what is Pinterest and how does it work if you're asking this question it means you're truly new to this platform so I will explain and show you right on my screen everything you need to know about Pinterest in a really simple way easy to understand even for beginners on any platform you will find two types of users it's regular users and online marketers on Pinterest regular users are saving pins to nicely organized boards on their accounts their goal is to save these ideas for later the boards
just help them keep all these ideas categorized by topics and they use what is called personal Pinterest accounts and if that's your case and you're not interested in building a business account on Pinterest you might want to just jump to another part of the video where I'll show what regular users do on Pinterest at the same time Pinterest marketers like me for example are trying to get more eyeballs on their content as content creators we're trying to always outsmart the platform and the algor
ithm and to get ahead of the competition we need to use a business Pinterest account in order to do this and luckily it's totally free and you can always convert your personal account to a business account and actually vice versa as well if you need to now how does a Pinterest business profile look like see here I have my username Anastasia blogger and I recommend you to keep this username short and easy to type it and to remember for users and it has to be as close as possible to your brand nam
e if you already have one or it could be as close as possible to your personal name and just in case you were wondering if this username can be ever changed if you pick something now and maybe you change your mind later don't worry for now Pinterest doesn't have any limitations for changing your username and you can do it more than once actually and it doesn't affect your pins that were published before because basically Pinterest pin URL doesn't include your username so even if you change the u
sername the URLs of your pins remain intact so you can do it at any time later this is your Pinterest profile name and you should mention here your brand name and one or two most important keywords that people would likely use if they wanted to find you in search on Pinterest you cannot add a lot of text here you just have 65 characters in The about field you have up to 500 characters so you can include more related keywords here but I still encourage you to use the most important text closer to
the beginning of this about field because Pinterest will only show a few lines of this field and keep the rest of the text hidden when users are visiting your profile and of course a Pinterest profile will include your profile photo in case you're building a personal brand or it can simply be your brand logo if you have a brand and you have the logo and also you should leverage the space that you have here in your profile header it's a pretty large image it must be at least 800 pixels wide and
450 pixels tall and using a horizontal image with a 16 by 9 aspect ratio is recommended by Pinterest as it is the best for the profile header now you can pause here for a second and just point out in your notes that 16x9 aspect ratio is what Pinterest recommends for the header and if you're not sure how you could ever create this kind of image just open canva canva.com it's a free graphic design tool that you can use in your browser and you can actually create your forever free account using my
link anastasiablogger.com canva and then you can just go ahead and just do a quick search start typing in 16 by 9 and it will already pop up something like this presentation format and if you scroll down you'll see lots of templates you can choose any template that matches your brand colors and your site now let's have a look at the Pinterest boards but before we get there if you find this video helpful so far give me like subscribe and if you have any questions the best place to ask me is actua
lly in the comments below the video and also make sure to watch my free Pinterest masterclass you can sign up for this using the link up there and in the description below so what is a Pinterest board a Pinterest board is a collection of individual pins it's a way to organize your ideas around one specific topic and here's how you can find your boards because new users always get confused about it because Pinterest has this tab called saved so all your boards will be there and if you scroll down
this page you can see all of them and by the way at the very bottom of the page you will find any of your secret or archived boards here I have them they're called protected boards at the moment that's how they're called but they here they also have my archived boards and secret boards at the same place you'll see for example the secret boards they will have this lock icon on them so you know these are secret boards and archived boards usually don't have any special icon on them but pretty much
most of my group boards are archived right now now if you click on your created tab you will first see your ID appearance and then if you scroll past all the ID pins you will get to your regular image pins or video pins and if you don't have any idea pins you will see your regular pins right away now going back to your saved tab the first thing you will see here is a folder called all pins and that's basically everything that you saved lately starting from the most recent pins and then if you c
lick on a title of any board you'll be able to see all the pins you've saved on that board so far so you could have Boards called Pinterest marketing tips blogging ideas Pinterest for e-commerce and any other ideas that you might want to save to your account depending on your Niche now the variety of topics that you can cover on your boards really depends on how broadly is the niche defined for your website you know some websites are very narrowly niched so you might have a site that is only doi
ng reviews of different types of carpets or flooring Solutions so a Pinterest account for this kind of sites will need to have fewer boards and they would be mostly around topics related to flooring specifically and the opposite example would be a site covering a broad Niche for example of home decor and that one would have boards on Pinterest corresponding to all kinds of subcategories present on the site it could be Boards called living room decor wallpapers ideas Farmhouse Decor style and so
on now you might have noticed that some Pinterest accounts use board cover images to make their boards look similar to each other and to reflect their brand colors and their Style it's not that common anymore to be honest so I even had quite a bit of searching to do to find a few accounts that still do it but if you're wondering if maybe you should create this board cupboards as well in my honest opinion it's really not worth the effort because users and Pinterest don't check your profile that o
