Pinterest is a great way to get traffic to your handmade shop.
You've heard it many times, I'm sure;
probably a lot of those times from me because I love Pinterest because I know
what it can do for your traffic and sales.
But how do you really use Pinterest for your business, for your shop?
Is it not just for recipes and home decor?
How do you get started strategically and start using Pinterest for your handmade
shop? In this video,
I'm going to share nine tips with you so that you can get started on Pinterest
on the right foot.
Hi there. I'm Deb, the founder of Tizzit.co,
a community for makers and handmade shop owners.
If you'd like tips to help you start and grow your handmade business,
make sure to subscribe to my channel so you don't miss any other videos. For now,
let's dive into some Pinterest strategy with tip number one. Tip number one is:
switch to or start a business account.
Your profile on Pinterest needs to be all about your business.
This needs to be strategically curated content and not just stuff that you pin
for yourself, like recipes and home decor.
So if you've been using Pinterest already and you have a personal profile,
I'd recommend that you do one of two things.
The first one is to switch your personal profile to a business account - that's
called converting it to a business account,
and it's really easy to do that with Pinterest;
or if you want to keep that personal profile on Pinterest because you like using
the platform for yourself
then start a fresh account and make it a business one to keep those two things
completely separated. Tip number two is:
pick boards that are going to attract the right visitors to your profile and to
your shop consequently.
What I mean by that is that when you start pinning on the platform pins to your
boards, you want to keep your customers in mind.
What does your ideal customer come to Pinterest looking for?
What do they like to pin?
What would their own personal Pinterest profile look like?
You want to be curating content that your customers are going to like,
even if it's not directly related to your products.
A good way to think about it is to think that you need to be pinning a
lifestyle. Let me give you an example.
If you're selling natural organic skin care or beauty products and your
customers, the people that you're targeting, are young moms,
then you might be thinking about creating boards around the topics of your
product categories. So you could have beauty travel essentials,
dry skin recipes or remedies,
and then you could have things that aren't necessarily talking about your
products but more around what this person,
your ideal customer wants to know more about or would like tips about.
So things like mom tips board, healthy recipes for the family,
quick and healthy meals - anything that this young mom that cares about the
stuff that's organic and natural and she's probably into a healthy kind of
lifestyle - what would this person want to see on Pinterest?
You want to provide that for her.
The great thing is that of course you don't have to start blogging about any of
those things.
If you're just creating products and you're not interested in doing quick and
healthy recipes for moms,
you would just be pinning other people content to those boards.
Really what you want to remember is that you need of course to have boards in
which you're going to be able to pin your own products,
but you also want to provide a place with your business profile on Pinterest
that attracts this busy mom because of the relevant tips and advice that you've
been pinning to your account. Tip number three, and that's a goodie,
is to pick boards with overlapping themes.
This is so that you can repin one of your pins to multiple boards giving you
more leverage on the platform because you're using the same piece of content and
you're using it on different boards. For example,
if we keep the example of the beauty organic skincare type of products,
you can have a board that's for example, "travel essentials".
Then you would have another ones like "summer skincare",
"cruelty free beauty" and "organic skincare".
This could be four different boards.
If I'm selling a small sized moisturiser,
that product can really go onto any of those four boards and so I should be
pinning it to any of those four boards.
Don't limit yourself with boards that have a topic that's too big like skincare,
when you can really break that down into smaller boards like travel essentials
or travel skincare essentials, summer skincare,
cruelty free beauty products, organic skincare...
By doing that,
you're giving yourself the opportunity to repin the pin to all these different
boards. That's very,
very important and I do not see enough people doing that properly on Pinterest.
So make sure that you go back to your boards and that you have overlapping
themes.
Tip number four is to optimize your board covers and your board titles.
This is really meaning:
make sure that your Pinterest profile is a place that your customers want to
come back to you and want to follow.
You should be able to tell in five seconds max,
probably much less than that, what the account is about.
If I'm visiting your Pinterest profile,
I should know in a split second what this is about and if I'm interested in
following it or not.
To do that and to convince people to come back to your page and to follow you on
Pinterest,
you want to create board covers that are branded and that are cohesive with your
fonts and with your brand colors, so that it's all pretty, it's good looking,
it's nice to look at and also with board titles that are clear and descriptive
so that I know exactly: "ah, this board has pins about this topic.
This one about this one." Don't try to be innovative and creative with your
board titles. Really use clear and descriptive titles also because,
and that's leading to tip number five that we're about to jump into,
that means that your boards are more SEO friendly,
which means search engine optimized. So let's dive into tip number five.
Tip number five is to think SEO.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and the reason that's very,
very,
very important and probably one of the most important tips in this entire list
is that Pinterest is not a social media platform like people think it is.
Pinterest is actually a search engine. If you think about Google,
when you type a few keywords in Google,
it shows you results based on those keywords with links and just a little blurb
of paragraph. Pinterest does exactly the same thing: people would go in,
type a few keywords and instead of the results showing up with text,
they show up with images.
So it's really just a visual search engine,
a visual Google if you want.
