Web Hosting Companies

With thousands of web hosting companies in the market it can be difficult if not impossible to know which web site hosting companies truly provide an excellent hosting solution at an excellent price. When you have an established domain name with a good web hosting company, you can get reports on your traffic and which of your pages your customers are visiting most often, as well as many other statistics.

Your web host will charge you a fee for monthly service that ranges from 10 or 20 to the more expensive 50.00 per month. Plan to pay between 300 and 500 per year to your web host.

Always avoid free or very inexpensive web hosting services, because you may experience bouts of server downtimes and you are likely to have significant limitations in storage, number of email addresses, FTP upload etc.

Be sure your web host can accommodate e-commerce and storefronts, wireless capability, bogs, forums, chats, online interactive helps and anything else you want to add onto your site.

Estimate what your growth needs are and ensure that this web host can serve you as you grow. The last thing you want to do is change host mid way unless you absolutely have to do so.

Check your bandwidth capability to be sure that, if your website traffic grows rapidly, your customers will not have to wait to download or view information. Three things to look for in a web hosting company are

1. Excellent Customer Support Your hosting provider should be there for you 24/7 and give you instant access to the technicians you need to solve your problem. Ask them how long it takes for them to typically respond to your problem. A good test is to call them in the mid night to check if you get to a live, level 3 support.

2. A Sound Infrastructure Check whether they offer a multi-homed network powered by multiple bandwidth providers to ensure redundancy. Some offer a 100 guarantee on its network availability or network uptime.

3. Financial Stability If youre running very critical operations, you cant afford to be with a hosting company that may not be in business in a few months.

1 comment - What do you think?
Posted by seoXpert - February 26, 2011 at 2:42 pm

Categories: SEO Tags: KeywordDensity, off page seo, on page, ranking, referer logs, search engines, SEO

