Using Pinterest as a small business is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your handmade shop.
You’ve heard it many times I am sure, probably a lot from me because I love Pinterest and what it can do for you.
But how do you use Pinterest for your handmade business? Or for your Etsy shop? Is it not for recipes and home decor? How do you start doing business on Pinterest?
In this video, I’m sharing 9 tips based on my experience and what I see the biggest hang-ups for business owners and makers are.
Let’s dive in!
NOTE, THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN UPDATED 🙌 ✅ 🎯 : Some things have changed since recording the video so please read the article below and you’ll spot some PINK updates (like this one) along the way to tell you what’s what currently 😉 For always-up-to-date information and the best course to get Pinterest working for your handmade shop, check out our Pinterest for Handmade Sellers course.
The first tip is to switch to (or start) a Pinterest business account. If you use Pinterest already have a personal profile, I’d recommend that you do one of two things: you can switch your personal profile to a Pinterest business account (that’s called converting it to a business account and it’s really easy to do that with Pinterest) or if you want to keep that personal profile on Pinterest because you like using the platform for yourself, you can start a new business account to keep those two things completely separated. Remember, your profile on Pinterest needs to be all about your handmade business. This needs to be strategically curated content relevant to your craft business, and not just stuff that you pin for yourself, like recipes and home decor.
UPDATE [Current for 2023] Curating content your customers will love on Pinterest is still important, but I don’t recommend you keep boards or create boards that you can’t fit YOUR own products onto anymore.
Instead, create boards that you can add your product pins to (and archive any other ones) and that have board names full of keywords you want to rank for.
Taking the example below, you wouldn’t have a board for ‘mom tips’ (too broad) or ‘ quick and healthy meals’ or ‘natural recipes’ (your products wouldn’t fit in it) for example, but instead focus exclusively on boards like “beauty travel essential, natural face masks, organic skincare, etc.)
When you use Pinterest to create your boards, you want to keep your ideal customer in mind:
What does your ideal customer use Pinterest for??
What do they like to Pin?
What would their own personal Pinterest account look like?
You want to be curating content that your customers are going to like, even if it’s not directly related to your handmade products. A good way to think about it is to think that you need to be pinning a “lifestyle”. Let me give you an example. If you’re selling natural organic skincare or beauty products and the people that you’re targeting are young moms, then you might be thinking about creating Pinterest boards around:
You want to have Pinterest boards in which you’re going to be able to pin your own handmade products. You also want to provide a place with your business on Pinterest that attracts this busy mom, because of the relevant tips and ideas that you’ve been pinning to your Pinterest account. The great thing is that you don’t have to start blogging about any of those things. If you’re just creating products and you’re not interested in doing quick and healthy recipes for moms, you would just be pinning content from other people to those Pinterest boards.
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Tip number three for your craft business, and it’s a goodie, is to pick Pinterest boards with overlapping themes. This is so that you can repin your pin to multiple boards, giving your small business more leverage on the platform because you’re using the same piece of content and you’re using it on different boards. For example, if we keep the example of the organic skincare type of products, you can have boards like:
Don’t limit your handmade business with Pinterest boards that have a topic that’s too big like “skincare”, when you can really break that down into smaller boards like “travel essentials” or “travel skincare essentials”, “summer skincare”, “cruelty-free beauty products”, “organic skincare”… If my business is a small sized moisturizer, that product can really go onto any of those boards. That’s very, very important and I do not see enough business owners doing that properly on Pinterest, so make sure to go back to your boards and create ones with overlapping themes.
Tip number four is to optimize your business on Pinterest by updating your board covers and your board titles. This is to make sure that thePinterest profile for your handmade business (or Etsy shop) is a place that your customers want to come back to and want to follow. When someone lands on the Pinterest profile for your craft business, they should be able to tell in a split second what it’s about. You can do that by creating Pinterest board covers to brand your business on Pinterest and making your profile more cohesive, and also by making sure your titles are clear and descriptive. It makes it easy for customers to know what it’s about and… SEO friendly, which is our tip number 5.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and the reason that’s probably one of the most important tips for small business owners. Pinterest is not a social media platform like people think it is. Pinterest is actually a search engine, something like visual Google. If you think about Google, when you type a few keywords in the search bar, it shows you results based on those keywords with links and just a little text. Pinterest does exactly the same thing: people would go in, type a few keywords in the search engine, and instead of the results showing up with text, they show up with images. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that your craft business is using SEO to make sure that for the keywords that your customers are most likely to type into Pinterest, your pins show up in search. You can do that by making sure you put the keywords in your:
Tip number six is all about how to actually create pins quickly and efficiently. To do that, create 3 – 5 templates you can re-use for each handmade product. This will give you a good amount of pins for your business to play with, and because Pinterest isn’t a social media platform and isn’t chronological, those pins are going to stay on Pinterest for months and years to come. I still have pins that I created three years ago or more that are still driving hundreds and thousands of people to my website every month.
