How to Advertise on Pinterest in 2024 — 15+ Tips For Beginners

Pinterest already has 250 million users, and 87% of them find it inspiring to do shopping. People are looking for ideas in this social network and are ready to spend money on things they like. If your site has attractive images or videos, add Pinterest to your strategy. It will bring hot traffic for free.

We will tell you how you can use this service to promote your business. In short, the scheme is this: you post content on your site, share it on Pinterest, and try to get traffic to your site. If you post great content, Pinterest can provide a ton of traffic for your business. Some users will certainly become your regular customers.

What is Pinterest

Firstly, we have to say an important thing: Pinterest is not a social network. The basis of a social network is the translation of what is happening in your life. This can be a Facebook status, a 140-character post on Twitter, or a photo of the pancakes you ate for breakfast.

A social network is communication, likes, and hashtags. All this is not on Pinterest. We come to Pinterest to find interesting ideas, to save useful information there, or to look at beautiful pictures. If you need to pick up ideas for repairs in the kitchen, we do not open Google, but Pinterest.

Pinterest designers knew what they were doing when they organized space for content. No other social site, especially Facebook and Twitter, allows you to easily find the content you added to bookmarks so you can watch it later. Also there it is almost impossible to find a photo of a specific user.

On Twitter, you don’t have a clear opportunity to go back to earlier photos and videos that the user posted. This is especially hard to do if you want to find certain content. If you do a lot of tweets, then it will be very difficult to see the old tweet. Pinterest pictures and videos are more organized and searchable. All photos are well presented and you can easily find them.

Each Pin is equipped with a photo and a link to the website. If you want to save the content in order to read it later, you can pin it to the Board and then return to reading and viewing it. This makes Pinterest unique and distinguishes it from other sites.

Pinterest is a search engine. Therefore, Pinterest will be effective if you have a blog with constantly updated content or a store (even if it is an Etsy store). The groups on Facebook, Instagram, are not suitable for promotion on Pinterest.

For promotion on Pinterest, search engine optimization and keywords are important. What we can ignore on Instagram/Facebook is important on Pinterest.

How much can you earn? Earnings on any platform depends on the amount of effort and time spent, and your luck, of course. There are examples how people start in Pinterest as total beginners, and the get to the goal of over $10K per month in less than 2 years.

Why is it worth to start using Pinterest:

• Pinterest is an ideal place to promote, along with Facebook or Instagram, since users are more likely to view photos with short comments rather than read long descriptions of a product or service.
• Pinterest helps show your expertise. For example, if you have a culinary blog, then on your Boards you can display beautifully decorated dishes. People will save your tips, share them, follow the links to your site.
• It works great with other services such as Twitter and Facebook.
• Pinterest is a great place for viral advertising since users actively like and re-pin (post images of other users on their Boards). This way you can increase the reach of your audience, which cannot be attracted through traditional channels of promotion.
• Another reason for Pinterest's success is that even people with very few followers can make good money. On Facebook, for example, only those who like your page or your followers can see your timeline post. The same picture is with Twitter: only followers can see your updates. On Pinterest, when you share a post, you share it with the community. Often you can find comments of people you don’t know under your posts. They see your pins in their updates, in the ‘Everything’ section. If you share something cool, Pinterest will put your pins in the Recommended or Popular sections. In this case, you will get more visitors. This means that even if you have only 1,000 subscribers, then you run the risk of gaining popularity by posting a viral post.
• Getting information only on certain topics. On Facebook and Twitter, if you decide to follow along with someone, you'll get a ton of their public updates. But what if you want to receive notifications only of a certain subject? This is exactly what Pinterest offers. You simply select the Boards and receive notifications only when they are updated. If you are not interested in something, then you simply do not subscribe to it.

Some more facts:

• About 70% of Pinterest's audience is female.
• More than half of Pinterest users have higher than average revenue.
• Pictures of goods and services with a price indication are more effective: their clickthrough rate is higher than that of pictures without a price.
• The most popular topics among users: cooking, fashion, decor, interior, hobbies.
• Pinterest generally has a higher conversion rate and CTR than Facebook or Twitter.
• About 70% of users who went to the advertiser's website from Pinterest spend 10% more on purchases than those users who came from other resources.

10 Ideal Niches for Pinterest

So, you are considering whether your business is suitable for working with Pinterest. You know, Pinterest traffic is right for any type of business. However, there are several areas that are easier to promote there. Let's take a closer look at niches that seem to be created for traffic from Pinterest.

