How to Sell On Pinterest in 10 Easy Steps

Phil Brown

Jul 29, 2020

When exploring new sales channels, don’t waste time on platforms without reach. Pinterest has more than 430 million active users who use it to make high-value purchasing decisions every month. Sounds good? Let’s quickly go through how to sell on Pinterest to grow your business.

In this article, we’ll quickly go through how to make money on Pinterest in 10 easy steps.

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest grew from a small startup in San Francisco to one of today’s largest social media platforms. At its core, it’s a visual search engine that inspires people, helping them find the right products and information to build the lifestyle they want.

Because it caters to such a broad and diverse audience – from foodies to workout lovers to ceramic cup enthusiasts – the chances are high that your target audience is on the platform.

Pinterest Demographics

Take a look at what Pinterest says about its users. Does anything spark an idea for your business plan?

Pinterest Terminology

An essential step of learning how to sell on Pinterest is learning its vocabulary. We want you to be fluent so you can fully focus on what’s important – how to make money on Pinterest. Go through these commonly used terms throughout the app:

Pins – the individual items (pictures, videos, text, etc.) you see on the app. You can organize pins by “pinning” them to your boards.
Pinterest boards – think of them as individual bulletin boards where you collect visual inspiration. Boards can be public, private, or shared between private groups of people.
Rich pins – these are pins that sync with your website to add additional information above and below the pin's thumbnail. This feature is absolutely free, but you need to apply for it beforehand.
Product pins – a type of rich pin linked with your store and showing potential customers they can buy your items. It automatically displays the most up-to-date information from your website on pricing, availability, and product description.
Pinterest tag – a simple line of code you can add to your website to keep track of different metrics like conversion rate and campaign performance. Plus, you get verified as a Pinterest merchant.

Learning how to sell on Pinterest is not just about the practicalities of setting up a shop. Social media is all about connecting and providing value. Pinterest is no exception – you’ve got to do some groundwork that will pay off afterward.

Make It Happen Today!

Start Selling

Build a Good Foundation for Success

Everything starts with your online store – you can’t create a Pinterest business account without it. If you already have one, we can jump right into selling on Pinterest. If you don’t, check out our guide on how to start an online store without Inventory. We’ll see you back here when you’re up and running.

Let’s go through some important points to consider before you sign up for a free business account on Pinterest.

Finding Your Business Niche

A niche is that market sweet spot where the demand is high, but the competition is low. It’s also an opportunity for you to establish yourself as a market expert. Read our guide to learn how to find your business niche in less than 10 minutes.

We recommend using free tools such as Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner to find relevant keywords in your niche. Pinterest is a visual search engine, so these will help you optimize your content to rank higher in search results.

Target Audience

There’s a saying in sales, “If you sell it to everyone, you’re selling to no one”. This is why it’s vital to find a niche, and when you find it, put your FBI cap on and investigate the buyers in your market segment. Here are a few things to find out:

Their age
Family status
Interests and hobbies
Occupation
Location
What motivates them?
What sets them back?
What's their personality?

After getting to know them, try creating multiple customer personas. They’ll come in very handy when you’re creating ad campaigns from your Pinterest business account.

Content Strategy

A content strategy starts with your business objective. Think about what the most important goal is for your business right now – it could be sales, brand recognition, customer engagement, or something else. After you’ve set your goal, come up with a content strategy that will lead you to it. Consider aspects such as:

With these in mind, you’ll have a clear direction where your efforts are going. A strategy also helps you stay consistent throughout time, building a stronger trusting relationship with your target audience.

Tip: Pinterest lets you schedule up to 100 pins in advance.

How To Sell On Pinterest in 10 Steps

Now that you’ve built the foundations, we can learn the nitty-gritty of how to sell on Pinterest. Follow these steps and you have a shiny new sales channel.

Step 1: Set Up a Business Account

Chances are, you already have a personal account. In that case, you can choose between linking both or creating a separate new Pinterest business profile with a different email address. Setting it up is quick – in just a few clicks, you’ll get access to more features to boost your business.

Benefits of a Pinterest Business Account

Run Pinterest ads to promote your content.
Get access to professional insights and Pinterest analytics.
Manage your Pinterest profile branding.
Boost traffic to your business website.
Add a widget to your website so people can pin your content to their boards.

