What is Ahalogy and Why Should You Be Using It?

what is ahalogy


Have you heard of Ahalogy? If not, take a look at this post below and get yourself familiar. First up, I will say that you do have to apply to use Ahalogy. If at any time you want to jump over and apply, click here to do so.

What is it?
In a nutshell, brands pay Ahalogy to gain access to their publishing network (which is the bloggers) and to be able to re-pin their content. Bloggers benefit by being noticed by brands and having their content pinned by major brands.

What does Ahalogy cost?
Ahalogy is free to bloggers. Only the brands pay. What are they paying for? They are paying for the ability to use (by re-pinning) great content that you are creating and pinning. It really is that simple. Brands were weary of re-pinning anyone’s content without permission and Ahalogy took care of this issue.

What does it do for me?
Ahalogy offers your pins up to brands and encourages them to re-pin your content. Imagine having one of your pins being re-pinned by Kohl’s, or another brand with over a million followers. Additionally, Ahalogy offers some great free-to-use tools such as a pin evaluator, an easy-to-use pin scheduler in addition to some awesome analytics (see below) and reporting tools.ahalogy statsWhat’s also really cool is that you can edit photos through PicMonkey with an Ahalogy account. What’s even more cool is that they give you access to the PicMonkey Royale tools. So if your pin is not getting a super high rating through their system, you can make changes right there!

Ahalogy also encourages people to follow you on Pinterest by creating a pop-up in the bottom right corner of your site featuring your Pinterest profile with a big “follow” button. This pop-up will ONLY appear when someone gets to your site by clicking a pin, ensuring that non-Pinterest users will not find it a nuisance. See an example below from my friend Alea’s site, recommended pinnerThis also prompts an evaluation of your profile to make sure your verbiage is optimized for potential followers.

Who is Ahalogy looking for?
They are looking for people who are pinning the highest performing categories such as: food, fashion and DIY. Don’t fall into those boxes? Don’t worry, if you have quality content, they will take a serious look at you. If you want to apply, click here.

What does it look like inside an account?
This is the Ahalogy interface, with explanations where necessary:ahalogy interface explained

Overall, Ahalogy is a newer service that we will continue to watch grow. I recommend trying to get on board right now. It’s completely free and definitely worth a shot.

What are Rich Pins and Why Should You Care About Them?

what are rich pins
Pinterest has made another change. This one is to their Pins, specifically. According to their introductory blog post about the rich pins, the 3 major types of pins that will be affected: product pins, recipe pins and movie pins. If you’re posting pins of these things already, you certainly don’t have to use rich pins. And you’re probably not going to want to after you see how complicated they are to create. See all of the nitty gritty details here.

Product Pins
Pins will now have up-to-date pricing information at the bottom of the pin as well as information about whether or not the product is in stock. There will then be a direct link to the store where the item is available for purchase. The stupid price stripe that used to appear in the upper corner of pins is now gone. That is nice because before, you literally couldn’t put a dollar amount in a pin (even if you weren’t selling a product) without it looking like a product for sale due to the stupid price stripe.

Recipe Pins
This created a bit of a stir in the blogging world. Obviously, food bloggers are concerned that more of their recipes are being shown on Pinterest, thus lessening the need for people to click through to their site. Well, the only things that will be included in rich recipe pins are the recipe title, cook time, ingredients and servings. People will still need to click through to the website in order to see how to make the recipe. Also, only big businesses are using rich pins right now and I don’t see that changing until they make the process of creating rich pins a LOT easier.

Movie Pins
These will now contain content ratings, cast members and more. Woopty doo.

So that’s all rich pins are. So ignore the unnecessary panic that some people are showing because as of right now, rich pins don’t really change anything for 99% of bloggers.

In my mind, this is a move toward monetization for Pinterest. I believe they geared this change toward businesses and will let them use the rich pins for a while. Once they show their worth, I have a hunch the ability to create rich pins will come at a price. I could be wrong here, just a thought.