• Travel and tourism. People constantly dream about traveling. Needless to say, when users see pictures of beautiful places, they immediately begin to fantasize about how good it would be to relax in such a beautiful place. If you can offer a person a solution on how to get where they want, then you will have subscribers. Please note that most users are not serious enough to immediately start buying tickets and booking hotels. However, don’t you need free traffic to your site?
• Design & Home. This is a good niche because many products and services are associated with it. You will easily find a dozen industries and hundreds of products that can be promoted through Pinterest in the “Home Design” category. Many site visitors spend time looking for original ideas. If you can show them what they would like to see in their own home, then you can get a bunch of subscribers.
• Art. Another great idea is to talk about art. People are constantly looking for something interesting to do. Therefore, if you sell goods that are needed when creating objects of art, then you will quickly develop your own audience. For example, products for painting, embroidery, restoration, hand-made, and so on.

• Food & Drinks. If your business is in any way connected with food and drink, Pinterest will be your ideal market for you, especially if you choose the right keywords. Many Pinterest visitors often look for new dishes that they would like to try. Try to offer them to order these dishes from you. Post pins with food photos for more customer engagement.
• Diet & Fitness. Pinterest is full of all sorts of offers with the right way to eat, weight loss programs, diet recipes, weight loss exercises, and so on. By the way, if you want to sell goods and services for this audience, then you need to communicate with people who are looking for pins, motivating them to follow a diet and do fitness. Show them products that will help them lose weight.
• Books & Films. People are actively interested in books and movies on Pinterest. Particular attention is paid to reading. People here love to buy books. They cost only a few dollars, but they contain valuable and interesting information on almost any topic. Promoting books on Pinterest is a good way to get lots of followers.
• Fashion. People constantly post photos with “their favorite” fashion and get crazy traffic for these pins. If you know how to interact with this part of the audience, then you will definitely get traffic.
• Beauty & Care. This top-end theme offers people a huge amount of products. You can make pins of any group of beauty products that today's market offers. The most relevant products are hair and nail care products, as well as cosmetics for the eyes.
• Wedding & Events. There are so many products and services related to the wedding business. A large number of wedding and event themes are presented on Pinterest, which indicates the demand for this niche.
• Garden. Nowadays, gardening hobbies are becoming more and more popular. People are increasingly looking for tips and tricks on how to improve the garden space and how to grow healthy herbs, vegetables, and fruits.

Pinterest Registration Steps

To register on Pinterest, you need:

1. Go to the website.
2. Fill out the registration form: enter the email address and password and then click "Registration".
3. Indicate the name, surname, age, and gender. Then click "Join" and go to the settings. Or you can register through your Facebook account. In this case, data is not required. You just need to click the "Sign in with Facebook" button.
4. At the first start of the service, a choice of 5 topics for subscription will be offered. By subscribing to them, photos of these accounts will appear on your wall. Choose what you like and go to the next step.
5. The next step is to search for friends on Facebook and Twitter who are registered on Pinterest. In this case, it will be possible to view updates to the pages of these users. You can search for friends manually using the blue “Search” button or skip this step and proceed to the next by clicking the “Finish” button.
6. Next, you will be asked to create a Pinterest button for the browser through which you can quickly add photos to the Board. To do this, click "Install."
7. Confirm the addition of the plugin and go to Pinterest.
8. Put your photo (good quality) or the logo of your store/brand as an avatar. Post links to your accounts on social networks and a link to the store (if you have any) on your personal Pinterest page. Add product photos and links with interesting descriptions. Create Boards (we’ll talk about it below).
9. Choose a business format.

There are two types of accounts on Pinterest — personal and business. Business option:

• gives access to advanced analytics;
• allows you to create advertising campaigns to promote your pins;
• makes it possible to use extended pins;
• emails with promotion tips.

Register as a company at the time of creating your account or go from a previously created personal account by visiting Business Pinterest. The creating of a business account is free.

What can you do on Pinterest

Pinterest can be used as a platform for online conversation or training; planning tools (e.g. travel); meeting options, etc.  So what exactly can you do?

1. Add Pins to Boards. This can be an image or video from any site. To add a Pin to the Board, you need to:

• select photo/video;
• click the "Add +" button on Pinterest;
• copy the link to the page with the posted material and paste it into a special field;
• add an image or video to the field provided for this;
• add a description, or hashtag to the content, and also post information about the new Pin on Facebook or Twitter using the “share” button.

2. Use messages.

You can add a message to any Pin that is sent to another user. To write a message, you need:

• select pin,
• click the share button,
• enter the message text in the field under the “send pin” button,
• click on the “Done” button in the upper right corner,
• select a user from the contact list. (If it is not possible to find the right user in the pop-up window of contacts, you need to make sure that they are subscribed to at least one of the Boards of the person sending him a message). After writing a comment for a friend, click the "Send" button, sending it to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Yahoo mail.

