How to Use Pinterest to Generate Revenue [Infographic]

Home to countless cookie recipes, laughable memes, and perfect last-minute gift ideas, there's certainly already a lot to love about Pinterest.

But what if we told you that the content sharing service had even more to offer?

The simple truth is this: Amidst the ab workouts and IKEA furniture hacks, there lies a huge opportunity for businesses to use Pinterest to drive revenue. And with nearly 30% of online American adults using Pinterest, this isn't an opportunity you'll want to leave on the table.

To help you get a handle on how to make Pinterest work better for your business, make your way through the infographic below from QuickSprout. It includes insight on what the most popular categories are and how to drive more engagement. Check it out to get the background you need to start putting your own Pinterest strategy into practice.

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Be a Pinterest Pro

The social media platform, Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool that helps you discover and save ideas for projects and interests. Think of Pinterest as social media’s answer to scrap booking. Create multiple “boards” for varying topics, interests and projects. From a business perspective; you can create boards of your products, content, services and additional boards relevant to your audience. For people, it can suck a huge amount of time as you find yourself going down a rabbit hole, discovering new content and beautiful things to add to your boards. A marketer’s playground right?

But it isn’t all fantasy holiday boards and dream wedding inspiration. Right now, hundreds of thousands of businesses are leveraging the power of Pinterest to drive traffic to their websites and increase sales. In fact, according to Search Engine Journal’s Quarter 3 Search Engine Traffic Report, Pinterest is the second largest driver of social media website traffic second only to Facebook.

OKAY I’VE JOINED UP. WHAT NEXT?

Once you’ve set up a business account with a strong profile, start creating boards. Your boards should be consistently aligned with your social media strategy and existing social platforms to communicate a clear brand message. I find it useful to map out boards on two levels: Core Boards and Relevant Boards.

CORE BOARDS

These are the boards that are your core business. They can include your content, products, blogs or sales messages. This is where you can push your products and services and drive traffic to your website.

That doesn’t mean it’s just sell, sell, sell. Make sure you tell the story of the product and explain in detail how your products can benefit your audience. E.g. a clothing retailer may have a board of dresses. Instead of simply uploading the pictures and prices of the dresses, create a story around them. Describe where you could wear the dress to, when and how. This creates value, engagement and shareability.

RELEVANT BOARDS

These boards add an extra layer to your content. Just like on Facebook, you aren’t spruiking your goods and services 24/7, so don’t do it here. E.g. a jeweller may have a wedding inspiration board that has among other things rings, venues, dresses decorations. These are topics that a jeweller’s audience are interested in, driving engagement and shareability.

Once you’ve mapped out your core boards and relevant boards, before you Pin anything, consider the following:

• What’s your primary goal for the Pin?
• Does the Pin communicate your brand value?
• Is this Pin relevant to your audience?
• How do you want people to feel after interacting with your brand?

WHAT MAKES A GOOD PIN?

Pinterest believes 3 foundations make a good Pin:

1. Helpful
2. Beautiful
3. Actionable

HELPFUL

How useful and informative is the Pin to your audience? Does it deliver value?

BEAUTIFUL

If your Pins are compelling and creative your audience will engage with you. Always use high quality images. The lower the quality the worse the Pin. Photos should be 600px wide and between 900px and 2100px tall.

ACTIONABLE

Just like anything online, include calls to action that help people take action on their interests. You can also link out to places that will help your audience make a purchase or complete an action.

WANT MORE INFORMATION?

Pinterest have compiled a great eBook that details everything you need to make great business Pins. Download it here.

And for those more experienced Pinners @beccacaddy has some great tips to share on her recent blog 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Pinterest.

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Pinterest: how to market your business with the social media site

With more than 70m users and a new promoted pins service, the online cork board can be used as a vehicle to grow your brand

Think Pinterest is just for people to post pictures of lovely lounges, crocheted owls or ice cream? Think again. While it can be lovely – not to mention incredibly distracting – to spend an hour browsing through “pins” of log cabins (I did warn you), the site also has numerous benefits for a small business.

The social media site, which was founded in 2010, has more than 70m users worldwide and is planning to turn some of the vast amounts of behavioural data it’s been collecting into advertising opportunities.

Pinterest launched its Promoted Pins service in December 2014, which allows advertisers to target messages to users. In the coming year this should become a lot more streamlined and detailed, so if you’re promoting your business and developing brand awareness, Pinterest has a ready and willing audience of users (mainly female) prepared to look at what you’ve got.

Dani Booth, a digital marketing specialist at Jelf Group, plc, says businesses that don’t pin are missing out. “Pinterest is one of life’s great equalisers. In varying degrees, everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennials is pinning,” he explains. “The online world is an increasingly visual environment so if your brand is a good fit and currently isn’t using Pinterest, then you’re potentially missing a huge opportunity.”