Don’t get overwhelmed though, if you’re just thinking about starting to use Pinterest and you have 200 handmade products in your shop and you’re like, “I am not going to design five pins for each of my products!” just focus on your best sellers. Don’t worry about the rest and moving forward when you do release a new product on Pinterest, start using those templates again. Let me show you an example of a craft business that I think is doing this really well: it’s an account for an Etsy shop called Tilly and Puffin run by a Tizzit HQ member, Sylvia, who makes embroidered felt ornaments. As soon as you look at this business on Pinterest, you can see that this account is cohesive in terms of the colors and pictures that are being used. But what is really interesting is how this small business is using different templates to show the handmade products and create tons of pins easily.
Instead of being overwhelmed each time your business has new items to promote, if you can create three to five templates that you can reuse and reuse and reuse each time you use Pinterest, you’re going to save yourself a lot of time and your sanity as well. You can use anything you’re comfortable with of course, but the best free and easy to use software has to be Canva. Canva has a lot of great free Pinterest templates, but you can also start a design from scratch. You can also purchase good looking templates from Creative Market.
UPDATE [current for 2023] Group boards don’t always perform as well as they used to when this article was written. Although some group boards are fantastic, other are just too broad and active to really serve your strategy, send the right SEO signals to Pinterest and make your pins be seen by more users. You should still consider joining group boards but treat them like your own: is it niche enough (avoid any “Etsy sellers of Pinterest” or “handmade sellers and lovers” type of group boards, these are WAY too broad to get you results)? are the pins I add to these board getting some love? If it works then keep using it, if not – it’s ok to not use group boards and you can be successful without them.
The next tip is to join and use group Pinterest boards. Group boards are just like regular public boards, but instead of having only one person pinning to it, there are many contributors. Anyone can create a group board by inviting other people to join in and pin to the board, making it a collaborative/group board. What this means for you as a pinner is that you usually get more reach and visibility for your pins because those boards have more followers, which means that you get more repins, more clicks, more saves, more love and more traffic to your handmade business / Etsy shop. Pins on group Pinterest boards – if it’s a good group board – tend to perform better. That’s really something that you want to tap into, but remember to only join group boards that are relevant to your handmade products, craft business, or Etsy shop and to your customers.
Tip number eight is to use Pinterest consistently.. You can’t just go on doing Pinterest business for a couple of hours, start pinning like crazy, and then forget to log in for a few weeks… and then do that again. That’s just not going to work . Pinterest likes to see that you are using the platform regularly and that you’re adding and participating with new pins and by repinning other people’s pins consistently on the platform – which leads me to tip number nine.
Tip number nine is to, when you’re ready, use Tailwind to supercharge your Pinterest strategy. Just so we’re clear, Tailwind isn’t going to create miracles for your handmade business if you don’t have your Pinterest account sorted out before you start using it. You want to start with those eight first tips and make sure that you follow this advice and that you have a clear Pinterest strategy in place before jumping into Tailwind.
Once you have that, Tailwind is going to help you in staying consistent and active on Pinterest without the need to log in to pin every day. It’s really a great tool that’s going to allow you to automate the process and to schedule in advance so that you’re much more hands off and you can reap the benefit of the platform (more traffic to your handmade shop) without the need to be so invested and committed to it. Tailwind is great! If you’d like to learn more about either how to set up your handmade business on Pinterest or, if you’re a bit more advanced, how to supercharge it with a Tailwind strategy I do have two full, in-depth courses with different modules and workbooks and checklists to help you with that. Click here to learn more.
That’s it! I hope it was helpful. I’d love to know: which tip was your favourite? Let me know in the comment below!
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Not only for a handmade shop but for other things to Pinterest works. Either is a digital store or a cosmetics store it is very helpful.
Can’t find that “ModernishShop” in Etsy.
Usually, most of the people don’t know how to use Pinterest properly and the benefits of it, just enjoy it for images. Thanks for sharing this article and keep posting.
I am having some difficult to enjoy group boards. I send the e-mail, but have no answers, how to deal with this? Frustrating.
Hi Claudya! Thank you for reading our article and for your message! You might find our lesson Pinterest for Makers: The Masterclass helpful. Pinterest Group Boards is Module 4. You can find it here: https://www.hq.tizzit.co/pinterest-marketing-for-handmade-shops/ Have a great day!
I want to know about Start my business
Hello Rupali! If you’d like to learn more about Pinterest and how you can use it for your handmade shop, please go to https://www.tizzit.co/join
You can follow our Maker’s Roadmap to start your own business and also take our Pinterest course.