Step 2: Connect Your Store to Pinterest

Before you start creating content, make sure your business account is linked with your online store. In Pinterest language, this is called claiming your website. This process makes sure people can access your store and product pages through your pins. It’s also essential for enabling marketing and advertising tools.

The setup process is slightly different from just typing in your URL in your profile settings. There are three ways you can do this:

Add an HTML tag to your website’s source code.
Upload an HTML file to your website’s web server.
Add a TXT record to your website’s Domain Name System (DNS).

If you’re not an IT specialist, adding a meta tag and a TXT record can sound low-key overwhelming, but it’s surprisingly easy to do when you slice the process in tiny steps. We recommend following these Pinterest instructions.

Note: Pinterest considers Etsy, Instagram, and YouTube social networks, not websites. Follow specific guidelines to claim these accounts. To link any other social media platform, check the individual app for any options to connect it to Pinterest.

Step 3: Create Beautiful Visuals

Remember, Pinterest is a visual search engine. For maximum results, your efforts should concentrate on creating content that’s visually appealing, above anything else. If people like it, they’ll click and pin. Remember the groundwork you laid when creating a content strategy? This is where it shines.

Here are some tips for creating stunning visuals:

Use high-quality photography. Consider investing in a professional photoshoot of your product samples.
Create professional-looking graphics. If you're not a graphic designer, try hiring one to save time on learning.
Keep it consistent with your branding. It's not only visually appealing to have your pins in one style, but it also means that your followers can recognize your pins from anyone else.

Note: The best pin size, recommended by Pinterest, is 1000×1500 pixels. You can choose other sizes, as long as you stick with the ideal 2:3 aspect ratio. Don’t go lower than 600×900.

Step 4: Organize Your Content in Boards

Once your visuals are ready, it’s time to organize them into Pinterest boards. They’re great if you’re selling products in multiple categories, so name them accordingly. Pinterest users will pin your content to their personal boards, and they’re usually very well organized.

Boards can also help people quickly find more of your products from the same category. Don’t be afraid to repin content from other Pinterest users if it features your products and fits the vibe of your Pinterest account.

Step 5: Create Rich Pins

Remember these? We covered them in the Pinterest Terminology section above. You can identify a rich pin by these three characteristics:

The pin has a bold title.
It show’s that you’re the author of this pin.
It has a description above and below the pin’s visual.

In sum, rich pins give Pinterest users more context on what your content is all about. Use them to your advantage to guide potential customers to your online store.

Step 6: Use Product Pins

They say that time is money. If you want to learn how to make money on Pinterest, you’ve got to know how to save people’s time. Product pins will move new customers from scrolling to buying much faster.

How do you recognize product pins among other types of rich pins, like recipe or article pins? Let’s take a look.

Use the Pinterest guide to learn how to create product pins by adding specific markups to your website’s HTML code to make these buyable pins.

Step 7: Try Pinterest Catalogs

When you’re learning how to sell on Pinterest quickly, catalogs just might be the right tool for you. They are specifically designed for merchants who sell their products online and want to upload all of them to Pinterest in one go.

In addition to saving precious time, catalogs give you two more benefits:

You can automatically create product pins for a larger group of items.
These product pins can be turned into shopping ads. They get your pins in front of Pinterest users whose interests match your products and the keywords in your content.

Setting up can be a bit tricky at first, but it will save you lots of time in the long run. Before you get started, make sure you fit the specific criteria Pinterest requires for creating catalogs:

You have a business account.
Your website is linked to that Pinterest account.
The website is aligned with Pinterest merchant guidelines.
You can provide a data source that includes all your products and their details.
You can provide Pinterest with up-to-date product information on a daily basis.

To learn more about creating a data source and if you fit the criteria, we recommend reading the general Pinterest catalog guide.

Step 8: Optimize Your Pinterest Profile

Just like with regular search engines, ranking higher on Pinterest can drive more sales for your online store. To place your content at the top of the app’s search results, Pinterest-specific search engine optimization (SEO) methods can help you get up there faster without using a single promoted pin.

Remember that keyword research you did during your preparation? The time has come to use these relevant keywords to optimize your Pinterest board titles and pin descriptions, as well as the titles and product descriptions on your website.

