Pinning for Etsy Sellers: Tips for gaining Pinterest Followers

T.E.S.T.'s own Michelle of  Kiriki Press has found that Pinterest a useful tool for running and promoting her modern, handcrafted embroidery kit business. She's managed to gain thousands of followers over the last half year, without spending much time daily, and has found Pinterest helps drive traffic to her Etsy shop.

Hi everyone! So I just reached 10,000 Pinterest followers (from 200 last summer). I know 10,000 isn't a ton compared to many other pinners, but I thought I'd share what I did to get to 10,000 because I've noticed that a lot of my Etsy traffic and sales are coming from Pinterest these days:

Barn Owl DIY Embroidery Kit by Kirikipress on Etsy

•  Only pin large, good quality images - (images with a vertical orientation look the best)
•  Link any images of your work directly to your online shop. I have a separate board for my own work.
• I've been extremely selective with which pinners and boards I follow. Don't follow people just because they follow you. This will clutter your feed with pins you don't care about repinning.
• I have one board that I have put the effort into building up, Pattern Inspiration, which has over 2000 pins and makes up about 90% of my followers. Through this board I have had hundreds of repins on my personal work board, which only has a few dozen pins that were pinned months ago and no one would have seen otherwise.
  
• Choose cover photos for all of your boards that spark an interest for what's inside as well as work well together compositionally as a whole.
• Have other boards related to your specific craft. Other popular boards of mine focus on illustration, DIY crafts and needlework.
• I only spend 15-20 minutes all together throughout the day looking at my feed and repinning (I post 10-20 pins a day on average)
• Sometimes an image just isn't greatest quality or doesn't really fit in anywhere, but you still want to keep it as reference... I pin these to a "hidden" board that only I can see.



Tabby Cat DIY Embroidery Kit by Kirikipress on Etsy

• Pinterest is an amazing survey of what the market wants. I chose to focus on building up my pattern board so that I could instantly tell which designs/colours/motifs are currently the most popular based on which pins get repinned the most (final conclusion: yup, it's cats).
• Above all, your Pinterest should be your personal inspiration board. Only pin things that you find interesting or beautiful. I've had tons of new ideas for projects since I started using it.

Discovering Etsy Treasury Lists.

About a week ago or so I discovered Etsy Treasury Lists. A selfless concept allowing you to create lists of things you like from various artists and make them public for everyone to view. Of course there are a few common sense guidelines such as do not use your own items and do not use same item twice. I am not sure what was the exact trigger to get me to create my first one but it may have been seeing a lovely owl bag created by a friend of mine. So my first Treasury List is called Owl Friendly . I loved looking around for items. It is a similar feeling to creating wish lists. My approach was pretty simple for this one just use the "owl" keyword to search. Actually before anything I already remembered I had three favorite shops which had owl oriented items that I liked so I added them first.

About the same time I have received an invitation to use a new bookmarking tool called Pinterest . If you like creating Treasury Lists on Etsy then I recommend the mix of the two for various reasons, which I will explain further. Some reasons to use Pinterest:

• “Pin it” allows you to bookmark pictures and create visual boards of things you see online and you like.


• I wanted to have a big selection of items and then choose the 16 to put on the Treasury List.


• I didn’t like to have many windows open to see which ones to add.


• I couldn’t figure out if I could save a draft of the list on Etsy or if it gets published right away.

These are the steps I follow to create my lists:

• When you set up Pinterest it will ask you to allow a “Pin It” button to be added in your browser.


• I create my lists on Pinterest first and add as many items as I like.


• Every time I see a picture of an item I like then I “Pin It” and add it to the board I have created with my specific Treasury List in mind.


• This approach allowed me to work on my boards when inspiration came for me to look for various items or when I had time.


• When I have at least 16 items then I go ahead and create the corresponding list on Etsy.


• I have a window/tab open for the Etsy Treasury List and one open for the board on Pinterest.


• In order to retrieve the link from the board: I hover over the item I want to add, on the Edit button I right click, choose to open it in a different window/tab. Once open I copy the link, close the window, and past it in the “Listing URL” in the Etsy list.

I found this a lot of fun and one possible bonus is that you are creating another venue for the respective items to be displayed. True there are not your items but oh well no harm in supporting other artists too. Unless you chose to make your Pinterest boards private (I have not checked how you do that) the boards can be visible to other people. Example of the board is here: Around the World in 16 Earrings .

I love making Treasury Lists which are meaningful to me. Since I am Romanian, Canadian living in Manchester, UK you will probably see often various artists from these places or from countries where my friends are from.

Now one warning about Treasury Lists. If you do as I did and just started don’t come back to it every other minute to see how many views and how many people liked it. I must admit I ended up like the character at end of the “Social Network”. I will not ruin it by giving more details but you get the picture ☺