Pinterest Strategy For Beginners

Brand Strategy

Jul 29

Can Pinterest grow your business?

Absolutely - Pinterest is the number one platform to help you drive traffic to your website. Don’t know where to start when it comes to using Pinterest for your business? Listen to Season 1 Episode 12 of Her Messy Bun Podcast to learn the step by step Pinterest strategy I’m going to use to help grow my business and drive traffic from Pinterest to my website or keep reading.

What is a Pinterest Strategy?

As requested by a bunch of you, in today’s episode I’m going to do my best to break down the mystery that is pinterest. Full disclosure, I’m pretty sure that I still don’t fully understand the enigma that is Pinterest, but these last few weeks I have been doing some major researching and digging deeper in my pinning game. I decided I wanted to take this journey together. In today’s episode I’m going to talk about how to start a business account, how many boards to have, where to start your pinterest strategy and a few more secrets I’ve discovered myself.

If you listened to my tips for the Etsy Seller episode, you know that I think etsy and pinterest are best friends. Pinterest is the number 1 social media platform that drives traffic to etsy, blogs and pretty much every small business. Since learning this I have been driven to tap into some this gooey goodness.

Business Account

First let's talk about starting your business account. If you didn’t know, like most platforms it is free to have a business account. The reason you want this type of account for pinterest isn’t just to learn more about your analytics, but to also tap into more of the benefits that Pinterest has to offer. Between group boards and connecting your website to allow verified pins, a business account will also allow your pins to be pushed through the algorithm better than if you were to have a regular account. There's another extremelyyyyy import perk to a business account, but I’m saving that one for later.

There are two ways that you can make a business account. The first is to transfer your current one over to a business account, and the second way is to just create one. I decided to just create a brand new one because I’ve had my personal account since I was a teenager and 90% of my boards are irrelevant to my business. So it just didn’t make sense to private all of my boards in order to create a new account. Plus I’ve been really weird with my Her Messy Bun business and wanting everything to start from scratch. My target audience is so specific that I wanted to know everyone following along with this journey wasn’t just a bot and was actually here to learn.

When you create your business account it is important to fill out your entire profile. Pinterest allows 65 characters in your name, and 160 characters in your about section. So for my display name I decided to put Danielle Lawrence | Her Messy Bun Podcast | Grow Your Confidence. This way you know my name, what my business is and what the you can gain from my business. Next in the about section I kept it brief and included a call to action. “Helping small businesses + entrepreneurs grow your confidence so you can walk through life more productively. Start feeling productive” Then I added a link you can click. I used bitly to shorten the link to fit in the character count.

These two sections are always important on all platforms but I’ve learned that they are even more important to utilize on pinterest because since pinterest is it’s own search engine these keywords get included in the search.

How many boards to start off with

Ok, lets move onto the boards themselves. This is where the enigma feeling really got me. A lot of my questions were, what kind of boards should I have, what should I be pinning, and do I still use this business account like a regular pinterest account. Now you have to remember, I’m a graphic designer so I’ve worked with clients that have had me make and design their pins, but what was always so weird to me was that they all did everything so differently. The confusion was real, but after weeks of research I believe I’ve crack the code.

In order to know what boards your business should have, you need to break down the topics of your business. Her Messy Bun is all about teaching other artists and small businesses how to grow their confidence in order to be more productive. I believe our confidence can be broken up into 3 different pillars. The first is selfcare, we have to learn to take care of ourselves in order to be consistent and reliable and in order to avoid burnout. The second is being organized and educated. The more we know the more we can do and the more we are organized the easier we can accomplish. The final pillar is mindset and manifesting. Getting yourself in the right mindset can help you defeat the negative feelings and self-doubt allowing your confidence to stay afloat.

Now that you’ve broken down your business creating the boards should be a piece of cake, but how many boards should we start off with? I’ve landed on 20. Over the last few weeks I’ve learned that the more boards we have the stronger our pinterest game can be. Another thing we really want to be conscious of is titling our boards. Be specific and use keywords, fill out the the description section for each of your boards using as many keywords as you can and connect them to category as best as you can.

Before I start listing my board names I want to mention that my first board is my business name “Her Messy Bun Podcast”. Everytime I post a new podcast this is where I will share it first. From there I will share that same pin to my other boards throughout the week.

Pinterest board titles I’ve chosen:

Grow your confidence
Support small businesses
Small business tips
Daily affirmations
Productivity tips
Etsy tips
Digital Art
Self Care
Home decor
Art Decor
Plants + Gardens
Home office
Inspirational quotes
Personal Development
Manifestation
Office Organization
TikTok for small businesses
Work Life Tips
Self Employed routines

Now that I have these titles the next thing I’m going to do is create the description for them as well as a board cover that I’m going to pin to the board with the same description as the board itself and then I can assign it as the cover. I found that having a branded cover art for each of your boards keeps your pinterest looking cohesive and allows your business to stay branded. This is as simple as putting the title of the board on a colored background. For a better understanding of what this looks like I’ll link my pinterest in the show notes for you to check out.

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Where to start your pinterest strategy

Now that we have our boards made and our cover pins created we need to have a pinterest strategy. Right now mine is simple and then as I get used to pinterest I will probably use an outside app like Tailwind to help me schedule my pins but I’m the type of person that really needs to understand what I’m doing first in order to feel comfortable moving to the next phase. So my strategy is to pin my podcast episodes, my etsy listings and Her Messy Bun tiktoks. These are my primary posts that I will be doing. The common strategy is to make sure that you post it to the most relevant board first, and then from there you can repost each pin to other boards that it would work under. You’re going to have core boards that only your product or primary posts will be pinned to and then you should also have boards that other peoples pins can be pinned to. For instance my inspirational quotes and my affirmation boards those I can re-pin like usual.

You want to make sure that majority of your pinning is to help drive traffic for your business, but you need to know theres a difference between re-pinning and duplicating a pin. For instance if I were to share one of my etsy listings I can either re-pin that pin or I can go back to etsy and share it again. Duplicating that pin will create a brand new pin for my analytics and re-pinning will share the analytics information. Ideally you want to boost your already created pins before duplicating them because apparently pinterest sees too many duplicates as spam. As I continue with my journey in my pinterest strategy I can share more information with you but for now this is my strategy.

Extra secrets (creating a fake ad in order to find relative or key words that people are searching)

Finally as I mentioned earlier, I want to share the biggest benefit of having a business account. When you create ads in pinterest theres a section that allows you to search relevant keywords to add to your ads. Not only do they give you the most common search terms, but they also give you the number of people that it’s estimated to reach. You can get to this section of the ad without purchasing anything, which means if you are looking for new ways to find the most significant search terms and tags for your SEO, etsy listings and even potential hashtags on other social media platforms.

More Resources

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