HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR ETSY STORE ON PINTEREST
Bonus Material: 50 Best Pinterest Tips – Free Guide
This blog post is for Etsy sellers who want to drive more organic traffic to their Etsy store.
Introduction
Etsy can be a great platform to use to sell your products, because it’s an e-commerce system in and of itself, with around 500 million people visiting Etsy each month.
That’s a huge audience inside the platform searching for products to buy!
It’s fantastic that Etsy brings such high volumes of visitors to the platform through their own marketing systems, but that doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels when it comes to pushing traffic to your Etsy store.
Etsy has seen an explosion in Etsy sellers on the platform – 8 million and counting!
This is not surprising, given how many people are in the platform searching for products to buy.
But this does mean Etsy has become a much more crowded marketplace than it once was.
You now have more competition when it comes to ranking your products on the first page of Etsy, and being the Etsy store people want to purchase from, over your competitors.
Any marketing you can do outside of the platform to bring more traffic to your Etsy store and your Etsy products, is good to do.
This should absolutely be part of your Etsy store strategy, to help give you the best chance of selling your products from that marketplace.
There are lots of ways you can market your Etsy store away from the platform, but one of the single best ways you can do this organically (so no money down!), is through Pinterest.
Why Pinterest Is A Great Platform For Organic Traffic
Here’s why I highly recommend every Etsy seller use Pinterest as part of their traffic driving strategy:
- Pinterest is a search engine (a bit like a visual version of Google). People actively go to Pinterest to find solutions for the things they’re looking for. This is very different to social media, where many people are scrolling for entertainment, rather than shopping purposes.
- Pinterest still has the ability to drive significant volumes of traffic to your small business organically – including to your products and services on Etsy. See below for a Pinterest metric screenshot of one of the ladies in my 40k community – she’s a creative business owner. You can see the volume of outbound clicks she has achieved from Pinterest to her business over the course of a year. These stats are insane compared to social media, and it’s ALL organic traffic. This is why you SHOULD be on Pinterest.
- Good Pinterest strategy takes only 10-15 minutes a day, when you know how to use the platform well.
- Pinterest still gives you the ability to drive organic traffic to your small business – including to your Etsy store, which is why it remains one of the best platforms to use to get more traffic over to your products on Etsy.
- There are many, many niches that perform really well on Pinterest including creative niches, coaching, financial, food, fitness, wellness, recipe, parenting, home decor and diy, and home organisation niches, to name but a few.
Key Pinterest Strategy To Drive Traffic To Your Etsy Store
If you’re ready to start increasing the volume of traffic to your Etsy store using Pinterest as a means to do this, let’s dive in to some key Pinterest tips to help make sure you do this right.
1. Pinterest Business Account
Make sure you have a Pinterest business account, not a personal account.
You can change a personal account to a business account, you can also add a business account to your personal account, or you can create a Pinterest business account from scratch.
Any of these options are fine, as long as you do have a business account, because this gives you greater insight in to metrics, and allows you to claim your website inside the platform (sadly you can no longer claim your Etsy store in Pinterest – they stopped allowing this some time ago).
2. Your Etsy Listings
Think about the listings you have on Etsy – what they are named and what do they do, because you want to create some Pinterest boards that align with the products you sell.
There are a couple of things to consider here.
Firstly, you want your boards (titles and descriptions) to be a reflection of the core products you sell on Etsy.
But you also need to make sure that your board titles and descriptions are keyword optimised for Pinterest.
This means taking a bit of time to do some research over on Pinterest.
For example, let’s say you sell a range of women’s t-shirts on Etsy.
It’s a good idea to start with 1-3 Pinterest boards you can pin to, that have a connection to the products you sell, but also match your products, Pinterest boards and Pinterest pins with the search terms people are inside Pinterest looking for.
If I head to Pinterest and I type “womens t-shirts” into the search bar, I can see from the results that eleven keywords are shown (see pic below).
