If you aren’t using Pinterest to promote your Teachers Pay Teachers store, then you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to appeal to potential customers.

Pinterest is the secret weapon of many of the top TpT sellers.

Why?

Pinterest is an amazing traffic tool.  It provides the opportunity to target customers in very specific niches, and is very successful at driving those people back to your business.

Pinterest aggregates content for niche interests like craft projects, organization hacks, recipes, etc.  This means it’s teeming with a potential consumer base for your TpT brand.

There are 7 steps to using Pinterest strategically in order to generate sales on your Teachers Pay Teachers store.

1. Get a Business Account

When you sign up for a Pinterest business account, you get access to Pinterest Analytics, which is a must.  Analytics will show you which pins drive the most traffic back to your site.

Without it, you won’t be able to gauge which of your pins perform the highest and which aren’t performing well at all.

By tracking your Pinterest performance, you can optimize the content you pin for maximum exposure, as well as drive more traffic back to your Teachers Pay Teachers store.  More traffic = more opportunities to convert site visitors into sales.

2. Post Consistently & Regularly

It’s important to post consistently to all social media.  Pinterest is no different.  Posting consistently and often is a key component to building your followers.

No matter how amazing your content is, no one is going to want to follow you if you only post once every other week.

Posting multiple times a day is key because different segments of Pinterest users are more active during different times of the day.

But finding content and posting it can be very time-consuming and isn’t practical for most people.  That’s why using a post scheduler like Hootsuite is an effective way to ensure that your posting strategy is consistent.

Take a couple of hours once every 1 or 2 weeks and plan out your pins for that period of time.  Then use your scheduler to pre-schedule pins to be automatically posted at specific times on specific days.

This way, you never have to worry about letting your Pinterest promotions slip through the cracks.

3. Create Different Boards

Pinterest is an asset because it depends on niche targeting.  That means you can get really specific with your content to appeal to very targeted groups of potential customers.

The best way to capitalize on this is to create different boards for different categories of content.

Don’t just have one overall education board.  Break it down into smaller subcategories.  Start with the Teachers Pay Teachers product categories you sell in, and then expand to include any extra categories that you think potential customers might be interested in.

Via Hojo’s Teaching Adventures

For example, have one board for 4th Grade English Activities and a separate one for Classroom Organization Hacks.  They’re both education related, but each of those will attract different types of people seeking very different things.

Browse around Pinterest a little to see which pins are the most popular and repinned.

Pinterest is constantly refreshing its feed which means the most recent pins pop up first vs the most popular.

Download the Pinsearch Tool and use it to automatically organize the content on Pinterest from highest repins/likes to lowest so you don’t have to manually sift through a bunch of pins.

Once you have an idea of popular pins and categories, start creating boards and pinning content to appeal to those targets.

4. Pin Your Products

So, how do you funnel traffic back to your TpT store?  You pin your own products.

Granted, no one responds well to a page that’s solely and exclusively trying to self-promote, but it is important to plug your own resources.

The majority of your pins should be content that is not your own.  You should pin other helpful, interesting, or fun content that others will be interested in.  This helps you build a following of people who find your Pinterest page to be valuable and useful.

Then, among that content, mix in a few pins of your own resources.  Take some of your most popular resources or freebies and pin them.  Then whenever you launch a new resource, pin that to start gaining some exposure.

You can even pin the same product across multiple Pinterest boards if it makes sense.  Just remember to balance your content.

To learn more about how to balance your pinned content, check out the Step By Step Plan To Earning Your First $1,000 on Teachers Pay Teachers here.

5. Follow

For Pinterest to have maximum effectiveness at driving traffic and generating TpT sales, you have to have followers.
If no one is looking at your pins, you won’t be funneling many potential customers over to your TpT store.

You want to build your following so that your pins have maximum exposure.  One way to do so is to follow other pinners in your target audience.

Make it a priority to follow new teachers on Pinterest every day until you’ve build up a solid following.  Obviously, consistent posting or having a blog with traffic also contribute to social media following, but this is a good place to start.

Make sure you’re following mostly teachers and not other TpT sellers.  It’s okay to follow some competitors, but you want to attract potential customers who aren’t selling.

Chances are, a lot of them will follow you back.

Learn more about building your following with our Teachers Pay Teachers guide.

6. Link Pinterest On Your Pages

Allow people to engage with you on Pinterest by giving them easy access to it.  Link your Pinterest to your TpT store, blog, other social media, etc.

Via Mskcpotter

You can use clickable badges on your site so that visitors can simply click to be taken to your Pinterest page.

This is a great way to promote your Pinterest page and gain followers.  It’s also a must because it’s unlikely that anyone is going to manually search for your Pinterest page.
Remove the guesswork and display it with a link or clickable badge so people know it’s there and can easily navigate to it.

7. Try Promoted Pins

You might also give promoted pins a spin.  Promoted pins are paid traffic.  That means you’ll take a pin of one of your resources and you’ll pay to have it featured.

This can be a good strategy to use to gain exposure to your pins and send traffic back to your Teachers Pay Teachers store.

If you use promoted pins, make sure you have your targeting nailed down.  You need to be specific about what kinds of people you want to see this pin.  It should be relevant to them.

Maybe your product is a middle school science activity. Target teachers who will be looking for that.

The experts from our Teachers Pay Teachers guide recommend using Pinterest promoted pins over Facebook Ads.  Many of them have seen boosts from Pinterest, but not so much from Facebook.  So, if you’re going to use paid traffic, Pinterest is the place to start.

Find out more here.

With these 7 steps, you should be well on your way to using Pinterest to generate sales on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Want more tips on how to make thousands on Teachers Pay Teachers?

Download our exclusive Teachers Pay Teachers guide and get tips on everything from creating profitable resources to promoting your products.