Episode 2: 10 Ways to Use Pinterest to Grow Your Business (In Just Minutes A Day)

This Week’s Episode

Whether you’ve struggled to maintain a presence on Pinterest without indulging in hours of procrastination, or if you just haven’t dived into Pinterest yet, this episode has 10 great tips for staying active on Pinterest in just minutes a day.

10 Ways to Use Pinterest to Grow Your Business (in Just Minutes a Day)

1. Establish a small number of pins per day
2. Pin as you’d like to be pinned (The Golden Rule)
3. Alternate between pinning new content from other websites and re-pinning
4. Use “Also on” to find new people and boards to follow
5. Join group boards
6. Refresh your boards periodically
7. Use secret boards
8. Convert to a business account
9. Take better pictures
10. Make it easy for people to find you if the Pin gets separated from the link

Following these 10 tips takes just a few minutes a day, but allows you to grow a following on interest and engage with your fans and colleagues.

1) Establish a small number of pins per day

Pick a number of pins (5, 10, or 15, depending on your schedule) that you will commit to each day. Pin binges are still ok – in moderation! – but approach your visits to Pinterest with your target goal in mind and leave when you’ve reached it.

If it’s too difficult to visit the Pinterest website without getting lost in the visual beauty, rely on a Pin It button in your browser. You can find instructions for adding the button to various browsers here.

2) Pin as you’d like to be pinned (The Golden Rule)

When pinning content, be sure to include the source in your text. When re-pinning, this may require a visit to the original link to get information that the first pinner didn’t include. Share enough information in the description to make the original material sound interesting and to encourage people to click through to the original post. Don’t copy and paste so much information that visiting the original source is no longer necessary.

3) Alternate between pinning new content from other websites and re-pinning

Re-pinning is a great way to engage with your Pinterest community and meet new (to you) pinners. It also adds diversity to your Pinterest content since you may not be exposed to the same websites as someone else. It can also prevent you from being spammy and pinning too much of your own content.

To stay within my number of pins per day, I alternate, focusing on pinning new content on some days and only re-pinning content on other days.

4) Use “Also on” to find new people and boards to follow

After pinning content that is already on Pinterest, the Also on screen will pop up.

It’s a great way to find new pinners with similar interests. You can grow your followers, find great content to re-pin, and engage with other pinners. I especially checking out boards that have the same content I’ve pinned organized differently. For example, they’ve pinned the same pattern I have on a crochet board to a photography board. I can usually find interesting information to diversify my pins that way.

5) Join group boards

Group boards can be a great way to engage with other pinners or cross-promote content with other businesses. PinGroupie allows you to search for group boards in different categories and sort them based on several different factors. You can also find group boards through Also On, or be invited to join based on your pins. Be sure to follow the guidelines established by the group (usually listed on the group’s board in the description) about how often and what type of content can be pinned.

Once you join a group, the board will appear as an option in your drop down menu as you pin new content.

6) Refresh your boards periodically

You can refresh your boards by reordering them, splitting larger boards into multiple smaller boards, and/or optimizing your board titles and keywords.

Feature your own content prominently at the top if you have a lot of boards, since most people won’t scroll all the way down. (Also, most mobile devices only display the first two boards on the screen.) As you add new boards, these automatically move to the bottom of your list, so refreshing periodically is a great way to make sure the most important content for your business right now is at the top.

You can find instructions for adding, editing, deleting, and reordering boards on a variety of devices on Pinterest here.

7) Use secret boards

Secret boards are a great way to pin content privately. Secret boards can be converted to public boards, and can be shared with collaborators.

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