I now know these are the keywords people are inside Pinterest searching for when it relates to women’s t-shirts, and I can use this information to set up my Pinterest boards.
3. Pinterest Boards
You want to choose the most relevant keywords from the search results you get, to create 1-3 different boards on your Pinterest account, that you can start to use to showcase the t-shirts you sell on Etsy.
It goes a little bit deeper here too.
Ideally you need to find some variations for your individual Pinterest board content, because the one thing you do not want to do on Pinterest is ONLY post Pinterest pins to your products on Etsy.
The best way to do this is to have at least one Pinterest board that’s more of an inspo type board where, for example, if we take the women’s t-shirts, you can share Pinterest pins that go to a blog post, or a You Tube channel, and in those spaces you share t-shirt inspo, to help get people more engaged with you as a small business owner.
So from the image above, if I were to set up a Pinterest account to promote t-shirts I sell on Etsy, I would create the following three Pinterest boards named using keywords from the list above:
Board 1 – named Women’s tshirt ideas – this is a slightly longer tail keyword than just ‘woman’s tshirts’ and could work better on Pinterest to get my t-shirt pins in front of my niche audience. This board is where I would post Pinterest pins that predominantly go to my Etsy products.
Board 2 – named Women’s tshirt fashion – this would be a board that would include a mix of pins that lead to the products I sell on Etsy, along with pins that lead to either a blog or you tube channel.
Board 3 – named Women’s tshirt hacks – this would be a board I would use more specifically for pinterest pins that go to my blog or you tube channel. That’s where I would show up and share all the t-shirt hacks for my t-shirts (things like how to best wear a t-shirt with jeans and a belt, how to side tie a knot in your t-shirt for a summer vibe etc).
The main purpose of Board 3 would be to push people over to my blog or you tube channel where I could then really showcase my expertise as a t-shirt expert.
Doing this would help people become better invested in me, and within every blog or you tube video my pins linked to, I would then promote the t-shirts I was showcasing – sending them through a link to my Etsy store to make a purchase.
It’s really important to have pinterest pins that are more than just pins to your Etsy store.
You have to be able to show up and showcase your credibility and knowledge as a t-shirt seller (or what it is you do as a business!), because this will help people become much more invested in you, and they are then likely to be more willing to visit your Etsy store, leading to more Etsy sales for you.
There’s a little more to good Pinterest strategy, and to having effective Pinterest boards set up – and you can learn more about that strategy in each of these places:
4. Pinterest Pins
When you have your Pinterest boards set up correctly, you can then start pinning to those boards.
This again requires good Pinterest strategy.
One of the KEY things to be mindful of when it comes to pinning on Pinterest, is that the platform DOES NOT LIKE broken links.
So when you post your own pins to your Pinterest boards, you MUST make sure that the urls you add to each of those pins will remain active and live urls moving forwards.
This can be tricky for some Etsy sellers, because they don’t always keep all of their listings live forever.
If you end up with lots of pins on Pinterest that go to links that are no longer live – Pinterest could shadow ban your account, because it sees this as spammy.
What Pinterest wants from you is fresh pins that go to live links, period.
If you know you have listings on Etsy that don’t always last forever, a way to get around this issue, and prevent your pins going to broken links, is when pinning your Pinterest pins, you show a selection of products on the pin image, and then link that pin to a CATEGORY in your Etsy store, rather than an individual listing, again as long as that category will have a full and long life so the url remains live.
Another key point to think about is that Pinterest likes new pins (or fresh pins) on the platform.
This means that every time you pin a Pinterest pin inside the platform, it should be a pin design that is never exactly the same as any pin you have pinned before.
You should also make sure you leave space between the pins you post that go to the same url.
That means that if you post a Pinterest pin that leads to a category or a listing on your Etsy store today, you should leave a space of between 5-10 days before you post another Pinterest pin that leads to the same url.
Where once we could pin hundreds of pins to the same url day after day after day, Pinterest no longer likes or wants you to do this.
