How to use Pinterest for doing business and earning money?

What is Pinterest?

With 500 million monthly active users, Pinterest has a strong potential to be leveraged for your business and brand building. Pinterest is a type of search engine; it is a visual search engine where you can find images. It is also a type of social media where you can meet new people and collaborate with others. 

You have to keep in mind that people visit Pinterest to find inspirations. You will find attractive images, beautiful illustrations and engaging visual contents on this platform. So, you have to build your growth strategy as per this trend if you want to grow fast. 

In this article, we will give you a roadmap and some hacks to grow on Pinterest. 

7 basic yet interesting features on Pinterest: 

1. You can have multiple boards (where you post the images or contents)
2. You can create your original pins (posts) and also post others’ pins.
3. You can repost your old pins as well. 
4. There is a chatting option on Pinterest, which lets to chat with other people.
5. You can search with keywords or #tags to find certain types of images, boards or even people. 
6. Pinterest search has SEO facility
7. While you post your image contents, you can use keywords and #tags in the description. 
8. Pinterest has a website as well as a mobile app. 

How to create and set up your Business Account on Pinterest?

1. First start with creating Account and organising it:

a) Business account for more exposure

It is quite obvious that you need to create an account to get started. At first, you will start with your personal account, where you can post your contents. But one tip is that, move to business account from personal account if you want to explore more opportunities. Because the business account offers exclusive tools like analytics, creator program, ad campaigns and more features. We will touch these later in this article.

You can turn your personal account into business account by going to settings. While creating this business account, you can add your website/blog and choose your niche. You can also add your team members or partners. Pinterest’s business account has an ad account feature but it is limited to a few countries. You should add your brand’s logo or your real image to build trust. 

b) Complete profile for more trust

In your personal as well as business profile, you will get to fill some details like contacts, basic information, website etc. We recommend that you fill these genuinely, keeping focus on your business or content strategy. This is important because Pinterest scans your profile details to understand what type of content you post. If your bio and contents are in sync, it will be shown to the right people and you can grow faster. You can create a unique username based on your brand. 

c) Claim website for more traffic

You have an option to ‘Claim website’ and we recommend it. The significance of this feature is that, if any other creator posts images or contents directly from your website on their own Pinterest account, your website will be linked to those pins and when someone clicks/taps on those image description or links, they will land on your website. So, you can get more traffic and leads. 

After creating the profile, you need to focus on your content strategy. 

2. Content strategy:

a) Create boards 

Boards are where you pin your posts. Consider your boards like rooms, and the account as your house. You keep specific things in your bedroom, kitchen or bathroom. Same will be applicable here on Pinterest. Create boards based on certain topics. Let us give you some hacks about creating boards:

• If you have a website, you should create a board about your business. Here you can keep all posts related to your business or website. And this should be the first board on your account. Interestingly, you can simply drag and reposition your boards. 
• Next, you should create about 3-10 boards, based on your niche subjects, business products or services. It is very important to name the boards suitably. When a user searches with a keyword, Pinterest shows them search results based on that keyword. So, you should, first think like a user- imagine what the user might search, so that your boards or pins are shown in the result. Make board names accordingly with those keywords. This will also help Pinterest to understand what your board is all about. Keep the most important board first (or after your business board). 
• While naming the boards, you don’t have to be too creative because users will usually search with simple keywords- “app icons”, “NFTs”, “girl sketch” etc. You can simply pick these keywords and use as board names. If you want, you can add multiple keywords like “men’s fashion + grooming” if you want to put both type of contents inside same board. The good thing is that, on Pinterest, multiple people can use same keywords for their boards without any restrictions. But make sure you pick your niche, about which you will post the contents on these boards. 
• It is normal that when you start, you create some unnecessary boards. You can simply archive or hide them later. But beware…. If you already have some audience on those boards, hiding or discontinuing those boards can reduce your audience count. 

b) Create pins

If you have a basic website or blog with some contents, you are ahead of others who don’t have these. Because content is the basic investment to grow on Pinterest. We have already told how ‘Claim Website’ feature can help you. Here are some hacks to build your content strategy- 

• Though you can post other’s pins on your board, Pinterest promotes your own creations. Because Pinterest promotes new contents on its platform. 
• The optimal picture size is 1000×1500 pixels or 2:3 aspect ratio. Try to maintain this, because it looks better on the app. And most Pinterest users (85%) use the app. 