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Inbound Internet Marketing Feed
Why You Need Social Media Followers Who Won't Ever Buy
Which is better? 50 qualified social media followers, or 1,000 followers, many of whom will never buy from you? The answer may surprise you.
In social media, reach is of critical importance. It directly impacts how much your content and messages get shared, it increases your business' ability to get found and generate leads, it can help extend your online footprint as a thought leader, and the list goes on. In other words, in an online world, social reach shouldn't be a trivial factor for businesses leveraging inbound marketing. So, have you figured out what the right answer to our first question is yet? If the title of this article wasn't enough of a hint, yes, more followers is always better.
It may seem obvious (more is always better....right?), but a lot of businesses fall into the trap of thinking fewer and more qualified is better. In this case, here's why it's not...
1. More followers means access to more followers' followers.
This concept, albeit simple, is pivotal to understanding the overall importance of reach, so here goes. Think about it: Every one of your fans/followers also has his/her own followers, be it 5, 500, or 5,000. Let's say that a follower who has 5,000 Twitter followers of his own shares one of your blog posts or retweets one of your tweets. Now, that content is getting exposed to 5,000 additional people who weren't directly following you. If you can understand that every one of your fans/followers might share your content with their friends and followers, now you can start understanding the awesome impact of reach. So even if that original follower of yours never becomes a customer himself, that doesn't mean one of his followers who saw your content because of him won't. Now that's some powerful stuff.
2. Influencers have, well, influence.
If you can build up a large following for your business in social media, you probably have a few influencers among the bunch. While these influencers may follow but never buy from you, remember that these people are called influencers for a reason. They can introduce you to co-marketing partnerships, put in a good word with investors, and provide introductions to other influencers, bloggers, and experts in your industry. For example, if you can solicit an introduction from an influencer to another industry blogger that you can contribute a guest blog post to, you'll probably benefit from a couple of inbound links. That follower may not have contributed any direct revenue to your business, but those inbound links are very valuable.
3. Followers who won't ever buy can still refer you business.
Indirect exposure to your followers' personal networks can be an invaluable source of business. Okay, so Frank the Facebook fan may never actually purchase your industrial vacuum cleaner for his teeny tiny small business office. But when his buddy, landlord Lenny, is searching for a new one for the apartment building he owns, Facebook fan Frank might just refer you some highly qualified business. Even if landlord Lenny isn't the type to participate in social media himself, his good buddy Frank is. Need I say more?
4. Social shares impact SEO.
The impact social media is having on SEO is only increasing. Search engines are taking social cues like social media shares into account when they're ranking your content, which means the more people you can get to share your content in social media, the better.
Let's say you own a dog grooming business, and you and one of your competitors each wrote a blog article about how to take care of your dog's coat in between visits to the groomer. But let's also say your competitor has 10 times as many social media followers than you and his article got tweeted 50 times, generated 20 likes on Facebook, and got quite a few shares on LinkedIn and Google+, too. All of a sudden, your competitor has quite a leg up when it comes to getting his article ranked in search ahead of yours. In other words, because social shares are now one of the factors search engines take into consideration when ranking your content, it behooves you to build up your following and encourage those social shares. If you tweeted your article and you have 1,000 followers compared to your competitors' 50 followers, you have a much better chance of generating social shares and a much better chance of ranking in search. Those people who shared your content may never become customers of your dog grooming business themselves, but someone who finds your article in search because of them might.
5. Your followers might surprise you.
If you've been doing your research and spending time developing buyer personas, you likely have a pretty solid grasp on who your ideal customers are. That's all well and good, but if you have a very narrow-minded idea of who exactly will buy your products and services, you could actually miss out on a completely different set of people who might also buy from you.
To use a classic example, the makers of baking soda had a very specific use case in mind for their product: baking. But we all know that the uses for baking soda extend way beyond baking -- it can also be used to extinguish small electrical fires, for personal hygiene, and as a cleaning agent, to name a few. And you can bet that some people who buy baking soda never even use it for baking.
The lesson here is that building up a large following in social media could expose your brand and products to a group -- or groups -- of people you might never have thought would be interested in what you sell. Your product or service may not have completely different, original uses like baking soda does, but your followers could still surprise you. Just because a social media follower doesn't fall neatly into one of your cookie cutter buyer personas, doesn't necessarily mean he won't buy from you.
Always Be Working to Build Social Reach
The ultimate takeaway here is this: just because followers may not directly turn into customers doesn't mean they're not valuable. Social media reach can be a powerful thing for any business, and the ones who understand this know that continuing to build reach is a smart social media tactic.
If building reach isn't something you're consciously doing, you may want to start working to attract more fans and followers for your social media accounts. In this article, we've got some great tips for building reach that can help get you going. Doing so can greatly increase the impact and ROI of your social media efforts. And if you're having a tough time convincing your boss that building reach is important, share this article with them :)
In what ways are you working to regularly increase your business' social reach?
Image Credit: Caitlin Doe

