Pinterest Marketing: Getting Your Account Setup The Right Way

If you’ve decided to create a Pinterest account for your affiliate site or online business, then you might think it’s as easy as signing up, adding some pins, and calling it a day.

You’d be wrong about that – at least if you want to have the best chance at success with Pinterest marketing.

And you do want the time that you spend on Pinterest to have a good ROI for your efforts, right? So, let’s get you started out the right way and optimize your efforts for maximum success.

Creating Your New Pinterest Account

Despite what I mentioned just moments ago, it is incredibly easy to sign up for a Pinterest account. Unlike Twitter, they don’t require your cell phone number to confirm the new account.

Just enter in your email address and new password, and you’re off to the races. They do make you select five topics that you’re interested in so that they can populate your homepage feed with relevant content.

Unfortunately, most of the topics that you can choose from are kind of lame. At least in my opinion. I give zero fucks about eye makeup, weddings, nail art designs, container gardening, etc. So, if you’re like me, then you’ll just have to select five stupid topics in order to move forward with the signup process.

Don’t get carried away following accounts, etc. just yet cause you need to convert this new account into a business account.

Convert Your Personal Account To A Pinterest Business Account

In order to SEO optimize your Pinterest account, you need to get yourself a business Pinterest account. It’s easy to do this and you can do it pretty much immediately.

There are two ways to do this. You can go to https://pinterest.com/business/convert/ to convert it, or use the option below.

Or, you can select “Add a free business account” from the drop down menu that you access via the … icon on the upper right corner of your page.

I just created a Pinterest business account for this very site, so you can see my screenshot below.

You’ll have to confirm your website with Pinterest by either uploading a HTML file to your site or using a meta tag (like you do with Google Search Console). This should be a self-explanatory step for you.

One of the reasons why it’s so important for you to get that business account is that you get a Display Name field instead of a First Name/Last Name option. And you can load that shit up with your target keywords.

There is a character limit, both for the Display Name and the About bio section of your profile. Since you want your profile to show up in Pinterest on-site searches, as well as Google, you should put your main keywords in these sections.

You can see how I’ve filled out my account in the image below. And remember, you can always edit this later and tweak it however you want.

I suggest that you first browse Pinterest to check out other successful accounts in your niche. See how they have filled out their bios and display names. This will give you an idea of important keywords for your niche.

That’s how I actually came up with the keywords that I used for my own Pinterest profile for this site.

I discovered that there are a LOT of Indian bloggers and SEOs just crushing it on Pinterest right now promoting their sites in this very niche. Here’s a couple of the more impressive accounts that I found –

What’s really interesting about this, to me at least, is that every single SEO or affiliate marketing Pinterest account that I found that has high numbers are all sites that I have never seen nor heard of in this niche.

Pretty crazy, huh? Well, it gets crazier. Both of the sites in the profiles above get basically zero traffic in Ahrefs.

Of course, there’s no way to know if those sites are getting click-throughs from Pinterest that aren’t reflected in Ahrefs or other tools.

I’ve gone a bit off topic here, but that’s how you get yourself the business account. Next up is to get Rich Pins enabled for your account.

Getting Rich Pins On Your Business Pinterest Account

To further optimize your new Pinterest account, you need to get your account approved for Rich Pins. Luckily, this is a quick and easy process.

Here’s how to get Rich Pins on your Pinterest account:

1. Enter a URL from your site into the Rich Pin Validator tool.
2. Click Validate.
3. Click Apply Now (assuming you get the all clear when you validate).

Within a few hours you’ll see rich pins enabled on your account.

That’s really the entire process. Simples, eh?

To make the most of rich pins, remember to fill out the meta data for each blog post that you do on your site.

Creating Your Pinterest Boards

If you’ve never used Pinterest before, then you need to know that content is organized and categorized by Boards. You should create boards for collections of pins that all related to a specific topic.

1. A Board For Your Site

First, you should create a board where you only put pins from your own site. You can call it just the name of your site, your site + blog posts, or whatever you want.

Here’s the board that I just created for this site:

Feel free to name your board whatever you want because there are no rules here.

However, it is important to note that whatever you make the title of your board will also be the words used for the direct URL for that board.

Here’s what mine looks like:

In my experience, Pinterest seems to remove stop words from the URLs (for the most part) so you don’t have to worry about excessively long URLs full of stop words like “the” or “and” or anything similar.

2. Other Boards

You’ll also want to start filling out your Pinterest account with other boards. Those boards should all be related to your core topic or focus.

So, if you have a recipe site that you’re creating a Pinterest account for, it would be irrelevant to have a board on crossbows….unless your recipe site is focused on venison recipes (did I just uncover a new niche?).

Naming those boards is something that you should spend a decent amount of time on.

3. Optimizing Your Boards

In addition to doing a bit of keyword research for your board names, you’ll also want to take further action to optimize every board that you create for your account.

You can easily do this by giving each board a description. Don’t rush through this – think about the keywords that you want to use, but don’t keyword stuff it.

Here’s what one of mine looks like –

Depending on when you read this, you may discover that not all of my boards have descriptions. Don’t worry, I’m getting to them! I am literally creating my Pinterest account for this site while writing this guide for you.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, setting up your Pinterest account and optimizing it for success is something that takes a bit longer than just a few minutes of your time.

And that’s just the set up!

After you get the account ready for use, then you gotta start filling those boards and setting up some Pinterest automation going on to keep those boards filled regularly.

Don’t worry, I’m already working on a guide to help you out with all of that. So, check back here or jump on my mailing list below or in the sidebar to get notified of new posts.

Shawna Newman

Hey, I’m Shawna. I make a living working from my laptop in places like London, Sydney, Dubai, Rome, Oslo, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. I share how I do some of that on this website.