Call me crazy, but I’ve been doing some market research recently, and I’ve found out that a lot of independent business owners still don’t use Pinterest! I mean it’s blown my mind, seriously guys, there’s a big juicy pie and you’re missing a slice. All puns aside, Pinterest is awesome for driving traffic, and you really should start using it.

I’m not an affiliate for Pinterest by the way, although imagine? I’d love to be. I’m just passionate about Pinterest and what it can do for you. It’s probably one of the last free tools out there to utilise and I can’t fathom why people don’t use it. Pinterest has also changed massively over the past couple of years in so many ways, but I’ll get to that point soon enough…

Anyway, I started reading through content that I’d written previously on Pinterest such as how to grow your social media platforms or how I got my Pinterest stats soaring, which are both flipping fantastic posts, even if I say so myself, but they were missing one crucial element. Or more to the point, they assumed that people were already using Pinterest. So, I realised maybe this was what I was missing. A post about Pinterest, for total beginners and why you should use it.

Now before you start moaning, “oh no! not another social media platform to master” and I’ll be brutally honest here, as a business the other ones don’t really matter, at least not as much. Pinterest also isn’t a social media site-exactly, it’s so, so much more than that. If I were you, I would temporarily ditch the other sites and focus on Pinterest a while.

Okay, now we’ve got the introduction out of the way, I hope you’re still following. I’m going to try my best to break down Pinterest for you, simply- because there’s a lot to learn, but, once you get the hang of it, you’ll realise it’s kinda easy, I promise.

Breaking Down the Total Basics of Pinterest

Pinterest is a search engine, but instead of searching for text like you do on google or other search engines, you search for images or videos. Each image or video is attached to a web page.

Google.

Pinterest.

To view a web page, you click on an image. Underneath the image there is usually some text to describe the page you will visit. After you’ve read the text, you can decide whether to click on it, or not.

Unlike google, Pinterest allows you to be social. You can comment on people’s pins or videos, for example I loved this Pumpkin Halloween Decoration Pin, so I let the creator know!

This encourages the algorithm and pushes people’s pins out to more people- a lot like Instagram, and you’re going to build a better following by interacting with followers and other content creators- it’s polite to do so. Remember, Pinterest is a platform of busy content creators, just like you- and we all love the platform. It’s fun and exciting and everybody wants success, so encourage others and see the return.

You can post 30 pins per day. That’s 30 pins of evergreen content per day, for free.

And you can schedule them too to free up lots of your time also.

So, you could spend one day a week scheduling pins by using an app called tailwind and it will send out pins when your followers are online and active, ensuring you have maximum chance of engagement with your pins. You can even schedule pins for free up to 4 per day! Hooray. Sign up to tailwind here.

Unlike other social media platforms, followers really are not that important on Pinterest. They’re a nice touch but they are not essential. What is important is your monthly traffic- and this is what brands will look at if they want to collaborate with you on Pinterest. (Tip for bloggers)

You can create a board on Pinterest. This is where you should organise your pins. You can create as many boards as you like. Make each board consistent with its name. For example, if you start a board called ‘cups’ don’t put images of elephants in there, unless they’re painted onto a cup, I suppose.

Videos on Pinterest are called idea pins and were introduced last year, at the moment Pinterest believe they are the most effective way to market products and so don’t let you upload regular videos anymore.

You can create an idea pin by pressing the + sign and selecting idea pin.

Basically, for each idea pin you can add up to ten videos, in a carousal type post. But the idea pin is easier to edit than an Instagram reel in my opinion, and similar in that you can add text, sound, stickers etc.

A top tip is to add text onto the idea pins via the Pinterest editing suit, the words you add onto the videos are counted as keywords, which means you can add more keywords in the description.

Which brings me to the next part, keywords…

Why you should use Key Words on Pinterest

Okay, so if you know anything about the internet it’s that keywords are essential. Keywords are the fundamental backbone of how people find you. For example, you might type ‘a mug with a dog on it’ into google. The keywords here are ‘mug’ and ‘dog’ and that is what google will search for.

