Authors, if you use Pinterest, have you considered displaying some of your boards on your author website?
I’m not the most sophisticated user of Pinterest by any means. But I do have three public boards that relate to my writing projects. Since my latest series takes place in West Africa, I have a board for Africa photos. The photos I pin here not only inspire me as I write, but give readers a glimpse into the world I’m writing about.
I also have a character board for each series. On these boards I pin photos that inspired the characters and, for the SSU series, photos of animals that are mentioned in the books.
Readers who find me on Pinterest can follow my boards, but how do they find the boards in the first place?
One way is through my website.
Authors, learn how to display your Pinterest boards on your website.
I recently started using the Pinterest board widget. Give Pinterest the url of your board and you will receive code that you can include on your website. I put the widget code on the Contact page on my website and also included it on the thank-you page that appears after someone has signed up for my author newsletter. This widget shows a grid of the most recent pins to my board. What’s super cool is that if you mouse over the image, you get a scroll bar that allows you to scroll down to see any additional rows of images. So a reader can see all the images on my board without leaving my website.
This is how the boards look on my Contact page:
Here’s how to get the code:
- Log into Pinterest.
- Go to the page of the board you want to display on your website.
- Copy the URL.
- Go to: https://developers.pinterest.com/tools/widget-builder/?
- Choose the type of widget you want. In this case, you want the Board widget.
- Replace the URL in the Pinterest board URL box with the URL of the board you copied in step 1.
- Choose a size. (Size doesn’t actually mean size here. Instead, it refers to location.) I want my boards to show up in the middle of my webpage, so I stick with the default of Square.
- In the box below that you will see a preview of what the board will look like on your web page.
- Underneath the preview are two boxes of code.
- The first code is what you will paste at the spot where you want your board to appear on your web page. How you insert this depends on what type of website you have. I have a WordPress.org self-hosted site with a premium (aka paid for) theme. My theme comes with a special tool for inserting custom HTML code onto a page, so I use that to place the widget code where I want it.
- The second code has to go before the closing tag of your page. Where you go to access the location for pasting this code will depend on what type of website you have and which tools you have access to. NOTE: You only need to add this code once to your site, no matter how many widgets you insert.
- Repeat 2 – 10 for each board you want to display. Pinterest generates customized widget code for each board’s URL.
That’s it!
If you try this, please let me know so I can check out your site.
This article first appeared in the Tech Talk column of the April 2017 issue of the Heart of the Bay, the newsletter of the San Francisco chapter of Romance Writers of America.
Copyright © 2017 Vanessa Kier.