Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social networks ever, having cracked the top 100 Alexa rankings pretty quickly after a somewhat slow start (they’ve been around for about 2 years but have just now caught fire).

Nice traffic, right?

But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here to find out how you can get this kind of traffic, as well, right? Well, why not piggyback off of Pinterest’s success? They want you to find neat stuff from all across the web and “pin” it to a board of your own.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

1. Sign up for Pinterest — look for the graphic elements below. The “Request an Invite” button will be near the top of your screen
    

2. Set up a board or two or ten (however many you want)
3. Start pinning *your own stuff*

That’s right, you’re going to make it a practice to pin your own stuff. Because Pinterest looks for images within the content you are attempting to pin, it forces you to do one of the best things possible for your own content

Insert images in your posts (and optimize them)!

Taking this step alone will get you a traffic bump. But then pinning your newly-optimized web posts on Pinterest could potentially skyrocket your traffic.

Now, make sure that you’re writing GREAT CONTENT. When a fellow “pinboarder” (or whatever Pinterest users call themselves) sees your pin, he or she may just click through to visit your site. You don’t want to disappoint.

It would be awesome to create your own images. But that’s not feasible for most of us. We’re not all photographers or graphical design geniuses. So what we need to do is to go find an awesome place or two to find free and freely-shared images.

I’ll show you a few places in Part Two. That post has not been written yet.

Once you’ve gotten your invitation, make a couple boards. I won’t show you how here–it’s very intuitive. Just take a look around and discover how the site works. You’ll figure out how to make your own boards. Make as many boards as you want with descriptive names.

Then, grab the Pinterest bookmarklet. You can find that here.

It’s just as simple, then, to go to a web page you just built, use the “Pin it” bookmarklet, and pin your own content. You will not only attract direct traffic, but you will be getting very beneficial links back to your site (aka, “backlinks”), as well as getting your content indexed PRONTO.

This is all great stuff–thanks to the newest social media darling, Pinterest.

Here are some other resources to help you with Pinterest:

• Pinterest itself
• Denise Wakeman
• My Pinterest board on Pinterest

Hope you found this helpful. I’ll be adding more to my Pinterest board as I find cool stuff for you.