S. If you look at all my boards, you'll notice that I don't have a whole lot of pins in Pinterest, other than "cool blog stuff." That's because I like it that way. My point is, Pinterest has lots of great uses, and doesn't need to be terribly time consuming. 

7 comments:

  1. Great post! I see you also have a Stumble Upon button there too. I am still trying to figure out all this crud! Thanks for explaining!

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  2. You're doing a great job laying out all this tech stuff. Now, if you could just tell us what we're supposed to do with all these different mediums, you'd have yourself the ultimate dog niche. ;)

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  3. Great post and info on how you're using the Pininterest. Personally, I think it's a Pain In (the) Nubbins!

    Tom
    xx

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  4. You reminded me that I've been wanting to add a
    pin button to my blog and I just went and did it!

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  5. I don't think I'll be adding the Pin-it (thanks for the instructions though) but I am loving the LinkWithin! It definitely has folks looking at my old posts, and I am having fun looking back, too!

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  6. thanks so much for the instructions. this and the tutorial for those social media icons are now both on my to-do list.

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