If the message was sent successfully, the message “Pin send” will appear on the screen. The recipient will be able to answer it - both in plain text and a pin. A message can be sent to nine users at a time.

3. To start selling your product or service, you need to prepare photos (or videos), as well as upload them as pins. Pins can be placed on different Boards. To make it easier to find a Pin in the search results, you need to provide each material with a description and hashtags.

4. Create your Boards and add your Pins there. Have you ever hung a corkboard on a wall to hang clippings from magazines, photographs, notes, etc.? Boards on Pinterest is something similar.

How does it work? You signed up for Pinterest and found a Pin that you liked. By attaching it to your Board, you save it to watch later. Pinterest allows you to have as many Boards as you want.

Boards allow you to store your favorite images. You can create a collage of photos and ideas. You can attach photos to the Board that will inspire people, encourages them to think. In other words, you use a Board to tell a story.

5. Pin images and videos. Pinterest allows you to attach video files from YouTube, Dailymotion, TED, or Vimeo. Test other types of visual content.

Why not show how to use your products, solve a customer’s problem, or improve their life? Why not use Boards to tell more about your products? Boards are the best way to show products in action.

In addition, Boards provide an excellent SEO opportunity. Remember that everything posted on Pinterest can be found, which means that your products can be found on Pinterest.

How to create your own Boards

Anyone who is just starting to use Pinterest is faced with the difficulty of placing on the first Board. What topic to start with? How much do you need to create? Do not be afraid, you will sort it all out. Let's start the process of creating the first Board.

Before doing this, it’s useful to think a little about what you want to tell. Who is your audience? What would you like them to feel? Take some time to find Pinterest topics that attract and inspire you. How are the Pins organized? What emotions cause their pins? What are the captions for the pictures?

Give the names to your Board. The name will tell you what content will be inside. If the name is boring or vague, it is unlikely that someone will look at it.

So, let’s start creating your Boards:

1. Click on the username in the upper right corner, going to the profile page, where click the "Create" button.
2. Write the name of the Board, its subjects (cars, flowers, animals, etc.). It can be made public or hidden. In this case, only friends can see her. After filling in these columns, click “Finish”.
3. Select Board covers. They should reflect the content. It is good when the design of the Boards have common colors.
4. Arrange the Boards in order from key topics to less relevant topics. You can move the Boards using the drag and drop method. Take the most relevant ones that best reflect the essence of your account to the top. People who first visited you should quickly understand where they are and what they will see here.
5. By the way, if your website is not in English, still, give the Board names in English or in two languages through a slash: this will help attract an audience from all over the world. Even if they do not become potential customers, let them subscribe to the page.
6. Think about the design. Look at your account as if it were a glamorous magazine, and Boards are categories. Name the Boards so that the keyword contains search keywords.

We do not recommend deleting your Boards. You may have subscribers who follow only a specific Board, and if you delete it, then delete subscribers as well. The recommendation of experts is to rename the Board and change the content there.

Another recommendation: while there are not a lot of Pins on the Board, drive it in secret mode, do not hang it in open access.

A feature of the secret Board is that the attached Pin does not notify the owner of the Pin about its attachment. Also, secret Boards do not affect the overall statistics of the account.

What are secret Boards for

There are several functions of secret boards:

• Saving secret information. Sometimes you can find some posts or photos that you do not want to show to your subscribers. These can be cool articles or some materials that you would like to keep on Pinterest. For example, articles with tips for your business, gift ideas, or photos of cats. Just make secret Boards and save all this stuff in private mode.
• Launching new Boards. If you load more than 10–20 Pins per Board per day, you may be mistaken for a robot. And robots are treated badly on any social network. You can get a ban. Therefore, first, you create each Board in secret mode, and everything is ready to open it. “Everything is ready” means: a description with keywords, a nice cover with an interesting name, 10–20 Pins (decorated in accordance with all the rules)
• Preparation of seasonal information. Let's say ideas for the Christmas holidays, summer parties, etc. Such boards are best run before the start of the season. The result will be traffic growth with Interest.

Do people mention your Pinterest blog

An interesting fact: if you have a blog, then it is likely someone already pinned the information from your blog to your Pinterest Board and your content already works on Pinterest without your participation. Just enter the address in the search bar: http://pinterest.com/source/Address of Your Site (after source – the domain of your blog without Http).

If you, for example, do not yet have a Pinterest account, but there are pins from your website, this is great. See which pictures and texts of your blog are the most popular, how your pins look (they are vertical or horizontal), what signatures to them (detailed and understandable or these are the names of picture files).

