How To Use Pinterest For Business (5 Marketing Strategies)

There are five key strategies of how to use Pinterest for business success and how to boost your traffic.

This process has helped me get over 16000 web visitors to my blog within the first months of starting it.
If you’re starting to use Pinterest for your blog business website affiliate or products or even you’ve been using Pinterest for a while but are not seeing the results that you wants then this post is for you.

 Pinterest & Facebook Groups

Joining and actively posting on Facebook, Pinterest and blogging groups has really changed my Pinterest account for the better.

It has been huge for making my Pinterest account more successful because of the tricks and tips learned from these valuable groups. And it takes barely any effort.

Instead of paying a consultant to look at your Pinterest account to give you some advice you could get the same from Facebook groups for free.

 There are Facebook groups run by people who consult professionally and often post exclusive tips, videos, or courses. 

You will actually receive advice from a ton of other Pinterest business owners just like youself who could be more experienced, or experienced in different ways.

 Back in the day I would try to learn all about Pinterest by researching a lot. Which took a lot of time and brain power. 

However, after I joined Facebook groups whenever I had a struggle with keywords for my pin descriptions, I got a valuable tip from other random users. I tried out his method and I literally tripled my average link clicks. (Read on to find out exactly what I did for keywords in descriptions)

Getting free followers re-pins and clicks.  

When you first start your pinterest account it’s important to get some followers. when people follow you, it helps your account grow. When I first started I would follow the followers of leaders in my niche hoping that they would follow me back.

I remember getting frustrated, as I would check to see if I anyone followed me back after following them. I got followers but not what i was expecting.

On Facebook however the huge benefit from Facebook groups, is free traffic to both your Pinterest account and website.

Most of this groups do follow For Follow .

This is when you post your profile link and then follow 10 other members profiles in return.

It’s easy to get 15 to 20 new followers for free from these types of posts.

The best ones are the click for click posts where someone clicks through your pin to your actual website. This will boost your actual Pinterest popularity and the algorithm will favour your account which makes it easier to get more traffic. 

Pinterest for Business  Staying Updated

Another good reason for joining Pinterest Facebook groups is because members update each other on the new algorithms, business account features, issues, or any other Pinterest news you need to know.

I remember a recent Pinterest update which was big for boards and analytics for business accounts.

I only got to know about this through the people that I got to be friends with from the groups. So this allowed me not to panic or spend time contacting Pinterest to figure out what was going on.

How to design pins

I have completely changed how I create my Pinterest pins. Before, I would design these quickly without paying attention to branding.

I would design my pins caring not of the colors & text and how they affect the click-through rate.

Here are some design strategies for pins.

1.  Use Canva. This tool makes creating  pinterest pins extremely easy. The best part is that it’s free. Canva has a database of approved stock photos and so many customization options and tools.
2. Use bright colors. Stay away from grey-brown and dark colors, this makes the pin easily visible and clickable.
3. Use clear and easy to read fonts.
4. Do not put your words at the bottom of a pin instead put them at the top or the middle. You can also overlay them on top of the image. Taking up to 60 to 70% of the graphic.
5. Always brand your Image. Put a logo on the pin. I prefer the bottom Centre.

Pins For Specific Audiences.

Your next step is to start designing pins for your specific audiences.

As you know when designing a pin you should design 3 to 5 different images for one post.

Planning out my pins for different audiences has been a game-changer for me.

Before, I used to use the same graphic for my pins with just different words. This alienated different parts of my audience who I was not reaching out to.

I have identified that one part of my audience are bloggers, and some who follow my content are interested in affiliate marketing in general.

Therefore If every single pin I design has a photo that only bloggers could relate to, it would alienate the others that are not blogging.

To illustrate this point further let’s use different examples.

Let’s say you are running a food blog, and write an article on “20 quick and cheap recipes”. You can create a pin with a photo of a mum and her children.

Then you could title this pin “20 recipes for a busy school night.”

Another pin could target young college students. Since the article is broad,  20 quick and cheap recipes”, many different audiences can benefit from this.

For college students, the pin could be titled

“20 quick and cheap recipes for college students”.

You could do the same for a young couple which would make a different audience.

Since I followed this principle I expanded my audience reach which has brought more traffic to my blog posts. 

One of my recent blog posts was on how to design a logo. I wrote this with the perspective of reaching out to new bloggers.

I realized it would be more helpful and popular to serve several audiences with this post because anyone doing business online would most likely need a logo.

I thought of how many other people would benefit from this.

For example, anyone doing

• E-commerce,
• Affiliate marketing,
• Work from home,
• Passive income,
• Entrepreneurs

Would benefit from the same article instead of just being a specific group of people or search query.

Pinterest File Name.

With the new Pinterest updates, I did a study. When uploading an image with the filename like this “IMG_543”

I found that I would not rank higher within Pinterest, than if I put the keyword on the filename.

The filename is an excellent opportunity to add keywords that give Pinterest an idea of what your pin is about.

This is how I did it using Canva:

1. First, create 3-5 images as separate pages in canva in one file. (instead of creating new designs for each one)
2. Then download the file and rename each image using keywords. You could either name them all the same name or what I do is name them according to the audience and keyword) it does not really matter as long as Pinterest knows what your pin is about.

