10 Steps to Making Your First Dollar with Pinterest

So you have heard about Pinterest, you have started using it, maybe you’ve even started trying to make money through it. But.. there’s a part of you that knows you’re missing something. After all, you’ve heard about other guys (or gals) making upwards of $1000 per week. What did they do, and who did they have to sleep with to get to that stage? Let’s hope nobody. On a serious note, I totally get that feeling of ambiguity, so I’m hoping this guide will fill in the missing pieces, boost your confidence levels, (and your bank balance). Since this is a complementary item to PinPioneer, snag a copy of that for maximum effectiveness (use code: ‘10steps’). 1. Understand your audience, understand your niche.Reports show that a large percentage of Pinterest users are female (est 80%). Keep this in mind when choosing a niche. You can see how ‘internet marketing’ might not be the best. Instead try to find a sub-niche of one of these broader niches. The stats below show the most popular pins and boards as of October 1st, 2012. Most Popular Pins:Food & Drink: 11.9%Other: 11.1%DIY & Crafts: 9.2%Home Decor: 5.9%Women’s Fashion: 5.4%Hair & Beauty: 4.6%Weddings: 4.3%My life: 4%Kids: 3.5%Humor: 3.4%Travel: 3.2%Film, Music & Books: 2.3%Remaining Categories: 31.2% Most Popular Boards:Home Decor: 11%Other: 10.7%Art: 10.7%Design: 10.3%

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Women’s Fashion: 7.7%Photography: 5.8%DIY & Crafts: 4.9%My Life: 3.8%Food & Drink: 3.6%Film, Music & Books: 3%Products: 3%Travel: 2.5%Remaining Categories: 23.2% After you have established which niche you want to proceed with, create an account specifically for that niche. It’s cleaner and usually more effective than having one account targeting 5 different topics. Do the appropriate keyword research to pick which sub-niches you want to pursue. In this case, I’m going to use the same example I used in the ‘Setting up Pinterest Niche Sites’ bonus that was included with your download. Women’s fashion. More specifically, scarves. Actually, ‘tube scarves’. Pick about three or four of these sub-niches per account, create SEO friendly boards for each of them (either automatically.. or manually) and you’ve got your marketing framework ready. 2. Know the limits, use the delays, act sober.As of late, Pinterest has introduced some new ‘spam filters’ here are some triggers you should familiarize yourself with and look to avoid. Max following limit per account, per day (using browser, or web requests): 300Recommended time delay when pinning 100 or more in one run: 40-60 seconds between pins.Est logins into different accounts from same IP before block: 10 accounts, with no delay.No. of submissions from a semi-trusted account with no delay before captcha appears: 72-90No. of submissions from a new account before captcha appears: 20

3. Niches Sites > Affiliate LinksFact is, when the whole Pinterest marketing craze first started marketers were using Amazon affiliate links in the descriptions (or sources) successfully and making a respectable amount of money. Pinterest has since made this harder by automatically stripping affiliate links and redirects from pins. So, instead of using shifty tactics for short term gains, it’s become far more valuable to set up ‘Niche Sites for Pinterest’. Again, if you have the guide/product refer to it. Otherwise, I’m sure you can find it floating around the web. Here’s a simple breakdown of how these websites work: - You buy an exact match domain (EMD), or as close as you can get to your sub-niche name. - You set up an automatic wordpress blog, using one of the many available plugins.