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25 Things You Could Buy With a Super Bowl Ad Budget
A 30-second commercial advertisement for Super Bowl XLVI is going for $3.5 million. Can you imagine what you as a marketer could do for your company if you had that kind of budget? If you can't even fathom what you'd do with a marketing budget that big (and just think, this is just one of many campaigns they're running this year!), we've come up with some ideas for how you can better spend that chunk of change. And if you're thinking you'd spend it on a commercial during the Super Bowl, well, maybe these ideas will give you some perspective on just how far $3.5 million can go in the marketing world.
25 Ways to Spend the $3.5 Million Budget of a Super Bowl XLVI Commercial
1.) Buy 1,458 years of HubSpot Basic Inbound Marketing Software. Tweet This!
2.) Direct mail the entire country of Sweden. Tweet This!
3.) Hire someone to blog for you for the next 70 years. Tweet This!
4.) Put up a billboard along the highway from Boston to D.C. every one mile. Tweet This!
5.) Purchase 2,333 years of Salesforce Enterprise CRM. Tweet This!
6.) Buy inbound links from enough web pages to fill the Oxford English Dictionary 16 times. Tweet This!
7.) Use PPC to buy a search presence for 2,333,333 keywords after Google dings you for purchasing links. Tweet This!
8.) Give 2,060 employees their own personal version of the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!
9.) Send those 2,060 employees to classes so they know how to use the entire Adobe Creative Suite. Tweet This!
10.) Buy the email list of the entire population of Chile and SPAM them; try to do it before your IP is blacklisted. Tweet This!
11.) Repair your company's spamtastic image by plastering your company logo and tagline across 35,000 park benches. Tweet This!
12.) Hire Al Gore to be your company's celebrity spokesperson for a full 24-hour day. Tweet This!
13.) Let everyone know Al Gore is your spokesperson by, ironically, printing enough flyers to stick to every single household door in the United Kingdom. Take that, environment. Tweet This!
14.) Buy the stamps to send out your 2012 holiday cards. Let's hope you have 7,777,777 customers. Tweet This!
15.) Purchase about 35,000 shares of Facebook after it IPOs. Tweet This!
16.) Keep a web designer on call 24 hours a day for 4 years to change your website whenever you want. Tweet This!
17.) Commission enough content from the Zerys Content Marketplace to post a new blog to your website every hour of every day for the next 26 years. Tweet This!
18.) Hire the entire graduating class of Emerson College's Masters of Marketing program to work in your department. Tweet This!
19.) Or, if you're happy with your current team, you could send 23 of them to get their MBAs. Tweet This!
20.) You should probably also buy them all brand new MacBook Airs for their studies; you'll have enough money left over to hoard 3,477 for yourself. What? Marketers love Apple products! Tweet This!
21.) Hire Lady Gaga to follow your CMO around all day, singing "Happy Birthday" on repeat, every year for the next 145 years. Tweet This!
22.) Develop 542 mobile apps. Because the other 541 just weren't good enough. Tweet This!
23.) Purchase enough color toner to print brochures that can span the Atlantic Ocean from Dublin to Boston. And then back again. Tweet This!
24.) Pay to rank for the rarely searched keyword phrase, "best company in the world" for 11,666 years. Tweet This!
25.) Air 17 regular commercials on network television any other time of the year. Tweet This!
Now just think of what you could do with the additional $1-2 million you'd spend actually producing the commercial...
If you had $3.5+ million to spend on marketing, how would you use the money?
Image credit: Images_of_Money