Attention spans online are short, adds Booth, but “with such a strong mobile/device interface, it’s essentially your brand in their pocket”.

Some brands fit readily into Pinterest’s visual mould. Chefs use it successfully and for travel companies it’s an obvious choice. “These are brands than have designed an approach that is slap-bang in the middle of the Venn diagram of ‘building brand awareness’ and ‘satisfying customer desire’,” says Booth.

“Retailers, for example, use Pinterest to seed their product images into search results, placing them alongside maybe more famous brands and generating traffic to their site.”

He’s right. Search for a simple term such as ‘brogues’ and you’ll be presented with hundreds of portals to different shops selling the product of your dreams. This approach, says Booth, “coupled with an engaging approach to communicating with your customers/followers and nurturing the popularity of your pins, will set you on the road for success”.

Sue Westwood-Ruttledge runs animal photography business, Horse Photographer UK. She began using Pinterest in 2012 to put inspiration boards together for forthcoming shoots.

Westwood-Ruttledge has 348 followers and says that though it doesn’t seem much, it’s not her main source of promotion. It is, however, a valuable productivity tool: “I use it to collaborate with the stylist and hair/make up girls to make sure we know what look we are going for.”

“Secret boards are a way of connecting people in businesses and making sure they are all on the same page with any project,” Westwood-Ruttledge adds. “Also, using tags, web addresses and watermarks to identify the source of an image is really helpful. There’s nothing worse than liking something but you can’t find where it originates from.” She also displays her work on the site and, for example, if you’re a horse-lover and you type in the words “black, Welsh stallion” to the Pinterest search bar, up pops one of her pictures with a link to her business. This sort of exposure is not to be whinnied at.

Pinterest has its uses as an administrative device. Hayley Brown runs Edinburgh-based GlamCandy, a hair and makeup school.

“I have been on Pinterest for a while, using it for photoshoots, fashion and home decor inspiration. I used it a couple of times to show students, photographers, stylists and artists my research,” she says. “It then occurred to me that it was the perfect accessible app for makeup artists and students to get inspiration and research old and new trends. So in January 2014 it was introduced into GlamCandy as our students’ homework and research tracker.”

The company also uses Pinterest with its partners to research promotional shoots. Brown explains: “We recently used it as part of our photoshoot brief for our 2015 bridal campaign and we shared a private board with our team so they could combine ideas and inspiration.” Brown is now developing some (currently top secret) ideas about how the company will monetise its Pinterest site in the coming year.

She could take some tips from London-based estate and lettings agency Paramount. Like everyone else, they started using Twitter a couple of years ago but last December started looking into ways they could use Pinterest to boost business.

Marketing manager Carla Bradman says: “It’s been a very successful medium for us in two ways. Firstly, it’s fantastic for us as an estate agency because we can share and repin home and lifestyle-related images.” Even better, in December the company launched its #WhampPlanet campaign, using the new Pinterest map feature.

Bradman explains: “The #WhampPlanet campaign involved distributing tote bags with an illustrated West Hampstead map on them throughout the local area. Bag holders were then encouraged to take a little bit of West Hampstead with them around the world, sending us photos of the bag in iconic locations to upload to our Pinterest map.”

To date the #WhampPlanet bag has been to the South Pole, the Great Wall of China, the Galápagos Islands, the Super Bowl final and Machu Picchu – and many other places. The campaign has earned the company “increased engagement with our target audience and a driver of consistent new visitors to our website”. In fact, she says, “visitors that stay on our website longer from Pinterest than from any other social network,” says Bradman.

Pin yourself successful

• Pinterest has two sets of terms—one for people and one for businesses. If you’re using Pinterest for business purposes you should sign up for a (free) business account and agree to the Business Terms of Service.

• Foodporn alone does not make a successful business. The key to a popular Pinterest account is finding a niche or unique approach. Dani Booth says: “Curate both your own and others pinners’ images that appeal to your brand without transforming Pinterest boards into billboards.”

• Consider niche boards to garner more interest (for example, rather than “20th century furniture” have “mid-century Danish furniture”).

• Like other social media sites, success is in how collaborative you are. Get involved in other people’s “pins” (liking and commenting) – don’t just post blatant adverts to your own products, but follow related companies.

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5 Ways to Improve Your Pinterest Marketing

Do you want more pins and repins?

Are you looking for ways to drive more traffic and engagement?

If you want your content pinned more often, you need to make it easy for visitors to take action.