Promotion on Pinterest

First of all, before starting the promotion, place the Pinterest icon on the sidebar of your blog, tell blog visitors that you have a Pinterest account, include this to your posts, add the widget. What else? We’ve prepared a list of Pinterest advertising tips for you.

• Post links to quality content only. Pinterest does not like spam and everything that looks like it. So if your links are brought to poor pages with pale content, this will destroy all your efforts.
• Make sure that you have posted descriptions for the photo so that users can find your posts. Also, insert hashtags for your promotional materials and hashtags that you always use in your business. Make your description meaningful by organically inserting words that users can search into the text. Keep track of trends, and soon you will be able to instantly generate the necessary keywords in the description of posts.
• Get the audience involved. Constantly add followers, view their feeds, comment on posts. On your site, give your customers the opportunity to add to you on Pinterest. No matter how strange it may sound, customers will help attract new followers on Pinterest. Use some bots. Ninja Pinner, for instance, does all the automated work on Pinterest. It can like people’s Pins and follow other accounts so that they add you too.
• Add Pins regularly, but not so often that people begin to unsubscribe from you, tired of your updates. Ideally place a couple of shots a day, a maximum of three to four. There are programs that automate the process, for example, Tailwind.
• Not only upload your pins but also re-pin others. Authors of pictures see a notification that their picture has been added to someone’s Board. They go to your account and become your subscribers.

• Add your pins to other people's Boards.
• Use vertical pictures. Pinterest does not make you any image size requirements. However, vertical and long images are especially respected here (for example, infographics). The main recommendation for image sizes: 735 by 1102 pixels. There can be any picture in height, but if it is too high, Pinterest will “collapse” it. The Canva service has a template for Pinterest pictures, and you can easily create bright interesting images there, even in its free version.
• Make headline-illustrations. It is important to place text on the vertical picture that explains the essence of the post, then they will click on the Pin and follow the link, and not just save a beautiful picture.
• Create guides and tutorials. Like all other networks, Pinterest has a lot of educational content. Take beautiful step-by-step instructions and your subscribers will be happy. Especially if they can click the "Tested" button, introduced recently by the network so that users can evaluate the quality of information.
• Write the price on the image if you post information about products. If you are promoting an infographic, then make a large heading against a contrasting background at the top of the image.
• Use "Rich Pins". Using it, you can make the description of a product or service more complete and comprehensive. This function increases the number of fields in the Pin description. If you enabled Rich Pins and uploaded information from another site to Pinterest, a description will be automatically added to the pin. It will show the website name, Pinterest icon, a title.

• Place pictures on your website in columns. There is one trick to placing vertical pictures. In order for the pictures to look decent on the site, they must be horizontal and placed across the width of the column. So even the most ordinary picture looks professional and neat. But this is the problem. The site needs horizontal pictures and in the Pinterest — vertical. And this is a headache. Especially if you have a lot of beautiful pictures, which they ask so that readers save them on their Boards.

There is one not bad solution — Wordpress plugin Column Shortcodes. It allows you to place vertical pictures in two columns. If the readers want to pin them, they will pin each picture individually vertically. In this case, the picture will look very decent on the Pinterest Board. And in the mobile version of the blog, vertical pictures simply line up one after another and it will look good.

• Add the “Pin it” Icon to your site. The “Pin it” appears when you hover over the picture with the mouse. It seems to remind the user, especially the one who already has an account and their own Pinterest Boards: “Hey, my friend, this is a super useful post, do you want to keep me for yourself for the future?” This button can be part of a WordPress theme. We recommend you the Jquery Pin It Button plugin. It allows you to set any design of the “Pin it” picture, which will be combined with the design of your site.
• Name the pictures correctly. It is very important that with a Pin the picture will be reflected in its description. Remember that Pinterest has more from search engines than from social networks? The description should look beautiful, concise and reflect the essence of the post, and not look like 5683.JPEG. Not only is this ugly, but it will also not help you in any way in finding Pinterest. You can make a picture description in the picture code ALT and TITLE. Name the picture so that there are a keyword and the name of your blog.

• Generate leads. Quality content will help you generate leads for sales. Post a subscription form where a person will enter their personal data and email address into an eBook exchange or useful material.

Conclusion

So, If you can spend about 30 minutes a day on Pinterest — just commenting, pinning, and following, you’ll see results soon. Pinterest is an ideal place to promote, along with other social media, since users are more likely to view photos with short comments rather than read long descriptions of a product or service. Use these tips, and you’ll get some fine benefits from your account.