When I opened my TPT store back in March of 2014, I spent a decent amount of time reading through all of the threads within the Seller’s Forum. Day after day I read posts from sellers “swearing” by Pinterest as a tool to increase sales! I just wasn’t buying it. “What are the chances of someone (EVEN JUST ONE PERSON) repinning a pin that I pinned to my humble Pinterest boards?” I knew that some of the individuals writing a few of these posts had a “MEGA Pinterest following” and the strategy made more sense in that case, but to sum it up, “SKEPTICAL” was the best word to describe my thoughts on the matter….

FAST FORWARD…. to 4 months later and here I am – watching my phone blow up with Pinterest notifications (which I don’t mind in the least)! I dedicated this last week to honing in on my “Pinterest skills” and I’ve learned more than I ever imagined.

Disclaimer: I am in no way a Pinterest all-star, in fact, I would still consider myself a rookie. But in celebration of my progress and in hopes of helping just one person increase their exposure on Pinterest, I thought it wise to write this post.

The moral of the story: Don’t JUST Pin Product Covers!

From March to June, the only thing I had ever pinned was my own product covers. That’s right, I didn’t pin any pins that would float through my Pinterest feed. I didn’t pin any interesting resources from websites. I ONLY PINNED MY COVERS. That’s what you call a #PinterestFAIL!

I started to think about the purpose of pinning covers and why we do it. We want to drive potential buyers to our products, right? Well, sometimes buyers are going to need to be “caught” and “reeled in” with a larger HOOK! What I mean is this: I realized I needed to create “Pins” (related to the product I was trying to promote) that would catch buyers’ attention. Simple – right?

Then I came to my next dilemma…

How do I grab the attention of potential buyers? Well, you’ve got to convince them that your product is going to fulfill a NEED of theirs. Why do people NEED your product? Will it make their job easier? Will it increase student engagement? Will it save them valuable time? Once you’ve hooked them with a solution to their problem, they click on the link and are taken to the product – THE SOLUTION! From there, all of the hard work that you’ve poured into your product cover, product preview and thumbnails will do the selling for you!

As I am writing this, I’m thinking, “Readers probably just think I am on some “Pinterest Soapbox” and am blabbing for sake of blabbing….” But I will show you evidence that proves this strategy works!

Here is the PRODUCT cover of a new product that I just created and posted in my TPT store within the last week:

Using my old strategy, I pinned this cover to three different Pinterest boards (ONE being my board and TWO being COLLABORATIVE boards). If I add up all of the “repins”, I think there are a total of “8”. Yes, eight people saw this and considered it useful enough to pin. From the time that I pinned this cover until last Tuesday night (about 7 days), I sold TWO of these bundles from my TPT store.

My sales data looked like this:

I had sold another small product on the larger mountain 🙂 Now, what you are about to see is what happened to my sales after changing my pinning strategies. The first two mountains below are the same mountains seen above (for comparison).

Big difference in sales between the two strategies, eh? Again, these are VERY SMALL successes… Most would call these sales “chump change”… but it’s “chump change” that taught me a valuable lesson! Since Wednesday, a total of 2.5 days, I’ve sold SIX more of these bundles – with only doing one thing different!

So what did I do to cause this BOOST in sales and exposure?

I started creating additional pictures/collages to use as a “Pin” to promote this product. This is not a promotion of any kind, but I use this easy web-based photo editor called Pic Monkey to create my “Pin” images. Pic Monkey is a resource that I learned about in the Seller’s Forums! Again, it’s important that we look at it this way, “How does my product fulfill a need for someone?” If you can answer that question, then you are well on your way to pinning success! Above, you saw the product cover. Now I am going to show you the first image I created specifically for “Pinterest” marketing…

So this was attempt #1…. Looking back at it now, I still didn’t really convey the message of how this could be valuable to someone in need of back to school activities… With that being said, it still received triple the number of “repins” that my product cover received. 

So I thought, “That was okay, but I am going to try this again!”

….and I came up with this! I guess I was feeling a little overwhelmed while lesson planning and, for me, humor is the best coping device! I guess a few others appreciated the humor because I quickly had about 50 pins! And it’s still being repeatedly pinned as we speak!

But I’m not one that just stops when I experience a small success, so I tried again….

We all know that our beloved summer vacation is coming to an end and I was feeling anxious… so I channeled that anxiety into this “Pin”! I posted this late last night and I woke up to the always-welcomed “Cha-ching” alert this morning… TWO more bundles sold!

Well… that’s all of the “Pinterest Wisdom” I have to share today. I hope you found my “psuedo case study” the least bit valuable, and if not, maybe you gleaned a little entertainment from my proclivity to make Pinterest work for my TPT store!

Do you have any tips or tricks that would be valuable to others? I’d love it if you would share them in the comments below! I would also love to know which of the three images created specifically for Pinterest caught your eye the most? Just curious 🙂

Keep calm and PINTEREST on!