Spread out your pins to the same url, so that you keep your Pinterest account healthy, and you keep Pinterest happy.
The three key points above are all part of good Pinterest SEO and great Pinterest strategy, and they should not be ignored.
5. Pinning On Pinterest
When you have your Pinterest business account set up, you have some keyword optimised boards that are both Pinterest friendly and match what you sell on Etsy, and you’re ready to start sharing some Pinterest pins to get eyes on you and traffic to your small business, the next thing to note is how it’s best to post your Pinterest pins.
You’ll find over in your Etsy business account that there’s an option you can use to share your Etsy listings from inside Etsy, over to Pinterest.
This is kind of like a Pinterest pin creator inside your Etsy store.
PLEASE DO NOT USE THIS FUNCTION.
Pinning from Etsy to Pinterest is not good strategy.
What Etsy does when you pin from inside Etsy over to Pinterest, is it takes one of your Etsy listing images, and pins it to Pinterest as a pin.
The trouble with this, is your Etsy listing images are not optimized for Pinterest.
The sizes are all wrong, the imagery and text overlay will be wrong, and they simply will not work well as pins on Pinterest.
Just like you do for your social media accounts, you need to create specific content for Pinterest.
You can use Canva to do this.
You only need a free Canva account to create some fantastic looking pins for your Pinterest strategy.
If you don’t like the idea of creating your own pins – I can save you time, with a range of pre-made Pinterest pin Canva templates you can use for your Pinterest strategy. You can find details of those pin templates here:
When you post any Pinterest pins inside Pinterest, you need to make sure they are Pinterest friendly pins.
That means using the right size for your pins.
Good pin sizes:
1000 x 1500 pixels or
1000 x 1920 pixels
If you go to the search bar in Canva and search for “Pinterest pin” – you’ll find hundreds of templates you can choose from.
Use any design you like, and then customize it to suit your brand.
Make sure you use clear product photos on your pins.
These should be professional images, that make your brand and products look great.
Add some simple, easy to read text overlay to the Pinterest image, to let your audience know what the pin is about.
This can encourage them to click the pin to dive deeper with you.
When you’ve created your pin in Canva, download it as a PNG, and then upload it to Pinterest.
You will need to add the right keywords to your pin titles, and use relevant keywords in your pin descriptions.
You can then choose the relevant board that pin will go on, add some Pinterest tags if you have that feature available (it’s rolling out at the time of writing this post), add your active url to the pin, and then send it live.
6. Watch Your Pinterest Metrics
Once you’ve started to share Pinterest pins on your Pinterest account, you can use Pinterest’s metrics to keep an eye on your best performing pins.
Your Pinterest metrics will give you insight into the pins your Pinterest audience is engaging with the most.
Those are your great pins, you should take note of those pins, and pin more of them (fresh pin designs each time please!).
Your Pinterest metrics give you really great feedback about your growth and success on the platform.
Don’t be afraid to dive in to those metrics, to keep an eye on what’s working well for you on the platform.
7. The Most Important Thing
It’s risky to rely purely on Etsy for traffic to your store.
Whilst that may be the easiest way to go, it’ll help your Etsy store enormously if you have strategy to drive traffic to Etsy from other spaces online.
This will help you bring a wider audience to your store, and, if they have come from other channels such as Pinterest, they’ve already indicated an interest in your Etsy products by clicking through to your store. This makes them more likely to make a purchase from you.
Pinterest, by far, gives you the ability to get organic traffic to your Etsy store over and above social platforms.
So go create your Pinterest business profile, set up some good Pinterest-friendly boards, design some beautiful pins over in Canva that really showcase your products and what it is you do.
Optimize those pins for Pinterest with great keyword strategy, and start to see the traffic to your Etsy store, and to your other spaces (blog, podcast or You Tube channel) begin to increase.
Bonus Material: 50 Best Pinterest Tips Free Guide
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