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Before I dive into how you should run a Pinterest contest, I should probably disclose to you upfront that I have never personally aided in, or ran a Pinterest contest.  That being said, I am one of only a few avid male Pinterest users (look me up here), so I write this not only as an internet marketer, but as a regular Pinterest user.

Pinterest, like so many social networks before it is forcing marketers and businesses alike to really scratch their heads and recognize how to best utilize the platform.  Like Facebook and networks before it, one of the first means of spreading brand awareness on the network seems to be the use of contests.  But if you’re going to run a Pinterest contest in a way that best serves the community, you need to do it in a way that won’t disrupt the community.  So if you’re thinking of running a Pinterest contest, consider the following:

Don’t Use a Contest Image

While I understand that companies want to get their promotional contest in front of as many eyes as possible, an image chock full of your contest rules isn’t doing much to serve the community.  I can’t tell you how many pinterest contest rules have popped up in my following feed and have annoyed the hell out of me.  In my opinion it’s almost as annoying as the spam pins telling me how I can lose weight with some magical weight loss program used by the celebrity pinned.

Below is an example from a Cost Plus World Market contest from a few months back and as you can see, a specific rule is to pin the rules.

Instead of pinning an image of the rules, why not integrate a rule to include a specific description explaining the contest and link in the board description or in the pin descriptions.  At least this allows you to promote the contest without intruding on the community.

Utilize Contest Specific Boards

Contest specific boards are going to make it easier for you to track your participants, and even easier for participants to make sure that whatever pin collection you are having them create is themed and easily accessible for themselves and their followers.  It also ensures that whatever it is you are trying to promote will be found in a single collection as opposed to spread out across a sea of Pinterest boards.  In the example below from Walmart Green, they may break the first rule of Pinterest contest club they do at least make users utilize a specific board for the contest.  This not only helps categorize the pins, but also alerts their followers that they are participating in a contest, which is a means of promotion in and of itself.

Make use of Hashtags

Another positive from the Walmart Green Pinterest contest is the use of the hashtag.  Like on other social networks hashtags help to group items together and are clickable in a description and will provide search results for all listings with the hashtag.  Again, this not only helps you as a business keep track of who’s participating, but it helps users see other pins within the collection that may interest them.

Encourage Pins of Your Own Content

While this may seem like a no brainer, and a staple of Pinterest contests I would strongly recommend you push users to use your own imagery, or imagery related to the contest to help fuel the board’s pins.  Not only will this help create a long term resource for Pinterest users, but it will also allow for long term traffic opportunities to your website well after the contest is over.  Zillow and Pulte homes recently utilized this as a bonus element to their “I want a new home sweepstakes”.  Entrants could earn up to $5,000 bonus cash for creating a “Dream Home” board using imagery from the Zillow and Pulte websites.

However, Pinterest is about inspiration.  It’s origins are rooted in creating a place for people to pin things from across the web that inspire them, or can help them achieve something.  So why not take your contest a step further and encourage users to pin images of how they use your product, or how it helped them.  Sure, you probably have some great professional images of your products, but how much more inspiring will it be if your users can see your product being used as it was inteded.  If applicable, consider having users upload their own imagery of your product in action as contest pins that help inspire other users.

Ultimately Pinterest is still very much in its infancy, so how people use Pinterest and how businesses use Pinterest is sure to evolve, but like any social network the key is to become one with the community.  If you serve your community, the community will serve you, especially if you’re pinning and promotion exceptional content.  If you still haven’t taken the plunge with Pinterest, here are some useful links that might help you get going:

• How To Use Pinterest for Small Business
• How To Resurrect Old Content with Pinterest
• Pinterest Marketing Ideas for 24 Industries and Professionals
• 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest

Back in July I learned a handful of nifty tricks after completing Google’s Power Searching with Google, and one of the more interesting tips was the ability to drag and drop any image from the web or from your desktop into Google image search to find the same or similar images.  This is probably takeaway I have used more frequently, especially when doing some fact checking with hurricane Sandy photos.  But as I continued to utilize this feature it occurred to me that people building links using infographics could easily use this feature to identify places that picked up their infographic and in turn make sure they are getting proper attribution.

