Using Pinterest as a marketing tool

I admit to being far, far from an expert on anything related to promotion and marketing, however, I do believe that people who are familiar with your name and brand are more likely to trust you than trust a name they have never heard of. It is for that reason I use Pinterest as a marketing tool.
There are many ways to market your products...squidoo lenses, twitter, facebook, and other social networking sites, and of course, the pay for ads both online and offline, business cards, word of mouth, blog posts, and well, you get the picture.
I fell in love with Pinterest the very first time I tried it out. You can find amazing recipes, awesome DIY craft projects for kids and adults, gardening tips, vacation ideas, photos of beautiful waterfalls, babies, and animals. You can get ideas for birthday cakes, teachers can get ideas for projects and classroom activities, the list goes on and on. I have hundreds of recipes saved in my "boards" on pinterest and I hope someday to actually be able to be less busy so I can try some of them out! I have also pinned hundreds of birthday cakes for kids, most of them theme cakes, some with instructions on how to, some that are just photos. Awesome cakes for baby's first birthday through teen years. Circus cakes, clown cakes, Star Wars cakes, dinosaur cakes, Mickey and Minnie Mouse cakes, Sesame Street cakes, you name it, it's probably to be found on one of my three Unique Kids Birthday Cakes boards.
Some people have said that affiliate codes get stripped out of pinterest links, so they don't find Pinterest as being a good marketing tool for them. To that I say...it does not matter to me! I'm addicted to Pinterest and so I will continue to use it, and I also think that it's a wonderful marketing tool despite that. I have hundreds of people, thousands perhaps, who have repinned my pins, I have hundreds of followers on various boards, and every person who looks at something I pinned sees my name and my website URL. I'm hoping at least some of them click through to my site, and I am even more hoping that for those who don't...they are subconsciously, or consciously, remembering the name peacockcards.com. So in the future sometime if they do indeed find a product of mine through google or yahoo or the cafepress.com or zazzle.com marketplace they will remember my name and know the type of person I am (from my pinterest interests) and trust the name.
Of course, I also have pinned a number of my own products including kids birthday T-shirts and invitations which incidentally match a lot of the themes of the birthday cakes I have pinned.
And so for me, Pinterest is a great match with something I enjoy and also find to be a good marketing tool.
If you love recipes, parties, kids birthday cakes, DIY projects for kids and adults alike, and gardening you might consider following my boards. I think they are pretty awesome and hope you will too!
My pinterest profile is:

http://pinterest.com/michigal/

Happy pinning! And if you get addicted, welcome to the club!