ften anyway and if you have too much time on your hands you can spend a day creating these board cupboards but they will make little to no difference at all to your success on Pinterest and this board covers they need a square image it could be 800 pixels by 800 pixels smaller than that it would be probably a lower resolution so you want to make them at least 800 by 800 pixels now I already mentioned that Pinterest boards can be public like these ones that you can see on my profile and some word
s can be secret boards I've already shown you some examples of that now people often ask me how many boards they need to create on a business account well that really depends on how many different topics are covered on your website basically you need about three relevant boards for the main topics you usually write about on your site and if your site is narrowly niched probably you could just create tan boards per Pinterest account and find on these boards a place for all of your content and the
same goes for e-commerce stores because a large variety of products and many categories means that you will need to create more Pinterest boards now Pinterest has a limit of 500 words per Pinterest profile so actually it's more than enough even if you run a huge online magazine or a huge e-commerce store now another question I still get asked more often than I wanted to is about group boards and the reason I'm not so happy to hear about them over and over again is that they have been pretty muc
h useless for about two years now but people who are new to Pinterest are still confused about group boards because you can still find information about them in older videos about Pinterest in Old blog posts and in all honesty most of the established Pinterest accounts even like mine still have quite a lot of group boards on their profiles so let's clear these doubts about group boards when you see a board name with more than one profile image on it like in this case it says 99 plus and actually
it's almost 2 000 contributors on this group board this is called a group board so it means that the board has several collaborators and all of these people can save pins to the board and not only the Pinterest profile that created this board and in the past it made sense to join group words that belong to established Pinterest accounts with large following because instead of showing pins just to your fewer followers because your account might be just brand new account you could actually show y
our PIN to thousands of followers of the group board owner but at some point Pinterest decided that enough is enough because these group words were manned as small shared places for friends and family to share their ideas and now they've become shared by thousands of contributors like you can see this group board has about 2 000 contributors and it became a place that wasn't dedicated to any specific topic and it would just full of uncontrollable spam so Pinterest announced a few years back that
they would be cutting off the distribution of pins saved to the this large and spammy group boards and they did it slowly and steadily so nowadays I don't think that pins that were safe to group boards are helpful at all because they don't seem to get any Impressions and now getting access to this group boards was a lot of work and if you try to do it now it might be even harder because most accounts are not accepting new contributors anymore and you will notice that many established accounts d
idn't remove some of the group boards from their profiles even my account has some group boards and this could be for two reasons one they simply don't want to mess around and risk that some of their opinions that were saved in this group boards years ago if they still are driving them some traffic these pins would disappear or be hidden so people just don't want to risk that and the other reason is that some of the group boards could have been built on your own account like I had a couple of gr
oup words that I hosted on my Pinterest profile so I assume that if you delete a board on your own account then the pins from from that board will be all hidden or gone from the platform and the analytics on your profile most likely will have a drop another reason why you might still see that all accounts have the school boards but as a new account you might not even want to waste your time to join this group boards and you can just build your own boards and go from there now what do regular use
rs do on Pinterest Pinterest is used for discovering new inspirational content and in many cases Pinterest users have a buyer intent people often look for ideas about their home decor recipes DIY projects food ideas art inspiration and so on and they save their favorite ideas grouping them into boards on Pinterest and the second type of activity is clicking on the pin title and going to the website that is linked to this pin so people are not just saving pins to their boards but they also are cl
icking through from Pinterest to other websites where they can learn more about the topic that that was mentioned on the pin and the content on Pinterest platform is obviously Visual and all these images which you see on Pinterest are called pins videos are called video pins and there is also another type of pins called image pins so videos and images are linked to a specific website so here if we look through all of the pins most of them will be linked somewhere and to visit a website you usual
ly need to click on the pin title something like over here or you can sometimes find a link at the bottom of the pin image now you might ask me what does it mean on Pinterest if someone is following you see it shows in the profile for any user the number of followers they have and I have about 80 000 followers right now and if you have just a personal account and you don't save a ton of pins on your account you shouldn't expect to have a large following on Pinterest and most of the regular users
on Pinterest don't even want to get followers they're just saving ideas for themselves cells and they often even keep their boards secret for that reason so unlike other social networks on Pinterest the interaction between users is not the main purpose of the platform it's more for the discovery of ideas and for saving them to check them later but actually you can send messages it's not like a lot of people do that but most of the time it's actually spammy messages but you can send messages to
Pinterest users and you can also comment on the pins saved by other users or on your own pins when someone comments on your pins you will get notifications over here on the left side right next to your Pinterest profile photo and here you will see all the messages that people sent you I get quite a lot of them as a regular user you might not even get any of those I get them because well my profile is pretty much public I make a lot of videos about Pinterest so people are trying to spam me in eve
