Pinfluence: The Complete Guide to Marketing Your Business with Pinterest [Paperback]

I have to confess I originally thought Pinterest was just for brides, foodies, and crafters. Boy, was I wrong!

This is the first business book I've read in a long time that required a notebook and pen. I could not stop the ideas from flowing! The book is not only a primer on using Pinterest for business, but also a great tool on using social media in general (and I'm not new to this).

What I really loved about this book is its wide range of focus on who could use Pinterest and why. I'm not a brick-and-mortar business or a nonprofit, but I still gleaned ideas from those sections as well. Specifically, it gave me great ideas as an author for promoting my own books, and I've already seen a financial return on my time investment.

It is a well-researched book with practical, doable solutions for your business without a heavy time commitment. Beth knows you still have a business to run, and Pinterest is simply a great way to drive more people to it.

I purchased this book 3 short days ago and have literally ripped through it. If you are doing any sort of online business, whether it's selling your products or services or just recommending other people's stuff...then you NEED this book. I kid not.

I've been online since 1999 with my health site (y2khealthanddetox.com ) to complement my practise of now 34 years and have spent a minor fortune in mentoring, courses, software, etc. I've written articles for ezine, Tumblr, Squidoo, Hubpages, etc., done the Digg thing, Facebook personal and pages and Twitter, etc. All have helped to some degree establish a presence for me.

Oh, yes and I've ridden the waves of Google's histrionics, through their Smackdown, Panda (not as cute a bear as I once thought) and managed to get unceremoniously relegated to their sandbox with a couple of my small sites..*sigh*

And if this wasn't crazy-making enough, I lather, rinsed, repeated the whole ball of wax for my fantasy book series, The Persephane Pendrake Chronicles (Book 1 is here on Amazon.) The Persephane Pendrake Chronicles: One - The Cimaruta.

Then a few months ago, I started to hear whispers about this "Pinterest" thing on a few membership sites I still belong to. Busy, busy...I really didn't have time to check out yet another social site..so I thought. It was Brilliant Beth's article "56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest" from Copyblogger which appeared in my Facebook feed that finally drove me to Pinterest. So I opened an account for my author name of Lady Ellen and created a few boards following the steps in her article. It drove traffic to my site the same DAY! Ok, I was a fan.

Let's face it, Pinterest is a blast, great fun and my fave...visual. Love that. But did you know that as of Jan 2012, Pinterest drove more traffic to websites than Linkedin, Google Plus, Reddit and YouTube..combined!!??

Beth's book "Pinfluence: The Complete Guide to Marketing Your Business with Pinterest" is the best information and education you'll could ever receive short of sitting at a guru's elbow ( that would be Beth) on a daily basis.

Beth starts with the basics, gets you up and running, helping you to build an effective profile, pinning to your first boards, then to optimizing your sites and blogs for others to pin from, and grow your followers. You'll see how to link to your other internet real estate such as your Facebook and Twitter accounts and on to advanced techniques, even using the iPhone app. It's all here.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to benefit from the avalanche of traffic and activity that today is called Pinterest.

When a new social media trend comes along I generally like to buy a book so that I understand it before I dive in. I know, I know -- that seems old fashioned. But the reality is that getting my head around a social media site like Pinterest by reading about it first saves me lots of time and energy down the road. So when I started seeing many of my friends on Facebook posting links to Pinterest, I wanted to understand what the site is all about. Pinfluence was perfect for my needs.

Several things really stand out to me about this book. The strategy chapters are excellent -- and there are lots of strategy chapters (basically chapters 3 through 14 are all about strategy). The strategy chapters include everything from etiquette to how to build community.

The author works directly with small business clients, so she knows the real issues that they are dealing with. Best of all, the author is not a fan of marketing hype. Instead she shows one how to become more authentic and real in relating to followers (and potential customers) on Pinterest.

By the end of reading Pinfluence, I had a clear picture of where Pinterest fits within the larger social media universe and I had lots of great ideas for how to use this tool as part of my larger marketing strategy.