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How the Third Wave of Media Is Transforming Marketing Content
As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to "the way it was," and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let's learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption.
This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world. Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? Those are the cries of the publishing and broadcast executives.
As a marketer, you should be cheering.
Amazon's Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry
Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. "What's that?" you ask? "Amazon publishes books? But I thought they only sold them." That's right -- Amazon is a book distributor AND publisher.
In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations.
But Amazon doesn't care.
As reported by the New York Times, Amazon published 122 books in the fall of 2011. This number is seemingly insignificant when compared to the total number of books published by all publishers during the same time period. But what doesn't matter, because a secret about the publishing industry is that it makes most of its money from a small group of best-selling books and authors. Amazon understands this and seems willing to lose money in order to take the best and brightest writers away from traditional publishing houses. And with more than $6 billion in the bank, it can.
Barnes and Noble, citing the lack of ability to sell ebooks from Amazon's published works, has decided to return the favor by not selling the print versions of those Amazon-published books in its stores. This marks a continued battle for control over distributing the words of the world.
The Third Wave of Media
Salar Kamangar, CEO of YouTube, believes that we are in a third wave of media. At an event in California this week Kamangar said, “The first wave was the broadcast networks. The second wave was cable networks. Now, it’s about giving people exactly what they want to watch today.”
Mashable reports that YouTube has invested more than $100 million into premium content channels around niche topics including food, fashion, pets, and fitness, making it clear that YouTube is willing to spend money to be a major player in this third wave of media. This week, YouTube hired Bruce Seidel, who oversaw shows on the Food Network and Cooking Channel, to lead programming for YouTube's new food-focused channel. According to a New York Times article, Seidel hopes to “discover new stars and galvanize the niches that are driving the internet food conversation.”
User Experience and the Third Wave of Media
Since the early beginning of the internet, pundits have discussed the rise of internet-based entertainment, but the fact of the matter is that online video has never really made it into the living room. One core barrier that is too frequently ignored is the user experience of watching online video compared to watching television. People watch television to relax, and having to click a new video to watch on YouTube every three minutes is not relaxing. Plus, you have the added anxiety that, for many people, the computer equals a device, and devices subsequently mean stress.
It is the deficiency of user experience that third wave media companies have to overcome in order to infiltrate the living room. But Kamangar, who plans to launch 100 niche content channels on YouTube this year, says, "The idea is that you’ll subscribe to a channel, and you’ll go and just keep watching.”
Niche AND Quality
The knock against many ebooks and online video shows is quality. The fact of the matter is that because anyone with a computer or video camera can create an ebook or online show, the quality and production value in many cases is much lower than that of traditional publishing houses and cable networks. That's why Amazon is signing top-quality authors and YouTube is hiring some of the best minds in cable programming. Both of these companies understand that, to take over the living room, the core content has to be remarkable.
The idea of remarkable content isn't anything new. However, content has the potential to become even more remarkable when it is applied to a niche. And that niche factor is the leverage third wave media companies have over the first and second wave media companies. Imagine if 100 new cable networks launched this year to cover niche topics. It simply wouldn't happen. Online video providers and ebook authors' best shot at disruption comes from a laser focus on increasing content quality standards while still serving and representing niche communities currently underserved by cable networks.
Change Is Hard: AKA Why This Hasn't Already Happened
The fact that the world is constantly changing isn't news to any of us. We write it off as a fact of life. Despite this constant change, we are at a paradox. Change is easy to hate, especially major disruption to our daily routines and habits. And it's not that we as people or as a society don't want to change. It's the simple fact that change is exhausting.
Chip and Dan Heath explain this idea perfectly in their book, Switch. The Heath brothers write: "Change is hard because people wear themselves out. And that’s the second surprise about change: What looks like laziness is often exhaustion."
The way we read, watch, and consume information is changing at the pace of a rapid turtle. This means that you won't blink and suddenly live in a world where no publishers exist, but every couple of months, a stack of small changes starts to become noticeable, and the media world becomes slightly different. Before you know it, a few years have passed, and the media world is completely different.
Marketing in a Transitional Media World
It's time to find your niche. The way information is distributed is gradually yet radically changing around us, which means you can't wake up years from now and decide that it's time to change. It'd be too late. Instead, you need to take action now to be an active part of this transitional media world.
Start executing on these four action items today to not only survive, but also succeed in the next generation of media.
1. Find Your Niche - Your niche isn't the product you sell. Rather, your niche is the subject matter that is of greatest interest to your prospective customers. If you sell supplies to auto body shop owners, then your niche is content about operating a successful auto body shop in every facet of the business, even those for which you don't have products to sell.
2. Balance Quality and Velocity of Content - The challenge of content in the online media landscape is that content has to be high quality enough to stand out, but also be agile enough not to be out of date the moment it's published. The only real way to know what a good quality/velocity balance is for your business is to test different options to understand what works the best for your niche. You can do this by changing the frequency in which you publish blog posts and other content. Do you get more leads and engagement when publish a blog post every day, or once a week? Do blog posts that you spend more time polishing and improving generate more traffic and leads than other posts? These are the elements to test as part of your marketing content.
3. Have a Personality - Don't be bland. Look at the text or videos that capture your attention. They probably have a clear point of view and an interesting tone. Don't be afraid to be fun, sarcastic, edgy, or any other tone that aligns with your brand and products.
4. Start Planning Beyond the Desktop Computer Screen - For most of us, we still think of a computer as the device that sits on our desk with a big screen that isn't touch-sensitive. But from the Kindle, Nook, and iPads to iPhone and Andriod smartphones, the definition of a computer has changed. Yes, these changing devices will impact your marketing content. And it isn't just about their size, but it's also that they all have one key element in common: touch. Start thinking about what your content looks like in a world without mice (the computer kind). It will have a huge impact on how we design our content and collect information from our leads.
Success of digital-only magazines like the Daily demonstrate that consumers are willing to not only consume but also pay for touchable content that is personalized for their devices. Survey your target audience, and understand what devices they are using to consume information. Then make sure your content works well on the most popular devices.
Change is here.
Image Credit: Ariane Middel

