| | | |

How to Use Pinterest for Creative Entrepreneurs

Sharing is caring!

Calling all creative entrepreneurs! If you’ve been hearing how amazing Pinterest is but haven’t figured out how to use it – this is for you! Pinterest is the number two traffic referral to websites. Is traffic coming to your projects, blog, or creative business? Learn how to use Pinterest for creative entrepreneurs for professional purposes and grow your business with social media.

Facebook has long been the biggest force for many small businesses and creative entrepreneurs but organic reach plummeted in 2015 as Facebook moved from being earned media (free media that occurs through organic search) towards being paid media in which you need to pay for sponsored and boosted posts to get views for your content.

While Pinterest is also moving forward with promoted pins, it's still possible to obtain excellent earned media views by creating and sharing optimized pins on Pinterest.

Are you worried that Pinterest is just for woman or for recipes? From research done by Ahalogy, “Male pinners are on the rise. There are 75% more male Pinners today than there were a year ago. Males are the fastest-growing group on Pinterest, as almost 2/3 (64%) of Active Males have joined in the past year. The balance between males and females on Pinterest has also shifted up by 4% since 2014.” Approximately two-thirds of the men on Pinterest have joined in the past yet. Wow!

One of the main features of Pinterest is guided search. While Google is traditional search – type in how to surf and you'll see the top articles, images, and videos on how to surf. If you go to Google for ideas, you need to have the idea or Google doesn't help you at all. On Pinterest, you're shown content based on topics you select, boards you follow, and people you follow as well as suggested pins based on your last Pinterest searches and other internet searches if you have that option turned on in Pinterest.

From Pinterest, “When you use Pinterest, we want to provide you with the most interesting (dare we say, “Pinteresting”?) content. Sometimes, we use information from other sites or apps to do that.”

Pinterest ideas for creative entrepreneurs

As a creative entrepreneur, blogger, or small business, there are many ways that you can reach your ideal audience on Pinterest. Pinterest can be used to:

  • build brand awareness
  • share expertise
  • share content
  • create resources for your community
  • highlight your community members

There are many different types of content that you can share on Pinterest on your Pinterest boards:

  • links to your writing, products, or services online
  • helpful videos to education your clients
  • infographics or stats to build your expertise
  • graphics showing products

Pinterest provides long-term web traffic

Pinterest provides great value to your social media efforts because Pinterest pins last a LONG time! While return on investment (ROI) and social media are a murky topic – at best – Pinterest is proving to be the best use of your time. From a Piqora study on ROI, “50 percent of visits happen after 3.5 months of first Pinning – Pins get discovered long after they’re born and continue driving visits to sites.”

The half life of a tweet on Twitter is 24 minutes and a Facebook post will get you 90 minutes of interaction in the Newsfeed.

  • Twitter: 24 minutes
  • Facebook: 90 minutes
  • Pinterest: 151,200 minutes

To me, that’s a drop the mic moment for social media return on investment for your time. It’s impossible to read this and think that this kind of traffic can’t help your blog or business. If it hasn’t worked for you yet, you need to get your Pinterest in order so you can start reaping the benefits.

Read more: How to Use Pinterest to Build a Loyal Following for your Brand

If you want to learn Pinterest in a more hands-on way, I've created a Pinterest course called Pin It Like a Pro!

In this class, you’ll learn the language of Pinterest, how the Pinterest community works and the basics of Pinterest marketing to bring traffic to your blog, small business, or online shop.
By the end of this course, you’ll know how to create a Pinterest board for your brand that will help more people find your content online. And you’ll know all of the essential elements that each pin needs to make it successful on Pinterest.

I hope this gives you some ideas for how to use Pinterest to share your ideas and services on Pinterest, if you're a beginner, I hope to see you in the course.

Sharing is caring!

11 Comments

  1. Your course was SO helpful. I don’t consider myself a beginner, and I still learned from you in the class. The “over your shoulder” format was incredible. There were lots of little tips you’ve shared over time that I understood in theory, but couldn’t quite wrap my mind around exactly how to do them (because I have a different workflow) until I saw you perform those tasks. That finally made things click for me.

    Pinterest is my #1 traffic source, and I know I’m not alone in that. That makes it worth the time investment for me.

    Thanks for this post and the class!

  2. I could not agree more how much Pinterest increases my traffic. This is a great post to note the great benefits of free advertising for your business.

    There are plenty of men jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon that I personally know. Thank you for this information.

  3. Hi Peg
    I admit I don’t use Pinterest much, but the statistics you gave here of long-term web traffic
    and the continuation time it has, does rise a second thoughts for me.
    I also see you wrote some other great staff about Pinterest , so I might take a look at that as well. My major platform today is twitter – but, the benefits Pinterest offers, looks a real catch.

    Thanks!

  4. Hi Peg!

    Love this. Count me as one of the men getting more engaged with Pinterest…and I have to say I’m loving it.

    For the longest time I dismissed it as a place where men didn’t really congregate. But, I’ve found some of the best interaction and engagement with men AND women there. And, like you said, the traffic is awesome.

    Thanks again and happy pinning! (is that what I’m supposed to say? lol)

    – Jeff

  5. These are great ideas to make the most of your Pins in Pinterest. Aside from the fun of posting your pins, Pinterest also offer tons of traffic to your website/ blog.

  6. This article has some great and useful information for Pinterest promotion. Definitely I’m going to apply these guide for getting more engaged with my Pinterest profile.

    Thanks for posting with us

  7. I absolutely love this post! Everything you said is so right. I work for a start up company and we use Pinterest to our favor 100%. It is a fast growing social media area that has a ton of range and something that anyone can use to engage an audience!

  8. We started using Pinterest approx. 4 months back and your stats proved us that we are on right track. Thanks for sharing these stats. Looking forward to know more about Pinterest for better visibility.

Comments are closed.