Setting up Rich Pins to Promote your Wizzley Articles on Pinterest

Before you even look at Rich Pins, you'll need to know why Pinterest matters.

After all, you could be here all day maximizing places that purport to boost your internet traffic. It doesn't necessarily mean that they actually do what it says on the packet, and in the meanwhile, there's valuable writing time being lost.

Pinterest is worth joining. It's one of the biggest internet sites around, popular with people of all ages and backgrounds, constituting a treasure trove of exciting things to find.

If you're looking to increase your readership, then your articles appearing on Pinterest should be made a priority. It's one of the biggies, comfortably nestling alongside Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Tumblr - out-pacing even some of them.

In an age of visual delights, Pinterest was a trend-setter. Swopping lists of links with pictures, it looks aesthetically pleasing. People warm much more to fancy images than reams of text. A page can be taken in at a glance; information flooding out in the same way that most of us view our world, as a series of visions waiting to attract our attention, or taken together in categories to form an overall impression.

Hours can be spent on Pinterest. The most compelling picture wins, drawing eyes towards it and distracting minds from the mass of the rest. Potential readers click for more, perhaps then following a link all the way back to Wizzley; pinning the article too in turn, if they found it interesting enough, thus adding to the snowball effect of publicity.

I've had many page ranks made in this way, or suddenly resurrect, when it was pinned to a large community board.

If you're still wondering about the importance of Pinterest, contemplating its influence on the web, look very closely at the front page of Wizzley, then compare and contrast with any given page on Pinterest. Like I said, it set a powerful trend and changed the face of the internet.

On Pinterest, awe-inspiring images take precedence over its source. An amazing picture may be easily divorced from the webpage that originally supplied it.

That's why the options tab - at the foot of the left-hand column of any Wizzley page in edit mode - includes a tick box empowering authors to prohibit the pinning of their article. It safeguards personal pictures, or those used with permission, from being shared without attribution nor even a link back to the source.

Wizzley has this ticked to allow Pinterest by default. Unless you have very good reasons to turn it off, the benefit in heightened traffic far outweighs the potential for abuse.

Rich Pins represent this issue tackled from the other side of the equation. This is Pinterest itself attempting to regulate repinning on its site, welding together picture and source, so that any Rich Pinned image will always lead back to the place from where it was originally lifted.

This will only work for those people sharing from sites for which they have had Rich Pins approved. But that doesn't greatly matter.

It puts one version out there, which has all the information intact. Moreover that one will feature in the 'already pinned to' section, whenever anyone passes on a matching picture. This is generally a great avenue of discovery for anyone embarking on a browsing quest through Pinterest.

For anyone pinning something that caught their eye, it's a fair assumption that they're interested in the subject matter. Their gaze is much more likely to fall now upon a pin that offers more than merely reproducing the image already seen. Your version, with its source and words attached, will be just that, hence the probability is high that it will become the most popular iteration doing the rounds on Pinterest.

In addition, the Rich Pins embed preview words beneath the picture, contextualizing and/or offering a taster of the article lying behind it.

They will be repinned by individuals with some regard for the topic, who tend to be followed by others who share their enthusiasm, maybe even forming communities devoted to it. These are people predisposed to having their attention drawn by the subject in hand, and now the blarb makes it clear the picture isn't all there is to explore.

It even concludes with a call to action - Read this on wizzley.com.

For all of these reasons - fixed linking, potential to create the popular pin, taster words, added inducement to already interested parties - Rich Pins are likely to boost your Pinterest traffic in ever greater numbers. You'd better get it all set up then!

I consider myself a bit of a geek, and even I get intimidated by the processes involved in establishing some social networking connections. But not this one.

This one is easy. The only way I can imagine it being less hassle would be to get someone to do it on your behalf. Like your three year old, or the elderly gentleman down the road, who's never touched a computer in his life. Easy.

• Create a Pinterest account, if you haven't already. (Those on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus don't even have to mess around with details. Just sign in via them.) 
• Pin one of your Wizzley articles. Or one of mine. No-one's fussy!

Or

• Log onto Pinterest.
• Go to the Rich Pin validator.

You will find a page looking exactly like this:

You can safely skip the bit about reading the Rich Pin documentation. That's only the technical bit about preparing your website to facilitate them. The Wizzley team already have that covered.

• Copy the Wizzley URL for any one of your previously pinned articles.
• Paste it into the box, over the legend 'Enter a valid URL'.
• Click Validate.

Your Rich Pin Validator page will now look something like this:

• Click 'Apply now', if your Wizzley link has been validated (and it should be, instantly).
• Check that the 'Apply to enable your Rich Pins' pop-up has wizzley.com as its domain, and HTML tags selected as the data format. These will be automatically filled in for you. I'm only mentioning it to pad out the instructions a bit, so it feels more involved.
• Click 'Apply now'.

Job done!

• Log onto Pinterest.
• Go to the Rich Pin validator.
• Copy a URL for any Wizzley article that you've previously pinned.
• Paste it into the box on Pinterest, over the legend 'Enter a valid URL'.
• Click Validate.
• Click 'Apply now', if your Wizzley link has been validated (and it should be, instantly).
• Click 'Apply now' in the pop-up, without touching any of the default information.

All done! 

You will know if you're successful, as an email arrives to tell you. I received mine within the hour, with no problems encountered. By then, everything that I'd ever pinned from the Wizzley web-site had already transformed into Rich Pins. All future ones will automatically be posted like that.

While you're waiting, you do get to enjoy a preview of what your Wizzley Rich Pins will look like, once approval has been granted to produce them.

My Erec and Enide article appears professional and downright snazzy!