Sunday, April 26, 2015

Etsy: Utilizing Pinterest


Unless you have lived under a rock, you have heard about Pinterest. Basically, it's girl porn. You can design your dream house, plan your dream wardrobe, imagine all the pre-school snacks you can make and be the envy of all the other moms, and you can do it all in your PJ's.

You can also advertise your items on Pinterest. If you have a pin board, and you are not advertising on it, you are losing out on so many potential customers.


So how do you advertise on Pinterest?

The easy way to pin something from your Etsy page is to go straight to the listing. As long as you already have a pin board, and are logged in, it takes about 10 seconds to pin an item from your shop.

Go to your shop page, and choose an item- any item, and open the item. Once it's open, the page will look something like this:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/225272396

You'll note that under the green ADD TO CART button, you have your social media buttons- favorite, add to, Tweet, Pin, Tumblr+, and Facebook. The button highlighted in green on my image shows the PIN IT button.

Just click, select a board, and hit enter. It's quick, painless, easy, and FREE.

Another popular way to advertise on Pinterest, is to find group boards. These are large boards with large followings (I recommend finding boards with at least 1,000 followers on the specific board), and become a member of the board.

So here's a quick run down on getting onto a group board. First and foremost, you have to click FOLLOW on the board. It will be spammy, so if you hate your Pinterest feed being cluttered with all sorts of stuff, then you may want to create a second account, or not join group boards.

To follow a specific board, click the red button that says FOLLOW.


It will look like the image above, and be off on the right side of the screen. Once you are following the board, someone has to invite you to be able to pin to the board. A good board will be on top of this, and you'll receive an invite within 24 hours. 

The invite will come across through your board notifications, so make sure if you have a lot of notices, that you go through them to accept the invite.

Once you are invited, you are free to post - but please make sure you are aware of the board's rules. Some require that you repin other member's pins. Some request you only pin a few a day. Others limit what type of pins they'll accept.

The rules will be at the top of the page, like this:
https://www.pinterest.com/annanonamus/etsy-sellers-products/

This shows the board rules, the number of followers, and number of pins- the pin count is low, because it's a brand new board.

Once you are a member, feel free to pin all sorts of goodies from your shop to these boards! They will help gain exposure from a whole new group of people, which helps your shop with views and (hopefully) sales!

On average, I get about 100-200 views in my shop from Pinterest each month. I know some very active shop owners that get more like 200 a week. Unfortunately, Etsy does not track where sales come from, so whether or not it's profitable? Who knows. But it's free, so in my opinion, it's worth it.

And here's my group board- just started tonight. I have over 1200 people who will see anything posted to it in their Pinterest feed. It's a good place to start!

https://www.pinterest.com/annanonamus/etsy-sellers-products/
Click me to go to the board!

Overall, for a free form of advertising, it's a good one. I highly recommend it. And it's easier to do than Instagramming... which we'll cover in my next post.

Need more Etsy tips? Check out the side bar on my blog page- I have lots of posts about Etsy!






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