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How to Tackle Your 5 Toughest Email Marketing Challenges
Email is a powerful marketing channel, but it's also one that presents many questions and difficulties. In its 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa surveyed 2,735 companies and asked them to rank the significance of 12 common email marketing challenges. In this blog post, we will focus on the top five challenges and suggest some ideas through which you can address these issues.
The best inbound marketers like to amass valuable data across their different channels. For instance, they might like to see the possible relationships between landing pages and emails or track the sales process of an email conversion. In addition to the obvious reporting benefits such integrations provide, they also open the door to a much more enjoyable experience for email subscribers.
Just think about it: if you could bridge the gap between email marketing performance and social media activities, landing page conversions, or new customer acquisitions, you are that much closer to improving your sales funnel and delivering content that your community loves.
'Other data,' including form submissions and activities on site, can point you to the resources your recipients are truly interested in. In that way, you have a clear understanding of how to further engage them through careful targeting and segmentation.
Solution: Integrate Your Data Systems
In order to integrate your email marketing with your other data systems, you need to use marketing software that allows for that integration to take place. In fact, integration is the foundation on which HubSpot’s software was built as it connects SEO, blogging, social media, lead management, and reporting with email marketing and lead nurturing.
Combining your different marketing databases allows for clear segmentation and the ability to better target your customers and prospects with relevant email messages. Once you have access to an integrated marketing system, keep your buyer persona in mind and focus on the opportunity to target the right audience with the right message.
The more targeted your email campaigns, the more content you’ll need. The key to promoting relevant content in email is to provide an offer that is connected to the initial request. What action have your contacts taken on (or even off) your website? Offer them content that fits with their intent and their needs.
Deliverability rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes
versus the total number of messages sent. It tells you how many of the emails bounced back,
and it's a sure sign of inactivity. The two factors that influence deliverability rate are soft bounces and hard bounces. The soft bounce is temporary and occurs when an email server rejects an incoming message (for instance, when your recipients’ inboxes are full). A hard bounce, on the other hand, is less benign and represents a permanent error to deliver an email. This generally occurs when the addresses you send to are bad or don’t exist.
A low deliverability rate might get you blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). If your list is full of inactive emails, you don’t really know what your complaint rate is. Sure, you probably look at the total complaints over total list size, but ISPs are actually registering the total number of complaints over the number of active email users.
In addition, ISPs can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. So even if you have acquired emails legitimately, the abandoned addresses may have turned into spam traps. Aside from all the ISP problems, low deliverability rate also means you are wasting money sending messages to nonexistent addresses.
Solution: Practice Good Email Hygiene
Start by cleaning up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. (You can identify these addresses with metrics such as opens, clicks, or website activity.) If you have a really serious problem with deliverability, you might want to redefine your opt-in process to prevent invalid emails from getting on your list. Either ask people to enter their email twice or experiment with double opt-in. Lastly, make sure your recipients have an opportunity to update their email addresses. Invite them to your preference center from every email you send. That might also help you with segmentation and achieving higher engagement overall.
In MarketingSherpa’s survey, marketing professionals shared that their third most serious challenge in respect to email marketing is growing and retaining subscribers. No wonder! Increasing the size of your email list and keeping your contacts engaged in your messages is no easy task. In fact, according to MarketingSherpa, the average email list depreciates by 25% every year.
Unfortunately, companies often battle this problem by purchasing lists. This practice will surely get you into trouble: it might add invalid addresses to your list, and thus, pollute your entire database. Even if the addresses you acquired are valid, the new recipients will most likely not be interested in your content and either unsubscribe or not engage with your emails altogether.
