pinterestI discovered Pinterest long before I was ready for marketing and writing, and was very quickly hooked. It was like a giant, visual bookmarking program. In a few short weeks I pinned literally hundreds of cool craft ideas, and became quite addicted.

When I started researching marketing for my novel, I naturally thought Pinterest would be great. So I signed up for an account for my writing (my personal one is far too cluttered with craft activities for anyone to see anything else!), and started making a few boards, and adding friends from facebook and twitter.

But unlike my personal account, this one just didn't take off. People didn't re-pin my pins, and I struggled to find boards to follow that gave me interesting new pins to share. For a while, I focused on twitter and facebook and didn't visit Pinterest, since I didn't seem to be able to crack the code there.

Then something made me come back. I can't remember what. Perhaps I was just pinning one of my blog posts, or perhaps it was the fact that I was getting some consistent blog traffic from a couple of my pins. I spent a bit of time adding some new pins to my board, and every time I found an interesting pin, I'd look at other similar pins, and click follow on most of the ‘this pin is also pinned to' boards. I followed more people from twitter and facebook.

Suddenly, my pinterest started to take off. I was being followed back by authors, and I was invited to pin to a couple of group boards. I wouldn't say it's a huge marketing strategy just yet, but I'm beginning to think it's worth the time.

If you want to check out my boards and follow me, I'm at http://pinterest.com/rinellegrey/

How do you use Pinterest? Do you find you use it as a reader or writer, or for something else?