(click on cover to buy)

Here’s an incredibly helpful guest blog post from our bestselling author, Derrick Sutton. Derrick is the author of How to Sell Your Crafts Online: A Step-by-Step Guide to Successful Sales on Etsy and Beyond, so he knows a thing or two about having the widest possible reach for selling and promoting your work. In his post below, Derrick provides concise directions for how to find out whether images of your work have been pinned on Pinterest and how to encourage fans to pin your images. We hope that his advice helps spread your work far and wide!

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The rise of Pinterest, the social photo sharing site, has been phenomenal. At the time of writing this post, Pinterest has become the third most popular social network in the U.S. So having your crafts, art, and photography shared on Pinterest could be a fantastic way to gain further exposure and might even lead to viral sharing potential. But aside from creating your own Pinterest page and uploading your own well-photographed, sharable content, how do you know when other people are sharing your images beyond “repinning” your uploads?

Pinterest Search
The easiest way to find out whether your Etsy or online craft store items have been pinned on Pinterest is to type your business name into the Pinterest search box. For example, if I was looking for my book How to Sell your Crafts Online, I’d simply type that keyword phrase into the Pinterest search box, which can be found at the top left-hand corner of the page:

As you can see, the second image showing on the resulting page (at the time of writing) is my book cover:

Try this out with your own Etsy shop name to see whether your items have been pinned.

The Pinterest Search Source
If you own your own website and post images of your work, there’s another, less well-known way to discover if your images have been shared on Pinterest. To use this technique, you’ll need to use the following URL:

http://pinterest.com/source/URL

But before you copy and paste the address, you’ll need to edit the part at the end which reads “URL” and substitute it with your website address, minus the “http://” or “www.” For example if I was searching for images pinned from my publisher’s (Macmillan) website, I’d use the URL from the Macmillan website: http://us.macmillan.com/and amend the Pinterest source URL so it reads as:

http://pinterest.com/source/us.macmillan.com

And when you copy and paste the above into your browser, you’re taken to a page that shows images shared and pinned from Macmillan.com:

Try this with your own blog and website and see if you’re being pinned!

As a further tip, if you use WordPress for your blog or website, as mentioned in my book How To Sell Your Crafts Online, you can also encourage people to pin your images by using a Pinterest button plugin:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pinterest-pin-it-button/

Action Steps:

• Create a Pinterest account if you don’t already have one.
• Check that the images from your Etsy shop or website being pinned.
• If you use WordPress for your website or blog, you can add a plugin to encourage and prompt people to pin your content.

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For more easy-to-follow helpful advice for how to attract more customers, boost your Etsy sales, and expand your online presence, check out Derrick’s book How to Sell Your Crafts Online and website http://howtosellyourcraftsonline.com/.