I love using Pinterest for personal reasons like looking for a home decorating idea or finding a good recipe to make for dinner but when it comes to using it for marketing my small business, this is where I get a bit stumped.
I understand that you are supposed to create boards and pins and that this content has the potential to be exposed to millions of people who then may hit my ETSY shop or my website with interest in buying one of my products or one of my art pieces but getting there is pretty tricky if you are a novice.
To provide some background, I sell different types of accessories with my unique designs on them like umbrellas, shoulder bags, pillows and laptop bags in my ETSY Shop called AGirlFromTribeca and I started creating my own Pinterest boards using the specific category name for the product that I sell. For example, I created a board called “Fun & Colorful Bags”.
Back to the Pinterest story, I then began following people on Pinterset and people returned the favor by following me. I felt like I was off to a good start and I managed to get about 500 people to follow me which really isn't a lot in Pinterest terms but I felt good about it.
I then caught onto the idea that if you can find relevant group boards that have lots of followers you can try to get yourself invited to join the board and then be able to post your product pins there. This is a way to expose your pins to all of the people following that group board which can number in the tens of thousands. I have been invited to about 4 or 5 group boards so far which is a good start. There is a website called Pingroupie which helped me find group boards more easily than scrolling through Pinterest manually which was a great help for me.
As with all social media platforms, there is a lot to learn about how to market yourself the most effectively to grow your presence on Pinterest and now that I have set up the basics, I am struggling with what to do next. One of the things I grapple with is exactly where to post (my own boards, group boards, both?), how often (once a day, twice a day, 30 times a day?) and in what form (website product links or a specialized Canva templates?). The more I read about how to use Pinterest, the more overwhelmed I seem to get.
I was listening to a podcast called ETSY Conversations by Ijeoma Eleazu which has become something that I regularly listen to and during one of the episodes a guest was speaking about how she hired a freelancer on Upwork to help her with her Pinterest marketing. She mentioned that you could hire someone for as little at $5 per hour and this would be someone who is a Pinterest expert and has had success helping lots of other shop owners like me.
Low and behold, I gave it a try. I will let you know what happened in my next post.
I would love to hear from any of you out there who may be new to Pinterest and are having some challenges as well. I would also like to hear from people who are much further ahead and might have some suggestions or advice to share.
Thanks for stopping by my blog!
Jen
AGirlFromTribcea
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