question for Moonwishes and others

[oakteakstore]

Hi Moonwishes-

You have mentioned many times about Pinterest. I am still not clear how to promote things on Pinterest. Do I promote my own things, do I promote others and also my things, I am clueless.

Wondering if you could give us a little tutorial about how to go about it?

Maybe you have done that already, and could link to the info.

Would appreciate the help.

[viewfinders]

There is a lengthy topic about Pinterest here somewhere.

You can use Pinterest any way you want:
Your items for sale only
Other peoples items
A mixture of for sale and general interest.

I'm finding more repins of pictures that have to do with the things I am most interested in. Only occasionally do for sale items get repined. I have one pin that has been being repinned many times a week for over a year.

When you make boards make sure you pin or repin onto the board that has to do with that pin. For example if you want to look at pictures of cats, you don't want the board you are looking at to be half pigs and recipes.

Check out the boards of several pinners before you start creating boards. There are some very creative people pinning and you can get excellent ideas for boards from them.

[elpereles]

Pinterest is easy to use. It improve since the 1rst time.

My recommendation. If you are interesting to promote your items. Break things in categories. Ask or search Moonwishes comments/suggestions about Pinterest.

About promoting other sellers. It isn't an obligation. I don't promote other sellers. I promote stuff in the marketplace. I create specific boards for it. So I'm not mixing my stuff with the rest.

[tigercreekgifts]

I have a pinterest business account however, still to this day, I cannot see how having a business account differs from a personal account other than they will allow you to pay for promoted pins if you want. They will also let you verify your store so a link to your store shows next to your pins but stores like ecrater using a sub domain or using a .com URL to mask the sub domain cannot get verified, only private .coms can be verified and I still couldn't figure out how to do that, the verification process for private .coms is complicated.

I pin a mixture of stuff. I have, I think??, about 34 boards right now. I have found that when I created boards and pinned only my items for sales I had very little followers and those who decided to follow all of my boards at once, would unfollow that one board that had my items but keep following the other boards that weren't helping me get traffic at all. I guess it made people feel like I was forcing advertising down their throat so I started creating general interest boards, pinning items I really like but every days I would slip in an item of mine too. So if I have a toy board, I will pin toys from all the web but slip some of my toys in there too. That works well. I had almost 500 followers but stupidly deleted several boards a while back which also removed the followers of those boards but I am back up to like 365 followers again.

Another little tip I learned and I have found my items are getting pinned way more than ever before. I stopped using my business name on pinterest because if people don't wanna see product promotions, they won't willingly follow a known business as much as they would a regular person. My items only got pinned once every 5-7 weeks. So, I switched to my name instead so that when I pin from my stores people won't see that my pinterest username matches the store name I pinned from, so now that people don't know I am pinning my own items, my items are getting pinned every few days now. And I do have a few boards I created that I don't even like, just to attract more followers to my other boards. I also have a few ecrater specific boards.

But people don't wanna follow a product promoter, they wanna come to you instead so I am simply making people think that I am just a regular person on pinterest, so when I do promote my products they don't know that I am, and they are more willing to pin my items I have for sale. It's working very well.

[MoonwishesStore]

I have written lots of info about using Pinterest. Under ecrater sellers only Thread, there is one about ecrater sales being down and there is a huge discussion about Pinterest there and how to use it to promote your own store and ecrater in general. I suggest you look there. I have severe arthritis including in my hands, so even though it seems I write a lot, I try to not repeat myself too much.

The suggestion on how to set up boards in your Pinterest account, by looking at what others are doing is a good one. Just like if you want to know what a good store looks like, go check out some stores and soon you will see things that are just plain weird and not working and you will know not to do that.

On my Pinterest account I have a board that was to be for sewing/needlecraft projects that my customers had made. Imagine my surprise to see one day a photo of a nice juicy hamburger! Or pictures from my other boards pinned onto that board Anyhow i realized that some folks either don't read or they don't care.

Most of my Pinterest site revolves around sewing and needle handcrafts. I currently have about 90 boards and over 13,000 followers. My most popular board is for Hand embroidery with over 9000 followers. I love to post pictures of projects I would like to do and that brings sewers into my site and then they can see many of the patterns I have up for sale. the nice thing about Pinterest is when you have something that could go in more than one category. Here you have to pick the best one, but on Pinterest if I have a pattern with a mom and dad, girl and boy and the pet dog all wearing matching outfits, I will pin it to my 5 different boards for each of those items so if someone is only interested in a doggy jacket, they will only look under my pet board for ideas. they won't have to try to figure out where else it might show up.

Hope that helps.

[oakteakstore]

Thanks for the info everyone. I guess I was trying to make it more complicated that it is. Seems pretty straightforward.

[maggiethehousecat]

Something that surprised me but happens quite often....when I am pinning an old listing, is to discover it has already been pinned by others.

[MoonwishesStore]