How Pinterest Can Grow Your Business Without Becoming a Time Suck.

 If you are growing your business you are probably looking for ways to get targeted traffic to your site without spending heaps of time and money.

There are many ways to get traffic. You can go for “organic” traffic, which normally means spending time creating amazing content.

Or you can go for paid traffic which involves giving  away some of your hard earned cash. (Depending on whether you can then gain more money from your traffic, this may or may not be a sensible option.)

We all want to attract our ideal customer without wasting time or money.

My favourite and best source of recurring traffic that attracts my ideal reader is Pinterest and I’m going to show you why I love it so much.

Of course, Pinterest isn’t for everyone but it is great for lots of business owners and when you have a great system, you really don’t have to spend hours and hours to get that traffic.

 HOW PINTEREST CAN GROW YOUR BUSINESS VIDEO

I Love Pinterest Users

My target market, my ideal reader, that person I’m trying to reach uses Pinterest.

Plus Pinterest users are often spending money.

• 200 million people use Pinterest monthly.

• 93% women

• Median age 40

• Majority of daily users under 40

• 93% of active pinners said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest.

(Source.)

 

Pinterest is Not a High Maintenance Platform

I have 4 kids to look after and although I’m dedicated to building up my business I don’t have hours to spend nurturing social media platforms.

My FB page is a deserted void of nothingness as I’m just not prepared to put the time into growing it. Equally as much as I love Instagram, I can’t be bothered to work on a platform that penalises me if I don’t turn up as frequently as they want me to.

(I made the mistake of forgetting about my IG account for a year and now it treats me like a spurned lover. Except it doesn’t seem to be willing to forgive and forget. I’m over it for now!)

Pinterest does reward people who pin. Of course, the more you pin to your account, the more people will see your pins. It’s not magic.

But it is really easy to use a scheduler and you don’t get penalised as long as you use one of the schedulers that is approved by Pinterest.

If I forget Pinterest for a while, I don’t see a huge dent in my traffic because of my pins that bring me consistent traffic.

Pinterest Doesn’t Require Hours of Input

You do need to create some kind of content that is valuable to your reader. You can’t expect Pinterest to send you traffic in return for sub standard, dull content that isn’t useful to anyone.

However, it’s easy to create a time efficient system to pin your own content and other peoples and get a good flow of traffic to your site. (Pinterest suggests not pinning your own content exclusively.)

I spend an hour a month scheduling. I also schedule out all my new content (one post a week). Plus I do a bit of hand pining during the week.

Even if I’m not great at keeping to my schedule, I don’t feel like it’s a disaster.

(Ahem, my scheduled queue hasn’t been working for the last couple of weeks but I’m still getting traffic from Pinterest.)

I can use Pinterest to grow my business and still maintain my life work balance and enjoy my family life.

 

Pinterest Brings Consistent Traffic

Once you get a pin that does well, it can bring you consistent traffic.

You may need to experiment for a bit to work out what does well for you, but when you figure it out, you’ve won the Jack Pot.

Anatomy of a Viral Pin

I have put together a simple handout “The Anatomy of a Viral Pin” that outlines the 3 important features of a pin that does well and attracts your ideal customer. When you sign up to join my "Easy Pinterest Club" (aka my newsletter) you'll be sent it by email.

Use Pinterest to Grow Your Email List

There are lots of different strategies to using Pinterest and earning money on line.

My personal strategy is to write content that my ideal reader is interested in, get them to sign up to my email list and hopefully nurture them so that they become a valuable customer.

For example, I write about how to help kids eat healthy foods.

My target reader is a parent of a young child who’s a picky eater.

I do a post that is a round up of “healthy snacks for toddlers”. In the post, I mention that they can sign up for my “feeding toddler cheat sheet”, a valuable gift that tells them the main steps that they need to take.

They then get sent some emails which help them with this problem more. Some of them will go on to buy a product from me (a book or an on line course.) Of course some won’t, but that’s fine.

Is Pinterest Right for Your Business?

Do you think Pinterest is a platform that is worth mastering?

If you are building up an email based business where you strive to provide your customers with valuable content and solutions to their problems, I'm willing to bet it is. (Just double check that your ideal customer is hanging around on Pinterest.)

Personally I am hugely grateful to Pinterest as it has allowed me to build up my business by helping me make contact with parents who I can help. It’s helped me drive consistent and targeted traffic to my website and for that I’m hugely thankful.