I’m all for building a solid Pinterest foundation, but sometimes you’ve got limited time and want to know how to improve your current Pinterest marketing in the least amount of time possible. That’s what this list of Pinterest tips is for.
Not every Pinterest tip has to be comprehensive or take hours out of your day. These quick Pinterest tips for creative entrepreneurs are simple and easy fixes you can do in about 10 minutes or less. But don’t let their small size confuse you; these suggestions are just as impactful as they are easy to implement!
10 Minute Pinterest Tips for Creative Entrepreneurs
If you’re using Pinterest as a creative entrepreneur, it’s likely you’re already wearing a bunch of “hats” in your business. That’s why I’m giving you one quick tip or swap to try in each element of your Pinterest marketing strategy.
Use these tips to review your current Pinterest account, or take them in to guide you as you get started! Either way, you’ll want to remember these simple hacks to make the most of your Pinterest marketing efforts!
1. Make sure your Pinterest username is the same as your Instagram username
If you have a following as one username on other social media platforms, don’t make your audience learn a new one for Pinterest! Of course, if the same handle isn’t available, you’ll have to make do, but try and keep them as similar as possible.
2. Use the same profile picture on Pinterest and Instagram
Yep, it’s the same vibe as the first tip. You want your audience to recognize you across every platform. Keeping the profile picture the same ensures brand cohesiveness!
3. Add a keyword to your profile name that’s content-focused, not your job title
This is one of the most common mistakes I see on people’s Pinterest profiles. If they’ve added a broad, high-volume keyword to their profile title, the impulse is typically to add your job title. For example, if you write website copy, you might make your title “Your Name | Website Copywriter”.
While that’s better than nothing, I’d encourage you to swap that “job title” focused keyword to one that focuses more on the content and value that Pinterest users can expect to see on your profile. For this example, it’s as simple as changing “Website Copywriter” to “Website Copywriting Tips”.
Remember, your Pinterest audience doesn’t care about you; they care about what you can help them with or provide them.
4. Claim your website domain
Depending on your website platform and your comfortability with it, this quick Pinterest tip might take slightly longer than 10 minutes, but it’s worth any amount of time! Claiming your website domain on Pinterest tells Pinterest that you “own” that website.
Since the Pinterest algorithm places so much importance on fresh, original content, claiming your domain is one way to signal that you’re doing just that. For most website platforms, this involves including a short HTML tag in the header code of your website.
Here are my trusted tutorials for some of the most popular website platforms:
- How to Claim Your Showit Website on Pinterest
- How to Claim Your Squarespace Website on Pinterest
- How to Claim Your WordPress Website on Pinterest
- How to Claim Your Kajabi Website on Pinterest
Claiming your domain is a simple Pinterest tip that will have a huge impact, as you’ll be able to see more detailed analytics about pins leading back to your domain, and your pins will likely start performing better, too!
5. Add the board title to your pin title before publishing
Making your pin titles and descriptions keyword-rich is an essential part of Pinterest SEO, but it can be hard to know if you’re doing “enough.” One easy way to make sure your pin titles are SEO-optimized is to include the title of the board you’re pinning to in the pin title itself.
If you’ve followed my advice on creating and optimizing your Pinterest boards, your board titles will have strong keyword titles already. Plus, when the keyword in your pin title matches the title of the board it’s being pinned to, that makes it super easy for the Pinterest algorithm to understand the topic of your content.
6. Use your blog post’s meta description as a pin description in a pinch
There are definitely some days where my brain just canNOT write a single additional word, but I’ve got pin descriptions to finish. What am I going to do? I’m going to grab that blog post meta description, add a few extra keywords if it needs it, and go on about my day.
Meta descriptions are the snippets that Google will typically pull about your page in the search results, and they’re commonly talked about in the world of website SEO.
My pals over at Duo Collective will tell you that it’s not a ranking factor for Miss Google, but they are important for user engagement and click-throughs. In plain English? If you’re writing good meta descriptions, they’re probably very enticing, clickable, and have your main keyword in them.
That makes them the perfect candidates for your pin description starting point. You can use the meta description as it is, but if you’ve got a little creative juice left in the tank, see if you can add a few more keywords in there to make sure the pin description is optimized for Pinterest.
Just like including the board title in your pin title gives that extra “check!” to Pinterest’s SEO robots, using the meta description in your pin description verifies to Pinterest that this pin is linking back to what you say it is. Gold star for you!
7. Customize your website’s 404 page
Of course, we hope that no one ever lands on your website’s error page, but mistakes happen, and that’s why the 404 error page exists in the first place. This is the page that shows up if someone navigates to a broken link or non-existent URL.
Customizing your 404 page is especially important for your Pinterest marketing because even if you edit the URL on a pin, it only edits that particular pin, not any of the repins or saves it’s accumulated.
So if you have an old pin that links to an outdated website or you changed the URL and a user still clicks through, that’s when they’re going to end on the 404 page. If you haven’t customized it, that user is likely to click right on back to Pinterest and forget you existed.
On the flipside, if you have customized your 404 page, you have the opportunity to still help that user and direct them to where they wanted to go or at least point them in a similar direction.
Need some examples? Here are some of my favorites…
This Pinterest tip might also take you a bit longer than 10 minutes, but it’s worth it, and you don’t have to put that much effort into it. Anything is better than the bland, boring default!
P.S. If you want to do some research on your fav site’s 404 pages, all you have to do is type their main URL and add /404 to the end. Happy browsing!
8. Check the most popular searches before you start creating your pins
I’m a big proponent of doing all your Pinterest keyword research up-front, but I don’t want to let that stop you from creating Pinterest content at all! Before you start designing your pins or writing your pin copy, head over to Pinterest to pick a few relevant and highly searched keywords.
Let’s say you’re pinning a blog post about brand voice, so you type “brand voice” into the Pinterest search bar. Pinterest will automatically suggest the most popular searches about brand voice, like brand voice examples, brand voice guidelines, and brand voice words. Those would be three great keywords to try to weave into your pin graphic and pin copy.
If you don’t have an hour or two to spend doing the bulk of your keyword research, this on-the-fly method takes a maximum of 5 minutes and will make a world of difference in your Pinterest results.
Using Pinterest as a Creative Entrepreneur
As it’s such a visual platform, Pinterest makes perfect sense for any creative entrepreneur looking to expand their marketing strategy. At the same time, you and I both know that doing all the things as a solopreneur or small team is overwhelming.
You don’t have to use all of these Pinterest tips at once or even right away, but small, baby steps in the right direction will help you make more of an impact with your Pinterest marketing than ignoring it entirely.
If you like this bare minimum approach with simple yet effective tips, you’ll love the Ultimate Pinterest Marketing Checklists, where I share everything you need to be doing on Pinterest daily, weekly, and monthly (and nothing you don’t).