How It Works

Google image search can easily search for images by simply clicking and dragging.  If you visit images.google.com you are able to drag images from other tabs directly into the search bar, or you can drag an image from a folder on your computer or desktop and perform the same search.  Searches using this feature will present you with a variety of results that look the same, or similar to your result.  Because of this, it is easy for you to find sources across the web that have been indexed with images that match what you’re looking for.

Finding Your Graphic

If you’ve posted an original infographic or other original image content you can easily drag and drop the finished graphic from your computer or website to find other places that may be featuring your content.  In the sampling of results below, you can see the results from and infographic I helped run for iEnhance.com last year.  The first result features the original piece of content, but is followed by other results featuring the same graphic.

With this information I can now visit each site featuring the graphic and make sure that iEnhance is properly receiving attribution for the image.  If not, I can contact the webmaster in hopes of getting the desired link that was included with the original infographic embed code.

Similar practices can be used to find essentially any original image content you’ve created for your website.  The catch is how original the content is.  For instance, this meme style header I did for a post on how to effectively pin images from Tumblr to Pinterest doesn’t exactly fare as well in my search because it uses a screencap from the popular eighties video game Super Mario Bros.

While many folks are still shying away from infographics in fear that they will be the next thing from Google to lose their value, I do feel that if done well these still have a place online and are still just as popular.  If you’re afraid that your infographics may hurt you in the future, this is also a great way to find opportunities to do link outreach and vary your anchor text a bit in comparison to your original embed code.  Regardless, its a quick and easy way to a) see who else picked up your graphic and b) make sure you’re getting the credit for your hard work that you deserve.

Update: After the post went out, Ben Cook tweeted me to let me know that Tineye is another good tool for doing this.  As an added bonus checkout his post on Copyright infringement outreach, which ties in nicely with my post and earning links from property that belongs to you.

Another great find with similar information is Geoff Kenyon of Distilled’s new post, which dives deeper into ways of finding missed link opportunities from your infographic.  Discover more ways to find sites that don’t link.

It’s 5:45am.  As the sun prepares for its ascent over the northwestern pacific, the sound of NPR’s Morning Edition bursts through a clock radio and breaks the early morning silence.  Portent CEO Ian Lurie awakes, pushes his cats Isis and Romulus aside, they exchange glares, and he begins yet another day in the life of Ian Lurie.

After a typical morning routine, he stumbles to his bicycle to make the first of three, 12 mile commutes he’ll make this week (the other two commutes will be by car) to Portent’s Downtown Seattle offices in Smith Tower.  Ian will point out that the ride to the office isn’t so bad, it’s the ride home with the 500-foot climb and occasional 10%+ grade that will kill you.

He arrives to the Portent offices around 6:30am and begins his morning ritual.  Each morning, Ian kicks off the day by recapping the day before.  He reviews what he got done and what he may have missed from his task list before hitting the RSS reader in an effort to curate content to share with his staff and on social media outlets throughout the day. A process that he mapped out in detail during his social media routine webinar.  Before diving into the day’s “must complete” tasks I an will focus a bit of time reviewing social updates from the previous night and respond as needed.

For the next half hour, he focuses on a single task.  This task is vital, and is always something that has to be done and cannot be ignored.  Typically, Ian will break larger tasks into smaller, more digestible chunks, but ultimately it has to be completed or he’ll be stuck spending the bulk of his day working to complete it.

After completing the day’s “must complete” task, Ian begins making his rounds to carry out meetings with various members of the Portent staff.  Though the meeting topics vary, Ian strives to keep them shorter than 15 minutes since he “really, really, really” doesn’t like meetings.

By 10:30am Ian is back at his desk, jumping from meeting to tweeting, as he spends about five minutes reviewing his RSS feed, Twitter stream and Google+.  The next hour is filled with the day-to-day duties of a CEO, but more likely he’s engaged in a snark fest – cursing and muttering about a post, quote, or something else from an industry “expert” that is probably going to wind up costing some poor business owner a ton of money.

