If you spend any time in social media, you've probably spent a few hours or days (or weeks?) on Pinterest. It is the ultimate inspiration board, visual idea source, and traffic tool. Yes — that's right. Pinterest is a great place to spend time and find your next favorite Snickerdoodle recipe or workout routine, but it can also be a huge source of traffic for your jewelry business.
For the past year, Pinterest has fluctuated between my first and second highest traffic referrer on my website. Those visitors don't always stick around — some are drive-by clickers. However, some do stay. They look around, and some become loyal fans and readers. Today I'm going to share seven great tips for using Pinterest to promote and grow your jewelry business. These tips will help you bring all those lovely new Pinterest browsers to your website and shop. Hopefully they will stay and become frequent visitors and customers!
1. Spend time on Pinterest. Get to know how Pinterest works. Learn how to pin, how to repin, how to create boards, and more. These are all basics, but the more familiar you are with how everything works, the less time it will take you when you are working on promoting your own images.
2. Pin your products. This might seem like another basic, but don't assume that everyone else will pin your jewelry. Get your photos out there.
3. Don't only pin your products. Pinterest frowns on that — and it makes your Pinterest boards boring. Build up your boards! Spend time pinning all sorts of things: jewelry styles, products you like, and anything else that catches your eye. Having a wide variety of Pinterest boards will only make your account more interesting to follow — and get you noticed by more people. The more followers you have, the more likely your jewelry images will be repinned, seen, and visited!
Find pinners whose style you like, and follow them. In addition to seeing all the fun things they are pinning, you will develop your account, and often people will follow you back. It's also a great idea to form a Pinterest group of friends and other business owners. Post links for each other and pin for each other. These support groups will put your jewelry in front of a whole different set of followers!
4. Know what works. There is no specific format for photos or for getting a pin to go viral — but I have a few tips for you that will help your photos get repinned.
- There are different theories as to the best time of day to pin. Some say weekends, some say mornings. I've found that the best times for an image to be repinned are those times that Pinterest traffic is higher. Evenings are great times to pin, when everyone is sitting down to a little relaxation and browsing Pinterest after dinner.
- Vertical photos are more likely to be repinned. That doesn't mean you shouldn't pin your images if your photos are horizontal, but vertical photos get more screen space and tend to be noticed more. Keep this in mind for your product shoots, and try to take a least one vertical beauty shot that you can use on Pinterest later.
In the screen shot above, you can see that the vertical Snickers Cheesecake Bar image is quite a bit more noticeable and gets more real estate on the page than the adorable Mummy Halloween top. Also, now I would like some cheesecake bars, please.
5. Know that when you are putting your jewelry images online, you are putting them online. Not everyone is a good pinner. Not everyone is out to support you and promote your business. There are companies that will take your photos, edit out your watermark, and post your photo with links to their own ad-filled sites. Awesome. However, Pinterest has a great support department, and they are vigilant when stolen pins are reported to them. The good from Pinterest far outweighs the bad.
6. Be a smart pinner. If you are going to pin, pin from the source. Make sure you are pinning or repinning from the original website and that they are getting proper credit.
This also holds true for your own site. Don't pin your jewelry from your main home page — make sure you are pinning from the item's actual page. This will attach the image link to the correct page and help those that click through on your photo arrive at the right page and jewelry piece.
You can see in this pin image that I've put my mouse over the website link at the bottom of the image. The mouse-over link shows that the photo goes to the actual page of the blog post, not just my main website. That way the pinner can easily access exactly what they are looking for.
As a side note, you'll see that with each image from your website, Pinterest shows a little graphic with other recent pins from your site. This is super helpful because pinners can see all the other gorgeous products from your website and click over and check them out. And hopefully they'll repin and click through!
7. Use Pinterest as a fabulous source of inspiration. While of course you want to stay true to your own style, Pinterest is a huge resource for images and ideas. For me, it has easily replaced Google Images as a photo search engine. Look around and see what's trending, and find new styles or materials. Maybe you'll come across a new necklace that you love that uses materials in a way you haven't thought about. Create a board for Jewelry Inspiration and pin that image for later — when you need ideas and creativity.
Pinterest can be an important tool for growing your jewelry business. While it's easy and fun to spend hours there, it takes just a few simple steps to utilize Pinterest as a huge resource and inspiration.
Bonus: Want to learn how to design and sell jewelry? Enroll in the New York Institute of Art and Design's Jewelry Design Course today!
