There are many different ways you can use Pinterest to brainstorm ideas, share ideas, showcase your life and more. Because of Pinterest’s quick and easy to use “Pin It” system, you can whip up all kinds of image boards in a jiffy. The very best training on this topic is from Lisa Suttora. Take a look at her Pinterest Training for eCommerce course.

Here are ten creative ways you can use Pinterest in your everyday life, but don’t stop at these. If you have special interests or hobbies, use these ideas to generate other useful boards for yourself. With this visual tool, the sky’s the limit!

#1 – Foods You Want to Cook

If you cook regularly, chances are you’ll want to experiment with cooking new and exotic foods every once in a while.

Instead of having to come up with what you want to cook every night, just start pinning interesting food ideas. Then when it’s time to cook a meal, navigate to your Pinterest board and you’ll have a whole array of ideas to choose from.

You can even come up with theme boards for upcoming holidays and events. It’s a great way to brainstorm what wonderful concoctions you may want to create.

#2 – Places You Want to Go

Where do you want to go? Do you want to see the deserts of India, or the beaches in the Caribbean? Or would you rather explore some history in Rome?

Put all the places you want to go on a Pinterest board. This can facilitate a lot of discussion between you and your friends, potentially spawning a real trip. It can also be inspirational and motivational to get you to finally go.

TIP: Create a “Places I’ve Been” board and move places of your wish list to the places you’ve been as you check them off your list.

#3 – Home Decorating Ideas

How can you make your home look even better than it does now? People who sit down and try to design how a home should look often hit a kind of block. The creative juices just don’t flow.

Instead, you can just pin images of beautiful designs and beautiful homes as you go about your daily life. Once you’re ready to start decorating your home, you’ll already have a whole reference library of ideas that you think look great.

#4 – Gift Ideas

There are numerous ways you can use Pinterest for your gift ideas, depending on the occasion and/or recipient. Here are a couple ideas to get you started.

First, you can use it as a gift registry. For birthdays or for weddings, just use Pinterest to save ideas for things you’d like other people to buy for you. Smart, eh?

You can also use Pinterest as a running bank of gift ideas. When it’s someone’s birthday or when Christmas rolls around, just open up your gift registry and you’ll be able to instantly come up with gift ideas.

If you need input on a group gift or from the gift recipient, ask them to collaborate on your board. Let others in on the fun and come up with a great gift ideas.

#5 – Skills to Learn

What are some of the skills you want to learn? Use Pinterest to help motivate yourself and your friends to get involved with more activities.

If you’ve always wanted to learn public speaking, pin up a few images of great speakers. If you’ve always wanted to learn Salsa, pin up a few passionate dance photos. If you want to get inspired to decorate your child’s birthday cake in a fun new way, pin some ideas.

This will help get yourself moving towards learning those skills; as well as tell your friends what you’re interested in. You might find yourself a learning partner! You can also use Pinterest to share pictures of your home office, parties you host or attend, and much more…

What is your social media marketing strategy? Social media has now been around for several years, but it has changed dramatically over that time. You can still make huge profits in a variety of way using social media marketing, and the changes will make it even easier for you to use this as a strategy to build your business. Think about the reason you are spending time with social media, the message you want to share with your target market, and the strategy you can develop in order to maximize your time and efforts. Also, be sure to connect with me on all three social media sites.

First of all, we are only talking about the ‘Big Three’ of social media here. These are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There are hundreds of other reputable social media sites, but none will give you the leverage that the main ones I mentioned here can give you very quickly.

Are you sharing pictures of your kids and pets and watching other people’s videos on Facebook? Stop it right now. That’s the social use of the site, and you want to use it to further your business goals. You can have this type of social fun once in awhile, but not on a daily basis. We can’t do that in our business, and it is not a good use of our time or knowledge.

Go over to Facebook right now and see what you have been posting on your wall. Does it reflect who you are and what you are doing in your business? If so, congratulations on using this site in the right way. If not, get busy changing your image there. Make sure to add your blog posts to your wall by using the ‘Networked Blogs’ application. Every day, talk about your business and what you are doing online. This will get people’s attention very quickly.

Be sure to fill out your profiles completely on all sites. Also, use a picture of you that actually looks like you now, not ten or twenty years ago. Our photo is a part of our branding, so let people see your face so they can connect it with your time over time.

Now go over to Twitter and see what your timeline looks like there. Make sure you are tweeting your blog posts and articles automatically, as well as providing useful tips and other information. You also want to retweet others on a regular basis, respond to people who mention you in there tweets, and look for new people to follow. After the initial setup, you can accomplish all of this in about ten minutes a day.

LinkedIn is my favorite social media site these days. Be sure to connect with me there. As of this writing, I now have one thousand eighty-two connections there. I did this over a period of two years, and continue to add one or two new people each week.

The groups on LinkedIn are the most valuable for your business. Find one or two to join by searching with your keywords. Then read the posts made by the others and add your own comments and information.

Treat your social media connections like a business and you will be able to connect with many more people than you ever thought possible. This is definitely a valuable use of your time.

Connect with me: Twitter – LinkedIn – Facebook

Social media has changed all of our lives forever. It’s now possible to let the world know where you are, who you are with, and what you’re doing no matter where in the world you live or are visiting at that moment. You can upload photographs, share your videos, record your voice, or simply say it in 140 characters or less over at Twitter.

