If you’ve established a portable career as a writer, photographer, blogger or life coach, your marketing centers (or should center!) around a website that you own.

Your website displays your skills, tells prospective clients or customers something about you, and gives them a way to get in touch with you.

Unfortunately, the days of “build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door” are gone. You have to let the world know about your mousetrap in no uncertain terms.

The old school way to do this was through advertising. Today, the better method is through social media.

A few months ago I told you about five social media sites you should be using for your business. At that time, there were two relatively new networks — Google Plus and Pinterest.

For a while pundits dismissed Pinterest as just a girly place for designers and wedding planners.

. . . Until Pinterest started referring more traffic than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, YouTube and MySpace combined.

Now businesses are flocking to the platform and some are using it in highly creative ways.

Pinterest is heavily visual. Its creators describe it as a “virtual pinboard” where you can post images (with links). The images can link to articles, photos or videos so it’s a very interesting and upbeat way to share content.

You organize your “pins” onto category “boards.” Some of mine include Panama, Expats!, Portable Careers and Travel Tips and Hints.

If Pinterest interests you and you want to know more about how to use it productively for your business, there’s a new book about it that’s definitely worth a read.

Pinfluence

Pinfluence: The Complete Guide to Marketing Your Business Through Pinterest by Beth Hayden is available now at booksellers on- and offline.

Beth, who gives advice to bloggers on her Blogging with Beth site, was kind enough to send me a review copy of the Kindle version.

She starts off by sharing some Pinterest success stories, and they are truly stunning.

Like Alaskan mom Ana White who loved woodworking and started a blog to share her passion. After getting involved with Pinterest, her blog now gets over three million page views each month, and about 6,000 unique visitors a day come from Pinterest.

As Beth points out:

“Done authentically and well, Pinterest marketing can be a powerful soruce of traffic to your website, and can help you build an incredible community of followers and superfans who loyally support everything you do.”

Isn’t that what we want?

The book walks you through joining Pinterest, setting up your profile, how and what to “pin,” and the basics of connecting with other Pinterest users. (It is a social network, remember.)

If you’re using Pinterest to market your business, you’re not spending time with it just because it’s fun (although it really is!). There’s a bottom line to be served, and Beth spends the rest of the book addressing it.

And, while you’re learning about Pinterest, you’ll be picking up useful information about how to use social platforms in general.

Beth includes an Action Plan at the end of each chapter, to help you put what you’ve just learned into effect.

On the whole, this is an excellent how-to guide for improving your business with Pinterest. It’s given me several new ideas about how to use Pinterest to attract more viewers to this site, and it’ll help you, too.