6 Pinterest Secrets Every Teachers Pay Teachers Seller Needs to Know

Hi Teacher Friends! I’ve been getting a lot of great questions lately about the best ways to grow your TPT following on pinterest and thought I would share some of the things that have been working well for me lately. If you are new to pinterest you might want to start with some of my earlier posts that cover some pinterest basics. Otherwise get ready for my favorite pinterest secrets.

Are you ready to be like this awesome baby with such incredibly engaged followers? I hope so 😉

1. Research & follow pinners who are NOT Teachers Pay Teachers sellers.

You probably are already following a bunch of TPT sellers, which is great! Keep doing that. It won’t be long though until you start seeing some of the same pins over and over in your feed. You need to find unique, high quality pins to surround your product pins with as well as to keep your feed engaging & interesting for your followers (& the future followers you are hoping to attract).

Following & repinning from pinners outside the TPT circle will help you find fresh and new pins that will stand out. Look for pinners in education-related fields like social workers, parents, speech therapists, day care workers, authors, child friendly celebrities, child friendly brands, artists, librarians, etc. Here are some great pinners to get you started:

Melissa & Doug Toys

PediaStaff

School Library Journal

Bernadette (Mom to 2 Posh Lil Divas)

Rainy Day Mum

Candlewick Press

Debbie @ Country

2. Save time by highlighting the text you want to include in your pin description before clicking the pin it button.

I just learned about this tip over on Cute as a Fox and it is such a huge time saver. Your pins have a much better chance of turning up at the top of pinterest’s search results when the description has meaningful key words rather than just the title of the image “IMG 56” or even by just leaving the description blank. By highlighting the text from the website that is most relevant to the pin you get a head start on writing an effective product description.

  Click here for this simple tutorial on Cute as a Fox.

#3 Think about what a teacher would type into the search box on Pinterest and be sure to use those words in your pin description.

It does matter! Writing effective descriptions is an ongoing project for me. My pins with clear, teacher friendly details included are always repinned at a higher rate than my pins with descriptions like “cute idea” or even worse “:-)”. Here are some articles that I’ve found helpful in writing pin descriptions as well as in improving the product descriptions in my TPT store:

5-Step Formula for Writing Handmade Product Descriptions That Sell

How to Write Product Descriptions That Sell, Boost SEO Efforts

5 Tips to Better Product Descriptions

7 Simple Steps to Writing Product Descriptions That Sell

#4 Research on Pin Groupie to find group boards you are interested in joining.

Instead of blindly searching for group boards on pinterest,  visit Pin Groupie and you’ll end up with a list of potential group boards almost immediately. Be sure to choose the education or kids category to filter your results. Then reach out to each board’s host to ask about joining. If there is no contact information in the board’s description look at the collaborator list and the icon the farthest to the left is the board’s creator. Then you can search for a blog or facebook page to get in touch with them.

Even if the board is not adding new pinners you should still follow it so you can study what successful pins (& boards) look like. Keep in mind that at some point most group boards end up having to stop adding new pinners because it just becomes too time consuming to manage.

It can be a total bummer to not be added but try to remind yourself that it really isn’t anything personal. I have been lucky to be added to many of the group boards I have reached out to board hosts about but I have also not been added to even more boards that I would have loved  to join. Remember, there will always be another board to join and you can always start your own group boards as well!

#5 Pins with an aspect ratio of 2:3 get 60% more repins than very tall images.

Super long pins and teeny tiny pins can both be annoying to your followers and are my personal pet peeve. 😉 That’s just one of the things you can do to optimize your images for pinterest. Click the image below to see a great infographic from Curalate with 7 more characteristics of highly repinnable images.

#6 If you have a product pin with zero repins and zero likes, delete it and create a more engaging promotional pin for that product.

This one can sting but it does make a big difference. As you get better at creating highly repinnable images you might come to find that the pins you started out with are not doing you any good.  In my case I found that some of my earliest pins were actually really embarrassing too! Refreshing these pins brought them to a new audience and to new buyers!

Looking for more Pinterest tips to promote your Teachers Pay Teachers products? Click below:

 If you are interested in joining any of my collaborative boards click below:

image credits as noted or gify

image credits for title: creative clips, sonya de hart, kg fonts