And so it's really important to make sure that you are using SEO,
search engine optimization,
to make sure that for the keywords that your customers are most likely to type
into Pinterest, your pins show up in search. To do that,
you want to make sure that you use those keywords and key phrases in your board
titles, in your board descriptions, in your pin descriptions,
and you can also use hashtags.
I actually have a full video on hashtags on Pinterest that I'll link below if
you're interested in learning more on how to use hashtags on Pinterest.
But make sure that your Pinterest account is SEO optimized.
Tip number six is all about how to actually design your pins and create pins
quickly and efficiently.
The tip here is to create pin templates - between three and five - that you can
reuse for each product.
Creating three to five templates and using it for each product is going to give
you a good amount of pins to play with.
Because Pinterest isn't a social media platform and isn't chronological,
those pins are going to stay on the platform for months and years to come.
I still have pins that I created three years ago or more that are still driving
hundreds and thousands of people to my website every month.
You want to make the most out of each product and instead of having just one pin
per product,
it's really much more effective if for each product you create three to five
pins.
Don't get overwhelmed if you're just thinking about starting using Pinterest and
you have 200 products in your store and you're like,
"I am not going to design five pins for each of my products!". In this case,
just focus on your best sellers.
Don't worry about the rest and moving forward when you do release new product,
start using those templates again.
Let me show you an example of someone that I think is doing this really well.
Okay,
so this is the Pinterest account of an Etsy shop called ModernishShop and they
do modern cat furniture. As soon as you look at this account,
you can see from the banner that grabs different pins from this account that
it's cohesive in terms of the colors and the brand and the pictures that are
being used.
But what I really want you to pay attention to is the different templates that
this Etsy seller is using.
Instead of being overwhelmed each time there's a new product and thinking,
"oh my God, I need to create three to five designs and I'm not a designer",
if you can create three to five templates that you can reuse and reuse and reuse
each time,
you're going to save yourself a lot of time and your sanity as well.
As you can see here,
this is the same template reused with different images.
One template has being used to create 12 different designs -
more than that actually because there are rows and rows of it;
and there's more than this one template.
This is another one here you can see - same template,
the only thing that's been changed is the picture and the color,
which is still the brand color, so it's cohesive and consistent with the brand,
but this is the same template. Again here, in a green version,
and then we have another template here and it's been reused.
Same thing with just changing the colors and the pictures in the background.
If I keep scrolling I'm sure we'll keep seeing more of that.
There's another template here that this person's been using.
That's a really smart way to only have to work on those designs once and then
you can reuse them multiple times after that. Okay,
tip number seven: join and use group boards.
Group boards are just like regular Pinterest boards,
but instead of having just one person pinning to it,
there are many pinners pinning to that same board.
Anyone can create a group board by inviting other pinners to join in and to pin
to the board, which makes it this beautiful collaborative group board.
What this means for you as a pinner in a group board is that you usually get
more reach and visibility for your pins because those boards have more followers,
which means that you get more repins, more clicks, more saves,
more love and more traffic to your handmade shop.
Pins on group board - if it's a good group board - tend to perform better,
which means more traffic for you.
That's really something that you want to tap into.
You want to be sure that you join group boards that are relevant, of course,
to your handmade shop and to your customers,
and this is really essential.
That's the foundation of a successful Pinterest strategy:
join and use group boards.
Tip number eight is be consistent.
You can't just go on Pinterest for a couple of hours every couple of months and
start pinning like crazy and then forget to log in for a few weeks - and then do
that again. That's just not going to work.
Pinterest likes to see that you are using the platform regularly and that you're
adding and participating with new pins and by repinning other people's pins
consistently on the platform - which leads me to tip number nine.
Tip number nine is, when you're ready,
use Tailwind to supercharge your Pinterest strategy.
Just so we're clear,
Tailwind isn't going to create miracles for you if you don't have your Pinterest
strategy organized and thought of and sorted really before you start using it.
So you want to go back to those eight first tips and make sure that you follow
this advice and that you have a clear strategy and pinning strategy in place
before jumping into Tailwind. Once you have that,
once your boards are optimized for SEO,
once you thought about your pin design and you're really ready to roll,
Tailwind is going to help you in staying consistent and active on the platform
without the need to log in to pin every day.
It's really a great tool that's going to allow you to automate the process and
to schedule in advance so that you're much more hands off and you can reap the
benefit of the platform, which is more traffic to your shop,
without the need to being so invested and committed to it.
Tailwind is great!
If you'd like to learn more about either how to set up your Pinterest strategy
or if you're a bit more advanced,
how to supercharge it with a Tailwind strategy I do have two full,
in depth courses with different modules and workbooks and checklists to help you
with that. I'll link to it in the comments just below this video.
That's a wrap for today guys.
I hope this video was helpful to you.
If you want to learn more strategies to start and grow a successful handmade
shop, please make sure to subscribe to this channel.
I'll also link below this video to my free resource library for makers and
handmade shop owners,
full of freebies so that you can really take your handmade skills and turn it
into a profit. See you next week.