I keep seeing badges in the sidebars of blogs, proclaiming the blog to be a "No Pin Blog," and I keep thinking about it and wondering "Why?"
Pinterest is a wonderful, amazing way to share the things you love. I am so excited every time a piece of my art gets pinned to someone's board! Someone likes my work enough to share that love with everyone else...
It's a wonderful way to get more people to visit my blog or my Etsy shop and share in my creativity. No one is stealing my work, just saying "Wow! Look at how cool Karen's painting/piece of jewelry is!" The link leads the person back to my blog or website or Etsy shop, which is exactly what I want.
One day, someone pinned a painting from my Etsy shop to their board, and I had SEVENTY-EIGHT visits to my shop that day, most of them originating from that pin (and all the pins that followed that). It's exponential exposure, and isn't that what we are all shooting for when we write a blog?
The only thing I will say is that you need to make sure that the images you put on your blog are small enough that no one could print them out and use the image as their own. Generally, resizing an image to 4 inches wide at 72 pixels per inch solves that problem. Viewers can see the image on their computer screen, but if they tried to print it out the quality would be very poor. But this caveat has nothing to do with Pinterest, specifically. This is something we all need to be aware of every single time we post a picture to our blogs--
So, in summary: if you are going to share your images online at all, I highly recommend that you allow people to pin them using Pinterest. It allows many more people to see your work, and as long as you are resizing your images correctly, no one can "steal" them.
5 comments:
I don't get the no pin blogs either...isn't the whole point to help market your work and Pinterest is amazing!!! I am all about pinning!!!!
I'm not a no pin blog but I have to admit that it makes me feel a little uneasy that my second most pinned post is a prom photo of my son and his girlfriend (people like the way I posed them). It just seems odd that they are floating around to so many people that I don't know. My most pinned post is a travel journal tutorial that I don't mind sharing at all.
Rinda
Problem is that often when your images are pinned the meta data is stripped from the images and no link is provided. scraper sites are also grabbing images and then posting them on pinterest with links to their sites. Pinners are giving away my copyright to pinterest as per pinterest TOS policy. I have had so much work taken and used by others to promote their products, bands etc. They just grab off flickr, pinterest, google with no respect for copyright. You are absolutely right about resizing images, but I am finding watermarking them helps much more in making sure people know where my website is.
Hard to know what to think reading these comments. Wanted to say thanks to you for your good information. A bit confused now. Cool that you got so many hits so to speak. I hope they generated lots of sales. How does one know if they are being abused!
Being a "no pin blog" doesn't protect your images anyway. If you can't pin directly, you can save the pictures and then upload them. That's actually worse for the artist because now your image has lost it's link back to you. Best to put your maker's mark on your photo before posting, just in case.
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