You’re probably creating Pinterest boards incorrectly. In fact, you probably don’t even know that your Pinterest board strategy isn’t even a strategy. Have you just created boards on your profile hoping that your content will get found? Today, I want to walk you through exactly how you should think about how to create a Pinterest board strategy, for your shop especially. 

What to know with how to create a Pinterest board strategy 

So as you start to think about how to create a Pinterest board strategy, there are three things I really want you to begin thinking about. 

1. What products do you sell in your business? 
2. What content do you create in your business? Any of the places where you actively are creating content, I want you to write those ideas down.
   1. blog
   2. YouTube channel
   3. social media 
   4. email newsletter
3. What services do you offer? You may not be offering services, but they can go hand in hand with the products you sell. 

I’m going to walk you through a very specific example of creating a board strategy as if you are a digital product seller with an online shop like Etsy or Shopify. If you sell physical products, these things still apply to you. So pay attention, take notes. 

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Create a diagram with everything you have

The example I’m using in this tutorial is a digital planner seller, someone selling digital planners in their shop. Based on those three questions above, put everything down on paper so you can see it and how they work together, in a venn diagram.

Make three circles like this, and you want them to overlap very clearly. Because how these overlap is going to be things for Pinterest boards between your content, product, and services.

So put down all the products that you sell. If you’re a digital product seller, this could be digital planners, digital stickers, a mini planning course. You also sell a paid workshop where you teach people how to use their digital planner. That is a product and also content, so it’s kind of in between where your products and services overlap.

Your social media content could be things like time management tips, productivity tips, etc. Any content where you’re teaching people in order to sell your product, write those things down. Now in the middle of products that you sell and services that you offer could be something like a membership program like what I offer, Pin Profit Academy. That is in between, it’s a product I sell but it’s also a service that I provide because I do a lot of one on one work inside of that.

As far as services that a digital planner seller could sell, it could be services that you offer inside of your business and systems that you’ve set up. So I want you to go through this exercise and visualize all of these things possible. From these topics, we’ll turn them into boards.

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Determining your board topics

As we begin to think about converting these topics into boards on your profile, you want to look at different groups of boards, like major topics. Organize them into three categories: 

• Product boards
• Content boards
• Resources/trend boards

With your product boards, you’ll have groupings of search terms directly related to your products. In the case of our example as a digital planner seller, we’d have boards for digital planners for students, notebooks, planners, and planner stickers, etc. Those are four product based boards that I could create on a profile selling digital planners that would attract my audience, but also sell my product.

The second topic is content based boards. These boards are going to support the content that you create, but are not necessarily product focused. Those are like digital planner tips, how to use note taking apps, college student planning tips, etc. Your blog posts and long form content that eventually leads to your products are great to pin here.

With the third, supporting boards are things like tools, resources, and it can also be seasonal trends. So supporting boards for this specific example could be iPad wallpapers, journal prompts for New Year’s self care, and back to school Google Calendar tips. 

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Testing your board naming

I want to show you a quick tip. If you were to create a board, you can test whether or not Pinterest understands your board and if you’ve done a really good job of naming it. 

You do this by going to your board, and down below, click ‘More Ideas’. Then if you see pins that are the same topic and content as the name of the board, you know that Pinterest understands well. You’ve done a good job. So that’s what I want you to pay attention to. 

Prioritizing search terms with your boards

Now, as you begin to think about what boards that you should create on Pinterest, you’re going to have to rank, with importance, what search terms you want to create boards for based on that terminology.

Quite often you can have two or more different search terms that could actually lead to the same thing. And a common question I get quite often is, “How do we prioritize which term to actually make a board for? Or should we just make a board for both or all of the topics?” What I like to tell people is to prioritize them based on how your audience is searching for them. There may be a lot more searches and interest in one term, but some significance in another.