To retain subscribers, a lot of companies also send fewer emails, thinking that the communication frequency might in some way define engagement. A few emails means they are more special, right? Wrong. Frequency of emailing, as we have established in our Science of Email Marketing research, doesn’t necessarily negatively impact subscriber retention.
Solution: Earn Your Email Subscribers
Don’t purchase email lists; instead, earn your subscribers. Be clear to your target audience about what they will get out of subscribing to your emails. Give them a clear description of what the value proposition is. For example, will your emails offer: (1) tips and tools on how to run their business more efficiently, (2) product updates from your company, or (3) special offers via email? Your audience will want to know “why” they should subscribe before they decide to clutter their inbox with even more emails.
Are you concerned that you are emailing your subscribers too often? Give this thought a break and instead ask yourself if you are emailing the right people with the right message. In order to retain your email subscribers, you’ll need to provide them with ongoing value that is targeted to their needs. Make sure you are segmenting based on knowledge you have about your recipients.
Don’t limit your email testing to subject lines. Embrace testing of various elements in your email marketing efforts to optimize email performance. For instance, you can do A/B testing of the landing pages you're promoting in your emails.
Achieving measurable ROI (return on investment) is another challenge that marketing professionals face in the land of email marketing. It’s difficult for them to connect the dots between the messages they send out to prospective customers and the moment when these subscribers get further engaged and turn into customers.
Interestingly enough, this problem is tightly connected to challenge number one -- integrating email marketing with other data systems. When your marketing channels are not speaking to one another, it’s hard to identify how they affect conversions. For instance, you might see that your email blast got a 3.4% click-through rate (CTR), but can you also see if that communication contributed to generating new leads? What is more, do you see if it resulted in any new customers?
Solution: Closed-Loop Marketing
The solution to achieving measurable ROI from your email marketing campaigns is to practice closed-loop marketing. Follow a contact from the point of visiting your website through further engagement (viewing other web pages, downloading resources, clicking on your emails), to her final conversion into a customer. Implementing closed-loop marketing empowers you to track leads from their initial channel through a first conversion all the way to becoming customers. Such intelligence, in turn, enables you to identify your most powerful marketing channels and assign clear value to each of them. In this way, you will be able to measure the ROI not only of your emails, but also of your other efforts, which might include social media marketing and blogging.
Your email campaigns should only be a part of your holistic marketing approach. The real power comes from achieving a strong marketing mix. Email cannot be truly as fruitful just by itself; rather, it should also strengthen your other initiatives, just like you shouldn't use social media in a vacuum, only rely on blogging, or trust that search engine optimization is enough to meet your goals. This, however, seems to be a challenge for marketers. How do you optimize your sales and marketing funnel with emails?
Most marketing professionals are accustomed to sending one-time email blasts that are not necessarily related to the actions of their email subscribers, their interests, or needs. Such a practice doesn’t help push leads down the sales funnel, and it can actually alienate them.
Solution: Nurture Your Leads
Lead nurturing sometimes goes by other names: marketing automation, drip marketing, auto-responders, etc. Simply put, lead nurturing is a system that allows you to send an automated series of emails to an early stage lead in order to better qualify them before handing them over to your sales team.
If it typically takes your leads a month to make a purchasing decision, then make sure you’re spreading out your communications to keep them engaged throughout the month. By taking this approach, you save your sales organization time because you educate and qualify the lead overtime.
Among some of the key benefits of lead nurturing is that it enables marketers to establish contact with their fresh leads fast and stay top of mind for potential, and even current, customers. In comparison to email marketing, lead nurturing is also relatively easy to set up because it is automated and doesn’t need a ton of maintenance over time.
What are some of your top email marketing challenges? Do you have any to add to this list?
This blog post is an excerpt from the ebook Introduction to Email Marketing. To gain a better foundation on executing and measuring successful email marketing, download your free copy of the ebook.

