You’ve probably experienced the awesomeness that is Pinterest. I’m sure I’m not the only one that goes on there to find inspiration or just look at someone else's clean kitchen when mines a disaster. But Pinterest is also a great way to grow your business. Yep that’s right, Pinterest could bring traffic to your site, new clients to your business, help strengthen your email list building game, and maybe convert into more income.
But what’s the business card of the Pinterest world? Your profile. It’s kind of the base camp of all your original pins linked to your awesome content, and it’s a way for pinners to get to know you, and better understand your business. How else are they gonna know how great you and your business are if you don’t introduce them?
Your profile should be the first thing to be set up and polished up when you start using Pinterest for business. It’s the face of your business, and ensures that you’re attracting the right people to your pins. Which in turn ensures that your content is reaching your ideal audience.
Related: 5 Simple Steps to use Pinterest for Business Growth
Are you ready to up your Pinterest game? Here are 7 ways to ensure you’ve got a picture perfect Pinterest profile. (Too many P’s? Probably. But whose counting?)
Step 1: Sign up for a Business Account
It may seem obvious, but this is the most important step. In order to function as a business on Pinterest, you MUST have a business account (it’s in Pinterest’s Terms & Conditions!). Plus, this gives you all the bells and whistles that a Pinterest for Business account offers, like analytics and site linking.
You have two choices here:
Start from scratch and open up a brand new account
This is the option I went with, because I felt that my personal account had too much content that strayed away from my focus for Loving Simple. It seems like a lot of work to start from scratch and build up boards and followers, but it’s totally worth it to bring in the right audience.
To do this, you’ll need to use a different email address than the one you used to sign up for your personal account. This means, that you’ll be using your business email. I highly recommend getting a G-Suite to go along with your domain. This can be purchased from your hosting account. It looks more polished, and makes it easier for people to remember your website. For example, I’m april@lovingsimple.com. Easy to find me on the interwebs that way, eh?
It’s pretty simple to sign up with a new account, just follow the prompts.
Convert Personal Account to a Pinterest for Business
This option has both pros and cons. While you might get to reap the benefits of having established followers and boards, you’re also going to have to deal with making most of your boards private (I’m pretty sure your food blog audience isn’t going to be pinning all those silly cat memes.). And consider that a lot of the followers on your private account may not be your ideal audience.
Converting an account is also pretty simple as well. You’ll want to head over to the Pinterest for Business page, click on “sign up” in the top right-hand corner, and then click on the red “Switch to a Business” button in the popup.
Woo-hoo! Now you’ve officially got a Pinterest for Business account!!!
Step 2: Your Username
This will become your address on Pinterest, for example, my username is loving_simple, so when you visit my Pinterest profile, the URL is https://www.pinterest.com/loving_simple/.
You have 15 characters to work with here, so if your business or blog name is longer than that, you’ll have to get a little creative. You could use your name (eg. aprilwinters), or come up with a shorter version of your business name. Lots of options here, but be sure your Pinterest name clearly identifies you or your business so you can be found and remembered.
Step 3: Your Business Name
Your Business Name is the name that displays in bold at the top of your profile. Pinterest allows you 38 characters for this space, use them to your advantage! To maximize your business name, make sure you use these 3 key elements:
- Your blog’s name
- Your personal name
- Niche-relevant keywords
Let’s take a look at my profile for example:
I’ve got my first and last name, blog name, and all related keywords. This helps me show up in searches, and tells people what I’m all about without having to take a guess and do some sleuthing. Because 9 times out of 10, people won’t be doing any type of extra searching, they’ll just move on to the next guy or gal. And you definitely don’t want them doing that!
Step 4: Your Profile Photo
Alright, so photos can be tricky. Most people hate pictures of themselves, if you’re like me you never know what to do with your hands, or how you should smile so you don’t look like your fake smiling, even if you are fake smiling. But don’t spend a lot of time worrying about how frizzy your hair was that day, for this picture you’re just looking for a friendly photo to show that there’s a person behind your business. And if there’s more than one of you, or you’re too bashful to get in front of the camera, think about using your logo.
Step 5: A descriptive bio
Your bio has room for 160 characters, so make it short and sweet, and make it count. Now is not the time to get cutesy and use emojis or silly descriptors (sure we’re all addicted to Starbucks, but your Pinterest bio is not the place to sing its praises). Keep it simple with these 3 elements:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Who you do it for
If you have space, include your CTA (Call To Action) at the end.
BONUS TIP: You can include your location in your account settings. This adds a personal connection with your readers. If you’re uncomfortable with advertising where you live, you can just include your state/province and country, or even just your country. Since I’m kind of paranoid about stalkers, I’ve include my state and country.
Step 6: Link and Verify Your Website
This is a super important step! It allows you to include your website, which is crazy important if you want people to ya know, visit your site. And this step allows you to enable Rich Pins, which is the next step in this process.
To link and verify your website is a pretty simple and straight forward process:
- Head to your account settings page
- Click on “confirm website”
And if your using Squarespace, you’ll need to follow these steps:
- In the Home Menu, click Settings.
- Click Connected Accounts.
- Click Connect Account.
- Select Pinterest from the Social Accounts menu.
- Log in using your Pinterest username and password.
- Click Allow to authorize the connection between Pinterest and your site.
There seem to be various ways to connect a Wordpress.org site to Pinterest, so you may have to hit up Google for this one.
Step 7: Enable Rich Pins
Once your website has been verified, you can enable Rich Pins. YAY!!!
Rich Pins are pretty cool, because they include a little more information, like the price of an item or product on your site, and your site title. They don’t change the Pin image, but having these enabled does allow for text to be bolded underneath your Pin, in your Pin description. But only content from your site can be seen as Rich Pins.
The lovely people of Squarespace have written up an easy guide to follow to enable Rich Pins on your Squarespace site. If you’re using Squarespace, you can find a step by step guide here.
And if you’re using Wordpress, there are lots of resources, this one looked to be the most helpful.
Rich Pins are kinda helpful when you’re using Pinterest to grow your business, so definitely don’t skip this step.
There you have it, easy peasy nice and cheesy, perfect, Pinterest profile. In 7 simple steps you can have a bangin’ profile that will bring in readers, clients, and with time, income! So remember, and if you’re a skimmer and scrolled to the bottom:
1. You MUST have a Pinterest for Business account!
2. Your username is the link to your Pinterest account, make sure it’s your business name or your first and last name.
3. Your business name should include your name, your business name (obvious right?), and keywords for your niche, with a Call to Action. Remember, it appears in BOLD at the top of your profile.
4. Include a photo of your smiling beautiful face, or your logo.
5. Bio should include who you are, what you do, and who you do it for.
6. Link and verify your website, this allows you to enable rich pins, and makes your links clickable.
7. Enable Rich Pins, to allow prices for your products and links back to your original content to be in bold under all your pin descriptions.
Happy pinning!
Does this seem like a cool idea, but you just don't have the time to implement it? No worries, I can help you out. Check out my Work with Me page to learn more about how I can help you rock your Pinterest game!
