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Making your Pins work for you on Pinterest by Jennifer from CAFFEINATEDPAPERCUTS

Wendy Wehe-Ballone

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February 11th, 2015 - 07:04 PM

 Making your Pins work for you on Pinterest by Jennifer from CAFFEINATEDPAPERCUTS

FEBRUARY 11, 2015 BY CAFFEINATEDPAPERCUTS
Making your Pins work for you on Pinterest
Hello there everyone – Jennifer here from Caffeinated Papercuts to share some tips & tricks for making your pins work for you on Pinterest.

In the world of social media, Pinterest is the the idea-gatherer. Virtual bulletin boards that are filled with recipes, DIY ideas, and pretty things to buy. Obviously we all want our products to be in that third category, but how to do it? I reached out to my CIJ teammates and they had some great ideas. Reading them over, there seems to be two categories – Promotion and Branding.

Promotion
Pinterest is all about pinning your products and having followers who pay attention to your boards. But having nothing but a board full of your creations is, well, boring. Much like Facebook, Instagram, and even your blog you need to build an audience and keep them interested. For example; you sell jewelry. Setting up a board of your creations, one for techniques, one for craft show booths, one for supplies and one for designs/patterns will draw in many different viewers. To really blow your minds, I checked out my Pinterest totals: I currently have 107 boards, 4,330 pins, 418 followers and am following 206 boards. Checking my Etsy stats, Pinterest is my 5th largest traffic source so it pays to keep active.

The team had some great ideas as well:

B.K. Scriblz from ScriblzDesignStudio says

What consistently works for me is to remember to post to Pinterest each and every time I list a new product; send it on to Pinterest. My stats tell me that Pinterest regularly brings in viewers/customers.

Yeah, it’s that “remembering to pin” part that can get me…but since Etsy has an integrated Pin it! button on our listing pages, once we publish it’s a quick & easy click to further promote our latest listings.

Amy Spock from BeadsandThreadsbyAmy says
Like B.K., I consistently have views from Pinterest. I completely enjoy curating my boards. Currently, I have boards on everything from Kitchen Decor to Pet Supplies to Hunting and Fishing. My Hunting and Fishing Board (which includes cabin decor) is one of my most popular boards. I fill my boards primarily with Etsy items from my shop and from the shops of Etsy Teams I belong to. I send a message to everyone with the link to their pin, and other sellers seem to like that.

I think what keeps my following on Pinterest is the varied posts I make. As I mentioned, I have several boards. Each board has items, vintage and handmade, that work with a variety of tastes, decor, and styles. I make sure I don’t post only my items, and I also make sure that proper links back to the origin of the pictures are maintained.

I receive traffic from Pinterest, and have had one customer who purchased an item mention she found the item on one of her friend’s Pinterest board. That item had been re-pinned from one of my boards, not directly from Etsy.

I work on Pinterest about once a week, finding my own items and items from other shops that belong on my boards. Each week, I have around 50 repins and likes on Pinterest, and steadily maintain about 50 views each week into my shop from Pinterest.

The new business tools Pinterest has integrated really helps keep track of what pins are really getting the love (now if only it was one from my shop…LOL). And don’t forget about hashtags! Oh yes, much like Instagram and Twitter those funny little tags get some Pinterest love, too. #forreal Be sure to include #cijetsy on your pins so we can find you!

Wendy Joy from wjoydesigns says
When I post my handmade goodies on Pinterest, I usually include a description of the piece and also note that the item is made by WJoyDesigns. If I am posting a treasury that includes one of my items, I include under the treasury, a thank you to the person or shop that made the treasury and a note also of the name or title of the item of mine that they included and that the item is made by WJoyDesigns!

Don’t forget about seasons and holidays! I know with Valentine’s Day right around the corner my feed has exploded with DIY ideas, so I made sure my pins had #valentine and my Love & Romance board was looking spiffy. Theme boards are also a great way to cross-promote your fellow teammates and sellers:

Robert Clough from SilverFoxAntiques says
Having several boards which are related helps for me. Like if you are promoting Christmas in July…I am going to have a Elf Food Entertaining board…full of ideas for the holidays…others as well all designed around the Christmas theme and will be promoting Etsy, I add items outside of Etsy so it looks balanced to pinners and not “advertising”, but the general idea is that it be appealing. I get a lot of sales from pinners, and it does drive business to my shop as well as others.

So now that we’ve got some visually appealing boards to work with, let’s talk about the next step – branding.

Branding
Having our listings pinned is one thing, but how will people know that it’s ours? I admit I hadn’t thought about this at all, but thankfully others have!

Patricia and Rebecca from northandsouthshabby says
We have tried to promote our brand on Pinterest in several ways.

We keep a separate account for our personal pins.

As we update our listings we have been adding our name to the first picture -however I do like the idea of adding our logo as well.

We try to pin only pins that have the shabby/nautical theme that we have in our shop.

We also have our “brand” on a majority of our boards by keeping the word “shabby” on them. Our boards, to name a few, are named Sea Shabby, Heart Shabby,Tweet n Shabby, Beach Wedding Shabby, etc -you get the idea! I think their names generate a bit of interest. Our stats show that we always get hits from Pinterest even when we haven’t recently pinned any of our own items, so our pins “by association” do lead other pinners to our shop.

Betty Travell from LadySnooks says
I have my logo next to the main picture.

I also have my Etsy shop address at the end of my profile. It isn’t a link, but it does give the address. Also, a hashtag can be used on your items with your shop name so that if someone pins your picture (and they will) they can click on that and see all your other items.

I hope we have your head swimming with new ideas on how to promote your items on Pinterest. Any questions or comments, be sure to post them here!

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