Note: Keep it natural and avoid keyword stuffing. This happens when you use one keyword after another, to the point where the text feels unnatural.

Step 9: Promote Your Pins

While Pinterest SEO is great for keeping your pins in the search results long-term, promoted pins can bring in more traffic in the here and now. First, you’ll have to make an ad campaign. This is where establishing your target audience, budget, and content strategy come in extremely handy.

Each ad will have a “Promoted by” tag, so potential customers know who promoted this pin and which website the click will take them to.

Step 10: Connect With Other Pinterest Users

Just like on other social media platforms, Pinterest users value brands that they can connect with on a personal level. A large part of how to sell on Pinterest is creating content that provides great shopping ideas and gives value to people.

Pinterest content is not just limited to stunning product visuals. Think about ways you can incorporate products and establish your expertise in blog posts, shopping guides, tutorials, and even videos.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Are the Benefits of Selling on Pinterest?

Finding multiple profitable sales channels can be a long process of trial and error for eCommerce businesses. To maximize your chances of success, go for platforms that have a pool of ready consumers. Does more than 430 million active users sound like a good starting point?

Pinterest is the go-to place to find new customers right when they’re looking for new products and inspiration. If you’re new to the market, you’re in good luck because 66% of Pinterest users are open to exploring new brands they’ve never heard of before.

Pinterest shopping was launched relatively recently, but it already offers an impressive toolkit for merchants to boost their business.

How to Sell On Pinterest?

Selling on Pinterest is easy when you slice your tasks into tiny steps:

Sign up for a Pinterest account. You’ll need a business account, because a personal account doesn’t include sales and marketing tools.
Connect your profile to your online store.
Create beautiful product visuals and valuable content. When it comes to graphics, bold colors tend to stand out.
Collect your pins in individual boards to keep things neat and organized.
Use rich pins to give Pinterest users more context to your content.
Create product pins to show your pins are buyable.
Utilize product catalogs to upload and update your product pins all at once.
Optimize your content with relevant keywords you’ve found from market research.
Promote your pins with ad campaigns to boost your profit potential.
Build a Pinterest community around your brand.

Learn how to successfully complete each step and set yourself up for Pinterest success by reading this article.

How Much Does It Cost To Sell On Pinterest?

Just like personal accounts, Pinterest business accounts are absolutely free. You’ll only encounter advertising costs if you choose to promote your content. These fees will depend on the scale and budget of your campaigns.

Will Pinterest Accept My Online Store?

When you open a Pinterest business account, you’ll be prompted to link it to your website. Currently, Pinterest easily integrates with multiple website hosts and builders:

Shopify
Wix
Squarespace
WordPress
GoDaddy and others

You can check the full list of supported website hosts in this table.

Note: There’s a different procedure for linking your Etsy, Instagram, and YouTube accounts.

How Does Pinterest Make Money?

Like most social media channels, Pinterest makes money from advertising. Businesses can pay Pinterest to promote their content for brand recognition or interaction. In the latter case, Pinterest only makes money when users engage with the promoted content.

Is Pinterest the Right Sales Channel for Your Business?

When you’re selling products, whether you make them by yourself or use print-on-demand services, Pinterest just might be the best place to show them off in their full glory with visually appealing product visuals.

While the initial setup does require a bit of your time, the potential long-term benefits outweigh the challenges. Pinterest is a great space where your products and content can live on forever, without losing their relevance like on other social media platforms as long as you utilize Pinterest SEO to its full potential.

Let’s recap the steps of how to sell on Pinterest:

Follow these, and you’ll start selling in no time.

Make It Happen Today!

Start Selling

Written by

Phil Brown

Phil is from Chicago in the United States and has been a digital freelancer and marketer for five years. In this time, he's done web design, content management, and ad management for companies, schools, and e-commerce sites. He also enjoys creating things and solving problems.

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PinterestStart a Business

2 comments

Crystal Bentley

October 16

I sell on etsy how can I link pinterest from my etsy

Reply

Martha Simmons

October 18

Hi Crystal,
Since this is an Etsy-specific question, it would be best to ask their support team, as they will be best equipped to guide you. However, you can also find useful tips about this on Google.

Reply

How to Sell On Pinterest in 10 Easy Steps

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