How to make your photography business more Pinterest friendly

If you have a photography brand and you’re still not using a Pinterest Business account to promote your work – you’re missing out on a huge gold site traffic mine with potential increase of revenue.

How Pinterest can help your photography business.

Usually, people think of Pinterest as a social network, but they’re wrong. Facebook and Instagram were created to share various user experiences and offer you an overview on life experiences, that have already happened or are happening now. Facebook and Instagram users share photos of their trips, concerts they’ve attended, events they’ve spoken at, meals they ate, and their baby’s teething (we all have those friends :). We interact with these posts through likes, comments, hashtags and DMs.

Pinterest on the other hand is more about the future. Pinterest users search for things they plan to do, looking for inspiration and new ideas. This includes anything from baking recipes, to outfit inspiration, wedding decor, quotes or tips on how to improve a certain skill set, and product/service recommendations. So it is safe to say that people use Pinterest when they are ready to make a decision, take action and make a purchase to realize their plans and vision.

What we love about Pinterest, is that they keep enhancing and improving their platform, to ensure a better user experience for new folks who join in + their value in terms of keywords and SEO weight keeps growing too. Statistics say that Pinterest has over 250 million users, actively searching for inspiration or doing research with a future purchase intent.

You’d be surprised, but possibly someone has already saved a photo from your website to their Pinterest board and your content is working on promoting you without your participation or effort. How cool is that? Would you like to check if there are any pins saved directly from your website? You don’t need to have a Pinterest account to do that. Just type in this link in your browser window https://pinterest.com/source/yoursite.com and replace “yoursite.com” with your website url without https or www.
For example, to check what people saved from flothemes.com we type in the link: https://www.pinterest.com/source/flothemes.com/.

Now you try! If there are any pins saved from your site – you’ll see them here. This allows you to get a good idea on what people like on your website, and what similar content you can prepare for your Pinterest audience. 

Making your website Pinterest-Friendly.

Fairly new to Pinterest, but curious to give it a try? Great! Many of our clients, who own a photography business mentioned on several occasions that they get significantly more traffic and conversions from Pinterest, as compared to Instagram. Surely Instagram is a wonderful platform to increase your brand awareness and gather loyal followers. Pinterest however, with its inspiration boards and clickable links, does a better job at facilitating and improving your sales funnel by bringing potential clients to your website faster. 

But before you start pinning everything, we highly recommend you to optimize your website for Pinterest. Some of the things you could do are: 

1. Start with the way your website looks and works. If it’s boring, outdated, doesn’t work properly or loads slow – the user won’t stay long enough to actually browse and pin something. Choose a design that looks fresh, modern and elegant, and make sure it offers a smooth and pleasant experience to those who visit it. Show off your portfolio and popular articles to offer more reasons for a user to stay and look through your site. 
2. Make sure you have enough good content on your website, it can be portfolio galleries, articles offering tips, inspiration, checklists and answers to questions your potential clients have before booking a photographer. If your blog is new – make sure to create at least 5-7 strong articles before starting your Pinterest campaign. Have no clue what to write about? Here are over 200 great ideas for a wedding photographer to blog about. 
3. Use vertical images with a title and short description for each post. Pinterest recommends a 2:3 aspect ratio for images, but horizontals can perform well too. The success of your Pin depends on how it looks on the search results page. Use large bold fonts when adding text on your images, so it can easily be spotted and read without having to click on it.

Now, let’s move to your Pinterest Account. Follow these 4 steps:

Step 1: Set up your Pinterest Business Account.

If you already have a personal Pinterest profile, you should convert it to a business account to be able to access Pinterest Analytics, create Rich Pins and try advertising. 

The process is quite simple. Log into your Pinterest profile. Click on the three dots in the top right corner to access your menu, and click on Edit settings. This will take you to your Account Setting. Scroll down the page and click on Convert Account. You’ll need to log in again, and done! Now you have a Pinterest business account. 

Step 2: Claim your site.

You’re probably impatient to get your first followers and start bringing tons of new traffic to your site, but there are a few more steps that you need to take. One of them is claiming your website. 

By claiming your site you’re proving your ownership of your site’s domain name, getting access to analytics and unlocking more options to showcase your business information. Your name and profile picture will appear on every pin with a link to your website, regardless if you’re the one who created this pin or someone else did by pinning from your website link.

There are two ways you can claim your website:

1. by adding a meta tag to your website
2. by uploading an HTML file to the root directory of your website. 

The instructions on how to implement each of the above are here.

Also, if you have an Instagram account, Youtube channel or Etsy store, you can claim them on Pinterest too. 

Step 3: Fill out your account details.

Once you’ve claimed your website (and other accounts if you want to), go to settings and fill out your profile information, such as your business name, a short description (use keywords for SEO) and of course your location. Keep in mind that the links in the description area aren’t clickable. 

We’ll talk more about filling out your profile and optimizing it for keywords in our next article. Click here to save it for a later read.

Step 4: Encourage your site visitor to save content from your website.

Pinterest has a lot of various widgets available for your website. One of them is particularly important for you to have – the Save to Pinterest button that appears on each of your images on hover. This button facilitates the process and encourages users to easily save pins from your site directly to their Pinterest boards.

To add this widget to your website click here. It will open Pinterest’s Widget Builder page. Choose your button settings and styling, then follow the instruction to copy and paste the code snippets to your site. 

Done. Your photography website is Pinterest friendly.

That wasn’t too difficult, was it? Congrats on optimizing your website for Pinterest users, and taking the first steps towards jazzing up your marketing strategy. In our next article we’ll share with you some proven tactics on how to maximize your exposure and click-throughs from Pinterest, how to identify your most performing pins and boost them all year long, as well as what’s the most common mistake many photographers make when using Pinterest for their business.