ry possible way so how to create app interest in the first time of pins that existed on Pinterest it was just a simple image pin they usually they had to be vertical but you will find sometimes other formats of images they just don't do that well on Pinterest because most of the users will be on mobile devices so your pins should also be vertical but over the years a Pinterest platform added also video pins they're just short vertical videos usually less than one minute actually Pinterest recomm
ends make them make the video pins just between 6 and 15 seconds long and then also Pinterest added idea pins they look more like sliders I can show you a couple of examples over here and this type of pins is called ideapins they look like a slider you see here we have two slides the first one I use usually a video and a short video and then an image but a slider can contain only videos or just images it's up to you what you include in your idea pins at the end of the idea pin you will see a pro
file photo and a button to follow it doesn't show here because it's my profile but if you look at the other people's profiles it will show a follow button here so let's take a look at the anatomy of a regular image pin on Pinterest and normally an image pin should have an image of course and then it would be linked to some website so if I open the PIN to edit you will see here the link to my website it does have a title and description so the description is something that most of the users that
are trying to promote on Pinterest they will make this extra effort and add a description but when regular users are saving pins oftentimes they will not add any pin description so you'll see a lot of pins on Pinterest that have just a title and no description at all so this is how pins look in the user's feed now ideapins are the format of the pins that was added to the platform most recently so they get additional boost in the algorithm and they can drive you a lot of Impressions but the issue
with idea pins is that you cannot add a link from them to a specific page on your site however I still encourage you to create some idea pins because they help your account get followers and in general they will drive you more views to the regular image pins too by bringing more users to your Pinterest profile I made a video showing how I've gained about 50 extra traffic to my site after a month of consistently creating ideas check the link to that video in the description below now how you can
use Pinterest to promote your business or to bring traffic to your website in order to do this you must use a Pinterest business account for some reason people often want to avoid this and try to use a personal account that's not smart for a few reasons one it's against Pinterest terms of service so if you get caught you might lose your account and even get your domain blocked from being used on any other Pinterest accounts in the future two on a personal account you will not get all Pinterest
analytics for your site and you don't get to verify your domain name and also as a business owner on a business account on Pinterest you'll get access to Pinterest ads I already made a video about promoted pins Pinterest ads and I'll give you a link to that video in the description below so you can watch it later if you're interested in Pinterest ads if you are concerned about the word business account and if you are worried that you will have to pay to use this account then this is going to be
a relief for you because business accounts on Pinterest are completely free and moreover when you own a business account for Pinterest it means that you're a content creator and that pins that are saved from your verified website those pins are going to get additional Distribution on the platform how can you use a Pinterest business account to make money with it there are many ways I can tell you from my personal experience that I'm driving free traffic search traffic and viral traffic from Pint
erest to my website as you can see in my analytics in the last 30 days I've got about 75 000 visitors to my site from Pinterest and I monetize the traffic with ads on my site mediavine the ad Network that I'm using on my blogs added an interesting report that shows which traffic Source pays you how much and the RPM for each platform RPM is a revenue per thousand visitor see here in the last 30 days about 74 of my income from this blog came from Pinterest perhaps you already know that I'm big on
Pinterest and get a ton of traffic from it but what's even more exciting is that RPM for traffic from Pinterest is the same as my Google SEO traffic I'm showing this to you because I've got some comments from users who don't really know the industry that Pinterest traffic is social media traffic and that premium ad networks see no value in Pinterest traffic this just proves that this opinion couldn't be further from the reality again Pinterest is not just a social network it's also a search engi
ne and on top of it this is mainly traffic from the United States which is the highest paid traffic compared to any other country I'm also driving traffic to my YouTube channel from Pinterest you can totally create a pin and Link from it to your YouTube video you can also sell products on Pinterest by linking your pins directly to your products if you have something to sell on your site maybe you sell physical products or maybe it's a digital product for example here I'm sending traffic to my ca
nva templates product as you can see the pin is linked directly to my landing page you can also send people to your opt-in pages as I do here with this free blogging checklist so people can join my list and later I can offer them some products or services and of course you can also promote e-commerce sites on Pinterest in this case you will have the so-called product pin type not just article pins like that I have linked to my blog post you will have product pins and they will have a price tag o
n them if this is your goal I have another video that talks about how to promote an e-commerce site on Pinterest so I'll give you a link to that video in the description below the same applies to the video about affiliate marketing on Pinterest so you can actually make direct links from your pins on Pinterest to affiliate products you can also use of course landing pages on your site as a transition between a pin and the affiliate product but as I said you can even use Pinterest to link directly
to an affiliate product again join my free Pinterest masterclass check the link in the description below below and now if you want to know my strategy on Pinterest for this year click on that video up there and I'll see you there
Comments