The internet is your best bet if you are looking to create additional sources of income but only if you know how to market your products/services. Setting up an online business is easy but getting traffic to you site is a different story. Fortunately, Pinterest can solve this problem and I will teach you How to Make Money with Pinterest.
Affiliate Disclosure – I am an Affiliate of many products promoted on this website and may earn a commission if you purchase something.
What is Pinterest and Why It Is Great for Online Business?
Pinterest is one of the best platform to use to generate and/or direct traffic to your site because it is part social media, and part search engine. That means you can use both social media marketing (SSM) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies to market your business.
Another great benefit of using Pinterest is its users are proactive shoppers.
This is great for you business because a good percentage of Pinterest users who will see your Pins will likely going to buy your product/service, provided you are advertising to the right people.
How to Make Money on Pinterest?
In any online business, you need 3 things to make money: a seller (you), products to sell, and buyers. However there is a little nuisance and is for the seller to figure out how you can bring your product/services to buyers.
Pinterest is the solution. You can use Pinterest to bring your product/services to your potential buyers but before that to happen, you need to optimize your Pinterest account and you need to grow your followers. Doing these two things will enable you to use search engine marketing and social media marketing effectively.
So how do you optimize and strategically add followers to make money on Pinterest?
Just simply follow the steps below!
Steps to How to Make Money with Pinterest
1. Create a Pinterest for Business Account
The first step of How To Make Money with Pinterest is to make a Pinterest for Business Account.
Note: Pinterest for Business Account is different from a regular Pinterest account so if you only have a regular account then you convert it now.
The difference between a personal account and a business account is the business account gives you information about your audience. You can then use the information to better serve your audience by creating contents that your audience would love.
Another key difference between the two types of accounts is Pinterest for Business accounts allows you to “claim” your website. When you claim your site, your website URL will appear in your Pinterest profile page. This is great because your followers can check out your site which is good for redirecting traffic.
If your claimed website is an e-commerce store, then Pinterest will allow you to use their Buyable Pins. Buyable Pins will be extremely helpful for you if you have an e-commerce store because you will be allowed to sell directly on Pinterest. This is beneficial because the easier you make it for a buyer to purchase something, the more like likely they will buy.
To create a business account, you simply need to go to business.pinterest.com and follow the instructions.
You can also check out, How to Set Up a Pinterest Business Account if you need a little bit more help in setting up your Pinterest for Business account. The article also shows how you can convert your regular account into a business account.
2. Choose a Niche
If you already have an established blog or business then you probably know what a niche is and why it is important to choose a niche at the beginning of the process.
That said, I advise the niche you will pick here on Pinterest is the same as your existing online/offline business. The reason for this will become more clear in the following steps.
On the other hand, if this is your first time hearing about “niche” then I suggest that you watch this online tutorial made by Wealthy Affiliate.
In essence, a “niche” is the market category of the products or services that you wish to sell. You can also define it as the theme of your blog/ business.
Choosing a niche is important because you want to sell to only a certain group of people. You want to do this because advertising/marketing your product to only a subset of the population is much easier and cheaper than trying to advertise to the entire population.
3. Optimize Your Pinterest for SEO
Like what I said earlier, choosing a niche is important because it makes your advertising campaign easier and cheaper. In this step, we will put that into actions.
You have 3 jobs in Pinterest marketing: Create or repin other people’s Pins that are related to your business niche, organize these Pins to help your followers find it, optimize your Pins and Boards so the right people can find it.
Since we are already talking about optimizing your Pins and Boards, optimize your username as well. Why not!
When I say optimize your Pins and Boards, it is just simply including “keywords” in their title/name.
Keywords are simply a word or phrase other users type in the Pinterest search bar if they are looking for some ideas or contents.
For example,
My blog/business is about personal finance.
I believe personal finance includes personal budget, personal development, and personal income. For these reasons, my blog and Pinterest niche is about personal budget, personal development, and personal income.
What I did next after determining my niche is I thought of sub-topics related to my main niche, created boards and named them after my sub-topics and, finally, filled each boards with related Pins by repining other people’s Pin.
Whenever I create my own Pin, I first do keyword research so I can put primary keywords on my Pin’s Title and secondary keywords on my Pin’s description. Afterward, I save (or schedule) my Pins to respective boards.
4. Strategically Add Followers
What I mean by strategically adding followers is you should add people who are probably interested in your business. You want to do this to increase your conversion.
The logic is if your business is selling books, then you should add people who are interested in books. This way, when you put out a store sale, then these book lovers will surely get interested.
There are two ways to strategically add followers.
The first method is through account optimization.
If you put niche-related keywords to your username, Pinterest Pins and Pin’s description, and Pinterest Boards, then you will be easily found by people who are searching for ideas and/or contents in that niche.
The other method is by finding an influencer in your niche and adding their followers.
When doing this strategy, just be sure to add real people and not spam accounts.
One of many ways I determine whether an account is a spam or not is by looking at their profile pictures. If the picture is a super pretty woman, an explicit picture, or don’t have a profile picture, then that signals me that is is probably spam.
Another way I do to avoid adding a spam account is I check their profile. You would know it is a spam account by just looking at what they Pin. Spam accounts have similar Pins or similar niche!