In this article you’ll discover how to optimize your images for pinning and repurpose your most popular pins for increased engagement.

Discover five ways to improve your Pinterest marketing.

#1: Add the Pin It Button

Pinterest offers a free widget that allows you to add a Pin It button to your images on WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger and Wix. You can even add the widget to your iOS and Android apps. Best of all, it’s free, customizable and easy to install.

Pinterest’s Pin It button makes it easy for users to share your content.

When visitors want to pin something from your site, all they have to do is click the button, choose the board they want to share to and confirm the pin.

To maximize the effectiveness of the Pin It widget, it’s a good idea to add it to all of your images—not just the first one. That way your visitors can quickly choose which image to pin.

Keep track of which images are pinned most—it’s a good gauge of which ones are most attractive to your audience. Take that into consideration as you create new images for your upcoming articles and product pages.

Does the Pin It button really work? Yes. Brands that adopt the Pin It button are seeing greater distribution of their images.

Three months after Allrecipes added the Pin It button, more than 50,000 recipes were shared to Pinterest. Better still, the site continues to see a significant lift in the volume of recipes shared by their community. This is purely earned media—a critical driver of brand awareness.

The Pin It button increases the number of pins from your site.

As you go through the widget installation process, customize your button to reflect your brand aesthetics. The shape, color and hover function should all match your site. Where you place the button is important too. You can manage all of these options from the Pinterest widget page.

You can even A/B test the size and placement of Pin It buttons to determine which version works best. When BuzzFeed enlarged the Pin It button on share bars and put the icon at the top of images, they increased pinning tenfold.

Try different button displays to see what works best.

#2: Write Pre-populated Pin Descriptions

An important part of increasing pins and repins is making things seamless for the user, right? Part of that is providing a relevant description so the user doesn’t have to.

In many cases when a user pins an image, the default text is uninspired, nondescript or missing altogether.

Generic descriptions don’t do you any favors.

That means the user does one of two things: pins the image with the lame description (which hurts the chances of repins and subsequent click-through traffic), or they take the time to write their own description (which may not include a brand or product mention).

Which one do you think happens most often? People usually don’t want to take the time to complete an extra step—they prefer you do it for them. Give them what they want. Every time you create a pinnable image, write a short description about the image, article or product it’s promoting.

Now it’s possible that people over on Pinterest will repin your image based on how attractive it is, even if the description is awful. But why take that chance?

Tell pinners about your product in the description.

Increase your likelihood of repins by providing a description with pertinent information about your product or blog content. Start with basic attributes, such as the product style, your company or blog name and other important identifiers.

The more creative you get, the better. Great copy combined with great images not only increases repins, but also click-throughs to your site.

#3: Watch What Pinners Do

Of course, you can’t guarantee pinners will use your customized pin descriptions. Sometimes users want to make a note to themselves or add a little of their own personality.

You can learn a lot by watching how pinners change your descriptor text. How are users talking about your product? Which keywords are they using? How do those fit with your brand, product or content?

Ultimately, these insights help you make more educated marketing decisions and drive engagement on your website. For instance, let’s say one of your products is frequently described using the term “gift.” Start using “gift” in your content and pin descriptions.

Pay attention to how your audience talks about your products.

You can also use the keywords to optimize home page headers, product descriptions and product categories.

#4: Showcase Popular Pins

When your audience pins your images, they are essentially telling you which of your products matter to them and which image they think best represents that product. As a result, popular and trending images on Pinterest have become a reliable way to predict which creative assets will drive the most engagement on your site.

To leverage top-performing pins, sort your images by interactions. Pick your best images and content and repurpose them. For example, create a gift guide on your blog that includes your most pinned gift items.

Or take a cue from Nordstrom and use those popular pins to create a top pin board on your own Pinterest account.

Don’t forget to maintain your own Pinterest account.

From here, shoppers can browse products by category, making it even easier to explore, save and potentially purchase items that have been voted up by Pinterest peers.

#5: Stock Your Digital Shelves

OK, so you’ve optimized your pins and repurposed them to increase traffic and engagement. But what happens when the pinned products are out of stock? Most sites just throw up a sold out or 404 page. If you’ve ever encountered this, you know how frustrating it is!

Don’t be that guy with the dead link.

As a business, if you’re guilty of the dreaded 404, you’re missing a huge opportunity to keep potential customers engaged. To address the “empty shelves” problem, make sure your social and ecommerce efforts are aligned.

Keep a close eye on Pinterest data to identify bad referral links and pass that information along to a team member on the ecommerce side so he or she canreroute users to active landing pages.

Those landing pages should offer to collect customers’ email addresses so you can let them know when the product is back in stock. If you don’t plan on restocking the item, provide suggestions and links to similar items.

