What is Pinterest and How Does Pinterest Work for Business, Bloggers and for Personal Accounts
What is Pinterest and how does it work? If you are asking this question, it means you are truly new to this platform. So, I will explain everything you need to know about Pinterest in a really simple way, easy to understand even for beginners.
So, on Pinterest this native activity for users is saving pins to nicely organized boards on their accounts. At the same time, Pinterest marketers, like me for example, are trying to get more eyeballs on their content or products on Pinterest.
So, content creators are trying to always outsmart the platform, the algorithm, and to get ahead of their competition. To show their pins in the feeds of their followers or other people on the platform.
Now that you have this general overview of what people are doing on Pinterest, let me focus on what specifically users, regular users are doing 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, and they do both things on Pinterest. They save their favorite ideas, grouping them into boards.
And the second type of activity is going from a pin to a website. So, people are not just saving pins to their boards, but their are also clicking-through from Pinterest to other websites where they can learn more about the topic or the idea about which the pin invited them to learn.
And the content on Pinterest platform is visual. All these images which you see on Pinterest are called pins. And most of the pins have a link to a source site. So, here if we look through all the pins, most of the pins will be linked to some website.
And if you close-up the pin, you will see that there is a specific website where the pin is linked. And every pin on the platform has to be saved to a specific board. A pin can not exist without being saved to a board.
And as you can see, any user can create any board they want to. So this is a regular user account. How I can tell that it’s an account of a regular user? The first and the most important sign is that the user doesn’t have any claimed or verified website attached to their account.
So this is just a regular user, saving ideas from Pinterest to their boards. And not trying to promote anything. Any of their own products or not trying to bring traffic to their site. Let’s take a look at the anatomy of a regular pin on Pinterest.
Normally, a pin would have an image of course. And then it will be linked to some website. Not all the pins are linked to a website. Because sometimes people are saving ideas that are not linked to anywhere, or the link is broken.
And then, there is no link at all. But also pins are including a pin description. And usually pin description is what you will find right under the title of the board to which this pin was saved. So this is how pins will look in a Smart Feed.
And then when you are clicking on a pin, it will enlarge the image and will show it in full together with the description, and with the title of the pin. And all the information that comes from the website to which this pin is linked.
There are two types of Pinterest accounts. It’s Personal and Business accounts. So, for personal Pinterest accounts, the pin limit is 200,000 pins. On Business accounts, currently, there is no limit, according to what Pinterest says.
But usually, on Personal accounts, you don’t really need to save that many pins. At the same time, as an owner of a business account, you will be probably saving a lot more pins. So for example, on my account you will see that I currently have almost 37,000 pins.
Now let’s have a look at Pinterest boards. 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. So you can have a board called Pinterest marketing tips, blogging ideas, summer food, Easter eggs, air fryer recipes, gift wrapping, health foods, and any other ideas you want to save to your account.
So, in your Pinterest board’s URL, you will always find your username. You see, here anastasiablogger username is in the URL of my board. You can see that I’m the only user contributing to this board.
And there is another type of boards, it’s called group boards. Group boards have multiple contributors. There is still one group board owner, and you can always see who is the group board owner in the URL of the board.
So, in this case it’s this user account babesmakemoney. And then all the other contributors of this group board are also able to save pins to this account. So, the pins that are saved to a group board, will be shown in the Pinterest profile of the main user.
Pinterest boards can be public, like the ones that I’ve just shown you on my profile, and some boards can be Secret boards. So this board has a setting to be Secret, and the pins that I’m saving to this board, will not be shown in public, and my followers will not see them and no one actually, except me can see the pins saved to this board.
In terms of limits, Pinterest has a limit of 500 boards per Pinterest profile. And now, what is actually a Pinterest profile? I’m going to click now on my profile and you will see what a profile shows.
A Pinterest profile contains your username, in my case it’s anastaiablogger. If you go to your Pinterest profile settings, click Edit here and you will see that you can change your display name, you can even change your username at any time if you need to.
And in this field, you can add some information about your profile. If you are using your profile to promote your business, you could give some links as well. Of course, a Pinterest profile will include your profile photo.
And also you can edit the look of your profile header. You can click on this pencil icon on the right side of the screen, and then you can choose which of the boards you want to feature in this header.
Or you can just feature the latest pins on your profile. Now you might ask me, what does it mean on Pinterest if someone is following you. Unlike other social media, on Pinterest the interaction between users is not the main purpose of the platform.
It’s more for discovery of ideas. But people can follow you on Pinterest. For example, currently on my account I have 28,000 followers. A personal account probably will not have that many followers because you don’t have a verified website.
So Pinterest users are not expecting that you will be constantly creating new content and saving new ideas related to the topic you are interested in. But anyway, even a personal Pinterest account can have followers.
Usually the number of followers will be lower. So that was about Pinterest for regular users. For personal profiles. But how you can use Pinterest to promote your business? Or bring traffic to your website? In order to do this, you must have a business account.
And I have another video on my channel that explains step by step how you can either convert a personal account ot a Business account, or create it from scratch. I will give you a link to that video above my head.
It will be an info icon over there. And you just need to click on it, and it will open the video in the new tab. And you can watch it later. Or if you can not see the info icon, I will also give you a link to that video in the description below this video.
If you are concerned about the word “Business account” and if you are worried that you’ll have to pay to use it, then this is going to be a relief for you. Business accounts on Pinterest are completely free and moreover, when you own a business account, for Pinterest it means that you are a content creator and pins saved from your verified website or the social media that you claimed on your account, those pins are going to get additional distribution on the platform.
A better distribution, compared to the pins saved by regular users. So, how can you use a Pinterest Business account to improve your income? There are many ways. I can tell you from my personal experience that I’m driving free organic traffic, search traffic and viral traffic from Pinterest to my website.
And I monetize that traffic with ads on my site. I’m also driving traffic to my Youtube channel. So you can see that a lot of pins that I published recently on my business account are linked to my Youtube videos.
You can also sell products on Pinterest. By linking your pins directly to your products. Like in this case, I’m sending them to a blog planner. It’s a printable file and as you can see, it’s linked directly to the landing page.
You can also send people to your opt-in page. So they will join your list. You can even sell your services on Pinterest, by linking pins to the page where you are selling any kind of services. And of course, you can also promote ecommerce sites on Pinterest.
In this case, you will have the so-called product pin type. Not just article pins, like I have that are linked to my blog posts. You will have product pins – they will have a price tag on them. I have another video that talks about how to promote an ecommerce site with Pinterest.
So, I will give you a link to it in the info icon above my head, and also in the description below this video. The same applies to the video about Affiliate marketing on Pinterest. So, you can actually make direct pins 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 also use Pinterest to link directly to an affiliate product. If you are not sure if you should use a personal account or a business account on Pinterest, then, well, in my opinion, it’s always worth starting a Business account.
Because then you can have one additional big bonus, it’s called Pinterest Analytics. And it will show you what is the performance of your account, of the specific pins on your account. And also, as an owner of a Business account you will get access to Pinterest ads.
So even if you don’t have your own website at this time, you can still use a Pinterest business account so you can get access to Pinterest ads and promote those affiliate products that you want to promote, without sending traffic to your own website.
Get our book about making money online
Check the following website for good advice with TheProfitSecrets.com