If you upload an image of a cup you have made, that has a dog on it to Pinterest and attach it to the place on your website where you can buy it. You might want to write something like “A hand-painted dog on a large mug made on a pottery wheel” So ‘dog’ and ‘mug’ are still the keywords searched on Pinterest, but you are letting your potential customer know how they are made.

You should make Pins intriguing, always think before you post something, will that make someone click on it? As well as does it contain the keywords so that potential customers will find it.

There are also many other ways you can use Keywords to encourage people to find you on Pinterest. For example, taking our case study. You should use keywords everywhere on Pinterest, from your name to your bio, board names, board descriptions, to image and video text. EVERYWHERE.

For example:

Name: Julie’s handmade Pottery

Bio: I hand paint mugs which I make from pottery on a pottery wheel, at my shop I sell a selection of large mugs, plates and teapots. Follow me for more designs and inspiration.

The key to traffic on Pinterest is Keywords.

How Pinterest has Changed

So long ago Pinterest was a place to search for ways to make cookies or wicker baskets or Christmas decorations. It still kind of is, and if you love arts and crafts, you’re probably gonna get sucked in- not gonna lie. Prepare to lose hours scrolling through amazing craft ideas, which leave you thinking “I could do that”. However, Pinterest is a bit more than this now.

Pinterest has completely changed over the last two years. In years of yonder Pinterest encouraged you to re-pin content that others had created and only upload a small amount of content you had created yourself. This meant that around 80% of the content you pinned was promoting other peoples content. Which sucked, for bloggers and businesses, let’s be honest.

It was a huge waste of time for everyone and they were really strict about it. They’d mark you as spam if you posted too much of your own stuff. You’d also end up with loads of irrelevant stuff. But they changed all that.

So now they actually make it their mission to make sure you only promote yourself. Which means that is totally awesome for business owners and bloggers.

They’ve also started to promote influencers, which is something new. Before it was more about showing a video of an object being made or some hands painting a rainbow. Whereas now it’s more about someone holding a painting of a rainbow smiling at the camera and showing you how to attach it to a wall. But there’s still a lot of creative stuff so don’t worry if you’re camera shy. It’s just a new style of content on Pinterest that’s worth mentioning.

Pinterest always has and always will love design. They like clear images, minimalist designs, clear text, and quality images.

It’s better to post 1 quality image a day, than 30 ones that look terrible. Remember that Pinterest has a slow scroll, so you want your pins to be beautiful, eye catching, scroll stopping. You want someone to stop scrolling and click on your image.

Pinterest also loves new images, a new image counts as something it hasn’t seen before. You could simply change the image, or the text and voila! you have two new pins.

Use Canva pre-sets to create easy designs for Pinterest- this is the best way to start. You can sign up for free or use Pro for all the extra features and designs. I really recommend using Canva pro, you get so many awesome designs, elements and pre-sets and it takes minimal effort to create 30 pins in an hour. Schedule them on Tailwind and you’re done for the week. Easy peasy, sign up for Canva pro here.

There are so many things I could mention about Pinterest, but I have really tried to outline the basics here, so I hope this helps.

I really think you are missing out on blog views or potential customers and I hope you can see why now.

Pinterest is the best platform for business- any business, so get utilising the platform today!

There are so many ways you can advertise a product on Pinterest so get creative and do your business a favour. Once you start it will get easier and I bet you’ll think to yourself, why didn’t I start sooner.

Have an amazing autumn everyone and remember if you’re really stuck or you’d like to hire me to create content on Pinterest for you, click here to find out more.

Finally, the most important tip of all, to become successful on Pinterest you should aim to post 3 to 5 pins per day. I’ve given you all the tips you need to see your stats start booming so enjoy and share my article so others can get to know too.

Thanks for reading,

Soph.

Add my personal account on Pinterest here and see what trends I’m loving. Send me a DM for more info if you’d like!

Add Starting Today Blog on Pinterest here and stay up to date with all my posts!

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