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Pinterest searches to validate your boards

Something else that you can do is you can actually come to Pinterest and search for things like ‘how to plan a day for students’. Maybe you want to create a board on that. Then you come into a Pinterest search and actually see what pins are showing up and see if this actually matches what you believe the search intent is for.

So if the search intent is ‘how to plan your day as a student’ and all you see coming up are digital planner templates, as a digital planner seller, you know that search is related. But if pins that show up after a search don’t match up for what you have in mind, you may want to rethink how you create your board and what topic you actually go after.

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Your homework in creating your boards

I don’t want you to do something that a lot of people do right off the bat, and that is to create just a bunch of boards. They don’t have any forethought into how they’re creating their boards, and the language that they use isn’t actually how people are searching for the content on the platform.

Now, before I leave you, go and do your homework now with creating your Pinterest board strategy. I want to leave you with some action items. 

Brainstorm your three topics.

• What products do you sell? 
• What content do you create? 
• And what services do you offer? If you don’t offer services, that’s fine. 

Then I want you to start researching your boards, and start prioritizing them in order of importance. 

• What are you publishing next? 
• What do you already have in your content library that you can create pins on?

I would prioritize things that are going to be in the Pinterest trends coming up first, in order of importance. Then after that, the pillars of content that you create in your business all the time deserve a dedicated board on your profile. 

Next, are there supporting boards, any trend based boards, tools that you could create? The topics at hand that you want to prioritize are going to be directly related to the products and services and content that you create in your business, i.e. how you generate sales. The supporting boards come later. They are not as important, but they may be essential to your profile.

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Using parallel topics with your boards and content

One of the common questions I get is “I sell X, but I also pin pins on Y. Is that appropriate?” For example, a digital product seller is obviously talking about digital planners, but maybe they also use Notion. They also could create content on how to use Notion, but they don’t sell anything in their business related to that. Someone in the industry looking for Notion tips may then be interested in digital planners. So, it’s like a parallel topic to your business that brings in customers from secondary topics. 

Another example of this is a recent student in Pin Profit Academy. She sells boho style, really nice, sustainable clothing, but she doesn’t sell hats. So, she created a board on her profile about hats and it still supported growing her audience and sales. 

That is something I want you to think through, but I also want you to de-prioritize those boards since they’re not your primary. You do not need to pin 15 or 20 pins to a board before you set it live into the world. Two to three pins is fine with these secondary topics. 

Optimize your board titles and descriptions

I do want each board to have a really solid board title and description. That is key: four to five keywords for every description that you write, and at least one main keyword for your pin and board titles.

That is my framework for how to create a Pinterest board strategy for your shop or store. That should also work really well for you. Beyond that, create your boards, make them secret until you have things to pin to them, and then publish pins to that board and then make that board live. 

You do not, and I will repeat this, you do not need to have 15 to 20 pins. Your board does not need to have the most pins in order to rank in search. You just need to have really optimized content. Pinterest SEO is just as important as Google SEO, so make sure you’re doing that or you’re just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks.

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Next steps with your Pinterest marketing strategy

Now, beyond that, you might be asking yourself, “Why the hell are you sharing all of this information for free?” I do it for two reasons. Number one, I like sharing information that no one else is talking about. Number two, I’d like to show you how I can help you further. And if I give you a taste of what I can do inside of my really low cost membership, then that’s more incentive for you to come and join us.

What’s inside Pin Profit Academy is: 

• a full organic Pinterest course
• Pinterest ads course
• Pinterest workflow course
• a template library
• monthly deep dive trainings
• coaching calls and working sessions

That’s literally just scraping the surface. There are actually 15 on demand courses inside of my membership. It starts at $37 a month. This of course is not a hard pitch. I hardly ever talk about my products and services. But I do want you to know that I can help you. 

If you are now confused on how to get started, this is how to get started… If you feel good about how I can help you, come join us in Pin Profit Academy.

Now that you know how to create a Pinterest board strategy for your brand, you’re going to need to know how to create a full marketing strategy. And you’ll find that inside of PPA, so come join us!

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