By 11:30am, Ian realizes that his snarkiness might actually be the result of low blood sugar and decides to grab something to eat before tearing apart another blog post.  While enjoying a quick bite, Ian seizes the opportunity to regain a bit of his sanity by reading the latest from Penny Arcade, XKCD, and Scripting News before diving back into his news feed and ultimately, insanity.

The remainder of Ian’s work day is spent doing the things that matter most as the CEO of a reputable internet marketing agency.  From blog writing and research, to working on proposals, aiding his team in diagnosing site issues, or extinguishing “enormous fires started, apparently, by gremlins whose primary desire is to see me running down the street naked, pursued by tranquilizer-dart-carrying guys from the funny farm.” This is when Ian truly gets down to business.  Ian rounds out the work day by clearing out his inbox and creating his to-do list for the following day before starting out on the 12 mile ride home…uphill.

First order of business upon arriving home? Recovery.  Second order of business? Pet the cats.  After a brief recovery and some quality time with the felines, Ian spends the remainder of his evening in the company of his family.  “I find if I cut more time from family and friends for work, I get frustrated and totally lose focus. They’re a sizable part of the reason I do what I do.”  Whether it’s chores, playing video games with his 12 year old son, or helping his daughter with a project, Ian makes sure his focus is on the home front during the evenings.  He checks messages on occasion and replies on an as-needed basis, but explains, “I know the other folks at Portent can handle just about anything.”  Which makes his evenings a lot less crisis-ridden in comparison to 10 years ago.

The remaining hours of the night are spent with his wife watching T.V., or catching up with friends.  As a family of Dr. Who fans, some nights require some additional negotiation with the kids since bedtime is often met with, “Do we have to go to bed? The Doctor’s regenerating, dad!” Other nights, the couple will watch Game of Thrones or True Blood, but only “if the kids are completely unconscious, in their rooms, with the doors closed and soundproofed.”  By 10:30pm, Ian calls it a night and heads to bed.  In just over seven hours he’ll be up and ready to take on another day as husband, father, internet marketer, and Portent CEO.

- – -

I’d been sitting on the day-in-the-life idea for a while and decided to kick it off with Ian Lurie after catching his presentation on time management.  If you’ve followed Ian’s work for any amount of time, you’ve probably picked up on a few things; he loves bikes, he loves cats, he has a wicked wit about him, and he goes to great lengths to maximize time and organization when it comes to his work.  About 20 slides in to the presentation, Ian features the slide below; as you can see the “work shit” and “home shit” segments are dead even.

It was then that I decided I would reach out to Ian to get his take not only on the day-to-day of being the Portent CEO, but to get his insight on how someone in this industry can find that ideal life balance.

After getting some insight into what a normal day was like for Ian I asked him what advice he had for internet marketers struggling with work/life balance and he replied, “No one ever lay on their death bed and said, ‘Damn, I wish I’d worked more’.”  The one fascinating thing about Ian is that even though he commits his time to his family and friends, he is constantly connected and checks email, Twitter, and the like every few hours.  I asked him how he manages to not get absorbed in it all and he told me that he manages by making sure to spend no more than five to 10 minutes, and makes sure it only happens when he is at home or during downtime.

But even though Ian has managed to create a work/life balance that works for him, he says that he has made one significant sacrifice for his career.  Every Sunday, Ian spends two to three hours  preparing for the week ahead and going through emails.  A small sacrifice, in my opinion, compared to what some of us are making for our careers on a daily basis.

This is one of a handful of posts I hope to do that capture a glimpse into the lives of some of those internet marketers that many of us respect and look up to.  As we all strive for greatness, it’s only natural for each of us to wonder how the experts do it and I hope that these posts will inspire folks to try something new to help manage their day to day lives as internet marketers.  Curious to know what the daily life of a certain internet marketer is, let me know who in the comments and I’ll see what I can do!

