Pin It to Win It | An Experiment in Traffic Generation

I can’t seem to go anywhere on the internet these days and not see some article or tutorial on Pinterest.  You guys blew me away with your response the other week to my article, Add Pinterest to your Facebook Fan Page | No Geek Required.

Over the weekend, I was catching up with reading some of my favorite blogs and almost everyone had some post about Pinterest. But one really caught my eye. Contests! Businesses are using Pinterest for contests to drive traffic and engagement.

Comment Contest: Post a picture of a product or service and ask people to comment on the pin. Then do a drawing for the winner using random.org, Now it couldn’t be much simpler than that and frankly a lot easier than Facebook.

Repinning Contest: Similar to the comment contest, but the pin gets even more exposure.

Photo Submission: Ask everyone on your social networks to submit a photo showing off your product. Think outside the box and you can have some real fun with this one. Or you can ask them to curate a board of their own with your products and the board with the most followers wins.

The Grand Experiment

But how much does this really pay off by creating more traffic for the small business and converting prospects to customers? The only way that can be answered is to do my own little experiment and gather the facts for myself.

The first step was to get Susie Solorpeneur invited to join Pinterest. After a couple of emails and a little bit of work, I’m happy to announce that there’s a brand new member of Pinterest. You’ll recognize Susie’s smiling face welcoming you.

It looks a little bare right now, but that will change. Now for some fun.

Announcing Pin It to Win It

I have set aside one board specifically for a contest named “Pin It to Win It”. Not too original, I know, but ir was late at night when I hatched the experiment.

The next thing I need is some people who would like to play along. I figured with everyone wanting to show off all of those brand new graphics for their fan pages, we might have a match. Here’s how the contest will work and how you can enter to win a prize and some bragging rights.

1. To enter you need to ba a follower of The Savvy Solopreneur on Pinterest.
2. Then, once you have published your shinny new cover on your fan page, go to Easy Fan Pages, and post a comment that you’ve published it and tag your page for the world to see. I’ll follow that tag and add a pic of your cover to the “Pin It to Win It” board.
3. Go to the board and put a comment under the pic of your cover about why you want people to “like” this pin.
4. Then ask all of your friends and fans to come by and vote for you with a with likes, comments and repins.

On April 1, I’ll tally up all of the votes and announce a winner. The winner with the highest total of likes, comments and repins will receive a copy of Mari Smith’s book, “The New Relationship Marketing”.

In case of a tie there will be a drawing using random.org that I will publish. All decisions are final.

So get your creative juices flowing. The idea is to have fun and come up with a design that will make your fans want to engage more with your site. Heck you can use this contest as a jumping board and get them involved with you.