You’ve probably heard of Pinterest by now. It describes itself as an online pinboard – a site where photos and images are more important than words. Since one of the most important parts of marketing your holiday rental is to present people with various images of it, you can see how valuable Pinterest could be.
Here are some reasons why you should be on Pinterest.
You can promote your Pinterest board on your own rental site
Attracting visitors to your Pinterest board can be done in several ways. A ‘follow me’ button is the easiest way to get people involved. Position it above the fold on your website (so people don’t have to scroll down). They can click through and see the collection of photos you have posted there.
It is also worth writing a blog post for your holiday let site explaining how and why you use Pinterest. If someone visits your website and likes one or more of the pictures there, they can pin them to their own pinboard on Pinterest. This helps bring you a bigger audience and generates more backlinks too.
You can post more photos than you would on your holiday rental site
Your main website will need photos. But you should only add the most important ones here. Think of Pinterest as a photo blog and add other more in depth photos there. Let people know what it would be like to stay there. Add close ups of flowers in the hanging baskets outside the front door. Take a photo of the cat that often appears for a fuss. How about a picture of a nice locally produced bottle of wine and two glasses?
Once you start thinking in more depth you will have a whole host of pictures to add to Pinterest. These can go into far more detail and because you have more, you can add them regularly – perhaps one or two a day. People will start to follow you and hopefully repin some of your photos as well.
You can link each photo back to your main holiday rental website
This clearly encourages more traffic and interest for your main site. If someone likes one of your images they can click through to your actual website. If you get creative with your images you will stand a better chance of having more people repin them too, leading to even more potential website traffic.
Remember to take pictures of special events and local attractions too. Each one is a reason for staying at your holiday rental. Provide a wide range of photos in order to appeal to the widest possible audience. Think seasonal too; you can always link back to specific and relevant sections of your website instead of linking to the home page all the time. This adds further links and promotes different areas of your site.
Once you get the hang of the visual element of Pinterest you will see how powerful a tool it can be when promoting your holiday let.
I can see the benefits of this, and I am already using Pinterest, how do I add the button to my PMP website? I’ve checked in widgets and can’t see it there.
Hi Helen, thanks for your comment. It’s great that you’re already using it. We have a couple of new widgets for Pinterest being released next week. In the meantime there’s nothing to stop you embedding the buttons in the content of your website using the HTML Snippet functionality on the editor.
Guys,
I have just started using Pinterest for my rental and found your (this) post whilst doing some google research on the subject. (so well done on the SEO front 😉
There are a lot of ‘top tips’ out there about Pinterest, but much of them are very similar and have obviously ‘scraped’ info from others, but you have given me some new dimensions to consider with this thoughtful post and have really got me thinking in a much broader way about how I might utilise Pinterest. Brilliant stuff –
Thanks a bunch !
You’re welcome Martin! Thanks for your comment. We’re pleased you got something useful out of it. We wish you lots of success with the promotion of your holiday rental via Pinterest.