Last week I posted about the ugly state of Google’s SERPs thanks to rich snippet abuse over at Search News Central.  the post drew a lot of feedback both in the comments as well as through social media, and one theme continued.  Nobody really liked how people were misusing semantic markup to generate rich snippets, but nobody had a clear definition of what was right or wrong either.  Thankfully, thanks to a prematurely released revision to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines we may receive some guidance after all.

Avoid Abusing Rich Snippet Markup

When I read the leaked contents on Patrick Sexton’s feedthebot (the post has since been removed since the updates were launched prematurely), I noticed that Google used this update to focus a bit more on abuse of semantic markup, which fuels the appearance of rich snippets.  In the original post, which Eren Mckay was kind enough to retrieve via cache for me, Patrick highlighted two points specific to rich snippets.

First, in the document Google recommends webmasters review their recommended best practices for rich snippets, but more specifically Patrick points out that Google specifically says to avoid “abusing rich snippet markup”.  Could the writing be on the wall for webmasters, SEO’s and the like who are using rich snippet markup to falsify ratings and author information like I outlined in my Search News Central post?  As someone who is tired of having to explain to clients why they shouldn’t follow some of these spammy practices, I hope so.

Penalizing Rich Snippet Markup Abuse

The one thing that still isn’t clear is how Google might penalize violations related to rich snippets.  Currently the abuse of semantic markup can be reported to Google, and as one commenter on my post on Search News Central pointed out Google does in fact take action.  However besides removing the snippet, the overall penalty is uncertain.  Does it impact only the violating snippet, or does it prevent rich snippets from displaying at all in the search results for your website? The outcome is still to be determined.

Regardless of the outcome, Google is clearly looking closer at rich snippets and hopefully in the coming weeks/months we’ll have some deeper insight into what they are looking at with the help of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.  While the true use of semantic markup can be argued, I suggest that you read the intent of the markup and decide from there if you are actually using it as it was intended, or are you simply looking to get another shiny thing added to your result in the SERPs in hopes of increasing click through.  If the answer is the latter, you may want to rethink your strategy.

In my Pinterest Guide for the Every Day User I outlined how to get started on Pinterest with a handful of best practices when it comes to setting up your account and pinning content.  But I am seeing an annoying trend on Pinterest when it comes to pins from the microblogging network Tumblr.  Pinterest and Tumblr seem as though they would be a match made in heaven, however even the best visual content can be hard to engage when pinned incorrectly.

The nature of Tumblr makes it a fruitful source of image content, however pins from tumblr are oftentimes taken from the homepage of the blog, a location that the image will not permanently reside.

When you pin an image from a website onto Pinterest, it collects the URL from the website you collected the image from, however while an image may appear on the homepage of a tumblr blog, it will be pushed down deeper into the site as new posts are created.  Chances are by the time someone repins or clicks through to see the source of your pin, the image will no longer be on the blog’s homepage and they’ll need to click deeper into the blog if they want to find the original post.

Pinning from Tumblr So Your Source Can Be Found

Let’s pretend for a moment you wanted to pin the Dollhouse Workout from Back On Pointe, because let’s face it, Dollhouse was awesome and so is working out.  Two days ago it was featured on the homepage, however today it now rests on page ten of the blog.  If you want to ensure that a user can access the original content on the source site you need to click on the time it was posted and then pin the image.  This will keep the integrity of the pin’s URL and will make sure that a Pinterest user can visit the source of your pin at a later time without having to search for it.

Depending on the theme of the Tumblr blog this may vary.  Sometimes it will display the actual date instead of how long ago it was posted, other times you will need to click on the image to obtain the original post.  However, the key is to access the page where the image is housed so as not to lead users to a location that may not house the image in the future.  This will be the page that shows the entire post along with the history of likes, reblogs, etc.

So the next time you go and pin something from a tumblr blog (or any source for that matter), do yourself and your followers a favor and make sure to pin it from the source and not pin it from the homepage of the site.  Nobody wants to dig for the content your sharing.