HOW TO USE PINTEREST FOR BUSINESS: 5 SECRETS TO CREATING PINS THAT WORK
Spoiler alert - learning how to use Pinterest for business has been a GAME CHANGER for me. Every month I consistently reach around 100,000 pageviews on my website, and guess where most of that traffic comes from? Yep, Pinterest.
In this blog post, I’m sharing my top five Pinterest blogging tips to help you learn how to use Pinterest for business. Get ready to not have to ONLY rely Instagram to build your email list and attract more clients you love.
How To Use Pinterest For Business Tip #1: Put Keywords As A Priority
When I first started learning about using Pinterest for business marketing I realised that I was actually doing it all wrong. Why? Because I wasn’t using keywords.
What is a keyword anyway?
Here’s a little description from a blog post on Yoast. You can dive deeper into that if you want to go down a keyword rabbit hole…
“A keyword, or a focus keyword as some call it, is a word that describes the content on your page or post best. It’s the search term that you want to rank for with a certain page. So when people search for that keyword or phrase in Google or other search engines, they should find that page on your website.
Let’s say you’ve got a website about pianos: you sell all sorts and types of pianos. You blog about what to look at when buying a piano and you share reviews about the pianos you offer on your online shop. You sell digital pianos so you’ve created a product category page about digital pianos. Ask yourself this:
What kind of search term do you want to be found for?
Which words do you think people will use in search engines to find you?
What would the search query look like?”
To put it simply, no longer should you name your boards “My Fave Recipes” or “Best Workouts”. You want to fill your boards, your pin descriptions, AND the text on your pins with keywords people are actually searching for on Pinterest.
Just searching for “online marketing” in Pinterest helped me realise “online marketing tips” was a very common long-tail keyword (aka a string of words together), that people were commonly searching for.
As soon as I learnt about keywords I started putting strings of keywords in basically every pin image, description and blog post. I’ve now got various keyword-rich boards dedicated to different categories of online marketing which you can find here.
How To Use Pinterest For Business Tip #2: Create Long & Skinny Images
Before I dive into the correct Pinterest images to use, if you really want to dive deep into Pinterest and blogging, check out my Free Content Conversion Workshop here, where I go over how to optimise your blog and create quality content to keep your audience coming back for more. (Yes, it’s INSANE how many actionable tips you learn in this masterclass!) Get access here.
Now you can definitely pin images from other social media accounts like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc. that don’t have the “long and skinny” format. You can download an app called IFTTT (IF This Then That) where you can set up a “rule” so that anytime you post on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc, it automatically pins to your Pinterest boards too.
What I recommend doing is personally making pin images to upload. And I always recommend going with the long and skinny option.
Why? Because if you want to know how to use Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog, this is what converts and gets people to click. People are used to Pinterest having the “long and skinny” images so that’s what they look for, and it catches their eye more easily.
I recommend using Canva to create these images. You can use the “Pinterest” graphic template they already have set up for you.
How To Use Pinterest For Business Tip #3: Spend Time On Your Descriptions
This relates to what I mentioned in tip number one with keywords. If you want to know how to get traffic from Pinterest, your pin description has to be full of keywords that your ideal client is searching for.
Top tip: type in the keyword you want to use in the Pinterest search bar. Try to use as many of the words that pop up underneath it in your pin description as possible.
Here’s an example:
If I was going to use “online marketing tips” as my main keyword, I would want to include as many of the words in the different colours that pop up when I search for it. An example of a good pin description would be:
“Want to learn some online marketing tips? In this post I’ll share with you my top online marketing tips, including social media and branding tips for small businesses and entrepreneurs. I’ll give you tips for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as online marketing ideas to help make your content work smarter AND harder for you. Repin and grab my free cheatsheet of the best online marketing tips!”
I tried to use as many keywords as possible, but of course, your description HAS to be accurate. If when a user clicks your pin, and it doesn’t go to a blog post that actually gives what the description says it will, they’re gonna be pretty annoyed. So make sure you are taking your viewers to the thing you actually say you’re providing for them. That’s how to use Pinterest for blogging successfully.
How To Use Pinterest For Business Tip #4: Brand Your Pins
You know how it’s great to create a cohesive theme for your Instagram feed? It’s exactly the same for Pinterest, because this will help your pins pop and become “you”.
I wouldn’t go crazy obsessing over this step, but I have seen it make a difference for me personally when I’m using Pinterest as a consumer. I recognise certain pins and know they belong to specific content creators - that’s what a successful Pinterest marketing strategy looks like. If you can create a brand (aka the same text, colours, and images), people will get to know your pins. If they liked your past pins and blogs, they’ll be more likely to click on the pin.
This will also save you a lot of time when creating pins in Canva. You can save a template with your colours and images so that you just have to make a copy or edit it each time you make new pins.
These are both examples of my pins and I use the same structure for all of my pins now. I slightly alter the colour and text for each graphic I create in a rotation, but they’re always very similar. When people see these colours and these fonts on my branded pins, people know they’re my pins.
How To Use Pinterest For Business Tip #5: Always Aim To Build Your Email List
While having people save your pins is great, that’s not the real aim when it comes to how to use Pinterest to market your business. That’s not going to convert them into loyal followers and build your email list!
You want to make sure that they:
Click on the pin to go to the website you’re driving them to
And that wherever you drive them, it gives them a chance to opt into your email list
You can do this either by directing them directly to your freebie landing page or to your blog post that has your freebie linked in it.
Top tip: Like I mentioned above, make sure when they click on the image they are going to a page (blog or freebie) they expect to go to! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked on a pin and it goes nowhere or to somewhere totally different than what I was expecting. Don’t be that person!
I usually write one blog a week and create a couple of different Pinterest images for that specific post. I use a tool called Tailwind to schedule those pins to multiple boards, so I’m pinning 30 times a day without actually going in a physically doing it myself. I highly recommend utilising Tailwind if you want to truly grow on Pinterest and learn how to use Pinterest for marketing.
Woah, that was a lot of info. I hope you found it helpful! Believe it or not, this post is truly just scratching the surface of how to use Pinterest for business. If you want to dive in super deep and really rock your Pinterest strategy, be sure to get access to my Free Content Conversion Workshop here.
Do you use Pinterest marketing to build your business? Which of these tips will you implement first?
