Tuesday, December 29, 2015

How to Grow Your Audience on Pinterest

After taking a few years to establish its position in the world of social media marketing, Pinterest is now one of the leaders in this field. Having grown from 15 employees in 2012 to 140 in 2013, Pinterest is now a powerful marketing engine with 70 million users. Each social media audience calls for its own customized approach, and this is true for Pinterest as well. Here are the key insights you’ll need in order to make the best possible use of this image-focused platform:

Spend time there!

This is the first tip because it’s both the simplest and the most difficult. Like all social media marketing, you’re only going to gain new traffic by showing up. Every day if possible. It’s simple because all you have to do is click into Pinterest and see what’s happening, but it’s difficult because you’ll always have a thousand other tasks you need to do. Putting in the hours will also give you an intuitive sense for Pinterest’s unique culture. You will begin to think visually and get a feel for the type of rich graphic content that’s most appealing.

Learn about your potential customers

Check your competitors’ Pinterest profiles, and see what types of content they’re pinning. Which of their pins are acquiring the largest numbers of re-pins? This is one way to learn about the preferences of the audience you’re hoping to win over. Are these users more excited by video content or by photos? Do pictures of products engage them, or are they seeking a behind-the-scenes look at your business?

Follow the power users

This is a basic marketing technique throughout the entire social media landscape; seek out the “influencers” in your field and follow them, and they are likely to follow you back and start re-pinning your content.

Be trendy

It takes an investment of daily time, but pinning content related to trending stories is a way to get your brand in front of large numbers of new users. Google Trends is a great tool for this, or you can see what hashtags are getting a lot of juice on Twitter. Find a few fresh stories each day that tie in to your business, and you’ll put the power of viral content to work for you.

Learn how to use rich pins

Pinterest is working hard to be useful to businesses, so it makes sense to pay attention to what they offer. Using the Rich Pin function requires putting some metatags in your site’s coding, and applying to Pinterest, but it’s definitely worth the effort. Remember, Pinterest wants your business to succeed!

Create an active group board

Pinterest group boards are a way to engage several people in creating a board together. Any board you have can be changed to a group board, so it’s best to make this change after you already have one that's very active. Selectively invite some of your most active followers who are most passionate about your topic, and you’ll benefit from the added energy of all their followers. After this, the next step is to get your new group board listed in a group board directory.

Cross-promote your profile

When you pin something exceptionally engaging, make sure to mention it on Facebook and Twitter. However, it’s important not to over-use cross-promotion, because your fans and followers on other social media sites may block you if they feel overwhelmed by too many notifications. Also, post a Pinterest button on your website, just as you do with other social media profiles, to let your users know you have a presence there.

Pinterest harnesses the internet's preference for visual appeal, and by simply following these basic tips you can turn this preference into a powerful tool for growing your audience.

Grow your Creative Market Partner with pinterest

How to Earn Money with Creative Market Program

How to Earn Money With the Creative Market Partner Program

Creative Market provides thousands of creatives around the world with an opportunity to earn money doing what they love. Our shop owners are the most talented people we know and they surprise us every single day with amazing new products.

If you're a Creative Market fan, you probably already know all this. What you may not know though is that anyone can make money with Creative Market, even if they don't have a shop! All you have to do is share your favorite products and when people buy them, you'll earn a chunk of that purchase. Read on to learn more about how it works or head over to our Partners page to get started.

How Does The Partner Program Work?

By now, you're interested in this partner thing, but need to know the facts, so let's cut to the chase. Here's the rundown of how it all works.

You send people to Creative Market by sharing links on social media, your blog, etc.
Some of those people will be new to Creative Market, and will sign up for an account.
For every new customer you bring to Creative Market, you'll earn 10% on every purchase they make for a full year.

It's as easy as that. How much you earn depends on how much you share. Some of our more successful partners are earning thousands of dollars every single month.

Joining the Program

Signing up for the Partner program is super easy. Over at the Partners page, click on the button that says "Become a Partner." From here, you'll see a window that asks a few simple questions.

Why Do I Have to Answer Questions?

We use this as a way to filter out nasty spammers, so don't sweat the answers too much. We're not looking for The Grapes of Wrath, just a sentence or two on how and why you'll be sharing Creative Market with the world. As long as you're a real person with genuine intentions, you should do just fine.

Tip: If you're a Creative Market shop owner, mention it in your Partner application.

Sharing With Your Partner Link

Once you're in, what's next? Obviously, it's time to share some products on your social channels or blog. To do this though, you have to make sure you're using your partner link.

Fortunately, we help you out with this by making sure that your Partner program information is baked into every one of our sharing buttons all across the site. For instance, at the bottom of every product screenshot, you should see a strip of buttons like this:

If you're signed up for our partner program, we'll track any links that you share with these buttons. I personally use the last button on the right all the time, which generates a shortened link to the current product that you can use anywhere you like.

Make Any URL a Partner Link

To create a partner link from any page on Creative Market, simply append "?u=username" to the URL (where "username" = your personal Creative Market user name) .

Share in Style With Our Banners and Buttons

In addition to simple link generation tools, we offer our partners some great visual/code resources to help you spread the word. Check out our Partners pagefor some great banners that you can drop into the sidebar on your site.

If you want to embed a specific product onto a web page, check out the following tool at the bottom right of every product page. Here you can generate an embed code for a nice little widget, a buy button, or a simple link, all with your affiliate tracking attached.

How Do I Know if Someone Buys Something?

After you've been regularly sharing links for a few weeks, it's time to check in and see if that cash is pouring in. To do this, go to your sales page and filter down to "referral commissions."

Get To It!

The information above is everything you need to get started with our Partner program. To sum up: join the program, share products that you love, and earn cash. It's a pretty sweet perk!

Now that you know all about how our Partner program works, it's time to head over to the Partners page and get started. Check back soon for some great tips on how our top partners are finding success.