How to Make Pinterest Work for Your Freelance Business, whatever your niche

Kate Ashley
Aug 24, 2017 · 7 min read

If you’ve been around the Interwebs for a while, reading articles about creating a successful freelance business, you’ve probably known the almost-legendary rep of Pinterest amongst business owners and bloggers.

When done right, Pinterest’s effect on your website’s traffic can be MASSIVE.

You’ve heard the stories:

Photographer grew his email list from 0 to 10K in three months using Pinterest.

Mommy blogger made Pinterest work for her and increased her blog’s traffic 300% in a month

With all those numbers, you kinda wish you could make Pinterest work for your freelance business right?

But then, you thought, your freelance business don’t really fit with Pinterest. So… how do you do this?

Here’s how we’re going to do this:

Step one, stop thinking your business isn’t fit for Pinterest.

Sure, I know it’s difficult to see the platform’s potential if your target market isn’t women, and your niche isn’t crafts or recipes or the like, and your business isn’t a highly-visual one.

But you have to see Pinterest as more than a social platform.

For a while now, they’re gradually becoming a visual search engine.

Whether I’m looking for easy recipes to cook for the weekend or content marketing tips, I go to Pinterest.

Why?

Because I know if the blogger took the time to create a visually-pleasing Pinnable blog graphic, there’s a likely chance they also took the time to create highly valuable content.

So I’ll say this again: Pinterest is more than a social media platform for women, okay?

Now that we got that one out, here are ## ways for you to make Pinterest work for your freelance business.

#1 Create or convert to a business account

For Pinterest newbies, it might be slightly intimidating to convert to a business account. I remember being nervous when I planned to because I thought it’s like a Pro account that you need to pay for. But that’s not the case at all!

Pinterest for Business is free and really ideal to have if you plan on utilizing Pinterest for your business (obviously). The main difference between a personal Pinterest account and a business account is that with business you can have access to the analytics of your account as well as your website.

If you already have a personal account, you may convert that to a business account or create a business account exclusively for your website. Which brings us to #2.

#2 Stop making Pinterest about you and start making it about your target audience

This is basically the golden rule of Internet marketing — and marketing in general if you think about it.

Your business is for your target audience.

That’s really the big difference between a business website and a hobbyist’s blog.

In that sense, you have to treat your business’s Pinterest account that same way as well.

The most successful business owners know their target audience like the back of their hand. They know what content their target audience wants.

Let’s say your niche is in personal finance for millennial college students. What topics would your target audience want? Personal finance, obviously.

But personal finance is such a broad topic, you can still create subtopics for that like: choosing insurance, budgeting, credit card, and so on. And because you’re targeting millennial college students, you can also create boards on travelling on a budget, DIY dorm décor, shopping on a budget, etc.

So if you have a board for taking care of toddlers when working, it’s time to reconsider putting that board to a personal account. Or if you don’t like managing more than one account like I do, set the board on private. That way, you don’t have to worry about its relevance to your target audience but hey! You still get to pin about it!

#3 Set Up Rich Pins

If you set up rich pins, Pinterest will basically get additional information from your site to put into the pin. Things like you’re the name and url of your website and descriptions. You can check out this post on how to set up rich pins by Tiffany of Beautiful Dawn Designs. Now speaking of descriptions…

#4 Fill in the Alt Text of your images

Pinterest automatically use your alt text as the description of the pin. And the description of your Pin can add to your search ranking in Pinterest’s search bar. So use it wisely.

Your alt text is not the place to name your image 20170822image123.jpeg. Make it keyword-rich but at the same time sensible. Don’t just stuff keywords in there like this: personal finance, millennial, budgeting, budget, on a budget.

No.

This is 2017. That doesn’t work on SEO anymore so it makes sense that it won’t work on Pinterest’s algorithms too.

#5 Create pinnable blog graphics for your posts

Let’s use the example of a personal finance blog for millennial college students. That’s not exactly a highly-visual niche, right? Right.

So then it’ll be difficult to create pinnable blog graphics for that niche, right?

Absolutely wrong.

Whatever topic you have, creating a pinnable blog graphic for your post is a piece of cake. Being a highly-visual niche has nothing to do with it. I mean, sure, you get a good advantage if your niche is highly visual. But remember what I said about how Pinterest are gradually becoming a visual search engine?

I can guarantee you that there are college students using Pinterest to look for personal finance tips.

So what do you do? Create a graphic of your blog post title that looks like a book cover.

Another graphic you can create? Infographics.

You can make an infographic for any topic, from meditation to content marketing. And infographics have higher engagement than the regular blog post title graphics. Meaning infographics are highly pinnable.

But what exactly makes a graphic pinnable?

· Vertical images.

While using horizontal images may be what’s appealing for your blog, this is not the case in Pinterest. Its feed has a vertical layout scheme. In that sense, horizontal images often get lost in Pinterest’s feed. So if you have a vertical image, you will stand out more. Look at the picture below, which ones stood out to you the most? I’m willing to bet you pinpointed the vertical images.

· Visually pleasing graphics.

Here we go again with visuals. Just stay with me here for a sec. It’s super easy to create visually pleasing graphics. Let me count the ways:

- Use at most two fonts only

- Utilize white space

- Add illustrations or clip arts when applicable (like with infographics)

· You can take it up a notch and create unique graphics.

This means your blog graphics have certain elements to them that makes them stand out amongst other pins. Perhaps you use a certain font or a certain color for your blog graphics. That way, people will be able to recognize a Pin to be yours. Two excellent examples for this are Marianne of Design Your Own (Lovely) Blog and Regina of ByRegina.com. Their blog graphics are unique to them and easily recognizable.

#6 Make pinning your images easy for your website’s visitors

If you meet with your site’s visitors halfway, it’s more likely that they’ll pin your blog graphics. Here are two ways you can do this:

· Add a Pinterest share button to your blog. You can do this by using social share plugins and for WordPress users, simply go to your settings.

· Add a Pin It button. This is different from your Pinterest share button since it’s that button you see when you hover on a certain image. There are plenty of ways to do this such as plugins and even simply tweaking the code of your website.

#7 Join group boards

Pinterest group boards are essentially the same as regular boards except there are multiple users pinning to that board. If you join in group boards that are relevant to your niche and have a huge following, you get an opportunity to share your pins to a larger audience.

And there you have it! With these, you’ll be sure to make Pinterest work for you.

One last thing:

Do know that your growth will not explode overnight. Keep pinning consistently, try out other strategies, and never faze. Before you know it, Pinterest will be your biggest referral to your website!

What other ways can you make Pinterest work for you? Do you know other strategies I didn’t mention? Share them below!

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Kate Ashley

Written by

Blogger. I love writing about creative living and personal growth, among many other topics. Also an avid podcast listener and a hobbyist artist.

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