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7 Examples of Brands That Pop on Pinterest
I’m sitting here next to an empty pan of mini red velvet donuts, and all I want to do is find another recipe to bake this weekend. No, my first stop won’t be the Food Network, Gourmet, or Cooking Light. What I am dying to do is head over to my new obsession -- Pinterest -- to discover the next pastry to tackle. Currently, I'm using Pinterest to save links to just about everything: recipes I love, clothes I want to buy, or furniture I want to furnish my house with someday. As a 25-year-old graduate student, someday is a little farther off than I’d like, but it’s best to be prepared.
Since you already know how to use Pinterest for marketing, now you're probably craving some inspirational real-life examples of brands using it effectively. Many businesses have recently discovered that, not only is Pinterest another way to engage with fans and customers without spending advertising dollars, but it's also a great way to impact purchases, especially when it comes to impulse buying. Data from Monetate shows that referral traffic from Pinterest to the websites of five specialty apparel retailers jumped 389% from July-December 2011.
Based on this data, it's not surprising that many businesses-focused early adopters have been lifestyle brands like home goods retailer West Elm and Real Simple Magazine. However, tech brands like Mashable and The Next Web, as well as design network Behance have quickly seen the benefits, too. For these brands, Pinterest's knack for allowing an interesting, visual way of categorizing information is likely the draw. So whether your brand is based on fashion or you're just trying to show your followers what your brand is all about, Pinterest offers a great medium connect with your audience. And the brands that have been most successful aren’t just enabling users to “pin” their content; rather, they're getting in on the pinning themselves.
While Pinterest is still very young and its true ROI remains to be seen, here are 7 examples of brands who are already using Pinterest the right way: to engage fans in a meaningful way that gets them to react, share, and even convert!
Chobani
You may wonder why anyone would want to follow a Greek yogurt brand, but like Facebook and Twitter, it’s all about the content you share, not necessarily what you sell.
What They're Doing Right:
Chobani's Pinterest account doesn't just feature its different yogurt types, but it also shares recipes of how users can use its products differently. Chobani also has a featured board called “Nothing but Good,” the company’s tagline, which only showcases fun and funny pictures that go along with its brand image; there's no yogurt to be seen. In this way, Chobani is embracing the main goal of Pinterest -- to focus on the concept of a person's lifestyle and encouraging users to share their tastes and interests with others and discover those of likeminded people. In other words, by promoting the lifestyle its products promote, Chobani is using its Pinterest account to enable people to learn more about its brand beyond just its signature products.
Oreck
Yes, the vacuum cleaner brand. Sure, Oreck may be a more boring, industrial-type product (not a brand you would typically think of following on a social media site), but then again, you haven’t see how clean its floors are.
What They're Doing Right:
On its Pinterest page, Oreck has taken its industrial cleaning product and made you forget that a vacuum cleaner brand is behind the pinboards you're looking at. For example, Oreck has a board just to feature pictures of beautiful flooring styles and layouts. The images are so beautiful, and it reminds viewers about the fact that they also have to clean them every once in a while. My favorite Oreck board, however, is its board devoted to 'Furry Friends.' It subtly points out one type of cleaning job its products help take care of without hitting you over the head with it. After all, we're all well aware that the hairy aftermath of your favorite pets isn't always the easiest thing to clean.
Mashable
Mashable is the largest independent news source dedicated to covering digital culture, social media, and technology. Pinterest currently has a pretty girly vibe, considering that 54-70% of it user base is female. But as this tech brand is proving, the overwhelmingly estrogen-charged demographic of this social network could change quickly.
What They're Doing Right:
Mashable is preparing to be ahead of the curve for when the male population finally gets on board with Pinterest. Mashable's Pinterest account showcases the gadgets and infographics the news source is well known for reporting on, taking its immense amount of data and information and making it more visual and shareable. Even if you’re a more data-driven company, that doesn’t mean you don’t have something interesting to share.