• Any content inside your blog or website can be a pin. Try to create simple and descriptive pins with attractive background and texts in front. A simple tool for this in Canva, where you can get a lot of free templates. Quality picture is the most important part of this content strategy because Pinterest promotes images that gave good aesthetic value. So use HD images and readable fonts. 
• You should use copyright free images or images to avoid any chance of future issues. Some good websites can be Unsplash, 
• You should ideally post 15-25 pins per day and do it regularly. You might think that you have limited contents to post. But don’t worry- here is a secret. You can use same picture with some modification. You can change the background of the image; you can change the texts and voila… you have new pins to post. Canva, photoshop or any other tools are sufficient for this. Thus, you can post same picture on different boards with slight modifications with background colour and/or texts. Don’t forget to link the pictures to your website URL; 
• But don’t just zoom an old post or just move a logo; Pinterest algorithm will detect this and it won’t be considered as a new post. 
• You have the provision to re-pin your old pins but as you already know, Pinterest encourages new pins rather than old reposts. If you repost same pins too frequently, your posts and boards will not get proper exposure. But if you have seasonal offers or relevant repetitive news, you can surely repost your pins. Ideally, you can repost your old pins 2-3 times in a year. The matter of exposure will depend on user engagement. If your re-pins engage the audience, if they get a lot of likes, saves or clicks, then there won’t be any issue. 
• Make sure you post board-specific contents, specially if you have a business account. This will help you to rank higher in the search results. 
• While you post your pins, you can add some title, description and #tags. Make sure you keep relevant keywords, which the users might search with. 
• Idea pins are similar to Tiktok or Instagram Reels etc. Pinterest is actually promoting idea pins these days, so it can be a good opportunity to grow by posting these. You can mix videos, images or texts to create the idea pins. 

3. Basics of Pinterest analytics:

• In your business account, you will find analytics section. Here, you can see audience engagement on your pins. It can be age-specific, device-specific, gender or type specific. You can see the impressions on your pins, saves and clicks on them. 
• You also get a comprehensive dashboard for audience insights. Here you can see demographic distribution of your audience- age, location, gender and device. 
• In the audience insights, you can also see overall demographics of all Pinterest users. Some insights are- 
  • 18–44-year-olds are the most active
  • iPhone and Android users are much more than website users. 
  • More than 70 % of all audience are female. 

4. Basics of Pinterest business hub:

• In the business hub of your Pinterest business account, you can claim your website. This can be done by adding HTML tag or uploading HTML file in the website root directory or adding TXT record. The benefits have been mentioned earlier. 
• You can promote your contents by creating an ad campaign. Here, you have to select a pin and attach a URL. You have to add some budget and your preferable target demographics. But before creating a campaign, you need to create an ad account and ad accounts are not available in all countries including India for now. 

How to earn from Pinterest: 5 ways to Earn from Pinterest

Pinterest gives you multiple direct and indirect options to increase your earnings. Let’s check those out now. 

1. Affiliate marketing is an easy way to earn from Pinterest. Make an attractive pin, attach the affiliate link and share with your audience. But make sure you mention this in the description and follow Pinterest’s guidelines. When a user visits the link through your pin and buys the product, you will get a commission. This is how affiliate works. But for this, you will need a good amount of user case. The moderate conversation rate can be 1-5 %. 
2. You can indirectly send traffic to your blog or website from Pinterest. In this case, you can run ads on your websites and when the user lands there, they will see the ads and you can earn money (if the ad has CPM- cost per mile model). If the ad has CPA (cost per acquisition)- the user has to buy from that ad and only then you can earn something. 
3. An easy way to earn is to direct traffic from your pins to your website where you sell some products or services. For this, you have to build trust. Post consistently and engage users to build trust. This way, they will be impressed and they may buy your products and services from your website. As an example, if you sell books, post contents about books- ‘top 5 books for this and that’ to pique the audience interest. They may visit your website and buy books from you. 
4. You can collaborate with brands. This way you will be actually become a brand ambassador and promote their products. The client will get profit and you will get commissions. You just have to reach out to these brands and convince them that Pinterest will be profitable for them and you are a good fit for the task. 
5. Pinterest has recently started its creator program, but it is not launched all over the world. In this content program, you are given certain topics and you have to create idea pins or contents to be eligible for earning directly from Pinterest. Check out if you are eligible here and other terms 

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