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- You use a quality eCommerce theme to make the website look and function like a proper store.- Before that you create about 5-10 pages of SEO friendly content using a service like iWriter.- Then you set up your Wordpress blog to automatically generate eBay/Amazon etc affiliate items under your niche.- Add a ‘recent pins’ gallery to your sidebar linking back to your Pinterest profile- Add a number of social sharing options.- Set up an email opt-in feature in your sidebar and an exit blocker.- Pin the same (or similar) items you have listed in your store to your Pinterest account, changing the source URL to lead back to your website. Give it a week or two, and these websites will start to become self-sustainable, and you’ll gradually see more and more SERP traffic coming in. 4. Call to actionsThis is pretty simple but I’m surprised how few people actually do it. At the end of your pin description place a call to action (i.e. ‘Please like, share, or repin. Thanks!’ or ‘For more beautiful scarves check out: yourdomain.com). And if you’re using PinPioneer, you can spintax - randomly rotate between versions of your description for better A/B testing. Simple! 5. Building followers (correctly)There is a belief that after following a group of people on Twitter/Pinterest etc, a certain percentage will reciprocate and follow back. And although this is true, to really stand out and turn your followers into customers you need to give them a reason to stick around. Value. So how is it done? Here is the basic structure for a more successful following campaign: 1. Create profile (optimize etc)2. Pin 100 images to your sub-niche board(s). Flickr is good for unique-high quality content.3. Follow 100 people in your niche4. Like, comment, repin 200 more pins in your niche5. Follow the same 200 people you just ‘contacted’.6. Wait 1-2 days. 7. Pin 1000 more images/videos. 8. Repeat steps 3-59. Wait 1-2 days, unfollow anybody who isn’t following you back.10. Continue pinning/commenting/following. Note: When commenting, ‘spin’ your messages and offer positive affirmation (i.e. “Excellent, you are my new favourite pinner!”, “Totally getting this!”). Alternatively if you can think of generic witty remarks relevant to your niche, it’s always helpful. This kind of systematic approach is completely automated, but also far more useful for both staying under Pinterest’s radar, and growing the reputation of your own profile. You are NOT spamming and as a result you’ll see a higher percentage of follow backs, and higher user engagement over the months to come.

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6. Repinly board / pin scrapingSo you want to engage with your users but to do so you need high quality content. You’ve tried using Flickr but it hasn’t been adequate enough. You’re about to give up hope but then you find this guide, so what do you do? This method will be expanded in a video later, but here are the basics: There is a Pinterest stats service I like to use called, Repinly which provides lots of cool information about popular pinners, boards, etc. If you are struggling to find content for your niche, all you need to do is search up the most popular boards for your keywords, copy that URL down, stick into whichever app you are using and it should scrape back all the pins for that board. And off you go! A good way to cut down time searching for content on Pinterest. 7. IFTTT Social Spheres Simple but super powerful. Why limit yourself to only Pinterest? Instead, spread the reach of your pins, your profile and your website by intertwining Pinterest with all the popular social services. Watch this video for an overview. 8. Watermarking Your PinsPhotos are generally more shareable than links. Along with videos they are usually the things that go end up going viral. So, if there is a higher chance of your photo getting shared than your link, why not watermark your photo with your web address/company logo etc. This is how it’s done: - Download your selection of popular or otherwise talked about pins in your niche. For auto batch downloads use this chrome extension.- Watermark them in batch using photoshop. Tutorial here.- Import them back into PinPioneer (or whichever app you use) along with your tagged descriptions and links.- Upload them back to Pinterest, to your followers, watermarked! 9. Offering ‘social media’ servicesThere is also another route you can go down if you don’t have a sustainable business of your own, or if you don’t like playing with affiliate marketing. Social media services. Businesses are paying upwards of $50,000/year for social media consultants to do nothing more than maintain their online presence. With the information attached in this guide, along with the tools recommended you can easily provide business with what they need to stay social for a fraction of the cost (i.e. high quality, engaging content, automatically linked, and uploaded to all their social media accounts). They think you are doing a lot of work when in fact it only takes you a couple of clicks.

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Offer these services on freelance websites like odesk, freelancer.com, elance.com etc. 10. Price taggingNot too long ago, I was curious whether or not ‘price tagging’ your pins would have any impact on their performance within Pinterest (i.e. clickthroughs, appearance in serps etc). Now, this is by no means an objective point of reference but it appears as though, pins which are price tagged (i.e. those which include a dollar value in the description) perform better in Pinterest’s own search results for that keyword. Since then, I’ve been price tagging 1/4 pins related to items available for purchase with relative success. And that’s it! If you want more information about anything included above (or any form of online marketing) I offer consultancy services with remote control via Teamviewer. Contact me here. Keep it tight,Eric

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