How to Make a Pinterest Pin Strategy

[Md. Anikuzzaman]

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing social networks, with increasing effectiveness for home business marketing. You can use Pinterest in marketing to share blog posts and videos, promote affiliate products, host contests, and more. But like all social media resources, it can be overwhelming. Many experts suggest pinning 10, 20 or even 30 pins a day across multiple boards. You can see how Pinterest can end up taking a great deal of time.

Fortunately, with a social media strategy and a few tools, you can make Pinterest an effective marketing tactic without using a lot of time.

Prepare Your Pinterest Account
Before you jump into making your Pinterest pinning strategy, you need to make sure your Pinterest page is ready to work for you. Here are a few things to make sure you've done:

Switch to a Pinterest business account: It's still free to use Pinterest as a business, plus you'll get additional resources such as pin analytics.
Complete your Pinterest profile: You should have your picture, website, and bio on your Pinterest profile page.
Optimize your boards: Remember, your goal is marketing, so you want to create board titles that attract your market.​
Create graphically interesting pins: The first thing that attracts people to a pin is the graphics and then the text. There are many great resources for free and low-cost graphics, and you can use tools such as Canva or Picmonkey to make attractive pins for free or low cost. Currently, images should be vertical, with a ratio of 2:3. These graphics can be pinned directly to your board, or shared from your blog or website.

Have a goal for your pins: What do you want the pin to do? Do you want to have people read your article, sign up for your newsletter, or buy from your Etsy store? Like all other marketing tactics, you should have an end goal result and call-to-action on your pins.
Optimize your pin descriptions: Similar to your board titles, you want your pin descriptions to grab attention. If you're pinning from your blog, you can set the description in the code of graphic. Or you can create descriptions from within your Pinterest account.

Add rich pins to your account: Rich pins let Pinterest browsers know where a pin will link to if they click it. This helps them decide whether or not to click and makes them feel safe in following the link. Current rich pin categories are apps, movies, recipes, articles, products, and places.

Choose your top three boards to highlight at the top of your Pinterest profile: Pinterest pages can have up to 500 boards. Even if you just have 20, that's a lot of boards for people to wade through. You can organize your boards, but even better, you can have your top boards scrolling on the top so followers can get your best information quickly and easily.
Group Boards Are the Key to Expanding Your Pinterest Reach
One of the best aspects of Pinterest for marketing is group boards, on to which many people pin items related to the board's topic. This is great for the Pinterest user for finding great content from a variety of people. For the Pinterest marketer, groups boards allow two ways to expand your market reach and attraction.

First, by joining a group board, you're immediately placing your pins in front of an already existing group with can have thousands of followers. Second, by creating a group on your profile and inviting others to pin, you get more great content on your profile page to attract more followers.


Joining Pinterest Groups
If you already have people you follow in your home business topic, you can visit their profile page to see if they have group boards. You know it's a group board if you click on it and see the profile pictures of several people next to the board's description. Another option is to visit Pingroupie and type in the board topics you'd like to find group boards for. You'll get a list of group boards and you can then contact the board leader to ask to join.

Be sure that you're professional and have a good sampling of pins on your profile before asking to join a group board. Also, many group board administrators have rules, such as not pinning the same pin more than once in a 30 day period. Be sure to follow the rules.

Creating a Pinterest Group
To create your own group board, choose the board on your profile page that you'd like to have others share their pins on.

Next to your profile picture, you'll see a large plus button. Click on the plus sign and a box will open up that allows you to choose who you want to invite. You can scroll through your followers or enter the name of the person to find them on the list. When you click on a name, they're automatically added to your collaborator list and sent an invite.

Creating Your Pinning Plan
At this point, you should have several boards related to your business topics and subtopics, attractive pins, and be part of other group boards. Now it's time to create your pinning plan.

Pinterest experts suggest pinning 5 to 30 pins a day. While you can take a few minutes to do all those pins at once, by scheduling pins you can pace your pin posts throughout the day increasing the chances of your market seeing your pins and avoiding them being overwhelmed by a bunch of pins at once.

Like on other social media, you can re-share old content on Pinterest, which is good news. You don't have to come up with 5-30 new graphics a day. First, you need to determine how far in advance you want to schedule. Will you schedule your pins each day or for the week? From there you:

Make a list of the pins you want to share: Things to consider are your most popular articles or products, seasonal content, newsworthy items, old content you'd like to give new life too, etc. Don't forget to consider your goals. For example, you'll want to have a regular pin schedule for the freebie that goes to your newsletter subscribers.
Decide what boards to put your pins on: First-time content (i.e. a new blog post), should go on your board first, but you can reschedule the pin onto a group board later in the week. Old pins you've already pinned to your board can be pinned to your other boards and/or group boards.
Choose a Pinterest scheduling tool: Tailwind is one of the most popular Pinterest scheduling apps. One perk is that it can integrate with Hootsuite if that is the social media tool you're using.
Buffer also offers Pinterest scheduling. Both Tailwind and Buffer have free and affordable levels of service ($10-$15 per month), offers tips on recommended times to pin, and have an easy "repin" schedule for pins that are doing well.

Another option for WordPress bloggers is CoSchedule. Like Tailwind and Buffer, you can schedule pins and ask it to post at the "Best Time" or give it a set day and time. CoSchedule also offers the ability to automatically set up future reposts through its ReQue feature. CoSchedule is more expensive, but for WordPress users, it offers many features that make it worth taking a look at. All of these options have browser extensions so you can easily pin from your browser or within the program.

A final option is Board Booster. Pinterest marketers who love this program say it's because it works within Pinterest and has a feature to create a secret board from which Board Booster will dole out pins to other boards. Some people express concern that it's not an approved Pinterest vender like the others are, and eventually, Pinterest might block its use. Board Booster has free and a variety of paid levels depending on the number of pins you post. Plus it has some other great features, such as help in cleaning up dud pins and creating campaigns.

Using your tool, schedule your pins, and set up your repins, if you're using that option.
Keep track of what boards you're pinning what content to. This is where things can get unmanageable. You don't want to pin a great piece of content to all your group boards at the same time. If its re-pin worthy, you don't want to pin it to the same board twice too soon. If you do so on a group board, you might get kicked off.
I've seen people use spreadsheets to keep track of their pin schedule. In fact, IFTTT offers an applet that will automatically track your pin to a Google spreadsheet. Others use a calendar that they either make or that comes with the tools listed above offer a calendar.

Regardless of what you use, there are a few items you should track:

Pins you want to continue to re-share. This includes your best pins, which you can determine through your Pinterest analytics or through your website host's stats.
Where and when pins have been posted to avoid duplicating too soon.
Content that isn't performing well. In this case, you might consider making a new graphics to see if that increases interest.
Pinterest has sprinted to the top when it comes to effective home business marketing. But for it to work you need to have a well thought out profile page and organized boards, great pinnable content, and a strategy for scheduling pins and repins.

Source: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/home-business-pinterest-pin-strategy-4129248