Just a side note Canva converta all images into a zip file so you need to unzip it before you can name the files.

Click here to check out Canva, 

Pin Descriptions & Keywords.

When I first started using Pinterest, I remember stuffing my pin description with keywords.

I would try to fit as many keywords as possible until I used all my character limit each time.

This did not work in the slightest.

Only when I got advice from one of the Facebook groups that I had joined did i stop doing this. It was actually working against the success of my pins.

One of the group members advised me to use 2 to 3 keywords and 2 to 3 sentences per pin.

After I tried this I was surprised how powerful it worked. This doubled sometimes tripled the click to my links with-in a short time.

Here is what you do for the 3-5 pins that you create with Canva and would like to schedule them for posting using Tailwind.

Include 1-2 keywords in your pin title e.g (” logo design ideas for bloggers”)

Then write a 2 – 3 sentence sounding natural with the description.

Write it as if you were talking to someone instead of advertising.

 Another recent advice I came across was to write it in three parts. For example,  start with a question or a problem,
then include a solution or an answer and after that a call to Action.

 For example.

Are you looking for blog Logo inspiration? These awesome design techniques will save you money while still being effective for your brand. Check out the 5 must-have logo design principles that your new blog needs.

The Right Way To Use Tailwind.

You probably are using tailwind or are tired of hearing about it.

In case you’re not aware of Tailwind, it’s basically a partner program with Pinterest that helps Pinterest business accounts to be more successful on the platform.

You can schedule your pins and have them curated on a daily basis.

This is absolutely crucial as it will increase the activity of your account and makes it easier to rank on Pinterest.

According to Tailwind and the other articles that talk about Pinterest scheduling, they say to just use ‘smart schedule’ and throw everything into your pin que and let it go. This is not the right way to do it.

There are several problems with this method. The main one being there is no strategy behind it.

For example, your pins could trigger spam if they are pinned to often, especially if its the same pin pinned multiple times during the week.

Also, the schedule is a random way of posting. So basically you’re not targeting when your audience is most likely to be active.

The best strategy is using interval scheduling. This allows you to be strategic and intentional about your pins.

It allows you to optimize for the best times according to your audience’s habits.

Here’s a quick rundown to interval scheduling.

To begin with, remember the 3-5 images created for your blog post or page URL with each image and description aimed at a different specific audiences.

1. Add your pin images to Tailwind.
2. Enter the boards and titles and SEO optimized descriptions. I usually do 2 to 4 boards per image( group boards and tribes).
3. Click on the interval which is at the bottom of the pin.
4. Select the date and the time that you want your pin to go out.
5. Select an interval which is ‘how often’ your pin should be pinned to the next board on the list. The best practice is to do a minimum of 2 days between pins. I personally do between 5 days interval. This spreads out longer and reduce the risk of my account getting flagged.
6. Choosing an interval type.

You want to make sure you look at your smart schedule for this. I make sure I pick a date and time where my audience is most active.

This is usually on the weekends but may differ depending on your niche.

Make sure your pin goes to the right board.

e.g. ‘best logo designs’ should go to the website design board before it goes to the blogging board.

Tribes

This is one of the best features in Tailwind.

They function as group boards and are niche-specific. They tend to have rules.

When I was choosing my tribes I made a mistake of not carefully choosing them.

When choosing a tribe you want to be picky because there’s a limit to both the number of tribes and pins you can pick depending on the package of Tailwind that you have.

You want to pick a tribe that has good activity and one that is also active and unsaturated so that your content cannot be pushed to the bottom after posting it for 10 minutes.

Find a good tribe by picking one from the tribe icons on the menu.

While picking a tribe make sure they have 4 to 5 bars on the activity bar.  I would recommend staying under 3000 members so you don’t get drowned out.

Just click join tribe even if it’s private and you’re all set.

Tribes are better than group boards because they come with their own Analytics.

Tailwind offers the opportunity to see how many people are sharing and viewing your content.

Do not have Tailwind? Click here to give it a try.

Remember that Tailwind can also be used for Instagram posts as well.

Sharing other people’s content

When I first started my Pinterest journey, a lot of people would say ‘share other people’s content’ on your own pinterest account.

I was confused about this,  I would think to myself why I would spend time making my competition successful. Little did I know how crucial this was to my own success.

Here are a few reasons why you want to save content from another account.

The more content you have on your board the better the Pinterest algorithm understands your niche and business and what it’s about.

When you have good content even if it’s not yours it will give you a good reputation and can really help you get more followers.

 You can also collaborate with other people in your niche which is a great way to build your network and stay updated on news in your niche.

You can get content ideas and gain followers who actually care about your content because it’s similar to theirs.

This is a must if you’re going to use Tailwind tribes and Pinterest groups.

The 80/20 rule.

When I first started with Pinterest,  I pinned a lot from other people.

However, now I only pin as much content as I have in order to follow the tribe and group board rules.

I aim for about 80% 20 so that I can always have a lot more of my own content going out.

Conclusion

I hope this post helps you to learn how to use Pinterest for business by avoiding the mistakes that I have made on Pinterest marketing.

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