Etsy
This online shopping website, with 43,000+ followers, is one of the biggest I’ve seen. Beware: I've seen items I’ve pinned for a later purchase quickly disappear before my very eyes.
What They're Doing Right:
As a retailer of homemade and vintage goods, Etsy's pinboards really take to heart what its brand stands for. You can of course connect to the thousands of items for sale on its ecommerce site, but Etsy's account also shows you how you can make your own products and how to put their products to work in your daily life, which again, emphasizes the lifestyle philosophy that Pinterest promotes. Not sure what to buy your love for Valentine's Day? Don’t worry, Etsy has all its pins organized to give you tons of ideas. In other words, giving your customers new ideas for how they can use your products will give them more reasons and incentives to buy from you. When using Pinterest, think outside the box of how you'd typically use social networks to market your products and services.
Drake University
Drake is one of the few universities jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon, and at the same time, they're doing an unbelievably awesome job. I sort of wish my beloved Wisconsin Badgers would jump on 'board,' too (hehe).
What They're Doing Right:
Drake University showcases items its student population might actually be interested in (sorry, I don’t exactly mean different kinds of beer bongs). Drake has its boards organized by clothing that matches the school's colors, room décor perfect for the dorm, what kinds of food to make when you run out of “Bulldog Bucks,” study inspirations, fan experiences, and even a board completely devoted to its bulldog mascot. Obviously, Drake is following Pinterest' lifestyle credo, making its boards specifically about the school and student experience. If you are a potential student, you can learn everything you need to know about the school with just a few quick glances. The takeaway here is to make your Pinterest brand page personal for your fans. Remind them why they love you (or should love you)!
General Electric
General Electric seems to be all about social media lately. They're rocking it on Instagram, and I shouldn’t have been surprised to find out they're dominating Pinterest as well.
What They're Doing Right:
Not only does GE have a board specifically devoted to the “Badass Machines” the company works with everyday, but it also has an “Archive” board that gives a visual history of the company’s products through the years. They also have an amazing board where they've posted all the fan photos taken during their #GEInspiredMe campaign, exemplifying a great use for Pinterest -- leveraging and featuring user-generated content. All in all, as its description says, GE is clearly devoted to “#Pinning things that inspire us to build, power, move and cure the world.” On Pinterest, stay true to core of your brand, and if you get your fans involved too, that’s even better.
Peapod
Peapod is the largest grocery delivery service in the United States, and if you are having trouble figuring out why, look no further than its Pinterest page.
What They're Doing Right:
Ever wonder how the food gets to your office or home? Want to know what sort of produce Peapod has in stock this season? The Peapod Pinterest page has all the answers. I particularly love the behind-the-scenes board devoted just to Peapod's delivery trucks. It really highlights that, at the end of the day, Peapod is primarily a delivery service. Showing the cities it's traveling through or watching its signature green bins getting loaded onto its trucks is a great way to give customers an inside look into a business that, on the outside, may not seem so glamorous. Even if your company isn't exactly devoted to “pretty things,” it doesn’t mean you can’t be on Pinterest. It just means you have to get creative about showing off your brand in an interesting and unique way. You can do this by showcasing some behind-the-scenes content that shows the people behind your brand, injecting some personality into your business and make it easy to relate to.
As you can tell, the trick to succeeding on Pinterest isn't necessarily about showing off your products or services directly. It's about finding creative ways to show how those products and services fit into the lifestyles of your target audience. Find ways to do that, and you'll have what you need to pop on Pinterest just like these brands do.
Are you experimenting with Pinterest for your brand? What are some pinboards you've created to highlight your business?
Image Credit: Christian Guthier

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