Pro Tip 1:
About ~20% of the people you follow will follow back and Pinterest will allow you to add ~200 people a day. Therefore, your primary focus at the beginning of your Pinterest marketing life is to add ~200 people a day. Do this for 3 months to get ~3600 followers.
Once you reached the 3k+ followers, then switch your focus on step 5 and step 6. You can still do step 4 but I think you will benefit more if you spend your resources in creating Pin and re-pinning pins.
Pro Tip 2:
I believe you should first focus on building your followers list, but you will have a hard time to get a follow back if you don’t have contents in your Pinterest. So even if you are focusing on building your follower list, be sure to also regularly publish Pins or even just re-Pin other people’s Pins.
5. Create Engaging Pins
If you want your Pinterest for Business account keeps growing, consistently creating an engaging Pins will be a must.
Here is the logic,
Say, you now have ~3000 follower and most of them will see your Pins after you publish them,
If they like your Pin, then they will re-in them for their followers to see.
Now if their follower likes the idea you are sharing then they will find you and add you and on top of that, they will rePin your ideas for their friends to see and the cycle continues on and on.
This is the reason why I believe once you reach a certain number of followers then you can put step 4 into the back seat.
Here is an example of an engaging pin! This is my recent best performing Pin:
So how do you create an engaging pin?
4 Simple Tips That You Can Do to Create an Engaging Pin
- Use Canva. Your life will be so much easier.
- Canva has a template for Pinterest Graphics so all you need to do is to pick one from their many templates.
- Once you have chosen a good template, replace the image with your own stock photos or search from their database.
- Then, you can change the title and sub-titles to match your needs
- Finally, go to Pinterest and click the “Create Pin”. Fill out the requirements and make sure to insert your website URL to the destination URL.
- To make it more engaging, add a short testimony of how your idea solve your problem
- For example, add, ” I will teach you my strategy that help me grow my Pinterest account to 3000 followers in just 3 months”
- Keep in mind who are your followers and create a Pin that will interest them.
- You can get the information about your audience, e.g. age, gender, location, which you can use as the basis of your design.
- For example, if your audience is 18-25, female, in the USA, then create Pins that a 23 y/o from the USA would like
- Remember step 3! Keyword optimized your Pins, Boards and even user name.
6. Re-Pin Niche Related Pins
Some would argue that Pinterest’s “Impression” number is irrelevant, but I think it is not. As a matter of fact, you should want to make that as high as possible.
Impression means the number of people who “saw” your Pins. That means if your followers are browsing their feeds and they saw your Pin, then that count as an impression even if they did not engage with your Pin.
Now, I want you to make that as high as possible because it gives you an indication of how many people get to see your work.
It can also be used to be the “baseline” of your expectation. I mean if your Impression number is high then you cannot expect a high number of Link Clicks.
Finally, (and mind you this is not science just my logic) if your Impression number is low then it’s kind of useless to devote your time and resources creating Pins when it reaches nobody. Do that when you have decent traffic to your profile. That is also the reason why I ask you to grow your followers first.
So here is our problem right now
Lower Impression = fewer people see your hard work
Fewer people see your hard work = not worth it to work hard
We also have one solution
Growing your followers list = increasing your impression
Now you might be wondering, where will step 6 gonna come into play!
Well, step 6 is another solution to help our Impression go up.
Re-pinning other People’s Pin is excellent in improving your Impression because, a, it takes 1 – 3 seconds to rePin a Pin, b, somebody already did the hard work for you.
Of course the downside is you don’t get people to go to your business website/blog because the destination links of those Pins are to their own website, but that is okay. Give and take.
6 Guidelines for Repining Pins
- Save Pins to their appropriate boards
- Please save nice, informative, and appropriate-sized Pins
- You need to Pin only those that are related to your blog
- Ideally, you need to pin 50 Pins a day
- You need to spread those 50 Pins throughout the day
- What?! 50 Pins Per Day, Nobody Got Time for That!
Yes, I hear your difficulty. I am a very busy person and spending 20 mins a day every 4 hours to update my Pin is a very demanding job.
Fortunately, humans love solving problems and there is a solution to this problem!
Introducing,
Tailwind!
Tailwind is a Pinterest auto-scheduler tool that can automatically publish your Pin on your desired time so instead of spending 20 mins x 5 a day, you can just sit in the morning for 10 to 20 mins to set when your Tailwind will publish your Pins as well as Repin other people’s Pin
Boom. Problem Solved.
7. Create Affiliate Pins or Buyable Pins
Doing steps 1 to 6 would ready your Pinterest for monetization.
There are many ways you can use Pinterest to make money. The most common and safe way is to direct traffic to your website or landing page.
Others directly insert affiliate links to the destination link of a pin. An example of this strategy is directing your Pinterest traffic to your Amazon or eBay using your affiliate link.
Publishing Buyable Pins is another option. Buyable pins are exclusive for multi-million dollar companies. Fortunately, Pinterest are making some changes recently which allows e-commerce site owners to create their own.
That’s About It, Any Questions?
I am proud of you!
You came, you saw my easy Pinterest marketing strategy, now conquer online business!
Well, I really hope you enjoyed this article and I hope that it added value to your life.
Before you go,
Please let me know which part of the strategy you like the most and why?
Also, do you see a step that would prove difficult to do or it doesn’t make sense?
Your answer means a lot to me, so please share your thoughts in the comment section down below.