Tag: Pinterest

Pinterest Tips for Guys

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Pinterest is the hot social media platform of the moment. It is suddenly the number one driver of traffic to retail websites, even more so than YouTube and Google + combined. Pinterest is a wild hit with the non tech savvy population and most especially with women.

Smart men are interested, but as my friend Jason remarked upon joining yesterday, it can at first seem like “estrogen overload”. I don’t know the demographic breakdown and I’m sure it’s evolving dramatically every day right now, but it is clearly dominated by women.

So it makes sense that when a guy signs up and Pinterest suggests which of his existing friends he should follow, he’s going to end up seeing a huge number of feminine pinboards. It could prompt the guy with average intelligence to conclude the platform is only for women and he’ll see no benefit. But writing off Pinterest entirely is a mistake and I’m pleased to be following at least a few chaps of above average social media acumen, not to mention great style. (I recommend following Brian Block, Caleb Gardner, and Philip Edsel just to name a few.)

So my first piece of advice is the same thing I said about Twitter years ago…don’t follow everyone that follows you. Don’t follow everyone of you Facebook contacts that happens to have a Pinterest account. Skim through the pins of each person you follow and make sure they have something to offer, something that interests you. Unfollow those with only a handful of girly pins.

Some of my various pinboards

Here’s my biggest tip: when you decide which people to keep following, go to their list of boards and selectively unfollow the most gender specific ones. For example, unless you have a major fetish, it’s unlikely you, a guy, would be interested in my Shoes! board. Same goes for My Style. However guys might dig my Inked board or my Stuff I Want To Eat board. My photography board is pretty genderless, as is my board full of running quotes. I even have a Men’s Fashion board, though I need to find more stylish guys to follow so I can fill it up.

Who doesn’t love food?

My last piece of advice is to create your own unique boards for specific interests and do searches to fill them with pins. That’s how I made my Inked board, since not many of my friends are into pinning tattoos. It’s also how I made my Office Renovation board which is for a real project I’m currently working on, not just some home fantasy.

Once you’ve got a good group of peeps to follow and a bunch of focused boards, you’ll find it easy to pop into Pinterest for a few minutes at a time and quickly repin your favorite finds for safe keeping. It’s much easier to stay on top of than Twitter or even Facebook, and it’s the perfect end-of-the-day brainless activity for me to wind down with after hours of creating content and marketing it.

Channeling Charlie Sheen.

Happy pinning!

Got any more obvious suggestions for guys that I missed? Leave them in the comments!
This post is linked up over at Kristen’s Works for Me Wednesday.

Pinterest Makes Cooking Fun!

Superbowl = crockpot chili

If you aren’t using Pinterest yet, I strongly suggest you check it out right away. You may have noticed a slight Pinterest-y (yes, that’s a word) theme around this blog of late. It is a lot like scanning through a magazine to look at all the pictures without reading any of the articles except for that one that grabs your attention and pulls you in a little deeper.

Except this magazine is perpetually published with new pictures. Oh and MY FRIENDS are the ones picking the photos. 
I trust my friends, they are smart. They generally have very good taste. Even those who have different taste that I do have good taste that is worth checking out. 
Ok back to cooking being fun. I’ve written many many MANY times about how I don’t particularly like to cook. I usually would much rather eat out at a restaurant where the food is lovely and hot and I don’t have to prepare it or clean up the mess. We are spoiled and do this quite a lot, which is wasteful and excessive both in dollars and in things like calories and fat. 
Crockpot BBQ Chicken!
One thing that has totally changed my desire to eat out is the big change in my eating plan I’ve made recently. It is totally possible to eat at all the same restaurants as I had been while on a diet, but it is nowhere near as much fun. In fact sometimes it’s downright torture, the way the whole place smells of fried food and the menu is covered in photos that make my mouth water. All of which include a abundance of cheese, bacon and bread. 
I’m drooling just thinking about it. So yeah, sometimes I actually want to avoid all that temptation. 
Another thing that makes cooking fun is having people to cook for that really, genuinely appreciate my cooking. My husband sometimes does, but not really as much as my grandparents do. They eat in restaurants every single night so when I cook for them at home they tend to gush over it with appreciation. 
Finally what made cooking super fun this weekend was Pinterest. I have a board FULL of photos of food that look divinely appetizing to me. My biggest issue in the past with cookbooks was the lack of pictures. Pinterest has essentially allowed me to create my own cookbook of my very favorite foods without anything I want to skip over. 
When I started the pinboard I wasn’t on a diet and you can tell. The beginning is full of recipes with cheese. And things utilizing crescent roll dough. 
But lately I have found things that are much healthier and don’t look too terribly hard to make. 
Parmesan crusted asparagus
On Saturday I knew my grandparents were coming to dinner so I planned accordingly. I found this recipe for crockpot barbecue chicken that says you can start with frozen chicken breasts, so I threw everything in the crockpot that morning. Then I also decided to try this Parmesan crusted asparagus I saw that looked delicious and not too hard. It turned out to be more time consuming that I imagined, dipping and coating all those little asparagus spears. I won’t likely make it again, but boy were they delicious! Next time I’m gonna try this recipe for roasted broccoli that sounds very good. 
I also made a birthday cake on Saturday and learned that plain homemade cakes are a thousand times tastier than the prettiest storebought cake. 
I loved using the crockpot so much on Saturday that I decided to use it again Sunday to make chili to eat during the Superbowl. We weren’t having a party or anything but Mike didn’t want the game interrupted by a  big dinner, so chili seemed perfect. I put it together right after church so it was ready to go at supper time. It was the best chili I have ever made by far. 
  • 1 lb ground beef (next time I’ll try ground turkey) 
  • 1/2 a red onion
  • 1 small green bell pepper
  • 1 big can of kidney beans (maybe 27oz?) undrained
  • 2 8oz cans of tomato sauce
  • 2 packets of chili spices
  • 1 10oz can of Rotel diced tomatoes and green chilis undrained
You brown the meat along with the chopped onion and pepper. Then you mixed in all the other stuff and cook on low for 6 hrs or high for 3ish hours and voila! I threw a tiny bit of jack cheese on top when I served it. 
In conclusion, I am definitely going to being using Pinterest for cooking ALL THE TIME now.