Everyone pretty much agrees that the only social media sites you need to use are the ‘Big Three’ – Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. By setting up accounts at these sites, filling out your profile information, and learning the basics of how to communicate with others, the world will become a much smaller place.

The only question that continues to arise in all of our minds is:

How do we know when the information we are sharing publicly through social media is simply too much information?

This was important to me from the very beginning, so I began to take a look at what others were doing to see what would feel most comfortable to me and my family. Once you put it out on the Internet, it’s there for the world to see, so you must have a strategy to follow.

My family is very private, so we agreed from the beginning that we would not share pictures of any family member who is under eighteen. We have all honored that promise to this day. It is also very seldom that I will post a picture or talk about personal information from the adults in my family.

I am now a public figure, so this means that pictures of me at live events I attend regularly will be everywhere. I love that part of my business and continue to feel grateful that anyone wants to have their picture taken with me. On any given day over at Facebook you will see me giving a status update or a link to one of my sites, and I am thrilled when the comments and ensuing conversation takes off.

Once in awhile there are situations where the line is more blurred. I may want to share about something more private and personal, so this must be done in a manner that respects the privacy of everyone involved.

I can remember when I made my first tweet that was personal in nature. It was the summer of 2009, and my family was hosting an exchange student from China. When we pulled up in front of our house for the first time he commented that he had never known anyone who lived in a two-layer, meaning a two-story, home. We had all thought that was just so cute we wanted to share it with others. Never calling him by name, especially because he was only sixteen, I went on to share much more about this young man over the course of that summer. He was a classically trained pianist, so I recorded the audio of him playing. When we went to Disneyland, it was a picture of Mickey Mouse that was posted to my Facebook page. As we gathered to say goodbye when he was to return home to China, the pictures I shared did not reveal faces that could be recognized. We had successfully shared our joy without compromising our privacy.

Decide right now what the boundaries will be for sharing personal information on your social media accounts. Discuss this with your family and close friends to make sure you are all on the same page.

Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook and join in the fun of social media!

You can make huge profits with a tiny list, and social media can help you to do this very quickly. Marketing your small business with social media makes sense for many reasons. It’s the modern day version of meeting new prospects and clients, you can extend your reach further than you ever thought possible, and it sure does save you lots of time.

Just a few years ago we were all still going to breakfast meetings, networking lunches, and after hours mixers. If you could connect with one or two new prospects you considered it a success. This was a tiring process, and the rubber chicken lunches became legendary. The Internet changed this somewhat at the turn of the century (doesn’t it sound funny to say that?), and social media revolutionized the way we connected with people starting in 2007.

Within a very short time, sometimes just a few hours, we are now able to

Creating your own group on the social networking site Facebook will help you to increase your profits. Start a group on your niche topic, using your best keywords in the title for the group. Add a tagline that states a benefit to those who join, such as some specific information they will receive as a member. When starting and maintaining your group on Facebook, you will want to keep a few things in mind. Take a look at some of the other groups on your niche topic to see what they have to offer the group members.

When people are searching for information, they are not setting out to purchase anything. They just want to know more about a particular topic at that point in time. The idea with creating your group is to have a central place where people can exchange ideas, ask questions, and find resources. You are the administrator and facilitator of the group, so they are coming to you for all of this.

You may want to invite your Facebook friends to join your new group, but only

Facebook Fan Pages are an excellent way to connect with your list as you promote your business on the Internet. This works extremely well, no matter if you work exclusively online, have a physical brick and mortar business, or do some combination of both. There are several things you need to know in order to get started, and then you will be on your way to marketing yourself and your business through one of the best methods now available, all at no cost to you.

Make sure you have an account over at Facebook before you try to go any further. You must have a personal account set up, along with a profile, before you can go any further. This only takes about fifteen minutes from start to finish. Upload a picture of yourself and include a link to a website or blog. Any other information, such as your birthday or relationship status, is completely optional. I find that this information is best for communicating with people you already know, along with family members, rather than for marketing a business and reaching out to potential prospects and customers.

Once you are all set up, look for an application called

You will want to have other methods of connecting with the people who have chosen to join your list. I have found that inviting them to follow me on Twitter, become my friend (or fan) on Facebook, and to connect with me on LinkedIn and FriendFeed are excellent ways to stay in touch. There are several ways this can beneficial to your business.

Email deliverability is not what it should be these days. Your email may never show up in your prospect’s inbox, or it could get lost among the many emails they receive each day. By sharing what you have to offer on social networking sites, you can remain ‘top of consciousness’ for them in a more substantial way.

I recommend sending a solo email that tells them exactly where they can find you. Also, include the direct links to these sites in the P.S. of your email. Even if someone would choose to unsubscribe from your list  at some point in time, you would maintain your connection with them for the foreseeable future.

I love Facebook, because there are things you can do there that will help you to make money very quickly. One of these things is the feature that allows you to create your own group, based on a specific niche topic. I have several Facebook groups, based on the different niches I am working in or reasearching. The group allows you to test out your ideas before you spend any time creating a product and marketing it to your list.

When you set up your group, invite your Facebook friends to get it started. Then start a few discussion topics so that visitors will have something to discuss while they are there. You can also tell them about your own or