You put a lot of time and effort into creating good content. It’s hard work. All you want is for your good content to be shared and for it to drive targeted traffic to your site. It’s feels good when your content gets pinned and repinned on Pinterest and shared on the other social networks. What if you could double the number of pins of your content by following a simple formula? Here’s a case study of one company (that we helped) to get way more pins than they normally would have otherwise by following The Perfect Pin Formula. What’s The Perfect Pin Formula?

Last week we posted about The Perfect Pin Formula and how to create images that get pinned thousands of times. It’s a great post. You should go read it right now if you haven’t already.  VD + PCC + M = The Perfect Pin Here’s a brief explanation: VD = Visual Dominance: This is all about making your image stand out in the pin feed on Pinterest. Think contrast. Whether by size (height, in this case), color, use of white space, etc. VD is what gets your pin/image noticed among all the other pins. PCC = Purple Cow Content: This part of the of the equation refers to content that is worth pinning and sharing. Your content must be remarkable enough to get pinners to want to pin it. PCC is what gets your pin/image pinned and repinned. M = Mystery: The perfect pin drives traffic back to your site. If you have all of the content in the image itself there will be no reason to click through to your site. The BIGGEST mistake made on Pinterest is giving away TOO much information on your pin/image. M is what gets people to click through to your site. Now let’s see how this formula was tested and used to double the number of repins per pin.

Here’s How We Used The Perfect Pin Formula For This Campaign

Diabetic Connect hired us to help them with a Pinterest campaign. They had a slideshow that they wanted to promote and push on Pinterest. It was a slideshow with 60 low-carb recipes for those with diabetes. We ran a little test with the page at first by using smaller images. These images definitely had PCC and M going for them. They were lacking some in the VD area. Here are the small images we used at first:

Image 1

Image 2

Image 3

Sidenote: When running campaigns we always pin to relevant community boards. We find these community boards by using a tool we created called Board Deck. We pinned these smaller images to several community boards and got decent numbers of repins and were pretty happy. Repin counts depend on the board you’re pinning to, the time of day you are pinning, and the day of the week. With these smaller images we averaged 23 repins per pin. The range of repins was as low as 6 up to as high as 80. But we wanted to see if we could do better. So we created a new image that was a lot taller by adding more pictures of recipes within the image and used some bolder colors in the header to make the image stand out more. This was all an attempt to create visual dominance. Here’s the long/tall image that was used:

Now the image had VD, PCC, and M. With this taller image, the average repins per pin was 48, more than double the average of the smaller images. The range was from 8 to 171! The results from this simple test were staggering. The total pin count with the small images was 4,910 in a week and a half. The total pin count with the long image in a week and a half was 19,560. This shows, that by using VD and PCC in the image we were able to get more pins. There was definitely M with all of these images because you had to click through to the site to see the recipes. How much traffic did it drive? 13,352 visits to the site 264,571 page views If you’d like to read a full case study on this campaign, click here. So, there you have it. The Perfect Pin Formula in action. Now go and implement it in your own images.

This blog post was written by Seth Norwood at Dillymarketing.com.

How A Site Doubled It’s Repins By Using The Perfect Pin Formula is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

If you want evidence of the way the internet is pervading every aspect of our lives, you need look no further than its effect on education. The internet and social media have dramatically changed both teaching and learning.

In fact, most students’ (an incredible 93 percent) first instinct when confronted with a research problem is to turn to Google or Bing to get information rather than going to the library, and despite the best efforts of faculty to discourage its use, Wikipedia is the research resource that is used most often. It’s not only students that are turning to the web, however. A whopping 90 percent of faculty uses social media in the courses they’re teaching, and 8 in 10 have used online video in class. In addition, colleges and universities are reaching out to students in a way they never could before—85 percent of admissions offices use some sort of social media, from video blogging to social networking.

The internet has also had a strong influence on the how, where, and what students are studying. Right now, more than 6 million students are taking at least one online course, and 11 universities across the country offer some sort of search engine optimization or search engine marketing curriculum.

Even with online learning being as widespread as it is, however, as many as one in three academic leaders consider it to be inferior to face-to-face instruction. As these online-trained students continue to enter the workforce, time will tell whether internet education can compete with traditional learning models.

Sources: 
http://sloanconsortium.org/publications/survey/going_distance_2011
http://www.pearsonlearningsolutions.com/educators/pearson-social-media-survey-2011-bw.pdf
slideshare.net/leighhouse/social-media-higher-ed
http://www.varsityoutreach.com/pagetracker/directory/topten.aspx
http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2008f/UR_191308_REGION1.html
http://www.nsba.org/Services/TLN/BenefitsofMembership/Publications/Creating-and-Connecting.pdf
http://thesmt.com/sem-seo-courses-coming-to-portland-oregon-campuses/
http://www.thebestcolleges.org/the-10-best-e-commerce-e-business-degree-programs/
http://www.fastweb.com/college-search/articles/43-ten-majors-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2010/01/14/careers-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago/
http://old.diglib.org/use/whitepaper.htm http://www.alea.edu.au/documents/item/180

How Has The Internet Changed Education? [Infographic] is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.

Many people see their mobile phone as an extension of themselves, but 20 years ago it was a different story.

People relied on getting information from internet searches exclusively on desktop computers.

Over the years, this evolved to include laptops and eventually mobile devices.

The way we search the internet has also changed with technology. Yahoo! was once the search engine of choice, using people to categorize each page. Then Google changed search. Webcrawlers were developed to scale the internet in search of data to determine where it will show up in an internet search.

Websites that optimize for these spiders ranked higher in the search engine results, and it’s becoming increasingly important for websites to optimize for mobile users as well.

Today, nearly half of all Americans are using smart phones as a search tool, opening the search traffic lanes for businesses to reach new customers, and geotargeting offers results based on someone’s location.

78 percent of smartphone users use their phones while they shop, and 60 percent of consumers search for brand information from mobile devices before making a purchase.

People are looking for information, and they need it promptly. Websites optimized for mobile use have a 75 percent higher rate of engagement per visit.

“This is the future, and everyone will adapt,” said Google chairman Eric Schmidt.

Now people can search by image. They can take photos of products and places, and use apps to help them find the best prices and reviews.

What can your small business do to improve its mobile search ranking?

Use effective keywords associating your brand with the right terms and phrases. Utilize Google Maps to help people locate your business quickly. Keep in mind that people use their mobile phones for immediate access to information, so make sure your web pages load quickly on any device.

With the touch of a button, consumers are seamlessly connected to the information they need.

Have you optimized your website to help them find you? Stop by our SEO for small businesses page to get a free, customized proposal.

Why Businesses Should Optimize Their Websites For Mobile Users is a post by SEO expert SEO.com. For information about our SEO services or more great SEO tips and tricks, visit the SEO.com blog.