Some Final Thoughts

Pins and repins bring attention to your company and products in an organic way. Most pins are the result of a consumer saving an image while browsing your site.

The optimization tips in this article help you make it easier for visitors to pin your content, which can lead to an increased number of pins, more traffic and (hopefully) more sales.

What do you think? How are you making the most of your popular pins? Have you seen an increase in engagement or repins? I’d love to know what’s working for you. Leave your comments below.

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Pinterest Interests: What Marketers Need to Know

Do you need an easy way to find new content to pin?

Would you like to see pins from people other than those you follow?

Finding good content to repin has always been crucial for Pinterest success. The solution is to follow interests on Pinterest.

In this article I’ll explain how to find and use Pinterest interests to improve visibility and engagement.

Why Explore Interests?

One drawback for many businesses on Pinterest is that there are only 32 specific and 6 broad categories available to search for pins.

Businesses whose products or services don’t neatly fit into one of these categories have to do additional searching on Pinterest to find relevant pins to share with their followers and new boards to follow.

The answer is to follow interests, and the pins come to you.

Interests are collections of pins about a specific niche topic from a bunch of people who aren’t necessarily following each other. Interests can be followed just like boards and accounts, and once you follow an interest, you begin to see pins related to that specific topic in your own feed.

#1: Find and Follow Interests

The option to Explore interests used to be included in the menu by the search bar, but is now gone. Here’s how you can locate interests today.

Explore Interests on a Desktop

At the time of writing this article, it’s not possible to search for Pinterest interests on your computer. The only way to discover interests is to find someone who’s already following them. To do that, go to any Pinterest account. Under their profile information (toward the right), locate and click the Following number.

When you click Following, a new page will appear. If the profile is following any interests, you will see them here. If not, the page will be blank. From this page you will also be able to see the boards and the accounts that user is following by clicking the tabs.

After you find an account that’s following interests, click one of them and a new screen will appear. Here you will see hundreds of pins related to that interest: some pins will be from accounts you follow, others will be from profiles you don’t follow. You’ll also see how many followers that interest has, as well as the profile images of eight accounts that follow that interest.

Below you can see some of the interests Social Media Examiner follows on Pinterest. Notice that they are much more specific than the Pinterest categories and are much more relevant to a social media–based business.

When you find an interest board you’d like to follow, just click on the Follow button underneath the title. Now you’ll see pins from this interest in your Pinterest feed.

To help you find even more interests to follow, Pinterest recommends seven others related to the current interest topic.

As previously mentioned, it’s not possible to search for interests on the desktop version of Pinterest. You need to find pinners in your field who already follow interests. To get you started, here are interests followed by Social Media Examiner(as previously mentioned), Neal Schaffer and Tailwind.

Explore Interests on Mobile

The recently updated iOS Pinterest mobile app added a way to search for interests, but you have to know where to look.

Both Android and iOS interests searches start similarly to the desktop process. First,find a pinner. Next, check their followers, and if they explore interests, look around. (Android users, select About then Following to get to Interests.)

While Android users are limited to finding interests through trial and error, iOS users can do a proper search once they locate any pinner who follows at least one interest.

If you’re on iOS and don’t find an interest you like under a pinner’s profile, just select the plus sign to do a search.

Follow the interest you like, and those pins will appear in your feed.

#2: Create a New Interest

The ability to create your own interests, especially at this early stage in the functionality, is particularly helpful for people in niche industries.

If you search for an interest using your iOS app and it doesn’t yet exist, here’s how you can create it with the push of a button!

Once you create an interest, it will populate with pins related to the keyword or phraseyou use in the title or description.

Uses for Interests

Not many people are aware of interests, which gives businesses exploring this tactic an advantage.

While pins in the feed from interest groups are a great additional source of repinnable content, there are many other benefits to incorporating interests into your Pinterest marketing:

• Increase visibility. If you use the proper keywords in your pins’ descriptions, they could become part of multiple interest groups. Your content will be seen by more users who are likely to follow you.
• Discover new people to follow. The profile images shown on an interest page constantly change. Click on, research and follow other interest followers to discover a great up-and-coming resource or connect with a new potential client who’s followed an interest related to your business.

• Engage easier. Once you start following appropriate interests, relevant content will come to you in your home feed. By commenting on, repinning and liking those pins, you have an easy way to engage with people you don’t follow on Pinterest.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a better way to find and pin content more regularly, discovering interests is a bit challenging, but certainly worth it.

What do you think? Do you use Pinterest interests? What cool discoveries have you made? Do you have any recommendations for Pinterest profiles that are following great interests? Please share your thoughts and recommendations in the comments.

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