WeHeartIt.com is a bookmarking site where you bookmark your favourite images by “hearting” them. Others can follow your “hearts” and “heart” your images for themselves. Each image retains a link back to the original source. So it’s potential as a marketing and traffic building tool is obvious.
I get a lot of traffic from WeHeartIt. It was not always so, it’s taken me a few months to figure out how to utilise it to it’s best advantage. If you want to know what I have learned please read on…
Knowing the Site & it’s Users.
If you take a quick scan around the site you will see that the majority of users appear to be women. You will also notice that there are plenty of what I like to call “dreamy vintage photography” examples being hearted. This is popular with WeHeartIt users and often if an image I want to use won’t fit this dreamy perspective then I won’t heart it. However I do like the traffic from the site so I always make a concious decision to include where possible, one of these images in my posts.
Sourcing the Right Images.
Back to the “dreamy vintage” thing. So you want to be looking for images that fall into these brackets: vintage, hazy, pretty, dreamy, pastel or that feature gorgeous models. If you can find images with all of these attributes then you are getting somewhere.
Tagging in The Right Way.
Once you have hearted your images you need to make sure you are using tags appropriately. Popular tags at WeHeartIt include the obvious such as “pretty”. I use “pretty” a lot, it goes further! These ladies want to heart pretty images. Make sure the image IS pretty and tag with short usually one word tags. The tags that work best for me are once again “pretty”, “vintage” “dreamy”. This can usually make the difference between your image being hearted twice to it being hearted hundreds of times. People need to be able to find it and tags are the seo of bookmark sites.
Hearting Often.
Heart images often. Obvious but important. Don’t heart all the images in your post, just heart the best ones. Then anyone following your links will find more stuff to heart than before. Always good to offer new content.
Linking Your Posts to WeHeartIt.
If you want the traffic then heart the images you have posted on your own site. WeHeartIt automatically uses link backs on hearts so that you can see where the original came from.
Following Back.
Always follow your followers. I have some great followers on the site and look forward to welcoming many more!
Final Thoughts
We Heart It is a photo-sharing website. We Heart It bills itself as a “haven for your inspiration” and a place to “organize and share the things you care about.” Users can save (or “heart”) their favorite photos to share and organize into collections. The site can be accessed using a web browser or the We Heart It iOS and Android mobile apps.
Fabio Giolito, a Brazilian native, launched We Heart It in 2008. He created the website as a side project with the goal of “hearting” images and saving them to share with friends. The product grew naturally from what began as a tool for himself and friends. When the company’s growth accelerated, Fabio hired co-founder Bruno Zanchet to help with infrastructure. In 2011, the site was formed in California and the two took on some seed investment.